"Uncongenial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the fair Bettina been conducted; and here, with a simple peasant girl to serve her, had she been treated with all respect, save that she was a prisoner. Rude were the inhabitants of this uncongenial spot; fierce in aspect, but completely under the control of the master spirit, whom they called captain. Hark! A peculiar wild cry rings over the tree-tops, and echoes among the rocks and hills; and observe how quickly those who have ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... home, and compared the distant beauty of the forests and their radiant clouds with the nakedness and desolation here, I gave up looking from the window with a determination to be gone as soon as possible from a country so uncongenial. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... it, and began to smoke. "I talked like that because I wanted that idle young scamp, Ned, to devote his fingers to the task. I had not the most remote idea that it would make a young lady commence such an uncongenial pursuit." ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... to me," I answered, "and never more so than in this instance. Forgive me that I cannot show my appreciation of your goodness, or thank you properly for your performance of an uncongenial task. I am sunk deep in trouble. I'm not myself and cannot be till I know what action will be ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... Never have men taken longer chances than did the faithful few who at this time furnished us with information as to events in Insurgent territory. Discovery meant prompt and cruel death. For a long time Major F. S. Bourns had performed the uncongenial task of directing the spies. He was then the chief health officer of Manila, and as all sorts of people were compelled to consult him on sanitary matters, visits to his office aroused no suspicion. He spoke ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... Selection, of which the last sentence is enclosed in pencil in inverted commas, as though Mr. Darwin had intended to quote it: "In other parts of Africa the xanthous variety [of man] often appears, but does not multiply. Individuals thus characterised are like seeds which perish in an uncongenial soil.") ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the chance of being "trod into the shape of half a crown by a wild elephant, or eaten by the tigers, which prefer this situation to the plains below for the same reason that takes so many Europeans to India; they encounter an uncongenial climate for the sake of what they can get." There were no books in the place except those that Macaulay had brought with him, among which, most luckily, was Clarissa Harlowe. Aided by the rain outside, he soon talked his favourite romance into general favour. The reader will consent to put ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... men. To a single friend whom he trusted, he would pour out his inmost heart; but let two or three be gathered together, above all, introduce a stranger, and he instantly became a quiet, unobtrusive listener, though never a moody or uncongenial one." ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... At that uncongenial place they had to wait a quarter of an hour, walking up and down the windy platform, where the porter abandoned himself to the contemplation of occasional rooks, and was sometimes surprised by the arrival of a train ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... of these, either from inherited passion or evil education, have deliberately and of free choice entered upon a life of shame; but the great majority do so under the stress of temptation; sometimes because of poverty or chafing against uncongenial employment, with meager wages. They are told that in the profession of prostitution, they can, if they are lucky, make more in a single night than they could by sewing ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... the Dutch people had nothing in common and their king, William of Orange (the descendant of an uncle of William the Silent), while a hard worker and a good business man, was too much lacking in tact and pliability to keep the peace among his uncongenial subjects. Besides, the horde of priests which had descended upon France, had at once found its way into Belgium and whatever Protestant William tried to do was howled down by large crowds of excited citizens as a fresh attempt upon the "freedom of the Catholic church." On the 25th of August ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... prisoners are commonplace and rude; He says he cannot relish uncongenial prison food. When quite a boy they taught him to distinguish Good from Bad, And other educational ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... such bold, fearless conduct that Jackson won admiration,—not by his law, of which he knew but little, and never could have learned much. The law, moreover, was uncongenial to this man of action, and he resigned his judgeship and went for a short time into business,—trading land, selling horses, groceries, and dry-goods,—when he was appointed major-general of militia. This was just what he wanted. He had now found his place and was equal to it. His habits, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... pale green eyes and straight, tight lips, she had never been beautiful, but five or six years in an uncongenial environment had hardened and wasted her. That her husband adored her and never spoke of her save in a tone of awe was common property and a favourite subject for local humour. That she regarded him with contempt and irritation ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... their death, would will the bulk of their property to the eldest son, with the proviso that the mother was to have a home with him. Hence it was not unusual for the mother, who had brought all the property into the family, to be made an unhappy dependent on the bounty of an uncongenial daughter-in-law and a dissipated son. The tears and complaints of the women who came to my father for legal advice touched my heart and early drew my attention to the injustice and cruelty of the laws. As the practice of the law was my father's business, I could not exactly understand ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... languor so fatal to early exertion in a warm climate. We could stand it no longer; but, shouldering our hoes, moved on to the house, resolved to impose no more upon the good-nature of the planters by continuing one moment longer in an occupation so extremely uncongenial. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... which I have been describing, were uncongenial to my natural temper, to the genius of the Movement, and to the historical mode of its success:—they were the fruit of that exuberant and joyous energy with which I had returned from abroad, and which I never had before or ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... He had suffered so much about it last time, probably, that was why he took it so easily now; or was it because his trust in the chapter of accidents had grown greater since he was more dependent on it? or because of the generally expanded sense of living in him which made anxiety uncongenial anyhow? Whatever the cause was, this was the effect. A momentary disappointment when he saw how little James's draft was—then a sense of that semi-intoxication which comes upon a poor man when a sum of money falls into his hands—gradually invaded his soul. He tried to ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... at improvising a jollification—Jack, at any rate, does not take his pleasures sadly. The gallant bands that have from time to time gone forth to a bloodless campaign in the icy north, have always managed to keep their Christmas right joyously. Certainly they could not complain of uncongenial skies or unseasonable temperatures; while, so far as snow and ice are necessary to thorough enjoyment, the supply in the Arctic regions is on a scale sufficient to satisfy the most ardent admirer of an old-fashioned Christmas. The frozen-in Investigators under McClure kept their first ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... as he was to finish them—with geology. Buffon's great views on the revolutions of the earth had made a deep impression upon him, although he was to end as the declared adversary of that vulcanism which we can trace already at the bottom of Buffon's theory—naturally enough, when we think how uncongenial all violence in society and nature was to him, how he looked everywhere for slow, uninterrupted evolution. From theoretical study he had early turned to direct observation; and when his administrative functions obliged ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... not tolerant of miracles; its doctrines exclude them; but, what is of even greater force than its doctrines, the subtle and penetrating atmosphere of feeling and intellectual habits which accompanies it is essentially uncongenial and hostile to them. It is against the undue influence of such results of experience—an influence openly acting in distinct ideas and arguments, but of which the greater portion operates blindly, insensibly, and out of sight—that Mr. Mozley makes a stand on behalf ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Commander-in-chief, as mentioned above—one fighting and manoeuvring on paper—making plans in his office, unfamiliar with every thing constituting a genuine military, scientific or practical soldier—to whom field and battle are uncongenial or improper—to whom grand and even small tactics are a terra incognita—such a chief is at best but an imitation of the English military organization, and certainly it is only in this country that ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... fully developed (by certain occult methods) their sixth, and in still rarer cases their seventh, sense. As an instance of the former class may be cited the Seeress of Prevorst; a creature born out of time, a rare precocious growth, ill adapted to the uncongenial atmosphere that surrounded her, hence a martyr ever ailing and sickly. As an example of the other, the Count St. Germain may be mentioned. Apace with the anthropological and physiological development of man runs his ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... that you have had time to think over your plan of leaving your old home, I hope you have come to see how foolish it is. Reflect that, if carried out, a life of poverty and squalid wretchedness amid homely and uncongenial surroundings awaits you; while, as my wife, you will live a life of luxury and high social position. There are many young ladies who would be glad to accept the chance which you so recklessly reject. By accepting ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... Tennessee meant, however, only a transfer from one branch of the public service to another, for the ex-Senator was promptly appointed to a judgeship of the state supreme court at a salary of six hundred dollars a year. The position he found not uncongenial and he retained it for six years. Now, as earlier, Jackson's ignorance of law was somewhat compensated by his common sense, courage, and impartiality; and while only one of his decisions of this period is extant, Parton reports that the tradition of fifty ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... puzzle to all who knew her. She was a puzzle even to herself, and was wont to say, indifferently, that the problem was not worth a solution. For this beautiful girl of fifteen was somewhat bitter and misanthropic, a condition perhaps due to the uncongenial atmosphere in which she had been reared. She was of dark complexion and her big brown eyes held a sombre and unfathomable expression. Once she had secretly studied their reflection in a mirror, and the eyes awed and frightened her, and made her uneasy. She had analyzed ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... playing cricket. It's too long a story to tell you now, but I was in much the same fix that you were in to-night, and it was my only way out. I never meant it for anything more; but I'd tasted blood, and it was all over with me. Why should I work when I could steal? Why settle down to some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger and a decent living were all going begging together? Of course it's very wrong, but we can't all be moralists, and the distribution of wealth is very wrong to begin with. Besides, you're not at it all the time. I'm sick of quoting Gilbert's lines to myself, ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... body more than once, but thinks as a rule (instanced in the case of John the Baptist forgetting that he had been Elijah) it is not permitted us to remember our former experiences of this life while yet again we are in exile here as strangers and pilgrims in an uncongenial clime away from our ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... his wife's more sympathetic insight, Edward Spence would have continued to interpret Miriam's cheerless frame of mind as a mere result of impatience at being removed from the familiar scenes of her religious activity, and of disquietude amid uncongenial surroundings. "A Puritan at Naples"—that was the phrase which represented her to his imagination; his liking for the picturesque and suggestive led him to regard her solely in that light. No strain of modern humanitarianism complicated Miriam's character. One had not to take into account a possible ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... was soon found too small for his extensive ideas. He, therefore, took a larger piece of ground in Lambeth Marsh, where he soon assembled the largest collection of British plants ever brought together into one place. But there was something uncongenial in the air of this place, which made it extremely difficult to preserve sea plants and many of the rare annuals which are adapted to an elevated situation,—an evil rendered worse every year by the increased number of buildings around. This led his ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... review of this remarkable essay, entirely worthy as it was of its subject and its author's genius; it is simply my purpose to call the reader's attention to a production, which, more than anything else in Hawthorne's writings, has kindled the hostile criticism of shallow and uncongenial minds. ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... author's chief object, however, it is a failure—that, namely, of making a plain, odd woman, destitute of all the conventional features of feminine attraction, interesting in our sight. We deny that he has succeeded in this. Jane Eyre, in spite of some grand things about her, is a being totally uncongenial to our feelings from beginning to end. We acknowledge her firmness—we respect her determination—we feel for her struggles; but, for all that, and setting aside higher considerations, the impression she leaves on our mind is that of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... disarm suspicion and promote peace; but the one was reawakened and the other endangered when it became known that he had so used his power over the Spanish court as to procure that the royal sisters of Spain should be married on one day—Isabella, the Queen, to the most unfit and uncongenial of all the possible candidates for her hand; Louisa to King Louis Philippe's son, the Duke of Montpensier. The transaction on the face of it was far from respectable, since the credit and happiness of the young Spanish Queen seemed ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... re-appeared on the skirts of the forest, and marched quietly down the bowsprit to his usual place on deck. He had evidently found the forests of the Rio Negro very different from those of the delta lands of the Japura, and preferred captivity to freedom in a place that was so uncongenial to him. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... then, you carping, skeptical creature? It's all perfect. An uncongenial, tiresome husband—and she need have no self-reproach about him, either—finally out of the way; a reverential adorer at hand; youth still theirs; money; a delightful place—what more could ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... took a candle and slowly remounted the stairs to his room. But on entering he found himself unprepared for that singular lack of sympathy with which familiar haunts always greet our new experiences; he could hardly believe that he had left that room only two hours before; it seemed so uncongenial and strange to the sensation that was still possessing him. Yet there were his table, his books, his arm-chair, his bed as he had left them; even a sticky fragment of gingerbread that had fallen from Johnny's pocket. He had not yet reached that stage of absorbing passion where ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... fifteen," wrote Mr. J. A. Joerg, his form-master, "it should be deemed a great honour for him to have passed in the First Division; it does him much credit." Mr. Boon, who prepared him in mathematics, testified that Paul had "worked with interest and energy" at what was for him an uncongenial subject. He entered the Sixth Form in September, 1911, being then fifteen and a half years old; the form average was seventeen years. In 1912 his reports showed that he was making all-round progress, and was applying himself with zest ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Anglo-gregorianists of thirty years ago, a presentment which has gone far to ruin their reputation; they are better understood now, and may be heard here and there sung as they should be. They are of great artistic merit and beauty; and instead of considering them a priori as uncongenial on the ground of antiquity, we should rather be thinking of them that they were invented at a time when unison singing was cultivated in the highest perfection, so much so that a large number of these tunes are, on account of their elaborate ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... pertained to this world alone;—there was another side to it, connected with the unseen and the gods. There were Great Gods in the Pantheon; but your early Roman had no wide-traveling imagination; and they seemed to him remote and uncongenial rather,—and quickly took on Greekishness when the Greek influence began. Minerva, vaguely imagined, assumed soon the attributes of the very concretely imagined Pallas; and so on. But he had nearer and Numaish divinities much more a part of his ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... in my daughter's life (let me say nothing of the change in my life) has come: they were married yesterday. The manse is a desert; and sister Judith was never so uncongenial a companion to me as I feel her to be now. Her last words to the married pair, when they drove away, were: "Lord help you both; you have all ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... saintly uses, and much that is beautiful in Christian life. He made his country eminent, and secured for her one great chapter in the history of the world; but he imprinted upon her a certain narrowness uncongenial to her character and to her past, which has undervalued her to many superficial observers, and done perhaps a little, but a permanent, harm to her national ideal ever since. A small evil for so much good, but yet not to be ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... hand, there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... the shadow of unreality that had begun to darken the world. For it was as if some power had pronounced against him—as if, by some heedless action, he had offended an Olympian god. Like many another, he wondered whether the god might be appeased by work—hard uncongenial work. Perhaps he had not worked hard enough, or had enjoyed his work too much, and for that reason the shadow ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... driven into a cheerful exile. The captain was always ready to give and take in the matter of entertainment, and he was invited everywhere though, on one occasion at least, it is recorded that he proved an uncongenial guest. Having dined, as a recognised lion among lions, he "didn't make a single joke during the whole evening." His host remarked on his silence the next morning, and ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... of one or other—she was recommended to the stage. She was supported in the idea by all her connections, for then no one questioned the perfect respectability of the profession. She studied hard in new, though not uncongenial fields; she ventured; she tried again and again, with the "modest but indomitable pluck" of genius, and she at last won a position and a prospect of independence. In all this nobody blamed her; on the contrary, the magnates of the hour—kings, councillors, bishops—awarded ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... stilted aspect of it shocked him. Everything seemed frosty and pinched, just as the cutting air did after the warm balminess of California. Only several persons, strangers to his recollection, were abroad, and they favoured him with incurious glances. They were wrapped in an uncongenial and frosty imperviousness. His first impression was surprise at his surprise. Through the wide perspective of twelve years of Western life, he had consistently and steadily discounted the size and ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... Austin, author of the 'Province of Jurisprudence Determined,' were celebrated, and Lord Brougham used to say: 'If John Austin had had health, neither Lyndhurst nor I should have been Chancellor.' He entered the army, and was in Sicily under Lord William Bentinck; but soon quitted an uncongenial service, and was called to the Bar. In 1819 he married Sarah, the youngest daughter of John Taylor of Norwich, {1} when they took a house in Queen Square, Westminster, close to James Mill, the historian of British India, and next door to Jeremy ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... school, and Charles, went to live in the prison; and Charles was given work in a blacking-warehouse of which a relative of his mother's was manager. The sufferings which the boy endured at this time were intense. It was not only that the work was sordid, monotonous, uncongenial; it was not only that his pride was outraged; what hurt him most of all was that he should have been "so easily cast away at such an age," and that "no one made any sign." He had always yearned for ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a unique position she was occupying there. Judge Saxon grumbled and scolded, but he was part of the group in the room. He had grown into it, and belonged to them, as he might have belonged to an uncongenial family. The Colonel's distinguished guests saw them only on their best behaviour. Their local critics never penetrated here at all. Judith was the only outsider who did, and she had besides the irrevocable right of youth ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... not like me; he wishes to humiliate me. Of course we are not loved here in your land. We are the irksome ones all through history. Obstinate idealists are not loved. He who is born with a pain, he who is brought up for a pain, is uncongenial, I know. To be unhappy is out of date here among you, it is not ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... desperate trial that very night. Just next to Stanton's apartment were lodged two most uncongenial neighbors. One of them was a puritanical weaver, who had been driven mad by a single sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and was sent to the madhouse as full of election and reprobation as he could hold,—and fuller. He regularly ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... need is there to trace him, step by step, in the new life he doubtless found fully as arduous as he had anticipated? That it was a very struggling, difficult, and uncongenial life to him can be well understood. These reminiscences of Everett Gray relate to a long past time. We can look on his life now as almost complete and finished, and regard his past as those in the valley look up to the hill that has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... rich sugar-refiner's wife in Baker Street, who, as he well knew, was much given to the entertainment and encouragement of serious young evangelical clergymen. He was again, he said, "upon the world, having found the air of a cathedral town, and the very nature of cathedral services, uncongenial to his spirit;" and then he sat awhile, making firm resolves as to his manner of parting from the bishop, and also ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... friendship with a woman who recalls the maternal impressions of his childhood. A famous example of this is found in the beautiful affection of Auguste Comte for his idolized Clotilde de Vaux. Although Comte was bound to a woman whom he had married in the flush of erotic desire and whom he found entirety uncongenial, Clotilde became the inspiration of his later life, and held his affection without the aid of any material bond because she so closely resembled the ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... who nevertheless persevered in them for several months after his father's return to Spain, endeavouring by strenuous application to divert his thoughts from his hopeless attachment. Weary at length of the effort, he determined to abandon a pursuit so uncongenial to his tastes, and to seek a more active course of life, and one for which he felt he was better suited. His plan was to repair to Africa, and endeavour to obtain a commission in one of the foreign corps which the French were raising for their campaign against ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... and coldness make uncongenial neighbors. The man, all passion, and the woman, who has no answering spark, grope toward each other ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... feelings towards our friends know that we are often worse than cold towards those we do not fancy. We sometimes, alas, take a certain pride in our sensitiveness in this particular. We justify our hatred for uncongenial people till we have fairly faced the truth that love is the law of our being, and that we must love our neighbor. Then, though we cannot change our temperament, yet by the doing of prosaic duties, the ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... replied, 'I speak for millions of gentlemen in uncongenial employments, mostly manual and fatiguing. This would give them the kind of activity that they would like—such as their class enjoys in other countries where my system is in full flower, and where it is deemed ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... spite of legal enactments and other absurd restrictions. Since women can be churchwardens, and have been so long ago as 1672, sextons, overseers and registrars of births, and much else, and even at one time were parish constables, it seems that the pleasant duties of a parish clerk might not be uncongenial to them, though they be debarred by law from receiving the title and ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... this complexity there must be limits—an endless and incongruous variety teases and revolts; the discordant effect of innumerable tints, among which some are sure to be uncongenial to each other, is always extremely irritating. There ought, then, to be a scale of color, it would seem, within whose limits the purest harmonies are to be found, and beyond which subdivisions should be no more allowed than in constant musical notes. When this idea strikes, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of wits, and was treated by them like a spoilt child, was born at Barnstaple in 1685, and left an orphan at the age of ten. He was educated at the free grammar school in the town, and was afterwards, to his discontent, apprenticed to a mercer in London. He escaped from this uncongenial employment to be dependent on an uncle, and thus early exhibited his life-long disposition to rely upon others for support. 'Providence,' Swift writes, 'never designed Gay to be above two-and-twenty by his ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... he filled only long enough to write one birthday ode. What seemed a better fortune came in the shape of an appointment as Registrar of the Admiralty Court of Bermuda. He went to the island; remained but a short time; and turned over the uncongenial duties of the post to a deputy, who subsequently became a defaulter, and involved Moore to a large amount. Returning from Bermuda, he travelled in the United States and Canada; not without some poetical record of his movements. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... A library of volumes would be needed to give even a sketch of the results of the labors of these devoted men and women. The Church holds their names in holy reverence. Many of them have attained the crown of martyrdom, and a still greater number have fallen victims to the severities of uncongenial climates. Every heathen land has now associated with it the name of valiant soldiers of the Cross, who have given their lives to add it to their Master's, kingdom. In India among many others, there have been Carey, Duff, Martyn, Marshman and Ward. In China, ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... fellow chu[u]gen on the street, and wiping out the insult with wine, he had idled along, leaving to every man his share of the roadway, and to the thirsty with burdens more than their share. Hence this uncongenial company of thirst and a woman. She had halted at a grocer's shop, and his eyes were soon agog at sight of her investments—mushrooms, not of much weight, but in bulk forming almost a mound; the dried sliced gourd called kambyoku, of which she ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... artistic tastes, and give his children the benefit of a very liberal education—the one distinct ideal of success in life which such a nature as his could form. Constituted as he was, he probably suffered very little through the paternal unkindness which had forced him into an uncongenial career. Its only palpable result was to make him a more anxiously indulgent parent when his ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... conversation. The Countess Muhlen-Sarkey awoke only when there was a fitful attempt to break the embarrassment which held all the others. The quondam Parisian openly welcomed each stopping-place as an excuse to escape from such uncongenial companionship. In the throngs on the platforms he found both transient excitement and opportunities of stretching his cramped and restless limbs. Josef conscientiously attended him on these brief excursions, never relaxing for an instant his grave ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... what Darwin had not: implacability and a fine Jewish literary gift, with terrible powers of hatred, invective, irony, and all the bitter qualities bred, first in the oppression of a rather pampered young genius (Marx was the spoilt child of a well-to-do family) by a social system utterly uncongenial to him, and later on by exile and poverty. Thus Marx and Darwin between them toppled over two closely related idols, and became the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... from Miss Bartlett. A coolness had sprung up between the two cousins, and they had not corresponded since they parted in August. The coolness dated from what Charlotte would call "the flight to Rome," and in Rome it had increased amazingly. For the companion who is merely uncongenial in the mediaeval world becomes exasperating in the classical. Charlotte, unselfish in the Forum, would have tried a sweeter temper than Lucy's, and once, in the Baths of Caracalla, they had doubted whether they could continue their tour. Lucy had said she ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... latest, solitary swallow flies Across the sea, rough autumn-tempest tost, Poor bird, shall it be lost? Dropped down into this uncongenial sea, With no kind eyes To watch it while it dies, Unguessed, uncared for, free: Set free at last, The short pang past, In sleep, in death, in dreamless ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Erckmann was born at Phalsbourg, in Alsace, on May 20, 1822, and Alexandre Chatrian, at Soldatenthal, on December 18, 1826. Erckmann, the son of a bookseller, became a law student, and was admitted to the Bar in 1858. But the law studies were always uncongenial, and Erckmann meeting Chatrian as a fellow student in the gymnasium at Phalsbourg, the two young men decided to join forces in authorship. The Erckmann-Chatrian partnership lasted from 1860 to 1885, and resulted in a remarkable ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... a scientist, Ron," Dennis replied. "That may account for the heresy of my profound disbelief in science. I wouldn't cross the road to see a 'miracle.' The twentieth century is uncongenial to anything of that sort. Take it from me, old chap, there's a man at the back of this—not a nice man, I admit, but an ordinary human being to all outward appearances—and when we catch a glimpse of his outward appearances we shall ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... Bompard sat evidently approving. It was almost as though the two were in league against her, just as children get in league against an adult who insists on unpleasant duties or uncongenial food. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... afterwards a scholarlike knowledge of Latin, he did not attain distinction in the school; and I should think that the character of the head-master, Dr. Russell, which was vigorous, unsympathetic, and stern, though not severe, was uncongenial to his own. With the boys who knew him, Thackeray was popular; but he had no skill in games, and, I think, no taste for them.... He was already known by his faculty of making verses, chiefly parodies. I only remember one line ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... and the warmth of those brilliant eyes was subdued. This was the only perceptible difference wrought by the little vexations and troubles incident to her position. She had found some bitter drops in the golden goblet which the prince in his love pressed to her lips—drops which were uncongenial to lips accustomed to the sweets ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... wife, cold, practical female being, you know me not; we are sundered as fah apart as if you was sitting on the North Pole and I was sitting on the South Pole. Uncongenial being, you ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... song of the teakettle may have been but the wail of imprisoned power, until Watts set it free to work out its glorious destiny, so the boy's surly ways had been his own protest against a destiny that seemed enchaining him to an uncongenial work, for which he brought neither love nor patience. In more congenial labor his soul had broadened, his heart grown warmer, his very looks had improved—But we were talking of the great house near the church. This stately pile, with broad halls from which lofty rooms opened on either ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... the cotton-picking,—the captive pining in his cell,—the patient wife of the drunkard, saddened by a consciousness of the growing vileness of one so dear to her once,—the delicate spirit doomed to harsh and uncongenial surroundings,—all in such hours feel the soothings of a celestial harmony, the tenderness of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... thought him, would incline me kindly to his daughter, even if no other tie existed between us," he said calmly, unmindful of my sarcasm. "But other ties do exist, mistaken girl! The world looks upon us as one family—since the marriage of Claude and Evelyn, that uncongenial union which, but for your caprice, would never have taken place, and which is at the root of all our misfortunes, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... with pleasure from this uninviting and uncongenial subject, to one more elevating,—to the all but unlimited private charity which was called forth by the Irish Famine. I have already endeavoured to give some idea of it, but of course an imperfect one. The feelings evoked, and the almost unasked alms bestowed with a ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... us, O dear, lost child! With beam of love, A star—death's uncongenial wild— Smiling above! Soon, soon thy little feet have trod The skyward path, the seraph's road, That led thee back from man to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... this they possessed comparatively small surgical interest, since, as a rule, the features presented were those of mere lacerated wounds, while the more severe of the cases which survived only offered scope for operations of the mutilating class so uncongenial ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... wanderer on the face of the earth, the homeless pilgrim of a cause he no wise had at heart. He was accused by the Sorbonne, and ultimately driven into the profession, of the heresy of Calvinism. Expelled from the bosom of the church, he sought an uncongenial refuge among the apostles of the new faith, only to be thrust forth from the city, for no more heinous offence apparently than that playing back-gammon with the Prisoner of Chillon. He died at Turin ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... evening hour in the drawing-room, had never listened to anything approaching to this style of conversation, nor seen her brother to so much advantage in society. Hitherto she had only beheld him neglected in his uncongenial home circle, contemning and contemned, or else subjected to the fretting torment of Lucilla's caprice. She had never known what he could be, at his ease, among persons of the same way of thinking. Speaking scarcely ever herself, and her fingers busy with her needle, she was ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... choice at the age of twelve or thirteen, often to find later on, when the first barriers of pupil-teaching and King's Scholarship were surmounted, that she was not really suited to her profession or that continued study was uncongenial. Even now, when the system is different and better, children are bound too early by a contract they find it hard to break. It cannot be too often insisted that every intelligent child who is worthy of a junior or senior scholarship, is not therefore of necessity predestined to ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... sailer, it was decided that she should take the lead, the other two following. La Salle, with his brother, Father Membre, and some others, transferred their quarters from the Joli to the Aimable. This movement was also probably influenced by La Salle's desire to escape from the uncongenial companionship of Captain Beaujeu. It was on the 25th of November, 1684, that the ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... years. Long afterwards he repented the unkind blow he had given to Mme. de Sevigne, confessed its injustice, apologized, and made his peace. But the world is less forgiving, and wastes little sympathy upon the base but clever and ambitious man who was doomed to wear his restless life away in the uncongenial solitude of his chateau. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... European work-man who must be compelled by economic pressure to do hard labour. The rough and menial work of the world has always been done through some sort of compulsion, either slavery or some kind of economic coaction, for it is not in human nature, white or black, to work hard at uncongenial tasks unless superior force in some shape or other supplies the driving power. The manual workers of Europe are forced by the economic conditions under which they live to do the heavy and rough work that has to be done—there ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... have been so familiar with lately as to have comprehended, I believe, the general sense of it. But I read it at Bowood, and though, as I assure you, with the greatest attention, I do not remember a single word of it now (the invariable practice of my memory with any subject that is entirely uncongenial to me). ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... friendship of Sparta according to his commands, crossed the boundary stream, and, in so doing, did indeed destroy a mighty kingdom; not however that of the Medes and Persians, but my own poor Lydia, which, as a satrapy of Cambyses, finds its loss of independence a hard and uncongenial yoke." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... now obliged to seek for them; and for this I feel I am not formed." It is a sad picture, that of the old composer sitting down to work in his seventieth year, distrustful of his own powers, with an uncongenial text before him; but no indications of age or weakness are to be found in this music, which from its first note to the last is fresh, original, bright, and graceful,—a treasure-house of ideas to which subsequent composers have gone time after time when they ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... from confinement and uncongenial society. Where he had been, of course he could not tell. His poor nose was sadly torn where the ring had been wrenched away as he broke loose from his imprisonment. Nono was glad that Blackie had lost his badge of servitude; and as to needing a rope to ...
— The Golden House • Mrs. Woods Baker
... disliked it, and was seriously thinking of seeking board in some private family. The barracks were too far out, and the roads deep in mud, or he would have lived and "messed" out there. The few boarding houses were crowded, and with an uncongenial lot as a rule. Private families that took two or three table boarders were very few, but some one suggested his going to see the rector of the new parish, himself ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... before midnight all was over. They had passed—those pure spirits, from a world which was uncongenial to a fairer world ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... reach that shining plateau, where "beauty pitches her tents", and the Ideal beckons. Favorable environment is the steaming atmosphere that fosters, forces and develops germs which might not survive the struggle against adverse influences, in uncongenial habitat; but nature moulds some types that attain perfection through perpetual elementary warfare which hardens the fibre, and strengthens the hold; as in those invincible algx towering in the stormy straits of Tierra del ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... now," said Edith, when we were alone, "I dread the interruption of company. Ernest does not care for it, and if it be of an uncongenial kind, he wraps himself in a mantle of reserve, that neither sun nor wind can unfold. After commencement, our house will be overflowing with city friends. They will return with us, and we shall not probably be alone again for ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... and put his back into it, as R. says, very slangily I think, and the suitors thought they had great subject for much mirth when they retired to the smoking-room—I think it was almost profane.... But it is time for one pipe on deck and a last look at the somewhat uncongenial sea, then to a bed, three or four inches ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... Functionary whom they mistook for royalty; and they walked out sideways instead of backwards, reactionary methods of progress not being in their blood. Still, taking them for all in all, they were a very learned-looking body, and their presence in such uncongenial surroundings ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... endure marvellously; but without love and its joy she could not live, in any real sense. In uncongenial society, her whole mental faculty had frozen; when love came, her mental world, like a garden in the spring sunshine, blossomed and budded. When she lost me, the Present vanished, or went by her like an ocean that has no milestones; ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... In these uncongenial circumstances the new apprentice worked for four months as he had never believed it possible he could work. He was annoyed both at the extent and the variety of his tasks, the work of an A.B. being ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... them even when they are harmless." And rather thoughtfully she disengaged herself from the sheltering arm of that all too sympathetic young man, and went forward, shivering a little as the hiss of the enraged adder broke out from the uncongenial mud where ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... departure from Cairo for London on coming down from the Equator, and his second departure from Cairo to the Soudan. Much of that period had been passed in travelling, much more in exhausting and uncongenial negotiation in the Egyptian capital. All the brief space over enabled him to do was to pass the Christmas with several members of his family, to which he was so deeply attached, to visit his sisters ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... known to him and by no means uncongenial; but Saltash the saint, not only beloved, but reverenced and enshrined as such, as something beyond his comprehension! How on earth had he managed ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... better class of members invited him to their houses and he went occasionally, and if he found them uncongenial he never went again. He could not make calls out of duty. It seemed to him that they took very little interest in the higher side of politics and some of them he found were unaware of any higher side ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... pair, one was apt to get the nine stitches, or a pretty comfortable multiple of them, every Wednesday when the wash came in; and how these different kinds of lives, coming together with a friendly friction, found themselves not so uncongenial, or so incomprehensible to each other, after all,—all this, in its detail of bright words, I cannot stop to tell you; it would take a good many summers to go through one like this so fully; but when the big bell rang for dinner, they all came down the ledge together, and Sue and ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... monomaniacs, who can keep themselves devoted to and concentrated upon gain. To the majority of capable good human stuff, buying and selling, saving and investing, insuring oneself and managing property, is a mass of uncongenial, irrational and tiresome procedure, conflicting with the general trend of instinct and the finer interests of life. The great mass of men and women, indeed, find the whole process so against nature, that in spite of all the miseries of poverty, all the slavery of the ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... sweet sister—for my sister you are now—you will accede to your uncle's prayer and mine—you will permit me to be your brother, and to provide for you as such. In this wild region it fits not that you should longer abide. This wilderness is uncongenial—it is foreign to a nature like yours. You have been too long its tenant—mingling with creatures not made for your association, none of whom are capable of appreciating your worth. You must come with us, and live with my ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... so long as her vice remains in her. But these considerations of the essential innocence of the German do make all this systematic hostility, which the British have had forced upon them, a very uncongenial and reluctant hostility. Pro-civilisation, and not Anti-German, is the purpose of the Allies. And the speculation of just how relentlessly and for how long this ring of suspicion and precaution need be maintained about Germany, of how soon ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... entirely left us, for Bennett and I had before us one of the most uncongenial tasks that an officer can have. The news has to be broken by someone when a wife is suddenly made a widow, and the task is generally taken on by the dead man's platoon commander, who sends back home his letters and papers. There were many men who had died that afternoon, and letters of condolence ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... feelers everywhere; now and then crying out in my undisciplined way that the task was too hard for me; that I loathed my life; that it was impossible to live any longer without love and appreciation and sympathy; that so uncongenial an atmosphere could be no home to me; that the world was an utter ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... conciliation, and to this end proposed Jay as especial envoy to Great Britain. His nomination was opposed in the Senate, but prevailed by a vote of eighteen against eight. The mission was not desired by him. Uncongenial as were absence from home and diplomatic cares, this exile and duty were, in all private respects, opposed to his tastes and wishes; he foresaw the difficulties, anticipated the result, but, once convinced ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "the only useful thing I have ever done in my life is to rescue Cicely from uncongenial surroundings, and provide her with all she needs for her musical studies. To help bring out a great genius gives ME some little sense of importance, you see! In myself I am ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... a vague notion that he would be able to get tickets on credit at the booking office if he presented his visiting card. But the clerk in charge seemed to find something uncongenial in his proposal. He did not seem to like what he saw of Mr. Brumley through his little square window and Mr. Brumley found something slighting and unpleasant in his manner. It was one of those little ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... generally; back Monday morning in season for biz!" This was certainly satisfactory as far as it went, but I added, by way of parenthesis, "and who else will be present?" knowing well enough that one uncongenial spirit might be the undoing of us all. To this Bartholomew responded, "No one but ourselves, old fellow; now don't be queer." He knew well enough my aversion to certain elements unavoidable even in the best society, ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... no worse place than a small yacht, or than a large one for that matter, for uncongenial people. The Four betook themselves to the cabin, which was fortunately large, and made life bearable with a game of cards; while Mrs. Cooke, whose adaptability and sense I had come greatly to, admire, contented ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and rumps to the prosperous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made an effort to start him in line for business by placing him in a stocking factory. The work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward he was employed in the office of a busy firm of lawyers. He spent twelve hours a day in the office and then an hour more in the evening was put upon Latin and Greek. Even such recreation hours as the miserable youth found were dismally employed in declining nouns ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the most serious part of the business. To live in a dull place is bad enough—to live with dull people is bad enough; but to have one's thoughts perpetually occupied with an uncongenial subject, and one's energies devoted to an uncongenial pursuit, is just misery, and nothing short of it! In fact 'tis a moral injustice, and one that no man should be ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... to form an opinion of his own upon Arnold's life and character, while achieving a result that not only assured his own position at Oxford, but brought him well into the front rank of contemporary writers. The religious animosity at Oxford was uncongenial to Stanley, and it was only the prospect of Dr. Arnold occupying the Chair of Modern History that reconciled him ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... religious nor moral education as kindly genial treatment and a good example; all else may then be let alone till the child is old enough to feel the want of it. It is true that the seed will thus be sown late, but in what a soil! On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly father harsh and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will be painful. He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of his father. He will therefore shrink from Him. The rottenness of stillborn love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the soul, and hence, ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... outsails all your argosies and armadas. She has revolutionized naval warfare once by the steamboat. She has revolutionized it a second time by planting towers of iron on the elephantine backs of the waves. She has invented the sewing-machine to save the dainty fingers of your virtuous grisettes from uncongenial toil, so that Fifine and Fretillon may have more leisure for self-development. She has taught you a whole new system of labor in her machinery for making watches and rifles. She has bestowed upon you and all the world an anodyne which enables ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... as possible, glide quickly, in fact, over the thin ice. But his disappointment was none the less keen; there was no splendid peroration to write; there would be no eyes gazing up at him through a mist of tears. His sensations were those of an actor with an altogether uncongenial and ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... beautiful square tower of elaborate design, gave a touch of colour and richness to a vista otherwise somewhat cold and bare. This was St. George's Church, whose vestry, in the days when it required some degree of heroism to be an Episcopalian in that uncongenial atmosphere, had founded St. George's Hall. The present edifice, though numbering seventy-five years of life, was young compared with the First Church; and the lapse of time had not served to alter their respective positions in the community. In ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the Phoenix, there pealed forth—faint in the distance and rain—a solemn royal ditty, piped by the tuneful Aldermen of Skinner's Alley, and neither unmusical nor somehow uncongenial with the darkness, and the melancholy object of the doctor's walk, the chant being rather monastic, wild, and dirge-like. It was a quarter past ten, and no other sound of life or human neighbourhood was stirring. If secrecy were an object, it was well secured by the sable sky, and the steady ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... behind the wainscot. In a few minutes the light was extinguished and the two men, thus strangely brought together again, lay a few feet from one another; the mind of each turning in the stillness of the night, to the link which had bound them, nay, which still bound them in a forced and uncongenial union. ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... had served as comrades, and it was through Alan that the sergeant obtained his present lucrative but somewhat uncongenial post. ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... we can judge without a close and uncongenial scrutiny of statistics, that daily journey, that has governed and still to a very considerable extent governs the growth of cities, has had, and probably always will have, a maximum limit of two hours, one ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... operations of a kindred nature, had no attractions whatever for me; my tastes and proclivities were all in favour of an active outdoor existence; and, though I was prepared to yield obedience if my father chose to insist upon my following so uncongenial an occupation, I felt that it was only due to myself to point out to him that it would be utterly out of my power to infuse any spirit or enthusiasm into my ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... he would not be constantly reminded of soap—to devote himself to the History of the Thebaid, when this cousin died suddenly and precipitated responsibilities upon him. In the frankness of conviviality, Moggs bewailed the uncongenial task thus thrust into his hands, and my uncle offered to lighten his burden by a partnership then and there. They even got to terms—extremely muzzy ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... see him again. To this young and attractive woman, full of the joy of living, hardly more than a girl, yet married to a much older man, sober-minded, stolid and uncongenial to her, and buried in this dull and lonely station, Wargrave had appealed instantly. Youth calls to youth, and she hailed his advent into her monotonous life as a child greets the coming of a playfellow. With the other two ladies in Rohar she had nothing in common. Both were middle-aged, ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... British merchants, but by a greedy desire to get what little might be gotten in the scramble. Robinson still kept his shoulder to the collar, but he did so with but little hope. He had made a fatal mistake in leaguing himself with uncongenial partners, and began to feel that this mistake must be expiated by the ruin of his present venture. Under such circumstances Maryanne Brown was not unreasonable in desiring that something should be done. She had now given a tacit consent to that plan for bringing back ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... linger on that thought for a few seconds; and continued, 'Then the question arose, what was I to do? I felt that to write prose would be an uncongenial occupation, and altogether a poor prospect for a woman like me. Finally I have ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... the young man curiously yet sympathetically. He was to him as a son, and he had done everything in his power to help him since his return from the war. But he was well aware that Reynolds was not happy, and that newspaper work was proving most uncongenial. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... gave me a rather gloomy impression of Russia, and accounted in some measure for the grave and uncongenial aspect of the people. One always likes to find some bond of sympathy between himself and the inhabitants of the country through which he travels. I remember reading somewhere of a Scotchman who had occasion to visit the United States on business connected with ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... watering-places, and would seem insipid to a generation which values excitement in scenery as in fiction. Readers, who measure the beauty of a district by its average height above the sea-level, and who cannot appreciate the charm of a 'waste enormous marsh,' may find Crabbe uncongenial. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... had not meant to be inconstant, but while I strove sullenly for success in uncongenial occupation, she came to me—Aspiro—came like the truth and light, and taught ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... but his tone changed to sadness. "I wish with all my heart, Tom, that you or some one else, could go and meet them, instead of myself, and undertake what I shall have to do. I can tell you I never had a task imposed upon me that I found so uncongenial as the one I ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... longed for the pleasures that pleased in the day of prosperity; the dance, the banquet, and those visits that won the momentary gratification of flattery and admiration were sighed for. So irksome was the monotony and so uncongenial the role forced upon them by disguise, they hailed with joy the least circumstance that might be the harbinger ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... not insensible that my character, at least in some of its traits, is not uncongenial to that of a Spaniard. Whether it be owing to this or any other cause I know not, but I believe never was any man, so obscure as myself, distinguished in so obliging a manner by the first personages ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... Keeper of the Queen's Robes. There she spent five pleasureless and worse than profitless years. In her 'Diary and Letters,' the most readable to-day of all her works, she has told the story of wretched discomfort, of stupidly uncongenial companionship, of arduous tasks made worse by the selfish thoughtlessness of her superiors. She has also given our best historical picture of that time; the every-day life at court, the slow agony of King George's increasing insanity. But the drudgery and mean ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... are shut up in this prison of the body, we are fulfilling, as it were, the function and painful task of destiny; for the heaven-born soul has been degraded from its dwelling-place above, and, as it were, buried in the earth, a situation uncongenial to its divine and immortal nature. But I believe that the immortal gods have shed souls into human bodies, that beings might exist who might tend the earth, and by contemplating the order of the heavenly bodies might imitate it in the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... would be. The pen persisted in sputtering at almost every word; and when, at crucial points, he took special pains to make the writing legible, the too frequent result was an indecipherable blotch of ink. When the valiant scribe had wrestled with his uncongenial task for half an hour or more, his sister came upon the scene. Quietly she stepped across ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... Somerset proceeded with the young photographer to sundry corners of the outer ward, and thence across the moat to the field, suggesting advantageous points of view. The office, being a shadow of his own pursuits, was not uncongenial to Somerset, and he forgot other things in attending ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... even when she knew the facts she could not decide what to make of them; and finally she had to reflect upon a great many pages from a cousin who found himself in financial difficulties, which forced him to the uncongenial occupation of teaching the young ladies of Bungay to ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... other quarter where they could do less mischief in the event of active operations; but Congress, to the regret of Washington, could not sanction so radical a method. Greene did his best to root out this element, but we may imagine that it was uncongenial work, and that he took far more interest in the progress of his redoubts than in chasing suspected persons ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... with Nature in our uncongenial climate, Cuddling plants and coaxing 'em, and oh, the weary time it Takes to get a slender crop—we toil the Summer through; England, needing quick returns, is looking ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... arose from the lack of trained economic thought among all classes, and especially among those to whom the majority looked for guidance. The air was thick with economic fallacies or half-truths. We were, it is true, successful beyond our expectations in planting in apparently uncongenial soil sound economic principles. But our success was mainly due, as I shall show later, to our having used the associative instincts of the Irish peasant to help out the working of our theories; and we ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... this morning, that forms quite a striking contrast to the almost childlike harmlessness and universal respect toward me observed in the disposition of the villagers. It requires no penetrating scrutiny of these fellows' countenances to ascertain that nothing could be more uncongenial to them than the state of affairs that prevents them stopping ine and looting me of everything I possess; a couple of them order me quite imperatively to make a detour from my road to avoid approaching too near their flock of sheep, and their general behavior is ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... lowered the shade and lighted the gas-jet. So short that in the long run she wormed first through a crowd, she was full of the genial curves that, though they bespoke three lumps in her coffee in an elevator and escalator age, had not yet reached uncongenial proportions. In fact, now, brushing with her bare forearm across her moistly pink face, she was like Flora, who, rather than ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... hardly judge whether I had what would be called a good head for study. I think that, in general, what I really liked I was soon able to grasp without much effort, whereas I hardly exerted myself at all in the study of subjects that were uncongenial. This characteristic was most marked in regard to arithmetic and, later on, mathematics. In neither of these subjects did I ever succeed in bringing my mind seriously to bear upon the tasks that were set me. In the matter of the Classics, too, I paid only just as much attention as was absolutely ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Mrs. Lenox watched him in somewhat irritated amusement. "She hasn't your brains, of course, Madeline, but she has such charm, such simplicity and freshness, that you can't help liking her. And she grubs away at perfectly uncongenial work, and lives with this fusty old mother in a fusty little lodging-house. It makes me sick to think of such daily crucifixion. I've no business to say it, I know; but when you spoke about a week at the lake, I couldn't help thinking ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... a brief in favour of tyrannicide, praised Lorenzino as a hero. De Musset, who wrote a considerable drama on his story, painted him as a roue corrupted by society, enfeebled by circumstance, soured by commerce with an uncongenial world, who hides at the bottom of his mixed nature enough of real nobility to make him the leader of a forlorn hope for the liberties of Florence. This is the most favourable construction we can put upon Lorenzo's conduct. Yet some facts of the case ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... very black and dull after the bright little sitting-room where she had parted with Selina; the lessons were wearisome, her companions more uncongenial than ever; she felt actually cross at the examination to which Clara subjected her about every trifle she could think of, in the house of Marchmont. She could have talked of its delights if there had been anybody to care about ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... was little Alora. She was going to a foreign land with no companion but a strange and uncongenial man whom fate had imposed upon her in the guise of a parent. As they steamed out to sea and Alora sat on deck and watched the receding shores of America, she turned to her father with the first question she ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum |
