"Incongruity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its fascinations. Sara was particularly offended at having to get out to tea, and more so at not being allowed to go in her bathing-drawers. But a mushroom hat trimmed with daisies appeased her, and even at that early age she saw the incongruity of that hat and those nether garments. They were packed, Hugh, Betty, Sara, and the nursery-maid, into the donkey-cart. Betty was supposed to drive, but Hugh and Sara had so large a share in the stage ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... no rational or natural connection or affinity between a pretension like this and the power vested by the Constitution in Congress with regard to the Territories; on the contrary, there is an absolute incongruity between them. ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... well represented. Thus no country in the world approaches England in the wide scope and play of hotel nomenclature. Some of the combinations are exceedingly unique and most interesting in their incongruity. Dickens has not exaggerated this characteristic; not even done it justice in his hotel scenes. Things are put together on a hundred tavern signs that were never joined before in the natural or moral world, and put together frequently in most grotesque association. For instance, there is a large, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... with the principles of modern civilization; and the various indications of a desire to reform and purify their ancient religion may be partly due to the perception among educated Hindus that so contradictory a position is ultimately untenable, that the incongruity between sacrifices to the goddess Kali and high University degrees is ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... The incongruity of the whole business was striking me. Why should anyone want to kill Davies, and why should Davies, the soul of modesty and simplicity, imagine that anyone wanted to kill him? He must have cogent reasons, for he was the last man to give way to a ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Monteverde to Orpheus when he is leading Eurydice back from the Shades is undoubtedly an air, but the situation is one to which an air is appropriate, and musica parlante would be inappropriate. If the drama had been a play to be spoken and not sung, there would not have been any incongruity in allotting a song to Orpheus, to enable Eurydice to trace him through the dark abodes of Hades. But the arias of Cavalli are not confined to such special situations, and recur frequently,' Cavalli had the true Venetian love of colour. In his hands the orchestra began to assume a new importance. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... suitability to the "formula" in mind. In brief, if we are to have complete efficiency, the right kind of life and no other must be put into the short-story hopper. Nothing which cannot be told rapidly must be dropped in, lest it clog the smoothly spinning wheels. If it is a story of slowly developing incongruity in married life, the action must be speeded beyond probability, like a film in the moving pictures, before it is ready to be made into a short story. If it is a tale of disillusionment on a prairie farm, with the world and life flattening out together, some sharp climax ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the fitness of things. It is like dancing and theatre-going, and a dozen other questions. It is very unusual to meet people who do not sneer at Christians for upholding such amusements; they seem to realize an incongruity between them and the Christian profession. It was just as plain to me, I know, and I have sneered many a time over card-playing Christians, and here you are, dear little Flossy, among them, just for the purpose of teaching me not ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... of the lady had the effect of throwing Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy during dinner, a circumstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs. Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since, as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, for purposes of humorous observation, used a pince-nez, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... human right bestowed by the Creator—if it can be tolerated and perpetuated in harmony with republican institutions and our Declaration of Independence—if its existence in the bosom of the Confederacy involves no incongruity, and is calculated to promote the prosperity and stability of the Union, or the welfare of the slaveholding States themselves—these are facts which can be made evident to the world, by the unsurpassed abilities of southern statesmen. Why, then, object to a candid and fearless investigation ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... clergymen that made their fortune by matrimony, were none of them in unison with the open and just dealing which was requisite to my success. The forebodings at which people have so often marvelled are, when they happen, nothing more than perceptions of incongruity, that disturb the mind. Of this kind of disturbing I ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... daguerreotype accuracy!! With such a platform, and such a candidate on it, Watkins would have the appearance of a man walking in one direction, with his head turned completely around, and his face looking the other way! The incongruity of the platform, and the peculiar reputation of Buchanan for political inconsistency, are alike adapted to the history and incidents of Watkins's late canvass for Congress! The plain truth is, that the man so completely destroyed ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... sat back on her heels. She had slipped her bared arms into the armholes of the sleeveless white "fluff-and-flimsy" evening frock, and the "sparklers" of the low-cut bodice now framed her blue-print clad shoulders with an astonishing effect of incongruity. "I have a wonderful inspiration. Let's ask Jeannette out here for a visit—an object-lesson as to the state of life whereunto the country cousins have been called. She hasn't seen me in ten years, and all I remember ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... saw the homuncule was irascible, and played upon him, being encouraged thereto by the shouts of laughter. For he did not see that the people were laughing not at his wit, but at the ridiculous incongruity of the two voices—the gigantic feeble fife, and the petty deep, loud drum, the mountain delivered of a squeak, and the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Hort[619] considers to be made by Conflation into [Greek: ta genemata mou kai ta agatha mou], because [Greek: ta genemata mou] is found in Western documents. The logic is strange, but as Dr. Hort has claimed it, we must perhaps allow him to have intended to include with this strange incongruity some though not many Substitutions in his class of instances, only that we should like to know definitely what substitutions were to be comprised in this class. For I shrewdly suspect that there were actually none. Omissions are now left ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... and a gentleman, as far as she could make out. They were characteristics which, until now, she had never associated together; but now, curiously enough, they did not seem so utterly at variance. Of course they were at variance, must of necessity be so; but in the personality of this man the incongruity seemed somehow lost. Perhaps it was a sense of gratitude toward him that modified her views. He looked a gentleman. There was something about him that appealed. The gray eyes seemed full of cool, confident, self-possession; and, quiet as his manner was, she sensed a latent dynamic ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... East Tennessee, and the lion spoke the old familiar mountain dialect so easily recognizable in this locality. Even a lapsus linguae, "you uns." was unmistakable amidst the high-flown periods. Although the ventriloquism was appreciated, the incongruity of this countrified jargon, held in great contempt by the townfolks, discounted Emperor's majesty and he ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... declared that "the corn-bins of Russia were bulging with grain." To-night Mr. MCCURDY told the House that, according to his information, the resumption of trade With Russia was not likely to open up any large store of wheat or grain in the near future. Possibly there is no real incongruity. The grain may be there, but the Russians, greedy creatures, may be going to eat ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... upstairs. And old Jamie waited. He dared not smoke his pipe in the parlor, nor even on the doorstep (which was a pleasant place; there was a little park, with trees, in front), for Mercedes thought it ungenteel. The present incongruity of this regard for appearances never struck Jamie, and he waited there. After eleven o'clock he fancied he might venture; the neighbors were not likely to be up to notice it. So he lit his pipe and listened. There was still a light in her window; ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... repeated Von Barwig, who evidently enjoyed the incongruity of the combination. Then noticing that Ryan was standing he said with a smile, "Brother artist, be seated!" Pinac and Fico roared with laughter. Mr. Ryan sat down, mumbling to himself that that sort of sarcasm didn't go with him; he was a workman, not an artist. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... power) but by feeling the effect He had on those who knew Him. They are constantly telling us how He amazed them, awed them, and bound them to Himself. Their superlative tribute to Him is that, holding His own pure and exalted view of God, they felt no incongruity in thinking of Him as beside God on the throne. It may have been their belief in His Messiahship, accredited by His resurrection and destining Him to come with power and judge the world, that led them to place Him at the right hand ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... not without hesitation, the Latin, rather than the Greek, nomenclature for the Heathen Deities. I have been induced to do so from the manifest incongruity of confounding the two; and from the fact that though English readers may be familiar with the names of Zeus, or Aphrodite, or even Poseidon, those of Hera, or Ares, or Hephaestus, or Leto, would hardly convey to them ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Lisle said, with a laugh. "I will try to suppress my zeal. I can assure you that I am perfectly conscious of the incongruity of being in such a ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... should be there only because it belongs there. Therefore all sub-titles should be couched in language that harmonizes with the story. Every word should be weighed. Nothing should ever shock the spectator out of his interest in the picture by its incongruity, extravagance or inanity. Too much in a sub-title is as bad as too little—like seasoning in a pudding. The function of the sub-title is to supplement and correct the action of the picture, to cover lapses in the continuity, and to supply the finer shades of meaning ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... which Hengist and Horsa landed on our shores.[200] But whether Hengist and Horsa arrived in A.D. 449, or, as seems more probable, about A.D. 428, if we suppose them in either case to have been born about A.D. 400, we shall find no incongruity, but the reverse, in the idea that their grandfather Vetta was the leader of a Saxon force thirty-six years previously. Hengist was in all probability past the middle period of life when he came to the Court of Vortigern, as ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... The incongruity of the name seemed somehow to throw into brighter relief the peculiar sincerity of its bearer's character, and by the time it was generally adopted among the students Madge Burtwell's popularity ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... the other hand, was regarded as the cold-blooded and cruel warrior who despised the pleasures of love and rejoiced in warfare: Ishtar thus combined in her person chastity and lasciviousness, kindness and ferocity, and a peaceful and warlike disposition, but this incongruity in her characteristics did not seem to disconcert the devotion of her worshippers. The three other planets would have had a wretched part to play in comparison with Nebo and Ishtar, if they had not been placed under new patronage. The secondary solar gods, Merodach, Ninib, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the weight and content of his criticism. Most of the eminent men who consented to take part came to play a game for the sake of the Hospitals, and because they rarely unbent like that in public they were wholly facetious and trivial. To Chesterton there was no difficulty or incongruity in combining the fun of acting with the fun of genuine intellectual discussion. When he prosecuted the Headmasters of leading public schools for Destroying Freedom of Thought I came down in a lift with them afterwards and found they were volubly nettled ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a queer tableau, indeed; Donna weeping on Mr. Pennycook's breast, when every instinct of her sex, even the vaguest acceptance of tradition and custom, dictated that she should have wept on Mrs. Pennycook's breast. Mrs. Pennycook realized the incongruity of the situation and was shrewd enough to attribute it to a strong aversion to her on the part of Donna Corblay. She resolved to make them both pay for her humiliation—Dan, within the hour, Donna whenever the ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... subjects are represented in the Amsterdam collection; they are full of artistic imagination and sentiment in their composition in spite of their seeming incongruity. The conception is so highly original, and at the same time betrays such a depth of understanding, that other prints, however beautifully done, look academic and stilted ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... the household. I can facilitate your entrance, should you find difficulty, and I can point out the proper manner and time of approaching the king. But I do not know," he added, smiling, "whether these little advantages will not be overbalanced by the incongruity of a nobleman receiving them from the hands ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... It stood on the other side of the hall between an Oriental cabinet and a sixteenth-century Italian cabinet—for all the world as if it were standing in a crowded curiosity shop—with the natural effect that the three pieces, by their mere incongruity, took something each from the beauty of the other. Sonia raised the flap of the bureau, and taking from one of the drawers a small portfolio, turned over the papers in it and handed a letter ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... alter, and they remain in their original form, for example, Burns, Fraser and McAllister. It is strange to hear these names spoken by people who know no language but the French, and I was much struck by the incongruity. ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... chin, that ended squarely as boot. Her sallow cheeks were raddled to a hectic color, a monstrous head-dress—like that of some horse in a lord mayor's show—coiffed her, and her dress was a mixture of extravagance and incongruity, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... the most solemn and tragic there often falls a light purely farcical in its incongruity. Such a gleam was unconsciously projected upon the present crisis by Mr. Bodge, better known in the village as Father Bodge. Mr. Bodge was stone deaf, naturally stupid, and had been nearly moribund for thirty years with asthma. Just before night-fall ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... collision with the world, alone and unsupported, Hamlet's natural buoyancy returns. It is the moment of isolation, but it is the moment also of intellectual freedom. It is desertion, but it is also independence. Every incongruity feeds his fanciful and inventive humour. He follows vanity and affectation with irony and mimicry, removes a mask with the point of his dexterous wit, and exposes the pretence of virtue or conceit of knowledge with sarcastic glee, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... incongruity alluded to had not altogether escaped his own notice, and since discord of any kind pained him, he had mended the matter—as best he could—by surrendering himself entirely to his mournful voice; allowing it to master his gestures, choice of language, almost ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the hallowed nonsense once again, struck with the fantastic incongruity of the moment. Even the dying have to go on living, and must be treated like living folks,—for a little while longer; and, though they are slipping away, slipping away, under your very eyes, there are merciful hours when you forget ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... recognizing the rights of the other, and both willing to give in upon occasion in order to make the service as a whole work out more smoothly. Many humorous stories are told, the point of which is based upon the absolute incongruity of the various parts of the church service. The writer remembers most vividly an incident that occurred during the first year of the Great War, in the church in which he was at that time the choirmaster. The choir had just finished singing an anthem ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... refused. "An nar," he said, his face glowing with conscious pride, "y'ort ter see me in a bloomin' bowt. I ain't a-goain' ter say as I kin fling wun o' them 'ere bloomin' 'arpoones like ar bowt-steerers kin; but I kin do my bit o' grawft wiv enny on 'em—don'tchu make no bloomin' herror." The glorious incongruity of the thing tickled me immensely; but I laughed more heartily still when on going below I was hailed as "Wot cher, chummy; 'ow yer hoppin' up?" by another barbarian from the wilds of Spitalfields, who, from the secure shelter of his cats'-meat round in 'Oxton, had got adrift, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances. In place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a painful incongruity that no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... in the sense of very or moderately, as "He was pretty badly hurt," "He is a pretty good scholar," "She is pretty wealthy," "Thomas is pretty ugly." So common is this provincialism in some localities that the incongruity of such an expression as ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... for a moment suppose it to have proceeded from a spirit of animosity, which I feel myself unconscious of deserving. But the reviewer further says, the objection to the identity of the Niger and the Nile, is grounded on the incongruity of their periodical inundations, or on the rise and fall of the former river not corresponding with that of the latter. I do not comprehend whence the Quarterly Reviewer has derived this information; I have always understood the direct ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... sphere. It limits and qualifies your relationship and at the same time affords me the happy advantage of confessing my heart to you. Really, I have always felt the need of such an officer in my spiritual kingdom. I could never reconcile myself to the incongruity of confessing in our experience meetings. It seemed to me that sharing my confidence with so many people was heterodox to nature itself. For this reason I have always thought that while Protestantism is based upon a nobler theory of the truth, Roman Catholicism is ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... admits of justification; which, like many other peculiarities of the ancient theatre, (such as the acting in the open air,) were still retained, though originally designed for other departments of the drama, and though they seem a greater incongruity in the New Comedy than in the Old, and in Tragedy. But certainly it was unsuitable to the spirit of the New, that, while in other respects the representation approached nature with a more exact, nay, illusive resemblance, the masks deviated more from it ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... threshold of earthly ruin, in the spaces where there is no need of a temple any more; they forgot their worn and far-spent lives,—each other's old and year-marked faces; they were as two spirits, met without hindrance or incongruity, looking into each other's ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... during the summer preceding Mr. Lincoln's marriage, and which in the opinion of many had its influence in hastening that event, deserves some attention, if only from its incongruity with the rest of his history. This was the farce—which aspired at one time to be a tragedy—of his first and last duel. Among the officers of the State Government was a young Irishman named James Shields, who owed his post as Auditor, in great measure, to that alien vote to gain which ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards his aim. Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed friends[19] and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... recall the great angler, Isaac [Transcriber's note: "Izaak" in Index] Walton, {44} even though we have no means of proving that these were actually his handiwork; but as a friend of Casaubon's son, and a namesake and admirer of the father, there is no incongruity in ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... someone was bold enough to object, saying that the devil, according to the ritual, knew all languages living and dead, and ought to reply in the same language in which he was addressed, the father declared that the incongruity was caused by the pact, and that moreover some devils were ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... consideration of a small payment for coal. And then he blew his fire and hammered, with a couple of candles on the bench and a Homer between them; and beat the long hexameters into his memory. The incongruity of it never struck him. He was going to be a great man, and somehow this was going to be the way. These scraps of iron—these tools of his forging—were to grow into the arms and shield of Achilles. In its own time ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... exhausted his memory of the whistleable parts, and he was not given to tiresome repetitions. He stopped for a moment, and Bob's voice chanted admonishingly from somewhere, "Keep her a-go-o-ing, Bud, old boy!" So Thurston took breath and began on "The Holy City," and came near laughing at the incongruity of the song; only he remembered that he must not frighten the cattle, ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... trees and grasses an inappropriate surrounding to her silken robes and costly lace mantle, she was none the wiser for that, you know, and took her seat, indifferent to them all, except that presently there stole over her the sense of disagreeable incongruity with her outdoor surroundings; so Satan had the pleasure of ruffling her spirits and occupying her thoughts with her rich brown silk dress instead of letting her heart be touched with the solemnity and beauty of the grand hymn which rolled down ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... original plan called for cascades from below the Stone Age group on the tower to these monuments. Although the elimination of this feature made the court more simple and satisfying as a whole, the figures of the Water Sprites were left high and dry, so that now there is a certain incongruity in their position. Still one may admire the very spirited girl archers surmounting the two columns, even if they are apparently launching arrows at their sister sprites below, instead of into jets of water ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... just the sort to see no incongruity in the majesty of Heaven stooping to plead and sentimentalize over such, and see in their salvation an ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... already made a woman's survey of Mlle. d'Esgrignon's room; the cold, bare, comfortless chamber, that might have been a nun's cell, was like a picture of the life of the heroic woman before her. The Duchess saw it all—past, present, and future—with rising emotion, felt the incongruity of her presence, and could not keep back the falling tears that made answer ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... laughed together at the incongruity of rehearsing those dainty rites of old Japan in the over-furnished sitting-room at the Imperial Hotel, with Geoffrey sitting back in his arm-chair and ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... which remained and leave the differences henceforward in respectful silence. The recital may still serve to show to sympathetic persons the true lines and enlargements of her genius. It is certain that this incongruity never interrupted for a moment the intercourse, such as it was, that ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... these motives were followed to their logical conclusion, the resuit, both in literature and in life, became a byword for absurd unreality. To live at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms, pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality of a decadent court or as the plaything of the leisure hours of a college of learning, and its insipid convention ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... upon a visit to Charles of Orleans. Where Master Baudet Harenc, of Chalons, found a sympathetic, or perhaps a derisive audience (for who can tell nowadays the degree of Baudet's excellence in his art?), favour would not be wanting for the greatest ballade-maker of all time. Great as would seem the incongruity, it may have pleased Charles to own a sort of kinship with ragged singers, and whimsically regard himself as one of the confraternity of poets. And he would have other grounds of intimacy with Villon. A room looking upon Windsor gardens is a different matter from Villon's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... comic in its incongruity with what actually is. The mere thought of these protagonists of the century working in harmony to one great purpose, without distrust of each other's motives, and with no necessity for anyone's dodging political foul play, summons the smile of irony. Mutual trust was never so much a suggestion to ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... according to its language and legal interpretation, can you say that when there is an award of judgment for the offences on the record, that judgment applies to those counts which bear on the face of them no offence whatever? That is, my lords, an incongruity, an inconsistency, which your lordships will never sanction for one moment. The argument which applies to defective counts, applies to valid counts on which erroneous findings are entered up. When judgment is given for an 'offence' on the record, it is given on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... was the thought of Christine being in this place. Her distress of mind and her poverty seemed so indecently exposed to view. He lingered a while in the thick of the crowd, torturing himself with the horrible incongruity between it and the poor, dear woman in the stateroom below. He had contrived to have put at her disposal the best the boat afforded, but it was abominably meagre. What business had she here at all? It was no place for her. His whole nature rebelled at it, and he grew savage as he thought that ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... supper, and the evening closed with hot cockles and blind-hoodman—the latter being blindman's buff. And among all the company, to none but John and Isoult Avery did it ever occur that in these occupations there was the least incongruity with the Sabbath day. For they only were Gospellers; and at that time the Gospellers alone remembered to keep it holy. Rome strikes her pen through the third and fourth commandments, if less notoriously, yet quite as really, as through ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... 225, 272). 'In such wise Grettir lost his life, &c.' The hardest thing to account for, or to bring to an intelligible issue in Grettir's saga, is the incongruity between the statements as to his age at his death and the number of years of his outlawry, as compared with the truthful account of the events told in the saga itself. From the time when Grettir slew his first man, all the events of the saga may be traced clearly ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... turned towards the house, eyes showing like flames under the khaki trooper's hat, which added fresh incongruity to the frock-coat and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... indeed, could hardly say, unlike as they were in complexion and character, which of the two I read oftenest or admired most. Again, among the prose writers, Addison was his especial favourite, and Swift he detested; whereas I liked Addison and Swift almost equally well, and passed without sense of incongruity, from the Vision of Mirza, or the paper on Westminster Abbey, to the true account of the death of Partridge, or the Tale of a Tub. If, however, he could wonder at the latitudinarian laxity of my taste, there was at least one special department in which ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... had got Mrs. Elizabeth Carey in prison, said no more about it. As Jonathan and his wife were safe, and beyond reach, the whole matter dropped out of the public mind; and Mrs. Elizabeth remained undisturbed. This is the only way in which I can account for the strange incongruity of the statements, as found in the "Complaint," Calef, and Hutchinson. The letter of Jonathan Carey is decisive of the point that it was "Hannah," his wife, that was arrested, and escaped. The error in Calef was not discovered by ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... strangely anomalous fact that children are at one moment seemingly cruel and at the next affectionate and kind, vibrating, as it were, between two worlds, egotistic and altruistic, without conscious sense of incongruity?" (F.L. Burk, "Teasing and Bullying," Pedagogical ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Roland's world. And Father Roland had invited him to enter it. That was the curious part of the situation, as it was impressed upon him as he sat with his face flattened against the window. The Little Missioner had invited him, and the night was daring him. For a single moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he laughed—a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to a point resembling laughter, ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... Wondering much, I stop at the north loop, and standing with the Government Building to my right and the Fisheries with its curving colonnades on my left, I gaze off upon the blue and shining waters of the lake, and realize fully for the first time the awful incongruity between all this stateliness and beauty and our mission in ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... that surrounds him, there is also, to a spectator, something almost touching in his situation. He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him appealing from the lonely honour of a representative attitude—perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderable literary baggage and the large conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one side is so subtle and slender and unpretending, and the American world on the other is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to the author of The Scarlet Letter ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... the progressive elements strove. A new Democracy was growing, intent on administrative reform and moderate Constitutionalism; Samuel J. Tilden of New York and his allies were among the leaders; their candidate was Chief Justice Chase. Only the incongruity with his judicial position marred the fitness of Chase's candidacy. Lincoln, though he had his own troubles in dealing with him, said, "Of all the great men I have known, Chase is equal to about one and a half of the best ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... And observing the incongruity of his surroundings, he laughed lightly, while his glance, turning inquiringly if not insolently, from one to the other, lingered in some surprise upon the young woman. He had heard that in far-away France the motley was not confined to men. Had not Jeanne, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... musing instant to the incongruity of rejoicing over a freedom gained by ceasing to be master and ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... swords in the hall, apparently that they might be ready to buckle them on again and rush out to do battle for the Fatherland between the courses, the other guests only looked upon these weapons in the light of sticks and umbrellas, and possessed their souls in peace. And when, added to this singular incongruity, many of these warriors were spectacled, studious men, and, despite their lethal weapons, wore a slightly professional air, and were—to a man—deeply sentimental and singularly simple, their attitude in this eternal ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... ingeniously introduceth a forest into a bed-chamber, or committeth the like incongruity, marvellous pleasant and mirthful to behold, but in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... understand the position of a Scottish bishop in those days, one must figure Parson Adams, no richer than Fielding has described him, yet encumbered by a title ever associated with wealth and dignity, and only calculated, when allied with so much poverty and social humility, to deepen the incongruity of his lot, and throw him more than ever on the mercy of the scorner. The office was indeed conspicuous, not by its dignities or emoluments, but by the extensive opportunities it afforded for self-devotion. One may have noticed his successor of later times giving lustre to newspaper paragraphs ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the direct look that accompanied this. Her opinions could not interest him one way or another, and he was going far in assuming that she was deeply concerned in Harwood's welfare. The incongruity of their talk was emphasized by the languorous strains of the newest popular waltz that floated over them ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... lives, beginning early and sitting late. They have a varnish of art over their swinishness, and must have music as well as wine. So, in many a drink-shop in England, a piano or a band adds to the attractions, and gives a false air of aestheticism to pure animalism. Isaiah feels the incongruity that music should be so prostituted, and expresses it by adding to his list of musical instruments 'and wine' as if he would underscore the degradation of the great art to be the cupbearer of sots. Such revellers are blind to the manifest tokens of God's working, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... by fascination than intent, he raised his head and faced his companion. The compassionate eyes that met his did hold certain childlike qualities of freedom from suspicion or hardness, but the gaze was not that of a simple child, nor was the bearing. Incongruity sparked a scarcely-controllable impulse to hysterical laughter. A small boy seated on a log, regarding his elder with gentle kindliness and understanding! Phil made a sound deep in his throat and swung his ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... accumulating for more than sixty years, and, interspersed with private acts, are scattered through numerous volumes, and, from the cost of the whole, have become almost inaccessible to the great mass of the community. They also exhibit much of the incongruity and imperfection of hasty legislation. As it seems to be generally conceded that there is no "common law" of the United States to supply the defects of their legislation, it is most important that that legislation should ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... The incongruity of all the passages, in which the Thane of Cawdor is mentioned, is very remarkable; in the second scene the Thanes of Rosse and Angus bring the king an account of the battle, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... his father's companion. With amazement, he recognised the queer figure of the lanky, gangling Droom; but too kind-hearted and well-bred to allow his features in the slightest degree to express the astonishment which he felt at sight of such a comic incongruity, the young man voiced a few kindly words to the old man, while from the table in the alcove, where the smart, little supper party were seating themselves, Miss Cable was smiling her cheery recognition to her prospective father-in-law; then Graydon ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... like or not to like the type of our apperception will be not so much what this type is, as its fitness to the context of our mind. It is like a word in a poem, more effective by its fitness than by its intrinsic beauty, although that is requisite too. We can be shocked at an incongruity of natures more than we can be pleased by the intrinsic beauty of each nature apart, so long, that is, as they remain abstract natures, objects recognized without being studied. The aesthetic dignity of the form, then, tells us the kind of beauty we are to expect, affects us by its welcome ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... original, would have given a false notion both of its style and purport; to have 10 translated it into the same metre would have been incompatible with a faithful adherence to the sense of the German, from the comparative poverty of our language in rhymes; and it would have been unadvisable from the incongruity of those lax verses with the present taste of the English Public. Schiller's intention 15 seems to have been merely to have prepared his reader for the Tragedies by a lively picture of the laxity ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... open—smiled to each other perhaps, recognizing how the prick of personal injury and injustice will arouse far-reaching rebellion against human wrongs and imperfections in general. But our famous American sense of humor may be worked overtime, and, from a perception of the incongruity and relative importance of things, be insensibly degraded into pusillanimous indifference to everything, good or bad. The soberest observer may concede that there is a spiritual energy and movement behind visible phenomena, whose purport and aim it is the province ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... congenial shade to the successor of its founder, seemed to impart meanness and vulgarity to the tapering verdure of his plantations, his modern trees—his pert poplars and mean larches—his sycamores and planes. Even the incongruity between his solid new paling and the decayed and sun-bleached wood of the venerable fence to which it adjoined, with its hoary beard of silvery lichen, was an eyesore to him. Every passer-by might note the limit and circumscription dividing the new place from the ancient seat of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... remembered that the longest list would be no nearer to an exhaustive analysis than the shortest. It is not a specious completeness, but a sense of infinity that can never be completed,—greater intensity, not greater extension,—that distinguishes modern landscape-art. Hence there is no incongruity in the seeming license that it takes with the firm order of Nature. It is in no spirit of levity or profanity that the substantial distinctions of things are thus disregarded,—that all absolute rank is denied, and the value of each ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... with me at the window kingship and Styrian discipline. In the latter there was to me nothing strange; I had grown into it from birth. But now it became suddenly noticeable, as a thing demanding justification, by reason of its patent incongruity with my kingship. I have shown how swiftly and sharply the contrast was impressed on me; if I have not made that point, then my story of a nursery tragedy is unexcused. I was left wondering what manner ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water falling over some cliffs. But it is very remarkably that. The human race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best to surround the Falls with every distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, power-houses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, sham legends, stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... no! It's real, real, deadly real, that's what ... Oh, Mollie—!" Instinctively, as a child, the man's head had gone to the girl's lap. Though never before had they spoken of love or of marriage, neither noted the incongruity now. "It's all over. We'll never be married, never again get out into the country together, never even see the green grass next Spring—at least I won't—never.... Oh, Mollie, Mollie!" The man's back rose and fell spasmodically. His voice broke. "Mollie, make me forget; I ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... the common law denouncing and deciding against the right of property in man. This could not have been their intention, nor can this be the construction. We cannot consider these gentlemen to have changed their opinion from one sentence to another, to have left an incongruity and a contradiction expressed upon the ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... Agar-Robartes was one of the most whimsically incongruous figures in the Government ranks. Twentieth-century Liberalism wears a somewhat drab and serious aspect, but this ultra-fashionable example of gilded youth would have been in his place among the votaries of Charles James Fox. The climax of his incongruity was a vehement and rather antiquated Protestantism; he was, for instance, among the few who opposed the alteration of the Coronation oath to a formula less offensive to Catholics. Nobody doubted that his Cornish constituents would endorse whatever he did, for the House held few more ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... He therefore determined, we will suppose, to make a wooden roof which would sacrifice as little of the height of his transepts as possible, and yet allow them to fit on to his nave without any appearance of incongruity. ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... allude to the disposition of some persons to use various fashions together. They are inclined to be "eclectic." They select from by-gone fashions, and endeavour to blend them with those which prevail. The result is a painful incongruity. Who would dream of placing a Grecian portico to an Elizabethan building? Why then endeavour to combine old fashions with new? Why attempt to wear a bonnet of almost primitive form with dresses of modern dimensions and style? or why wear flounces when they are out of ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... Macker said. By the inflections of his tones the others knew that some incongruity of the situation had aroused Macker's sense of humor. "Why don't we give the creature an entirely new body? We could replace the flesh and viscera, as well as the cartilaginous structure, with our own type ...
— Vital Ingredient • Charles V. De Vet
... not to be wondered at, as with every two steps he prostrated himself full length on the ground before the little altar he carried with him. With this primitive mountain world his act was in weird harmony, but there was an incongruity almost stunning in the sight of a Hindu carrying out a similar vow in one of the crowded business streets of Europeanized Calcutta. I nearly stepped on him as I came out one day from the Hong Kong ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... 'there is some incongruity in these two narratives, which more minute particulars might reconcile.' We have noticed them. Mr. Bennet received the account verbally, and may be mistaken in some points, but there is little doubt ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... companionship was requisite for her happiness; but for this society nature had endowed her with no fitness. In the case of an unhappy marriage, where the unhappiness is not caused by actual misconduct, but is solely due to incongruity of tastes and capacities, it is cruel to assume that the superior person of the ill-assorted couple has the stronger claim ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... old, old days a boat was passing the rocky promontory of Kagbubtag.[12] The occupants espied a monkey and a cat fighting upon the summit of the promontory. The incongruity of the thing impressed them and they began to give vent to derisive remarks, addressing themselves to the brute combatants, when lo and behold, they and their craft were turned into stone, and to this day the petrified craft and crew may be seen on the promontory ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of cleanliness and quiet prosperity, of excellent sanitation and odd historic corners, side by side with big new modern buildings and exquisite green gardens where the old gnarled apple-trees are afroth with blossom in the spring, which is the peculiar flavour of an English country town. The incongruity is the charm; you step from a modern drapery store, with a respectable display of plate-glass, on to the clean narrow pavement, and find yourself looking down a small dark passage opposite, into a sunny paved court, where the houses are cream-washed, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... in our essay "On the Cause of the Pleasure we derive from Tragic Objects," it is known that in every tragic emotion there is an idea of incongruity, which, though the emotion may be attended with charm, must always lead on to the conception of a higher consistency. Now it is the relation that these two opposite conceptions mutually bear which determines ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... or the pioneer, in vocations which have been the life-work of the latter. O, the wearisome nonsense of this kind which is remorselessly thrust upon a docile public! And what an opportunity for some novelist, in his rabid pursuit of originality, to merely reverse the incongruity—picturing a semi-barbarian, lassoed full-grown, and launched into polished society, there to excel the fastidious idlers of drawing-room and tennis-court in their own line! This miracle would be more reasonable than its antithesis. Without doubt, it is easier to acquire gentlemanly ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... bed, to fortify himself with a view of the ark, and fell asleep. Over most of the beds, the toys were yet grouped as the children had left them when they last laid themselves down, and, in their innocent grotesqueness and incongruity, they might have stood for the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... perceived that wealth did not increase in proportion to industrial capacity, even when production and trade were, as Smith demanded, freed from State interference and injury. He hit upon the expedient of finding the cause of this incongruity in the nature of labour itself. Since labour is the only source of value, he said, it cannot increase value. A thing is worth as much as the quantity of labour put into it; consequently, when with increasing productiveness of labour the amount ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said, sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before him on the path to listen brought ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... ripping his protective clothing and gashing his legs, meanwhile trying to get its knife into play. He was vaguely conscious that his men had disposed of the rest of the Rumi and were dancing around him frantically trying to get a chance to aid him. He was struck by the incongruity of a civilized being descended from simian ancestors and a civilized being descended from feline ancestors fighting fang and claw while a bunch of misplaced amphibians danced ...
— Narakan Rifles, About Face! • Jan Smith
... possibly the judicious Sterne himself (acute enough in matters of this kind), had perceived that now was the time to publish a series of sermons by the very unclerical lion of the day. There would—they, no doubt, thought—be an undeniable piquancy, a distinct flavour of semi-scandalous incongruity in listening to the Word of Life from the lips of this loose-tongued droll; and the more staid and serious the sermon, the more effective the contrast. There need not have been much trouble in finding the kind of article required; ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... majestic strokes, and we should have had a great simplicity, a noble outline with none of the detail put in. Ibsen, already, cannot be satisfied with this; to him the detail is every thing, and the result is a hopeless incongruity between the cartoon and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... purpose. When one speaks of Congressmen or Members of Parliament one thinks, to be plain about it, of intellectual riff-raff. When one hears of a pre-eminent man in the English-speaking community, even though that pre-eminence may be in political or social science, one is struck by a sense of incongruity if he happens to be also in the Legislature. When Lord Haldane disengages the Gifford lectures or Lord Morley writes a "Life of Gladstone" or ex-President Roosevelt is delivered of a magazine article, there ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... easily, showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire. He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... careers, concern about advancement, habits of comfort, maternal solicitude, the shrugs of the shoulder and the half-smile of the strong-minded neighbor. Stone upon stone and each stone in its place, his faith builds up and becomes complete without any incoherency in its structure, with no incongruity in the materials, without any hidden imbalance. He has been taken in hand before his twelfth year, when very young; his cure, who has been instructed from above to secure suitable subjects, has singled him out in the catechism class and again at the ceremony ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... companions went quietly from the room, and through the long and stately passages, where the worldly pomp visible had stirred in Dalaber on entering a sense of incongruity ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... over the incongruity of the lovers, is not the whole play filled with convulsive energies and unhealthy bursts of passion? For my part—but in this, my dear Smith, I will willingly yield to your better judgment—I think Iago was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... a third raison d'etre for this facsimile, which to name with approbation will no doubt seem impiety to many, but which, as a personal predilection, I venture to risk—there is no Cotton! The relation between Walton and Cotton is a charming incongruity to contemplate, and one stands by their little fishing-house in Dovedale as before an altar of friendship. Happy and pleasant in their lives, it is good to see them still undivided in their deaths—but, ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and animate itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum; but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists trying to make her out with ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... there is none which is more popular in Germany than that of the Modern Lohengrin bestriding the world in glittering armour. The Kaiser lacks the democratic gift of humour, and does not seem to be aware of the incongruity of the Lohengrin masquerade. A Prussian King cannot honestly play the part of a knight in quest of the Holy Grail. Chivalry and Prussianism, the crusading spirit and the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... the versicle, "Give peace in our time, O Lord," and the response, "Because there is none other that fighteth for us, but only thou, O God," to be "a very infelicitous non-sequitur." For correcting this palpable incongruity, the authors of The Book Annexed have been sharply criticised here at home. What were they that they should have presumed to disturb ancient Anglican precedent in such a point? If we could not understand why the God of battles, as the God of battles, should be implored to "give peace in our time," ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... could so plainly recognize his own influence, and the incongruity of it against the gentle, colourless background of the tale was in truth amusing. A more ludicrous effect could hardly have been obtained, if Miss Bibby herself, clad in the limp lavender muslin, had been encountered lashing about ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... hastily made highway from one camp to another. Rough, too, were the vehicles traversing it; the oddly assorted teams, mules, donkeys and Mongolian ponies, went unclipped and ungroomed; the drivers went unwashed. Loathsome beggars sat in the gilded doorways of the fur-shops, the incongruity of their rags against the background of barbaric splendour evidently appealing to none of the passers-by who hurried about their business ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... National Guards, who arrived in military order with their arms. Jules Favre addressed them. Now as far as I can make out, these battalions went to the Hotel de Ville on their own initiative. No one, however, seems to see any incongruity in the friends of the Government making an armed demonstration as a protest against armed and unarmed demonstrations in general. The question of the municipal elections will lie dormant for a few days, but I see no evidence ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... beside Mr Valiant and Mr Fearing, and you have a sudden revelation of the abyss that lies between the fashionable author who could see nothing in the world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the comedy of their incongruity, and the field preacher who achieved virtue and courage by identifying himself with the purpose of the world as he understood it. The contrast is enormous: Bunyan's coward stirs your blood more than Shakespear's hero, who actually leaves you cold and secretly hostile. You ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... same afternoon when our great poet was laid in the Abbey with every pretence of national grief. The pursuit of one horse by another is doubtless a more elevating spectacle than "the pursuit of a flea by a 'lady,'" but on that afternoon even a tepid lover of letters must have found an equal incongruity in ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... undertaking an opportunity is presented that would be eagerly seized, with all its attendant labor and expense, by any one of the States, and that it was with great difficulty, and only because of the self-evident incongruity of holding it elsewhere, that we were permitted by the national authorities to celebrate the anniversary in Philadelphia. It is in connection with this, and as a part thereof, that the Zoological Gardens ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... the flames began to scorch his fingers, and then flung it, still burning, into the grate. Then he looked at himself in the glass in the mantelpiece—the room was full of mirrors—and laughed bitterly at the incongruity of his gentlemanlike, respectable, and even refined appearance, in ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... the Attic dialect may not have assumed all its more marked and distinguishing characteristics—still it is difficult to suppose that the language, particularly in the joinings and transitions, and connecting parts, should not more clearly betray the incongruity between the more ancient and modern forms of expression. It is not quite in character with such a period to imitate an antique style, in order to piece out an imperfect poem in the character of the original, as Sir Walter Scott has done in his ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... gravely courteous, and in the Latin tongue. The purity of his speech, his cultivated manners, his reticence, served to stimulate their curiosity the more. Such as observed him closely were struck by an incongruity between his demeanor, which had the ease and grace of a patrician, and certain points of his person. Thus his arms were disproportionately long; and when, to steady himself against the motion of the vessel, he took hold of anything near by, the size of his hands and their evident power compelled ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... "He's got that rooster in his throat," he said solemnly. The rooster was nearly life-size, but the incongruity of this suggestion did not strike him. Judith hastily rose from her chair ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... which pressed upon him so that many must have come into bodily contact with him, he knew that some one had touched him with special intent. No perplexity arises from the difference between the accounts, for there is only difference, not incongruity: the two tell more than the one; it is from the nature of the added circumstances that it springs, for those circumstances necessarily involve inquiries of the most difficult nature. Nor can I in the least pretend to have satisfied myself concerning them. In the first place comes the mode ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... like despotism of all sorts, is characteristically self-confident and proud; but because it had been allowed to grow up under protest in the midst of free institutions, and among a people conscious of the incongruity of the relationship existing between them and it; and had so contracted the habit of apology, and the hypocritical profession of regret for its own inherent wrongfulness. Provoked, however, to try its strength against ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... his little cup of coffee, his subconscious mind registering the incongruity of such a skimpy amount of coffee after such an amazingly ample meal. Consciously he was having a hurried, whispered conversation with ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... satisfaction, agreeing, that fame had spoken truth for once, in extolling the two last-named delicacies. We went to the Opera, and there, in a brilliant salle of white and gold, spoilt, however, by the incongruity of bonnets mingling everywhere with full evening toilettes, assisted at a massacre—unmusical and melancholy—of "Lucrezia." We drove out through the crude, unfinished Central Park to Harlem lane, whither the trotters are wont to resort, and ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... even the "native" scout encountered can be estimated only by those familiar with the vigilance that surrounds an army. The casual meeting with an acquaintance, the slightest act inconsistent with his assumed character, or the smallest incongruity between his speech and that of the district to which he professed to belong, has sent many a good man to the gallows. One of the best of Rosecrans's scouts—a native of East Kentucky—lost his life because he would "bounce" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... within the lute? Ah, who is without it? What household has not its skeleton? Where shall we find perfect happiness—or anything perfect? In this instance it was soon apparent to us; and again we marvelled at the inconsistency of human nature; the incongruity of things; the way men spoil their lives and make crooked things that ought to be, and might have ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... accidental benefit be derivable from homophones, we shall always command it fully and in excess; look again at the portentous list of them! And since the essential jocularity of a pun (at least when it makes me laugh) lies in a humorous incongruity, its farcical gaiety may be heightened by a queer pronunciation. I cannot pretend to judge a sophisticated taste; but, to give an example, if, as I should urge, the o of the word petrol should be preserved, as it is now universally spoken, not having yet degraded into petr'l, a future squire ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... surprised at such an incongruity, asked him who he was, how he came to be living in such a wild place, and how, with all the appearance of a forester, he was wearing the ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... ceremony, seems to me to provide a possible explanation of the feature found alike in Wolfram, and in the closely allied Grail section of Sone de Nansai; i.e., that the wound of the King was a punishment for sin, he had conceived a passion for a Pagan princess.[22] Now there would be no incongruity in representing the Dead King as reborn in youthful form, the aged King as revenu dans sa juvence, but when the central figure was a man in the prime of life some reason had to be found, his strength and vitality being ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... see the incongruity of his position, of being a passenger, though secretly and surreptitiously, of the car containing those embarked on a mission so closely concerning himself. Instead of fleeing from them he was actually courting their company, pursuing himself, as it were! At another time he might ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... of Walt Whitman and Artemas Ward. Yet it is not burlesque. It appears to have been written in good faith, and for this reason the incongruity of such a grandiloquent rhapsody on such a prosaic subject is all the more noticeable. As an example of "fine writing" it has seldom been surpassed, and for sheer nonsense it ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... another anomaly—her words were always of a meek and submissive character, but her voice, her look, her gestures were those of a queen. The Doctor felt this, but hardly its incongruity, as she slowly resumed her seat and signed to ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... becomes the Olympus of Ovid. Strength, sublimity, even stateliness disappeared, unless we admit some of the first two qualities in the landscapes of Vernet. Not only is beauty replaced by prettiness, but by prettiness in season and out of season. The common incongruity of introducing a spirit of elegance and literature into the simplicities of the true pastoral, was condemned by Diderot as a mixture of Fontenelle with Theocritus. We do not know what name he would have given to that still more curious incongruity of taste, which made a publisher ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... closed shop. A dingy barber's pole gave a clue to the nature of the industry formerly carried on, and the card—which was written upon in fair and even scholarly Hebrew characters—supplied particulars. I had stopped to read the inscription, faintly amused at the incongruity between the recondite Oriental lettering and the matter-of-fact references to 'eligible premises' and 'fixtures and goodwill,' when the door opened and two men came out. One was a typical English Jew, smart, chubby and prosperous; the other was ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... do nothing of the kind," rejoined the girl earnestly, quite forgetting the shortness of their acquaintance, as she had forgotten the flight of time, while on his part he did not notice any incongruity in the situation. "I'd leave ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... paintings, placed in relief against the orthodox crimson screen. Elsewhere the walls are covered with books, arranged neither in formal regularity nor quite helter-skelter, but in a sort of genial incongruity, which tells that sooner or later each volume feels sure of leaving the ranks and returning into different company. Mr. Sloane makes use of his books. His two passions, according to Theodore, are reading and talking; but to talk he must have a book in his hand. The charm ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various |
