"Homely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and refinement not to be unreasonably shocked by such vulgarities. But we should at least endeavour to correct the rash judgments which we may be disposed to form on these occasions, and should learn to recognize and to prize a sound texture and just configuration, though disguised beneath a homely or uncouth drapery. It was an Apostle who declared that he had come (to the learned and accomplished Grecians too) "not with excellency of speech, or the wisdom of words." From these he had studiously abstained, lest he should have seemed to owe his success rather to the graces of oratory, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... afterwards in later life how fine the right choice, the vigorous resistance, the honest perseverance might have been; but the worst faults of boyhood have something exciting and even romantic about them—they would not be so alluring if they had not—while the homely virtues of honesty, frankness, modesty, and self-restraint appear too often as a dull and priggish abstention from the more daring and adventurous joys of eager living. If evil were always ugly and goodness were always beautiful at ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life; I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me, for—though ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... little tale that comes dressed in very homely garb. The story has in it a bit of that that makes the heart burn. It has all the marks of real life. It ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... Witch, all proverbial Speeches, and which testify'd what Tools it was Satan generally work'd with; and these old Spectres, they tell us, us'd to ride thro' the Air in the Night, and upon Broomsticks too, all mighty homely Doings; some say they us'd to go to visit their Grand Seignior the Devil, in those Nocturnal Perambulations: But be that as it will, 'tis certain the Devil has chang'd hands, and that now he walks about the World cloth'd in Beauty, cover'd with ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... making for charm in a coarse homely face was a set of white even teeth. I found her singularly unattractive. A tear rolled down her cheek and its course was that of a rill in ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... who are conversant with the wonderful features of the Egyptian religion and priestcraft, will observe how eagerly they seized upon and deified anything symbolical of their mysterious tenets, and transmitted them to posterity, figured as hieroglyphics; and it is but natural to presume that this homely-looking flower, with its halo, so typical of glory and resurrection, would have ranked high in their mythology, if it, and its properties, had been known to them. Moreover, an examination of the elaborate works of Josephus, Herodotus, King, and Diodorus, so full in their description of Egyptian ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... had got her off to Chicago to study piano, and who had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match she would be likely to make in that part of the country. Johanna Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country. She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental. She was so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her niece because of her talent, because of ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... when I offer you this. Many times I have come bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And yet—and yet—it is something better than flowers; it is a SEED-CAPSULE. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... farfetched constructions have been put by the commentators upon this very homely sentence. As long as the question was, whether their wits should have licence to go a-woolgathering or no, one could feel no great concern to interfere: but it appears high time to come to Shakspeare's rescue, when MR. COLLIER'S "clever" old commentator, with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... of Sponges, the soft skeletons of which form the useful article of everyday use. There are many forms who weave a home of far more delicacy and beauty than their more familiar and homely brothers. The sponge creature itself is a slimy, soft creature, which fills in the spaces in its spongy skeleton. It is fastened to one spot, and gathers in its food from the water around it (and oxygen as well), ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... three-masted, and passenger-carrying, I have nothing to say, feeling in general little sympathy with people who want to go anywhere; nor caring much about anything, which in the essence of it expresses a desire to get to other sides of the world; but only for homely and stay-at-home ships, that live their life and die their death about English rocks. Neither have I any interest in the higher branches of commerce, such as traffic with spice islands, and porterage of ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... head?" Who lived on the scanty fare of a small purse in common with the family of his disciples? Who withdrew from the entertainments of Jerusalem to the humble cottage of Mary and Martha, cheerfully subsisting on the most homely and casual provision?—HE, who has taught us to limit our desires of temporal good within the narrow circle of one short request—"GIVE US THIS ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... robs each part o'th world With borrowed beauties to enflame thine eye: The Sea, to fetch her Pearle, is div'd into; The Diomond rocks are cut to make her shine; To plume her pryde the Birds do naked sing: When my Enanthe, in a homely gowne— ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... my cousins having given me carte blanche to effect what alterations I pleased, and a sum having been set aside for that purpose. The ordinary sitting-room and bedrooms I left much as they were: for I knew Diana and Mary would derive more pleasure from seeing again the old homely tables, and chairs, and beds, than from the spectacle of the smartest innovations. Still some novelty was necessary, to give to their return the piquancy with which I wished it to be invested. Dark handsome new carpets and ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... in making bad scholars; and I believe that those boys who take part in rough, hard play outside of school will not find any need for horseplay in school. While they study they should study just as hard as they play football. It is wise to obey the homely old adage, "Work while you work; play while ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... constant friend in him. No beggar ever asked the Captain for a shilling without getting it, if the Captain had a shilling anywhere about him. Sometimes he had plenty of money, yet when at home he always lived in a frugal, homely way. Great was the rejoicing therefore, among his friends (and they were many), when it was known that he had fallen in with a streak of good fortune. Having been instrumental in saving the British bark Dauntless from shipwreck, the insurance companies had awarded him a liberal salvage, ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... that under no circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moralised upon this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... It is to this primitive parish that David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, refers, in his "Orcadian Sketches," as "celebrated over the whole archipelago for the peculiarities of its inhabitants, their singular manners and habits, their uncouth appearance, and homely address. Being the most landward district in Pomona," he adds, "and consequently having little intercourse with strangers, it has become the stronghold of many ancient customs and superstitions, which modern innovation has pushed off from their pedestals in almost all the other parts of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... principles of that government for which you fight, they would renounce the English allegiance, and the whole of this territory would be yours. I know them, from Quebec to Detroit and Michilimackinac and Saint Vincennes. Listen, monsieur," he cried, his homely face alight; "I myself will go to Saint Vincennes for you. I will tell them the truth, and you shall have the post ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... their tufts of crimson berries Over stone walls gray with mosses, Pause by some neglected graveyard, For a while to muse, and ponder On a half-effaced inscription, Written with little skill of song-craft, Homely phrases, but each letter Full of hope and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter; Stay and read this rude inscription, Read ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... upon the sacred yet oft-times homely duties of married life, if this love had been mine, how would that life have been transfigured! The petty faults of my husband under which I chafed would not have moved me; I should have welcomed Martha and her father to my home and made them happy there; I should have had no conflicts with my servants, ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... with the full assurance that she had not been mistaken concerning the beauty of the little face which she had seen in the looking-glass. All that troubled her was the consideration that her aunt Maria, whose homely face seemed to glare out of the darkness at her, might have looked just as she did when she was her age. She hoped, and then she hoped that the hope was not wicked, that she might die young rather than live to look like ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ever stole such a name as that," said Foley. "And for all he's homely enough to stop traffic, his face sorta lives up to his name. ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... standby to the amateur gardener should undoubtedly be the blue-flowered shrub known as "plumbago". This homely but hardy plant will grow anywhere. It naturally prefers a good soil, and a sufficient rainfall, but if need be it will worry along without either. Fowls cannot scratch it up, and even the goat turns away dismayed from its hard-featured ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... did you say? Not a bit of it. For my part, I think she is homely; her face is too round ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... but never a laugh. Herein they are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her "Dutch painter's" portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately skilful reproduction of its homely wit and harmless absurdity. Happily neither these writers, nor the purveyors of mere sensation who cannot get on without crime and mystery, exhaust the list of our romancers, many of whom are altogether healthful, cheerful, and helpful; and it is ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... Suffolke Street most richly, which is a most infinite shame. It seems she is a bastard of Colonell Howard, my Lord Berkshire, and that he do pimp to her for the King, and hath got her for him; but Pierce says that she is a most homely jade as ever she saw, though she dances beyond any thing in the world. She tells me that the Duchesse of Richmond do not yet come to the Court, nor hath seen the King, nor will not, nor do he own his desire of seeing her; but hath used means to get her to Court, but ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... wind howls round the valley with a dismal sound, it seems as if one were looking on at some unholy, magical incantation; so that it is pleasant to return after a while to the comfortable rooms and cheerful fires within, which have so homely and domestic an air. We hope to spend to-morrow here, and the following day to go on to Toluca, from whence I shall ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... that I should join them, and I had good cause to be grateful, the place being delightfully clean, and little, quaint, homely Mrs Dean looking upon me as a lodger who was to be treated with ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... looked down at Peggy from the little platform where she sat in the old mahogany chair, she thought with a throb of satisfaction that she was glad she didn't have to change places with that homely little thing. Evidently, Peggy was just up from a severe illness. Her hair had been cut so short one could scarcely tell the color of it. She was so thin and white that her eyes looked too large for her face and her neck too slender for her ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Huntsmen" and observe that while the wicked huntsman is effective in his own way, the good huntsman is weak in every way, a sort of sexless woman with a face like a teaspoon. But there is more in these first forest tales, these homely horrors. In the earlier stages they have exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy does not shudder. They are made fearful that he may be fearless, not that he may fear. As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric dreamland is decent; and though individuals ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... of divers hue. But his legs were flat and corded like a racer's, his neck long and thin as a thoroughbred's, his nostrils large, his ears sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings around his eyes hinted at a cross, somewhere in his pedigree, with Arabian blood. A huge, bony, homely-looking horse he was as he drew the deacon and Miranda into the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose, shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar that the smart village chaps, riding along in their jaunty turn-outs, used to chaff the good ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... and also made machines to sew other things than cloth, as leather. Agricultural machinery was now in common use. The horse reaper had been much improved, and countless machines had been invented to make agricultural labor more easy and economical. Hundreds of homely articles, as friction matches and rubber shoes, came into use in these years. In short, the thirty years from Jackson's inauguration to the secession of the Southern states were years of great progress. But this progress was confined ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... there upon his pillow Being so troublesome a bedfellow? O polished perturbation! golden care! That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide To many a watchful night!—Sleep with it now, Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet As he whose brow with homely biggin bound Snores out the watch ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... said my father, throwing it on the table. "There is more poetry, more romance, more sublimity, more splendid imagery hidden away in that homely document than could be found in all the traditions of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... little story, very simple, and homely; but yet, one that illustrates very well the point of which we are speaking. It is ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... von Rosen, who was one of the guests and who sat behind Annie Eustace, looked at Margaret with wonder. "Was this the way of women?" he thought. He did not doubt for one minute that the Western girl had spoken the truth. It had been brutal and homely, but it had been the truth. Little Annie Eustace, who had been allowed to come to a dinner party for the first time in her life and who looked quite charming in an old, much mended, but very fine India muslin ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... find her in almost every generation, in almost every country, in almost every city. She is not a typical adventuress, she is not a genius. The reason for her strong power is occult. The nameless charm is found as often in homely, clumsy, dull, old masculine women as in the reverse of ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... His homely figure seemed to be lightened up by his fidelity and generosity. Every word he uttered had a force that no other grace could have ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... (his mother's diamond-guard, which he wore constantly,)as a pledge for some advance of money; but the kind Welsh people would not have it. They had not much spare cash, but what they had they readily lent to the survivors of the Anna-Maria. Dressed in the homely country garb of the people, Frank and Maggie set off in their car. If was a clear, frosty morning; the first that winter. The road soon lay high up on the cliffs along the coast. They looked down on the sea rocking below. At every village ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... special merit to these letters. They were not written for publication, but for an intimate circle of relatives and friends. And because of this they are not artificial, but are free and graceful, with homely touches here and there which add so much to their value. Amidst the incessant roar of mighty guns; surrounded by the wounded and the dying; shivering at times with cold, and wearied almost to the point of exhaustion, these letters were hurriedly penned. No time had she for finely-turned phrases. ...
— 'My Beloved Poilus' • Anonymous
... pernitiosa, saith the same Fabius, many childish tracts and sentences he hath, sermo illaboratus, too negligent often and remiss, as Agellius observes, oratio vulgaris et protrita, dicaces et ineptae, sententiae, eruditio plebeia, an homely shallow writer as he is. In partibus spinas et fastidia habet, saith [128]Lipsius; and, as in all his other works, so especially in his epistles, aliae in argutiis et ineptiis occupantur, intricatus alicubi, et parum compositus, sine copia rerum hoc fecit, he jumbles up ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... historic feat, usually related to war. But this column stood for those sturdy virtues that were developed, not through the hazards and the excitements and the fevers of conquest, but through the persistent and homely tests of peace, through the cultivation of those qualities that laid the foundations of civilized living. Isidore Konti designed the frieze typifying the swarming generations, by Matthew Arnold called "the teeming millions of men," and to Hermon A. MacNeil ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... poles just cut, three inches in diameter at the butt and twenty feet long, drawn on carts. Both men and women were carrying young children and older ones were playing and singing in the street. Very many old women, some feeble looking, moved, loaded, through the throng. Homely little dogs, an occasional lean cat, and hens and roosters scurried across the street from one low market or store to another. Back of the rows of small stores and shops fronting on the clean narrow streets were the dwellings whose ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... which had been adopted at Ullathorne Court. What, not an oriel? says Miss Diana de Midellage. No, Miss Diana, not even an oriel, beautiful as is an oriel window. It has not about it so perfect a feeling of quiet English homely comfort. Let oriel windows grace a college, or the half-public mansion of a potent peer, but for the sitting room of quiet country ladies, of ordinary homely folk, nothing can equal the square, mullioned windows ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... unheeded—held Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame—Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand, Ascending and dilating, it disclosed Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass With roots that groped about eternity, And in each drop of dew upon each blade The mirror of the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... questioner with alacrity; perhaps he feared he had wounded his friend's feelings, and dreaded lest there might ensue a squabble, for sparrows, it must be confessed, are easily affronted over trifles, though, as a rule, they are good-tempered little fellows enough, putting up with scanty fare and homely lodgings very contentedly and cheerfully. 'I wonder what kind of seed it is, do you know?' he still further questioned, being of an ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... made up of just such contrasts," he thought, "and Pietro at his homely breakfast is more to be dreaded than Achmet casting the horoscope. Ah! Sir Jasper Kingsland, it is a very fine thing to be a baronet with fifteen thousand pounds a year, a noble ancestral seat, a wife you love, and a son you adore. And ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... and her room together always carried me back to a dead and gone generation. There was a rag carpet on the floor, of the "hit-or-miss" pattern; the chairs were ancient Shaker rockers, some with homely "shuck" bottoms, and each had a tidy of snowy thread or crochet cotton fastened primly over the back. The high bed and bureau and a shining mahogany table suggested an era of "plain living" far, far remote from the day of Turkish rugs and Japanese bric-a-brac, and Aunt Jane was in perfect correspondence ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... manners, their art and literature to, at least, a level with the highest. It has been impossible in these pages (it would perhaps be impossible in any pages) to give any unified picture of this national character with its activity, its self-reliance, its belief in the homely virtues and its earnest ambition to make the best of itself. But of the future of a people with such a character there need be no misgivings, and Americans are justified in the confidence in ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... hands Of Protestant Plymouth held his memory long; Often in strange and distant dreams he saw That scene which now he tenderly portrayed To Doughty's half-ironic smiling lips, Half-sympathetic eyes; he saw again That small inn parlour with the homely fare Set forth upon the table, saw the gang Of seamen dripping from the spray come in, Like great new thoughts to some adventurous brain. Feeding his wide grey eyes he saw them stand Around the crimson fire and stamp their feet And scatter the salt drops from their ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... his employment at the docks, a third earns a few shillings weekly, as an errand boy, or office messenger; and the employment of the man himself, detains him at some distance from his home from morning till night. Sunday is the only day on which they could all meet together, and enjoy a homely meal in social comfort; and now they sit down to a cold and cheerless dinner: the pious guardians of the man's salvation having, in their regard for the welfare of his precious soul, shut up the bakers' shops. The fire blazes high in the kitchen chimney of these well-fed hypocrites, and the rich ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... he began to write; and though it was some time before he discovered where his strength lay, his writings were not unsuccessful. They were coarse, indeed; but they showed a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly-bought spiritual experience. They therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and the spelling, were well received by ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I liked his unaffected way of saying it. His voice had more of the homely, homelike, rural twang in it than I had heard in New York in many a day. I mentally added fifty dollars to the fee I had intended to give him. And now Anita and Alva were coming down the stairway. I was amazed at sight of her. Her evening dress had given place to a pretty ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... helpless Fanny, I would that I knew she was safe,—I would not despise it, I would throw myself into it, and regard the training her and forming her boys as a most sacred office. It would not be too homely for me. But I had far rather become the founder of some establishment that might relieve women from the oppressive task-work thrown on them in all their branches of labour. Oh, what a ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... liking a boy just because he was handsome, was too foolish to even consider. The fact that Dick Saxon—supposedly her arch enemy, but really her best friend—had flaming red hair and was undeniably homely—may, of course, had something to do with her disgust for good looks. Like lots of other girls, The Three judged boys by their ability to do; while the road to Fanny's heart was by way of ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... no hand with a square-rigger, and he had shown it. But he was a sailor and a born captain of men for all homely purposes, where intellect is not required and an eye in a man's head and a heart under his jacket will suffice. Before the others had time to understand the misfortune, he was bawling fresh orders, and had the sails clewed up, and took soundings ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of comfort or bit of quaint philosophy. Into the fever-hot hands of one flaxen-haired farmer lad lying half delirious and dreaming of home, he dropped a few flowers plucked in the prison yard that morning; to a lonely, discouraged Frenchman he spoke in his own tongue, uttering a homely proverb that caused the homesick foreigner to laugh back into his smiling face. At last he came to Louis, and, with a nod toward the puzzled Jonas, lifted the bowl of soup and placed it to the ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... of the twins burst into the room with the information that the bishop had arrived, and Katherine, walking like one in a dream, went out from her chamber and crossed the homely kitchen to ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... Despite this homely exterior, she herself was a 'lady' in every sense of the word. Her manner was dignified and courteous to everyone. To her daughters and to myself she was gentle and affectionate. Her voice was sympathetic, almost musical. I never saw her temper ruffled. I ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... most extraordinary efforts in this line is related by Mr. Jerdan. A dinner was given by Mansell Reynolds to Lockhart, Luttrell, Coleridge, Hook, Tom Hill, and others. The grown-up schoolboys, pretty far gone in Falernian, of a home-made, and very homely vintage, amused themselves by breaking the wine-glasses, till Coleridge was set to demolish the last of them with a fork thrown at it from the side of the table. Let it not be supposed that any teetotal spirit suggested this inconoclasm, far from it—the glasses were too small, and the poets, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... itself. If you let slip time, like a neglected rose It withers on the stalk with languished head. Beauty is Nature's brag, and must be shown In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities, Where most may wonder at the workmanship. It is for homely features to keep home; They had their name thence: coarse complexions And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply The sampler, and to tease the huswife's wool. What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... course," said our homely landlady. "Boys who are growing want plenty to eat. I hate to ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... Santos, only occurred to me on our unexpected—shall I say PROVIDENTIAL?—arrival at that spot; and the necessity of expedition forbade me either inviting your cooperation or soliciting your confidence. Human intelligence is variously constituted—or, to use a more homely phrase, 'many men have many minds'—and it is not impossible that a premature disclosure of my plans might have jeopardized that harmony which you know it has been my desire to promote. It was my original intention to have landed you at Mazatlan, a ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Hrad[vs]any and its congregation did all honour to the crowning of Bohemia's first King. It is also interesting to note that Vratislav had "contributed to the party funds"; he had lent money to the Emperor. This should strike a homely, familiar note ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... he was delightedly alive. Hence, in such a passage as this about the Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader's mind is entire conviction and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the thing fell out, not otherwise; and you would no more change it than you would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, a homely touch of Bunyan's, or a favored ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... made an apology for the humble style in which her table was set out, which she owned could not be equal to what they met with at their own homes; but hoped they would not be dissatisfied with her homely fare. The cakes she produced were excellent, for she spared ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... almost fiercely, one night to the children—"you'll love mamma, no matter how cross and homely she gets, ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... the south. There, broad and fertile below her, running away across the miles, were the Howard acres. She even made out the clutter of head-quarters buildings. Somehow she fancied that the sweep of homely view snatched from these bleak uplands something of their loneliness. When her father announced that this was just the spot he had longed for, Helen nodded her approval. Here for a ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... greater than it was among the few hundred who settled it. Probably our own superabundance of good things has actually lessened our capacity to enjoy, in comparison with theirs. Their simple tastes and homely joys amid their rude surroundings were probably more productive of positive pleasure and real happiness, than all the refinement and culture ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... Striking example of its display is connected with Yedo Castle. This fortress, as built originally by Ota Dokwan, was not of imposing dimensions even as a military stronghold, and the dwelling-house in the keep presented most homely features, having a thatched roof and a porch of rough boat-planks. Yet Ieyasu was content to make this edifice his palace, and while he devoted much care to strengthening the fortifications, he bestowed none on the enlargement and adornment of the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... do Yet love must needs come breaking through, And now and then the office hum Dies like a mist, ... and there will come An Oxford breakfast scene: the quad All blue and grey outside—O God— And there sits Twiston at the feast Proclaiming he will be a priest! I see his eyes, his homely neb— Ring, telephones, ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... soldier, reeling from his anguish and weariness, was admitted into the beleaguered fortress, his first words, more homely in expression than Murat's, were to the same dreadful purpose—"Your honour," he said, "all is dished;" and this being uttered by way of prologue, he then delivered himself of the message with which he had been charged, and that was a challenge from the Kandyan general to come ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... foregather. The sullen husband, the flighty wife, is no longer there to plague the innocent spouse. All is sweet and peaceful. It is the long rest cure after the nerve strain of life, and before new experiences in the future. The circumstances are homely and familiar. Happy circles live in pleasant homesteads with every amenity of beauty and of music. Beautiful gardens, lovely flowers, green woods, pleasant lakes, domestic pets—all of these things are fully described in the messages ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cleared away, the same wild mood possessed her. The man wondered if her mind was going with all else; but as she hung up the towel, her humor changed, and she ran out of the cabin into the dusk as if she could not bear the simple, homely tasks in a homeless world, the firelight and the bounds of a dwelling when doom must be at hand. The man put a fresh log on the fire, and covered the coals with ashes. He would have preferred to remain there, but he knew why she was hurrying back ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... renders their sight weak at an earlier age than we in general find ours affected. These large black eyes are universally shaded by the long thick sweepy eyelash, so much prized in appreciating beauty, that, perhaps hardly any face is so homely which this aid cannot in some degree render interesting; and hardly any so lovely which, without it, bears not some trace of insipidity. Their tone of voice is loud, but not harsh. I have in some of them found ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... after dinner," resumed Mary, "that is to say, if papa does not want me to read to him." And as, during dinner, Harriet contrived to make her wishes very evident, Mr. Mannering dispensed with the reading, and, accepting the arm of a neighbour, a new and homely acquaintance, took a second stroll in ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... the child was right in the word used. God is lonesome, though for an utterly different reason than was in the child's mind. God was lonesome that day, left standing alone under the trees of the garden. He is lonesome for fellowship with every one who stays away from Himself. That homely human word may well express to us the longing ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... at the catalogue of sins that lie side by side with this exhortation of my text! They are all small matters—bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil-speaking, malice, stealing, lying, and the like; very 'homely' transgressions, if I may so say. Yes, and if you pile enough of them upon the spark that is in your hearts you will smother it out. Sin, the wrenching of myself away from the influences, not attending to the whispers and suggestions, being blind to the teaching of the Spirit through the Word ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... is thickly wooded to the water's edge, with here and there an exposure of red granite. It is a very beautiful stream, and it was a pleasure to get out of the great river and its oppressive vastness into the familiar-looking, homely water, its eastern rocks and exquisite curves and bends. Rounding a point, we came upon a camp of Chipewyans drying fish and making birch-bark canoes, all of them fat, dirty, like ourselves, and happy; and, passing on, at dusk we reached the outlet ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... remarkable, that he retained in his memory very slight and trivial, as well as important things. As an instance of this, it seems that an inferiour domestick of the Duke of Leeds had attempted to celebrate his Grace's marriage in such homely rhimes as he could make; and this curious composition having been sung to Dr. Johnson he got it by heart, and used to repeat it in a very pleasant manner. Two of the ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... in all their lives would moments so full of sweetness and splendor come to them. They were all the sweeter because blended with the homely duties that fell to Antonia's hands. As she went about ordering the breakfast, and giving to the table a festal air, Dare thought of the old Homeric heroes, and the daughters of the kings who ministered to their wants. The bravest of them had done no greater deeds ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... letters which formed Major Pendennis's budget for that morning there was only one unread, and which lay solitary and apart from all the fashionable London letters, with a country postmark and a homely seal. The superscription was in a pretty delicate female hand, and though marked 'Immediate' by the fair writer, with a strong dash of anxiety under the word, yet the Major had, for reasons of ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the earth, Contented with our homely fare, How cheerful was the orphan's hearth Before cold Death ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... very man you are looking for. He has come up from the ranks and is now the most popular member of the Legislature. He can make a stirring speech and they say he is going to be the President of the United States. He's wise and witty and straight as a string but a rough diamond—big, awkward and homely. You're just the girl to take him in hand and give him a little polish and push him along. ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... the fact that on that day the simple, homely, stirring, and inspiring melody of Old John Brown was heard for the first time by the people of Boston. It was a surprising and a gladsome spectacle—a regiment bearing Daniel Webster's talismanic name, commanded ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... sips his wine And says nothing. You know him of old, dear. He's only too happy to rest,— After making three millions in gold, dear. He's played out, it must be confessed,— And I—I'm to wed an old Baron Three weeks from to-day, in great style (He's as homely and gaunt as old Charon, And they say that his past has been vile); And I've promised to cut you hereafter,— Small chance, though, we ever shall meet,— So let's turn our old love into laughter, And face the thing through. ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... Park or a field day at Windsor. The one side was as sad and sombre as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and warmth of a military pageant. The holders of the hill had come from their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among them came in the decent civic suits they wore behind their desks or counters. Few men's weapons were fellows in that roughly armed array. Each militant citizen carried ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for Nature passed through various stages. These can be clearly traced from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man's inner life; until finally, in Hellenism, Nature was treated for ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Pegg! Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut!" And as the young subaltern gave utterance to these homely sounds, he was recalling certain sarcastic remarks of the stern master of drill respecting officers and gentlemen demeaning themselves by associating ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... to my taste, and to yours too! Give, but, if you can, spare to the poor the shame of holding out a hand."[9] And the important thing, as we have said, is that Diderot was as good as his sentiment. Unlike most of the fine talkers of that day, to him these homely and considerate emotions were the most real part of life. Nobody in the world was ever more eager to give succour to others, nor more careless ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... weeping, no, not the guard themselves. Yet at last with a full heart she was severed from him, at which time another of our women embraced him; and my aunt's maid Dorothy Collis did the like, of whom he said after, it was homely but very lovingly done. All these and also my grandfather witnessed that they smelt a most odoriferous smell to come from him, according to that of Isaac, 'The scent of my son is as the scent of a field which ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... upon a couch, propped up with pillows, and her face was turned full towards John as he looked round the door. He could have cried out as his eyes rested upon it, for there were Mary's pale, plain, sweet homely features as smooth and as unchanged as though she were still the half child, half woman, whom he had pressed to his heart on the Brisport quay. Her calm, eventless, unselfish life had left none of those rude traces upon her countenance which are the outward emblems of internal conflict ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Perrin, of Marseilles. She had little technical knowledge of the objects surrounding her, but she submitted to the strange and soothing charm they never failed to work on her—the charm of stillness, of peace, as of things which, made for common homely uses, had passed beyond that stage into an existence ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... homely, sneaky, shifty-eyed looking things!" thought Billy. "I would not like to meet one alone after dark, but still I hear they are cowardly and wait until one is dead before they try to eat him up. I don't think I will make a long call, for they grin and laugh too much, ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... toss of her bobbed-off black hair, said: "Oh, Pen, why do you waste your time on a commonplace architect? He will never satisfy you—not in a thousand years. Bye-bye, I'll see you at the party." Then away she went, her eyes challenging Seraphine who stands for all the old homely virtues, including unselfish love, that Bobby Vallis entirely disapproves of. What shall I do? Seraphine says I must not go to this party, but—I ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... who to their great commendations, be it spoken, spared no pains, night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, ... in a word did all the homely, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... of the matter might have been given in much more homely terms; it was natural that Mrs Yule should leave out of sight the sufficient, but ignoble, cause of ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... Eyck's sarcasm was inspired by a mind's-eye picture of Miss Martha Gamble. To quote Jo Grigsby, she was "so plain that all comparison began and ended with her." Without desiring to appear ungallant, I may say that there were many homely young women in Essex; but each of them had the delicate satisfaction of knowing that Martha was incomparably her superior in ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... enough to cause her to smile at their homely enthusiasm, and the striking contrast of language. It was a relief to hear intelligible language once more, and in the rural dialect so ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... is this!" said the father. "Hoc credam! I thought that wax doll did not come up. Can my eyes deceive me? non verum est! There is a doll there—and what a doll! on crutches, and in poor, homely gear!" ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... are too apt to say, 'Ask your Sunday-school teacher,' when such questions are put to them. The decay of parental religious teaching is working enormous mischief in Christian households; and the happiest results would follow if Joshua's homely advice were attended to, 'Ye shall let your ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sundry lessons she had received, and the tears came up into her eyes as she felt that she must be proud and not show her delight at the receipt of homely delicacies to which they ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... The faces, dress, passions, gratitudes, and revenues of the great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers who had been the first to gaze from those rectangular windows, and had stood under that key-stoned doorway, could be divined and measured by homely standards of to-day. It was a house in whose reverberations queer old personal tales were yet audible if properly listened for; and not, as with those of the castle and cloister, silent beyond the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... what you have heard on this subject you confidently expect the British barmaid to be buxom, blond, blooming, billowy, buoyant—but especially blond. On the contrary she is generally brunette, frequently middle-aged, in appearance often fair-to-middling homely, and in manner nearly always abounding with a stiffness and hauteur that would do credit to a belted earl, if the belting had just taken place and the earl was still groggy from the effects of it. Also, she has the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... a whole leaden existence. That reminds her of her graduating essay, which she digs out of the trunk, tied with baby-blue ribbon. "One Crowded Hour" was her burning topic, but her hours and days and years have been crowded only with homely toil and poverty ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... smile on her face as she rose—a smile that brought a hot mist of tears to my eyes. There was tragedy itself in that spare, homely figure standing there in the garden, the wind twining her skirts ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... not for sitting on; just to give the room a social standing in an emergency. It sneers at the other chairs with an air of insolent superiority, like a haughty bride who has married into the house for money. Otherwise the furniture is homely; most of it has come from that smaller house where the Wylies began. There is the large and shiny chair which can be turned into a bed if you look the other way for a moment. James cannot sit on this chair without gradually sliding down it till he is lying luxuriously ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... author. His works may be said to have merits peculiarly their own. His graceful, easy, fluent style; his admirable capacity for illustration; his graphic delineations of scenery and character; and, above all, his unfailing use of simple, terse, homely Saxon, have combined to place him in the front rank of living writers. Among his more notable publications we may mention "The Home School" (Edinburgh, 1856, 12mo), a reprint and extension of lectures for working ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... beautiful—almost too trite to write—but the beauty is lonesome and terrifying, and my city-bred soul longs for some good, homely, human "blot on the landscape." There are no trees on the cliffs now. I understand, however, that Nature is not responsible for this oversight. The people are sorely in need of firewood, and not being far-seeing enough ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this dependence. A hand-wrought silver spoon, of a commercial value of some ten to twenty dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable—in the first sense of the word—than a machine-made spoon of the same material. It may ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... became cordial. She inquired my name, and I repeated the plain, homely Scotch-Irish cognomen that had been handed down ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... to make which ill accords with my luxurious surroundings of the moment. It is that I am accustomed to press my trousers myself by the homely and ignoble expedient of sleeping on them. My only excuse is that I am a heavy sleeper. So automatic is the process, that I was wrapped in sheets and darkness before it occurred to me that I had placed the trousers I had just doffed under the mattress ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... we can explain this more fully by a homely but practical illustration: A great many of my readers have probably seen in operation in the summer amusement parks the "human roulette." This contrivance consists of a large wheel, board-covered, somewhat raised in the center, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... possession, a sense of her natural charms: but no matter what their college may have been, no matter how little illustrious, historically or architecturally, it is round the college life, the rooms, the friendships, the homely details, that their loving memory hangs. It is there that first they knew what independence meant: there that the chairs and table were their very own: there that they could come and go almost as they liked: there that they first knew the delight ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... If, as in seeking other gift to gain, (For Nature, without study, yieldeth nought) With mighty diligence, and mickle pain, Illustrious women day and night have wrought; And if with good success the female train To a fair end no homely task have brought, So — did they for such other studies wake — As ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... with the theoretical niceties of wifely submission, but with his creature comforts. His instructions as to how to make a husband comfortable positively palpitate with life; and at the same time there is something indescribably homely and touching about them; they tell more about the real life of a burgess's wife than a hundred tales of Patient Griselda or of Jehanne la Quentine. Consider this picture (how typical a product of the masculine imagination!) of the stout bread-winner, buffeted about in all weathers ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... apron full, Brings fuel to the homely flame; I see the smoky columns roll, And, through ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... The once homely Maria, whose home had rung with laughter by the taunt and ridicule of those who made fun of her ugliness, [94] now graced her house with sweet smiles and engaging features, which drew scores of visitors to ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the best fighters in the Revolution. He was a homely little man. He was also a very good man. Another general said, "Mar-i-on ...
— Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans • Edward Eggleston
... in any other of the dignified importations transplanted from Greece or Rome and forced to grow on uncongenial soil. They must ever be to us exotics, with perhaps the beauty of the exotic, but without the homely qualities which endear ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 01, No. 12, December 1895 - English Country Houses • Various
... Munro asked for a loan till next week. He explained the state of our purses and the uselessness of applying to the Captain so early in the week; James was dubious. Munro urged the case in homely Doric; James, though pleased to hear the old tongue, was still hesitating when Munro skilfully put a word of the Gaelic here and there. A master move! James was highly flattered at our thinking he had the Gaelic (though never a word he ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... valetudinary.... When he is in pretty good health, that he may venture upon more savoury hotter things, &c." The most rigorous Protestants will relax to hear how "To make a Pan Cotto as the Cardinals use in Rome." And if "My Lord Lumley's Pease Pottage" sounds homely, be it known, on the word of the eloquent Robert May, that his lordship "wanted no knowledge in the discerning this mystery." What fastidious simplicity in the taste of the great is suggested by "My Lord d'Aubigny eats ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... directness and homely strength of "The Village Blacksmith" have made it deservedly popular. One questions whether the last stanza might not have been omitted with advantage both to the unity and ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... unconventional manners, who, without the slightest effort to put on dignity, treated all men alike, much like old neighbours; whose speech had not seldom a rustic flavour about it; who always seemed to have time for a homely talk and never to be in a hurry to press business; and who occasionally spoke about important affairs of State with the same nonchalance—I might almost say irreverence—with which he might have discussed an every-day law case in his ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,—the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods 'brewing ale' to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Joetun; sending out Thor to get the caldron ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... president's full face, and while pondering on it he remembered that he had never seen him in profile. Nor was this all that set the two men apart in Joseph's consciousness. The prior's simple and homely language came from the heart, entered the heart and was remembered, whereas Mathias spoke from his brain. The heart is simple and always the same, but the brain is complex and various; and therefore ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... Dalcastle partook of all the gaiety, not of that stern age, but of one previous to it. There was feasting, dancing, piping, and singing: the liquors were handed, around in great fulness, the ale in large wooden bickers, and the brandy in capacious horns of oxen. The laird gave full scope to his homely glee. He danced—he snapped his fingers to the music—clapped his hands and shouted at the turn of the tune. He saluted every girl in the hall whose appearance was anything tolerable, and requested of their sweethearts to take the same freedom with his bride, by ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... Olympus. This over, bonfires of hay and straw were lighted, music was made with cymbal and flute, and shepherds and sheep were purified by passing through the flames. A feast followed, the simple folk lying on benches of turf, and indulging in generous draughts of their homely wines, such, probably, as the visitor to-day may regale himself with in the same region. Towards evening, the flocks were fed, the stables were cleansed and sprinkled with water with laurel brooms, and laurel boughs were hung about them as adornments. Sulphur, incense, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... was, besides, a clever draughtsman, though he worked chiefly from the designs of Thurston and others. One of the most successful of his illustrated books is the "Vicar of Wakefield," after Mulready, whose simplicity and homely feeling were well suited to Goldsmith's style. Another excellent engraver of this date is Samuel Williams. There is an edition of Thomson's "Seasons," with cuts both drawn and engraved by him, which is well worthy of attention, and (like Thompson and Branston) he was ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchy and monarchs. The necessities of the Churchills were pressing: their loyalty was ardent: and their only feeling about Arabella's seduction seems to have been joyful surprise that so homely a girl should ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... window came the clear trill of a canary singing blithely in its cage. Within the tidy, homely little room a pale-faced girl and a youth of slender frame listened intently while the bird sang its song. The girl was the first to break ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... have begun to popularise the results of their laborious researches; although it cannot be said that they have taken the lead of the age, we may at least affirm that they have gone along with it. They have not lingered in the rear. They have adapted their instruction and language to homely understandings, and have increased rather than lessened their dignity by the condescension. They have become more honoured and respected as the benefits of their labours have grown more palpable to common sight; they have been more renowned since the many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... himself. I'm not a tall man: just the dull average five foot ten or eleven that appears taller, while it keeps lean—so naturally I have a hopeless yearning for nymph-like creatures who pretend to be engaged when I ask them to dance. Still, there's consolation and homely comfort in talking with a little woman who makes you feel the next best thing to a giant. Biddy is an old-fashioned five foot four in her highest heels; and as she smiled up at me I saw that she hadn't changed a jot in the last ten years, despite ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... so intermarried, as to create the most curious net of cousinship, the meshes of which are yearly becoming more intricate and numerous. Yet there are no especial indications of exclusiveness or spirit of clique; rather it is the homely feeling of kinsmanship, which makes the intercourse of relations more familiar and unceremonious, than that ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... bring dried corn husk to school, she brought brightly colored raffia, and taught them how to make baskets. The children were clamorous for more knowledge of basket making. The fascinating task of forming objects of beauty and usefulness from homely corn husk and a few gay threads of raffia was novel to them. Amanda was willing to help the children along the path of manual dexterity and eager to have them see and love the beautiful. Under her guidance they gathered and pressed weeds and grasses and the airy, elusive ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... in every week the King assembled his Wazirs for the purpose of meting out justice to all strangers in the land. The palace within was richly adorned and furnished with costly furniture: without, upon the wall faces were limned homely landscapes and scenes of foreign parts and notably all manner beasts and birds and insects even gnats and flies, portrayed with such skill of brain and cunning of hand that they seemed real and alive and the country-folk and villagers seeing from afar paintings of lions ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... were silent, for every man there felt that the hour was big with doom. At length Panda rose with difficulty, because of his unwieldy weight, and uttered these fateful words, that were none the less ominous because of the homely idiom in which ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... the Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies held session. His room, which served him for bed-chamber as well as for the uses of the day, was scantily furnished, and he shared the homely fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter, a sworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family cherished their guest as if he had been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldest daughter of the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, and Robespierre ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... red rep cushions along the pew where the hours were very slow in passing; the white clover in the field behind the garden, got at easily through a hole in the privet hedge. The play of light and shadow over the hills of home, the dusk at nightfall, and the homely cawing of rooks. All the delicious things that went with the smell of ripe strawberries under nets, where thieving birds fluttered until the gardener let them free again; and the mystery of sparks flying up the chimney when the winter logs blazed. Every simple joy ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... me, my loving Proteus. I will not, like a sluggard, wear out my youth in idleness at home. Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits. If your affection were not chained to the sweet glances of your honored Julia, I would entreat you to accompany me, to see the wonders of the world abroad; but since you are a lover, love on still, and may your ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... admitted, frankly, "'kase thar war sech a many o' them mealy-mouthed cusses a-waitin' on 'Genie. The kentry 'peared ter me ter bristle with Luke Todd; he 'minded me o' brumsaidge—everywhar ye seen his yaller head, ez homely an' ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... drawings—the list is large; all these various aspects of the world he has recorded with a fresh, unfailing touch. His horses are not as rhythmic as those of Degas, his landscapes are not as sun-flooded as those of Monet, nor are his Holland bits so charged with homely sentiment as those of Josef Israels. But Liebermann is Liebermann, with a supple, flowing, pregnant line, his condensed style a versatile conception, a cynical, at times, outlook upon the life about ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... as he always did; with great distinctness and deliberation, so that everybody in the church, young and old, could catch every syllable; and he preached, considerately enough, a very short sermon—pithy, homely, and affectionate. He reminded them that he was then preaching his thirty-first Christmas-day sermon from that pulpit! The service and the sacrament over, none of the congregation moved from their places till the occupants of the squire's pew had quitted it; but as soon ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... the cafe, the boy felt as though he were taking leave of an old and tried friend. By homely methods, this unerring diagnostician of the human soul had been reading him, liking him, and making him feel a heart-warming sympathy. The man who shrunk from lion-hunters, and who could return the churl's answer to the advances of sycophant and flatterer, enthusiastically poured out ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... was a churchyard; the time, midnight; the persons, Edward Chester, a clergyman, a grave-digger, and the four bearers of a homely coffin. They stood about a grave which had been newly dug, and one of the bearers held up a dim lantern,—the only light there—which shed its feeble ray upon the book of prayer. He placed it for a moment on the coffin, when he and his companions were about to lower it down. There was no inscription ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... was Eben Jackson, and the homely appellation was no way belied by his aspect. He never could have been handsome, and now fifteen years of rough-and-tumble life had left their stains and scars on his weather-beaten visage, whose only notable features were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... whose bars to-day Drooped heavy o'er our early dead, And homely garments, coarse and gray, For orphans that must earn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... deny. His performances of those parts have shown him to be a man of weird imagination, and they have shown that his characteristics, mental and spiritual, are sombre. Accordingly, when it was announced that he would play Dr. Primrose—Goldsmith's simple, virtuous, homely, undramatic village-preacher, the Vicar of Wakefield,—a doubt was felt as to his suitability for the part and as to the success of his endeavour. He played Dr. Primrose, and he gained in that character some of the brightest ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... found of other mould than these; Who are their own upholders, to themselves Encouragement and energy and will; Expressing liveliest thoughts in lively words As native passion dictates. Others, too, There are, among the walks of homely life, Still higher, men for contemplation framed; Shy, and unpractised in the strife of phrase; Meek men, whose very souls perhaps would sink Beneath them, summoned to such intercourse. Theirs is ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... as the opportunity presented itself, the Active Committee feeling an unusual desire to hear their story, began the investigation by inquiring as to the cause of their escape, etc., which brought simple and homely but earnest answers from each. These answers afforded the best possible means of seeing Slavery in its natural, practical workings—of obtaining such testimony and representations of the vile system, as the most eloquent orator or able pen might labor in vain to ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... it's worth explaining. We have rather luxurious quarters at the hotel, but this room is somehow different. It's restful—I think it's homely—in fact, as I said, it's nice ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... an exquisite sensation to feel her body once more normal, her usual home, and not a scaring, almost hostile entity, apart from her. When she finished, she leaned against Neale's shoulder with a long breath. For an instant, she had no emotion but relieved, homely, bodily comfort. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... nearer he fell to wondering what she was like. Could she talk, for instance, of anything but the homely details of her own rough life? He shrugged his shoulders as he fancied her crude attempts at conversation, her uncouth language and raw expressions. The girl turned her horse toward the hotel entrance. As she drew still nearer he saw that she was not pretty. Her mouth was too large, her face too ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... That man has seen a good deal of what they tacked on to his name. I laughed when I seen him first. Little lame fellar, crooked-legged an' ragged, with thet awful homely face! But I forgot how he ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... the Chinese represent wife by a woman holding a broom—certainly not to brandish it offensively or defensively against her conjugal ally, neither for witchcraft, but for the more harmless uses for which the besom was first invented—the idea involved being thus not less homely than the etymological derivation of the English wife (weaver) and daughter (duhitar, milkmaid). Without confining the sphere of woman's activity to Kueche, Kirche, Kinder, as the present German Kaiser ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... through which one was obliged to pass. I took my daughter with me and gave up the largest room for her and the maid who was to take care of her. I was lodged in a little hole on straw, to which I went up by ladder. As we had no other furniture but our beds, quite plain and homely, I brought some straw chairs and some Dutch earthen and wooden ware. Never did I enjoy a greater content than in this little hole, which appeared so very conformable to the state of Jesus Christ. I fancied everything better ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... unexpected, as now when motoring with Thornton in the car that he had brought back with him on, his return to Needley, when laughing at the Flopper's determined pursuit of Mamie Rodgers, when engaged in the homely, practical details of housekeeping about the cottage, there came flashing suddenly upon her the picture of Mrs. Thornton lying on the brass bed in the car compartment that night, every line of the pale, gentle face as vivid, as actual as though ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... cart-track sloped to the river, which at this point sweeps southward with a strong rush of water, its steep banks forming a plateau on either hand. The narrow gorge was spanned by a rough bridge of boats lashed firmly together; and on the farther side Honor found a lone dak bungalow, its homely dovecot and wheeling pigeons striking a friendly note amid the callousness ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... he gan the virgin deare Towards his cottage gently home to guide; His aged wife there made her homely cheare, Yet welcomde her, and plast her by her side. The princesse dond a poore pastoraes geare, A kerchiefe course vpon her head she tide; But yet her gestures and her lookes (I gesse) Were such as ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... figure of the burly townsman of Jerusalem who lifts his cap in acknowledgment of Joachim and Anna, as they meet at the Golden Gate, in his illustrations of the Life of the Virgin (Fig. 243), may be cited for its homely truth, a characteristic which runs through all Duerer's works, and gives them a certain naivete. The figure is an evident study of an honest townsman of Nuernberg, and is as little like an ancient Jew as ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt |
