"Unadorned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feel that the man makes the Dress. Almost any thing looks well on a noble woman. The plainest Dress becomes agreeable when worn by a person of grand purpose and good-doing life. Real life when unadorned is most adorned. Noble womanhood is always beautiful. The world always has and always will admire it. The richest Dress is always worn on the soul. The adornments that will not perish, and that all men most admire, shine from the heart through this life. God ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... poverty of her scenery, at this stage of the panorama. If Africa had been aware of the learned gentleman's preferences, she would, doubtless, have got up some stunning effects for him in places where now you see only a river, a sky, and a strip of green bank, all unadorned, precisely ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... of most Norwegians the atmosphere of the back stairs. Better the unadorned version ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... hashed meats, in their unadorned simplicity, do not come under the head of luxuries. But if the hashed meat is carefully warmed and well flavored, and put on toast, if the potatoes are chopped and browned and put around the meat, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... and of Burns and others in less degree, have clothed the mountains and the glens with a splendid lustre, that causes people to view their natural beauties through a mental magnifying glass. Nature unadorned seldom gets the admiration bestowed on it that it does when added ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... inner texture, a mere unadorned walk from one point to another was intolerable, and he had not gone a block without achieving some slight remedy for the tameness of life. An electric-light pole at the corner, invested with powers of observation, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... writer. While the first eight sonnets, written before 1645, are sonnets of reminiscence and intention, like those of the Italians, or the ordinary English sonnet, the eleven sonnets of Milton's silent period, from 1645 to 1658, are records of present feeling kindled by actual facts. In their naked, unadorned simplicity of language, they may easily seem, to a reader fresh from Petrarch, to be homely and prosaic. Place them in relation to the circumstance on which each piece turns, and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... leg lying on the counter, and observed it with due respect, as the prop of a hero. With this leg, which is fitted with a very handsome boot, he reviews his troops next Sunday, putting his best foot foremost; for generally he merely wears an unadorned wooden leg. The shoemaker, a Spaniard, whom I can recommend to all customers as the most impertinent individual I ever encountered, was arguing, in a blustering manner, with a gentleman who had brought a message from ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... N. plainness &c adj.; simplicity, severity; plain terms, plain English; Saxon English; household words V. call a spade 'a spade'; plunge in medias res; come to the point. Adj. plain, simple; unornamented, unadorned, unvarnished; homely, homespun; neat; severe, chaste, pure, Saxon; commonplace, matter-of- fact, natural, prosaic. dry, unvaried, monotonous &c 575. Adv. in plain terms, in plain words, in plain English, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wandering souls and pine in Babbulkund, and one for the princesses of his own kith, whose brown cheeks blush with the blood of ancient Pharaohs and who exult with Babbulkund in her surpassing beauty, and who know nought of the desert or the jungle or the bleak hills to the north. Quite unadorned and clad in simple garments go all the kith of Nehemoth, for they know well that he grows weary of pomp. Unadorned all save one, the Princess Linderith, who weareth Ong Zwarba and the three lesser gems of the sea. Such a stone is Ong Zwarba that there are none like it even in the ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... he thought of it, he was piqued as well. A country girl, poor enough, that was evident; living with her family in a cheap and most unattractive frame house, such as carpenters build in America, scantily furnished and unadorned; without the adventitious aids of dress or jewels or the fine manners of society—Harry couldn't understand it. But she fascinated him, and held him just beyond the line of absolute familiarity at the same time. While he was with her she made him forget that the Hawkins' ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... respect. Where they then were the building swept round in a circular form; and at its base it is supposed by tradition to retain something of the ancient Roman masonry. Just before them rose the spire of a plain and unadorned church, singularly contrasting the pomp of the old with the simplicity of the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fancy—fancy it must have been, and yet still I felt it to be real—that under every change she looked best; if she put on a shawl, then a shawl became the most feminine of ornaments; if she laid aside her shawl and her bonnet, then how nymph-like she seemed in her undisguised and unadorned beauty! Full-dress seemed for the time to be best, as bringing forward into relief the splendour of her person, and allowing the exposure of her arms; a simple morning-dress, again, seemed better still, as fitted ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... had not been more than ten days at Mourzouk, before he was attacked with severe dysentery, which confined him to his bed during twenty-two days, and reduced him to the last extremity. His unadorned narrative conveys an affecting account of the sufferings to which the party were exposed from the insalubrity of the climate; the inadequate arrangements which had been made for their comfort, or even subsistence, and the sordid and treacherous conduct of the sultan. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... unadorned, but it will at least have the merit of sincerity, and, like the widow's mite, be all ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... their chief. "Long live the Tribune of Rome!" was shouted, but less loud than the cry of "Live the King!" And the vulgar almost thought the revolution was incomplete, because the loftier title was not assumed. To a degenerate and embruted people, liberty seems too plain a thing, if unadorned by the pomp of the very despotism they would dethrone. Revenge is their desire, rather than Release; and the greater the new power they create, the greater seems their revenge against the old. Still all that was most respected, intelligent, and powerful amongst the assembly, were delighted at ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... always short, unadorned, and practical. He has endeavoured, by moving a resolution, to reduce the inordinate length of the speeches in the House as the only way of saving time to get through the yearly increasing work of legislation, and he has proposed some other resolutions for facilitating the business ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... he found Maxwell seated at a table looking over the parish records; and when Nickey appeared, still rather blue, attired in short red trunks, otherwise unadorned, Donald gazed at him in mute astonishment. For one moment there was silence as they eyed each other; and then Maxwell burst into roars of uncontrollable laughter, which were not quite subdued as Nickey gave a rather incoherent account ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... her body the one garment of hindu-widowhood, unadorned; but without marriage. She said, 'I will mourn for the children that have not been—that are not—that cannot be.' The women heard the voice of her mourning; and they forgot her too-great beauty, to serve her ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... parties which the Douglas household countenanced,—such as Christmas trees and Fourth of July picnics, Mary Hope would sit and stare fixedly at Belle Lorrigan and wonder if all painted Jezebels were beautiful and happy and smiling. If so, why was unadorned virtue to be commended? Mary tried not to wish that her hair was yellow and hung in curls, and that she had even white teeth and could sing and dance so wonderfully that everything stopped and every one looked and listened from the minute ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... was pre- eminently practical, while it was deeply spiritual; in fact, it was the religion of sanctified common sense. The true grace of her character gained the admiration which she never sought. As some simple unadorned column rising in the midst of richly-carved sculptures arrests attention by its mere dignity of height and grace of perfect proportion, so in the unassuming wife of Bernard Oliphant there was a loftiness and symmetry of character which made people feel that in her ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... heart. And then it was that art and wealth and genius poured out their treasures to raise fitting tabernacles for the dwelling of so divine a soul. Alike in the village and the city, amongst the unadorned walls and lowly roofs which closed in the humble dwellings of the laity, the majestic houses of the Father of mankind and of his especial servants rose up in sovereign beauty. And ever at the sacred gates sat Mercy, pouring out relief from a never-failing store to the poor and ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... is no sign of any human habitation, save that of a miserable police guard of four or five, who occupy a wretched hut on the side of the road midway, and seem by their presence to render the scene around more dreary.[4] the road is a mere footpath unimproved and unadorned by any single work of art; and, except in this footpath, and the small police guard, there is absolutely no single sign in all this long march to indicate the dominion, or even the presence, of man; and yet it is between two contiguous [sic] capitals, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... inscription on a monument, hence it came to signify any pointed expression. It now means a statement or any brief saying in prose or poetry in which there is an apparent contradiction; as, "Conspicuous for his absence." "Beauty when unadorned is most adorned." "He was too foolish to commit folly." "He was so wealthy that he could not ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... type of that remarkably beautiful race whose outward appearance is identical with the more god-like races of Earth men, except that this higher race of Martians is of a light reddish copper colour. As she was entirely unadorned I could not even guess her station in life, though it was evident that she was either a prisoner or ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... It was rumoured that he wrote deep, unintelligible poetry that did not rhyme; and if the school rules had not forbidden the practice, he would have worn long hair and a fly-away necktie. Shepherd, on the other hand, went in for logic, unadorned by any movements suggestive of setting-up drill. His style bore a suspicious resemblance to that of Augustus Powler, Esq., M.P. He stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and pushed forward that portion of his body which it would have been unfair to strike at in a fight. It would ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... into the pleasant valleys of Arcadia, encircled with verdant hills. Here nature reigned in simple beauty, unadorned by the magnificence of art. The rustic temples were generally composed of intertwined trees, in the recesses of which were placed wooden images of Pan, "the simple shepherd's awe-inspiring god." Here and there an aged man reposed in the shadow of some venerable oak; ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... thy rage indeed, and the commotion of thy mind is terrible; this thing, however, though it have fair arguments, if any one unravel it, is not fair. But I am unadorned with phrase to speak to the multitude, but to speak to my equals and to a few, more expert: but this also has consistency in it; for those, who are of no account among the wise, are more fitted to speak before the rabble. But yet it is necessary for me, since this calamity has come, to unloose ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... it is difficult to speak in ordinary words. The enrichments of the surface, which is covered by beautiful groups set in a graceful framework of marble, with scarcely a flat or unadorned spot from top to bottom, have been ever since the admiration of artists and of the world. But we confess, for our own part, that it is the structure itself that affords us that soft ecstasy of contemplation, sense of a perfection before which the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... is a common Postscript of an Hagg to a young Fellow whom she invites to a new Woman, She has, I assure you, seen none but old Mr. Such-a-one. It pleases the old Fellow that the Nymph is brought to him unadorned, and from his Bounty she is accommodated with enough to dress her for other Lovers. This is the most ordinary Method of bringing Beauty and Poverty into the Possession of the Town: But the particular Cases of kind Keepers, skilful Pimps, and all others who drive a separate Trade, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... grasp superior to anything of Beyle's and equal to anything of Flaubert's or Maupassant's. But the real cause of admiration is the nature of the grasp itself. Here, and perhaps here only—certainly here in transcendence—Balzac grapples with, and vanquishes, the bare, stern, unadorned, unbaited, ironic facts of life. It is not an intensely interesting book; it is certainly not a delightful one; you do not want to read it very often. Still, when you have read it you have come to one of the ultimate things: the flammantia moenia of the world of fiction ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... course he had soon moved from Vauxhall Bridge Road. He knew enough for that. What he got hold of next was an old; enormous, rat-infested brick house in a small street off the Strand. Strangers were taken in front of the meanest possible, begrimed, yellowy, flat brick wall, with two rows of unadorned window-holes one above the other, and were exhorted with bated breath to behold and admire the simplicity of the head-quarters of the great financial force of the day. The word thrift perched right up on the roof in giant gilt letters, and two enormous shield-like brass-plates curved round the ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... so good for an ignorant man as silence, and if he knew this he would no longer be ignorant:—When unadorned with the grace of eloquence it is wise to keep watch over the tongue in the mouth. The tongue, by abuse, renders a man contemptible; levity in a nut is a sign of its being empty. A fool was undertaking the instruction of an ass, and had devoted ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... becomes a snare and ruin, while solid virtue, though unadorned, gains respect. The latter, too, will mature with age, while the former ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... the ship's side, and right aft, big armoured doors opened on to the stern walk. It lacked conspicuously the adornments usually associated with the Captain's apartment. Bare corticene covered the deck; the walls of white enamelled steel were unadorned save for a big scale chart of the North Sea and a coloured map of the Western Front. A few framed photographs stood on the big roll-topped desk in one corner, and a bowl of purple heather occupied the flat mahogany top to the tiled stove where an electric radiator glowed. ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... . You worship victories, for in your trophies the cross is the heart of the trophy. The camp religion of the Romans is all through a worship of the standards . . . I praise your zeal: you would not worship crosses unclothed and unadorned."[23] ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... preferring in this the positive accounts of voyagers and travellers to the vague myths of antiquity and the dreams of speculators on our pristine state. From Australia and Abyssinia he drew pictures of mortality unadorned, as lively as if he had lived amongst Bushmen and savages all his life. Then he crossed over the Atlantic, and brought before you the American Indian, with his noble nature, struggling into the dawn ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... didn't further him in Rhoda's regard. She thought him rude, as indeed he was, though he tried to conceal it. He seldom spoke to her, and when he did it was with an unadorned brevity that offended her. Mostly he let her alone, and saw Peter when he could outside his home. Rodney, himself a celibate, thought matrimony a mistake, though certainly a necessary mistake if the human race was to continue to adorn the earth—a ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... attract no eyes, it will stop no passengers, it will invite no interior examination; people will take it for granted that the finishing and furnishing can not be worth seeing, where the front is so unadorned and clumsy. But, if upon the solid Tuscan foundation, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian orders rise gradually with all their beauty, proportions, and ornaments, the fabric seizes the most incurious eye, and stops the most careless passenger, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... fine bosses, and, like those in the nave, they have been treated in a tentative way with colour and gold. As a whole, the effect of decorated bosses standing out in such strong relief from the simple, unadorned stonework is rather spotty and distracting. The arms of the Despenser family are to be found on some of the bosses in the south aisle, and it is to the munificence of that powerful family that the execution ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... the whole, how much the atmosphere of office life has gained in amenity by the coming of the stenographer, the typewriter, and the telephone girl, not to speak of her frequent decorative value in a world that has hitherto been uncompromisingly harsh and unadorned! Men may affect to ignore this, and cannot afford indeed to be too sensitive to these flowery presences that have so considerably supplanted those misbegotten young miscreants known as office-boys, a vanishing race of human terror; yet ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... and she stood up with the other maids. Her dress of dark woolen, severe and unadorned, her close ruff and prim white coif, would have cried "Puritan," had ever Puritan looked like this woman, upon whom the poor apparel had the ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... delight the treasures of art which the rich patricians of Amsterdam had collected in their princely homes and the public museums. No one supposed that this small man in the brown coat, with dusty shoes and coarse, unadorned hat, could be a king—a king whose fame resounded throughout the whole of Europe. Frederick had enjoyed the great happiness of pursuing his journey and his studies unnoticed and unknown. He had many amusing and romantic adventures; and the joy of being an independent man, of which ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... all senses of the phrase. He was magnificent. His exposition of the state of Europe, perfectly unadorned, had yet an effect upon the House not unlike that of opening a volume to a multitude who had but just learned to read. All was novelty, conviction, and amazement. His appeal to the principles by which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... for the better understanding of the circumstances which led up to the events here presented. It will be obvious that I can make no claim to literary skill; I have simply written down my exact and unadorned remembrance of incidents which I witnessed and took part in. Now it is all over I wonder more and more at the slightness of the hazard which suddenly placed me at such a period in ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... Mrs Fuller. There was a great crowd in the church that covered, with sweeping arches, an interior more vast than any I had ever entered. Hope was gowned in white silk, a crescent of diamonds in her hair—a birthday gift from Mrs Fuller; her neck and a part of her full breast unadorned by anything save the gifts of God—their ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... marked the opposing Englishmen that summer afternoon. The plain men handled plain firelocks. Oxhorns held their powder, and their pockets held their bullets. Coatless, under the broiling sun, unincumbered, unadorned by plume or service medal, pale and wan after their night of toil and their day of hunger, thirst, and waiting, this live obstruction calmly faced the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... art really means mediocrity. If you have nothing to tell about yourself, or if courage be lacking in you to tell the truth, you are not an artist. Are women without souls, or is it that they dare not reveal their souls unadorned with the laces and ribbons of convention? Their memoirs are a tissue of lies, suppressions, and half-truths. George Sand must fain suppress all mention of her Italian journey with Musset, a true account of which would have been an immortal story; but of hypocritical hare-hearted allusions ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... the utterance of thy prayer Be lost amid the torrent of thy tears, Yet does the sight of thy fair countenance And of thy pallid lips, all unadorned[123] And colourless in sorrow for my absence, Make ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... besides the sway Of every salt flood and each ebbing stream, Took in by lot, 'twixt high and nether Jove, Imperial rule of all the sea-girt isles That, like to rich and various gems, inlay The unadorned bosom of the deep; Which he, to grace his tributary gods, By course commits to several government, And gives them leave to wear their sapphire crowns And wield their little tridents. But this Isle, The greatest ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... alternative. I think that almost everything depends upon the course which Althorp takes, as far as the rest of this session is concerned. His popularity in the House of Commons is very great, and even surprising; it is a proof of the influence which personal character may obtain when unadorned with great abilities and shining parts; his remarkable bonhommie, unalterable good nature and good temper, the conviction of his honesty and sincerity, and of his want of ambition, his single-mindedness, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... because eloquently; nor therefore falsely, because the utterance of the lips is inharmonious; nor, again, therefore true, because rudely delivered; nor therefore false, because the language is rich; but that wisdom and folly are as wholesome and unwholesome food; and adorned or unadorned phrases as courtly or country vessels; either kind of meats may be served up ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... confinement, by affecting the reproductive system of male birds, frequently checks the development of their secondary sexual characters, but has no immediate influence on any other characters; and I am informed by Mr. Bartlett that eight or nine specimens of the Knot (Tringa canutus) retained their unadorned winter plumage in the Zoological Gardens throughout the year, from which fact we may infer that the summer plumage, though common to both sexes, partakes of the nature of the exclusively masculine plumage of many other birds. (80. In regard to the previous statements on ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... architect, their subduing effect. Religious poetry—the highest poetry, consequently the highest truth—was here. There are who might prefer the modern conventicle, with its glare of sunshine, and white glass, and bare, unadorned, white-washed walls, and justify their want of taste by a reference to nature, whose light and atmosphere, they will tell you, they are admitting. And like this is the argument of many an artist, when he would cover the poverty of his invention under the plea of his imitation of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... been transformed into a theater, from which gazed a thousand dark, still faces. A thousand eagle plumes waved, and ten thousand bright-hued feathers quivered in the soft breeze. The fantastically dressed scalps presented a contrast to the smooth, unadorned heads of the converted redmen. These proud plumes and defiant feathers told the ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... ingenuity of the artist. But the Latin language is comparatively weak, scanty, and unmusical; and requires considerable skill and management to render it expressive and graceful. Simplicity in Latin is scarcely separable from baldness; and justly as Terence is celebrated for chaste and unadorned diction, yet, even he, compared with Attic writers, is flat and heavy.[256] Again, the perfection of strength is clearness united to brevity; but to this combination Latin is utterly unequal. From the vagueness ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... sister listened to her in attentive silence, impressed by the deep significance of the unadorned story of a human being, who was regarded as cattle are regarded, and who, without a murmur, for a long time felt herself to be that which she was held to be. It seemed to them as if thousands, nay millions, of lives spoke through her mouth. Her existence had been ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... drawing-room; the sort of nicety which is unobtrusive exactness and delicacy; an artistry which in no way labels itself skilful. But underneath all, the woof of the process is social skill—that skill which is the ability to go back to unadorned first principles with the dexterity of one who has acquired the power to do the simple thing perfectly by having mastered the entire gamut ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... the poetical idea of "sweet simplicity" always and everywhere. Not that the rich gown is in itself objectionable, or the inexpensive dress intrinsically beautiful. It is not invariably true that "beauty unadorned is most adorned." It is not true that a "simple calico" is more charming than a sheeny silk, nor is cotton edging to be compared with ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... the LOT of you!" cried Uncle Jim, and backing dexterously whirled the eel round in a destructive circle. The pink sunshade was torn from the hand that gripped it and whirled athwart the complete, but unadorned, tea ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... within you, with all its glorious capacities for improvement, languish and pine! What! build factories, turn in rivers upon the water-wheels, enchain the imprisoned spirits of steam, to weave a garment for the body, and let the soul remain unadorned and naked! What! send out your vessels to the farthest ocean, and make battle with the monsters of the deep, in order to obtain the means of lighting up your dwellings and workshops, and prolonging the hours of labor for the meat that ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... depare. Note the play on parer, and compare the English saying: Beauty when unadorned ...
— Bataille De Dames • Eugene Scribe and Ernest Legouve
... You will come? By every star in the firmament I swear I will begin with the verb J'aime—I love—and you shall see how, in comparison with the language of a devoted heart, in comparison with the art which unadorned nature can practise, even Voltaire is only—a wigmaker. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... inquires what is the cause of his sighing, and of his forehead being mutilated; when thus begins the Calydonian river, having his unadorned hair crowned with reeds: ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... when the Arabian Chick-Ibn Molana came over, and, marrying the daughter of the king of Damak, received as her portion the province of Cheribon. Their mosques are generally of wood, and perfectly unadorned; but the tomb and mosque of the said Ibn Molana form a magnificent edifice. They do not place their dead in coffins, but wrap them in linen, and place a stone at the head and another at the foot of the grave, as seats ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... solid, substantial, and unadorned, suggested unlimited spaciousness and comfort within; and was redeemed from positive ugliness without, by the fine ivy, magnolia trees, and wistaria, of many years' growth, climbing its plain face, and now covering it with a mantle of soft green, ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... its sanitary features since my visit four years ago. There are many charming views; an interesting place for the tourist, alike for the virtuous and the vicious, for those so inclined can see human nature "unadorned." Wide streets pierce the city, the stores on which are a continuous bazaar, lined with many exquisite productions of necessity and Eastern art. But I have previously dwelt on ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... good things. He was a most good-natured, courteous old gentleman, although his costume consisted of nothing but a few bunches of ferns. The number of guests increased steadily; besides the real heathen in unadorned beauty, there were half-civilized Christians, ugly in ill-fitting European clothes, of which they were visibly vain, although they made blots on the beautiful picture of native life. All around the square grunted ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... protection against the descents of the Barbary corsairs. The Pope sent La Valette a cardinal's hat, but he would not accept it, as unsuited to his office; Philip II. presented him with a jeweled sword and dagger. Some thousand unadorned swords a few months sooner would have been a better testimony to his constancy, and that of the brave men whose lives Spain had wasted ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... kings built great unadorned pyramids, but the later Theban monarchs constructed splendid palaces and temples. Two of the most prominent masses of buildings on the site of Thebes are called, the one the Temple of Karnak, and the other the Temple of Luxor, from ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... rich liveries, and fine nosegays, and gold-headed canes; and with lovely women within, so sumptuously dressed and so surpassingly fair. I was always extremely sensible to female beauty; and here I saw it in all its fascination; for, whatever may be said of "beauty unadorned," there is something almost awful in female loveliness decked out in jewelled state. The swan-like neck encircled with diamonds; the raven locks, clustered with pearls; the ruby glowing on the snowy bosom, are objects that ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... fellow, do you really think it is wise? I am here because I have just been to one of those exhibitions of unadorned gluttony they call a City Banquet. Do you know, Alban, that I don't want to hear of food and drink again for a month. It's perfectly terrible to think that men can do such things when I could name five hundred children who will go ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... the old. The style of the building is Transition, and advanced Transition; it is all but early Gothic. The pointed arch alone is used; the only trace of Romanesque feeling is to be seen in the short columns of the arcade, and in the extreme simplicity of the triforium and clerestory, a single unadorned lancet in each. The vaulting is naturally a little later; that at least, with the English-looking shafts from which it springs, is in the ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... folk, following honest trades—millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory. John, the land-labourer, is the one living and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than a collateral. It was on August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on the Craigdowhill, and 'took the heavens, ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ruggednesses, clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and—so far as you or I can make out—unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... enjoyment. He was acquiring what it is the chief function of all higher education to impart, the art, namely, of so relieving the ideal or poetic traits, [54] the elements of distinction, in our everyday life—of so exclusively living in them—that the unadorned remainder of it, the mere drift or debris of our days, comes to be as though it were not. And the consciousness of this aim came with the reading of one particular book, then fresh in the world, with which he fell in about this time—a book which awakened the poetic or romantic ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... Ambrosial weeds, With the rank vapours of this Sin-worn mould. But to my task. Neptune besides the sway Of every salt Flood, and each ebbing Stream, Took in by lot 'twixt high, and neather Jove, 20 Imperial rule of all the Sea-girt Iles That like to rich, and various gemms inlay The unadorned boosom of the Deep, Which he to grace his tributary gods By course commits to severall government, And gives them leave to wear their Saphire crowns, And weild their little tridents, but this Ile The greatest, and the best of all the main He quarters to his ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... marble of the floor was sorely fretted by the foot: its original colours of blue and red had passed into a dingy gray, chequered with the variously-tinted light which flowed in through the stained windows. The white walls and unadorned pillars looked cold and naked. Beggars were extending their caps towards you for an alms. On the floor rose a stack of rush-bottomed chairs, as high as a two-storey house,—as if the priests, dreading an emeute, had made preparations by throwing up a barricade. A carpenter, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... formed by the duckers and divers of both sexes. Situations for obtaining favourable views are anxiously sought after by elderly gentlemen, by whom opera glasses and pocket telescopes are much patronised. Greatly as we admire the investigation of nature in her unadorned simplicity, Ramsgate would be the last place we should select, if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the soil that feeds them, far diffused And lowly creeping, modest and yet fair; Like virtue, thriving most where little seen. Some, more aspiring, catch the neighbour shrub With clasping tendrils, and invest his branch, Else unadorned, with many a gay festoon And fragrant chaplet, recompensing well The strength they borrow with the grace they lend. All hate the rank society of weeds, Noisome, and very greedy to exhaust The impoverished earth; an overbearing race, That, like the multitude made faction-mad, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... and with a flame-like vividness. There the divine origin of the State which in the Athens of Pericles is hidden or revealed in the myriad forms of art, plastic or poetic, in the Rome of Sulla or Caesar in tragic action, displays itself in naked purity and in majesty unadorned. If artistic loveliness marks the age of Sophocles, tragic grandeur the Rome of Augustus, mystic sublimity is the feature of the Islam of Omar. The thought and the deed, logos kai poiesis, here ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... in his mind comparing it to many cultivated prospects which he had known, and coming to the conclusion that, however desirable the presence of civilised man might be in the world, it could not be said that his operations really add to its beauty. For the old line, "Nature unadorned adorned the most," still remains true in ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... and the episode of Bertha and Rudenz, though beautiful, is very brief, and without effect on the general result. It is delightful and salutary to the heart to wander among the scenes of Tell: all is lovely, yet all is real. Physical and moral grandeur are united; yet both are the unadorned grandeur of Nature. There are the lakes and green valleys beside us, the Schreckhorn, the Jungfrau, and their sister peaks, with their avalanches and their palaces of ice, all glowing in the southern sun; and dwelling among them ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the classical period but very common in the Middle Ages, or from the presence of punctuation, which the oldest manuscripts invariably lack. The manuscripts of the first group show letters that are simple and unadorned and words unseparated from each other. Those of the second group show a type of ornate writing, the letters having serifs or hair-lines and flourishes, and the words being well separated. There can be no reasonable doubt that this rough classification is correct as far as it goes; but it must remain ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... followed by two exhortations; then Rev. Rowley Heyland preached from, "Buy the truth, and sell it not." About two o'clock the people were again assembled to hear the Rev. James Richardson (formerly a lieutenant in the British Navy) from the words, "Be ye reconciled to God." His style was plain but unadorned, his reasoning clear, and his arguments forcible. The services concluded with the celebration of the Lord's Supper. About three hundred communicated, sixty-two professed to have obtained the pardon of their sins, and forty-two gave their names as desirous of becoming members ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... appeared at the window of the Provost's lodging in the High Street, and made her wild appeal, in all the force of impassioned and terrible emotion, to the overawed and excited crowd. They saw her in the carelessness of misery half-dressed, unadorned, disenchanted, and delivered from the maddening delusion which had carried her away, recognising in its full extent the horrors of the result—and their hearts were rent with pity. But notwithstanding ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... glanced at him humorously, and yet with a bit of intensity, too,—as if searching for the meaning under such an unadorned question. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... however, is distinguished, I think, by a deliberate endeavour after a dignified and unadorned ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... indiscriminate panegyric or mawkish praise. Her comedy is by no means satisfactory to me. The disadvantage of a petite figure is not, in this department compensated by any high excellencies. Her comedy is generally speaking, rather meagre and unadorned, and in a degree pointless and ineffective.—But her tragedy merits every praise. In richness and variety of tone; in propriety and justness of action and gesture; in picturesque and impressive attitude, in a nervous mellowed modulation; in appropriate ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... garments, all over interwoven with gold; those that were chosen for carrying these pompous shows having also about them such magnificent ornaments as were both extraordinary and surprising. Besides these, one might see that even the great number of the captives was not unadorned, while the variety that was in their garments, and their fine texture, concealed from the sight the deformity of their bodies. But what afforded the greatest surprise of all was the structure of the pageants that were borne along; for indeed he that met them could not ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... from the first. Its benches, hideously hacked and thick with grime, were as hard and uncomfortable as when I first saw them, and the windows remained unshaded and unwashed. Most of the farm-houses in the region remained equally unadorned, but Deacon Gammons had added an "ell" and established a "parlor," and Anson Burtch had painted his barn. The plain began to take on a comfortable look, for some of the trees of the wind-breaks had risen ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... not long thereafter we find her luring the King with her "delicious smile," while he was hunting in the forest of Senart; and in 1745 she was formally installed at Court, under the title of the Marquise de Pompadour. This story, unadorned, may sound paltry, even commercial, but we should not fall into the error of judging it by twentieth century standards. The morals of the French Court, never austere, were especially lax in the reign of Louis XV., and galanteries ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... The lamp burning low made her needle fly swiftly. In her own room was an old chest nearly full of dainty garments which she was never to wear. She had wrought miracles of embroidery upon some of them, and others were unadorned save by ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... invective, of eloquence, of ornament, or of any attempt at pathos, did our barrister mix with this statement. It was his object to put the jury and the court clearly in possession of facts, which, unadorned, he knew would appear stronger than if encumbered by ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... there was one glass leviathian which contained all colours within its sphere, and which was kept only to be handled and admired. Tops were there, too, from polished little beauties with shining steel tips, which were intended only for amusement, and were spun with fine white cord, to unadorned, massive, vicious-looking warriors with sharpened projecting points, which were intended for the battlefield, and were spun with rough, strong twine, and which, dexterously used, would split another top from head to foot as when you slice butter with a knife. Her stock of ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... them, and left, doubtless, partly as a place of refuge for outlaws and robbers, and partly granted out for the more settled habitation of a few vassals following the employment of shepherds or woodlanders. Hence these lakes and inner vallies are unadorned by any remains of ancient grandeur, castles, or monastic edifices, which are only found upon the skirts of the country, as Furness Abbey, Calder Abbey, the Priory of Lannercost, Gleaston Castle,—long ago a residence of the Flemings,—and ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... than the first, and was very differently attired. He wore a fustian doublet, without either lace or embroidery; a pair of unstuffed cloth hose, dark worsted stockings, shoes with narrow toes and plain shoe-strings of black ribbon; a flat cap; cloth gloves, unadorned and unscented, and a cloak of black cloth, of a more rational length than the other. As he came to the ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... Galileo used a bell-tower at Venice, and Kepler stood on the bridge at Prague to watch the stars. The men, not the buildings, do the work. No disappointment, need be felt, then, to find the modern Observatory a range of unadorned buildings running east and west, with slits in the roof and in some of the walls. Within these simple buildings are the instruments now used, displaying almost the perfection of mechanical skill in their ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... me the following story, which I have often heard confirmed by others as the unadorned and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... herself in her best. I do not deny a love of fine clothes in Damaris. Yet in her own home, and for delectation of the men belonging to her, a woman is surely free to deck herself as handsomely as her purse allows. "Beauty unadorned" ceased to be practicable, in self-respecting circles, with the expulsion of our first parents from the paradisaic state; while beauty merely dowdy, is a pouring of contempt on one of God's best gifts to the human race. Therefore I find no ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... when the cactus had once rewarded her by producing two bright-red blossoms. That was long ago, and it had never done anything so brilliant again. Content with its one effort it had since remained unadorned, yet as it stood there, with its fat green leaves and little bunches of prickles, it had the air of saying to itself, "I have done it once, and if I liked I could do it a second time." Even now as she bent tenderly ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... at nine Bianchon mounted his uncle's dusty staircase, and found him at work on the statement of some complicated judgment. The coat Lavienne had ordered of the tailor had not been sent, so Popinot put on his old stained coat, and was the Popinot unadorned whose appearance made those laugh who did not know the secrets of his private life. Bianchon, however, obtained permission to pull his cravat straight, and to button his coat, and he hid the stains by crossing ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... rows of clerks and recorders, make an impression of orderliness, tinged nevertheless with a faint revolutionary flavour. Perhaps it is the straight black Chinese hair and the rich silk clothing, set on a very plain and unadorned background, which recall the pictures of the French Revolution. It is somehow natural in such circumstances that there should occasionally be dramatic outbursts with the blood of offenders bitterly ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... ryo wherewith he had been commissioned to purchase a new kind of armour which had recently come into vogue in Owari province. But though this alleged theft becomes in certain annals the basis of a picturesque story as to Hideyoshi repaying Matsushita a thousandfold in later years, the unadorned truth seems to be that Hideyoshi was obliged to leave Kuno on account of the jealousy of his fellow retainers, who slandered him to Yukitsuna ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi |
