"Humbler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kinswoman saluted the new powers in this way; but some good fortune at least occurred to a family which stood in great need of it, by the advancement of these famous personages who benefited humbler people that had the luck of being in their favour. Before Mr. Esmond left England in the month of August, and being then at Portsmouth, where he had joined his regiment, and was busy at drill, learning the practice and mysteries of the musket and pike, he ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... example, a man who is born into, but cannot support himself in, a superior class of society is not, as long as he can find a livelihood abroad in a humbler walk in life, entitled ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... large picture. The process has already been continued in an equally destructive, though somewhat more delicate manner, over the whole of the humbler canvases on the ceiling of the Sala del Gran Consiglio; and I heard it threatened when I was last in Venice (1851-2) to the "Paradise" at its extremity, which is yet in tolerable condition,—the largest work of Tintoret, and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... which none of them now have; the middle classes, because they find no protection or encouragement, and no hope that their children will be permitted to inherit the property they may leave, not invested in our Government securities; and the humbler classes, because they are now abandoned to the merciless rapacity of the starving troops, and other public establishments, and of the landholders, driven or invited into rebellion by the present state of misrule. There is not, I believe, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... the fact also, that we have all a common interest—moral, political, and pecuniary—in the education of the whole community." Those gloriously exclusive schools I had no wish to visit. But I felt a peculiar pleasure in visiting this humbler yet well-conducted institution, for the benefit of those who are despised and degraded on account of their colour. As I entered, a music-master was teaching them, with the aid of a piano, to sing some select pieces for an approaching examination, both the ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... this appears to be the general impression as to his parentage. In a History of Cheshire, however, written, I believe, by Cowdray, and published in 1791, the author claims him as a native of that county, and makes him to be of much {335} humbler birth and descent than any of his other biographers. Hear him in ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... labour, and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thus be set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an occasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humbler kinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still left some men and women who are not fit ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... office of ministering to the comfort of human beings. All the schools contemned that office as degrading; some censured it as immoral. Once indeed Posidonius, a distinguished writer of the age of Cicero and Caesar, so far forgot himself as to enumerate, among the humbler blessings which mankind owed to philosophy, the discovery of the principle of the arch, and the introduction of the use of metals. This eulogy was considered as an affront, and was taken up with proper spirit. Seneca vehemently disclaims these insulting compliments. [Seneca, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... other subordinate species; fruticis, frutages and shrubs; which are also lignous trees, tho' of a lower and humbler growth, less spreading, and rising up in several stems, emerging from the same root, yielding plenty of suckers; which being separated from it, and often carrying with them some small fiber, are easily propagated and planted ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... learn (with dimmer knowledge of mysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"—"Tacitus's Germania," supposed by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars" of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and Goethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... and to read Raleigh's little retort when Coke complains of a want of words adequately to express his opinion of Raleigh; to be reminded how the worst of kings proved himself an admirable lawyer, and the possessor of manners which, in a humbler station, would assuredly have made the man; to hear the jokes as to Essex's responsibility for the financial prospects of the proposed revolution which amused the company of desperate men in the wine-merchant's upper room; to come across the ghost of the conversation ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... heart—he would yield! Three times during that winter he fell into the mire; on Washington's birthday he began to play in the morning, and stopping only for meals, he played until long after midnight. Forever afterwards he was a humbler and a gentler man because of that experience; understanding how squalor abases one, and how swiftly and stealthily an evil passion closes its grasp ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... simply because he offered an interesting problem and an inspiring theme. An ingenious charity may find in that attitude evidence of modesty; to my thinking it argues a more subtle and magnificent conceit than if he had fathomed the truth, as many humbler men in his place ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... Humbler scholars had to content themselves with small cupboards constructed in the thickness of the wall, or hung against it, as in the picture I will next shew you, from a French translation of Valerius Maximus, copied for King Edward the Fourth, and dated ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark
... for each girl to have an individual protege, that she might call upon the family and come into personal relations with a humbler class. She was to learn the special needs of her child, and give something really useful, such as stockings or ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... It was a humbler thing than any she had ever said to a man, but the raw sincerity of time and place and association was beginning to ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... network. I will not speak here of trails discovered and followed in an almost mediumistic manner, after an object of some sort has been sniffed at. Such stories, though highly probable, as yet lack adequate support. But, within a similar order of ideas, and in a humbler world and one with more modest limits, the dog, for instance, is incessantly surrounded by different scents and smells to which he appears indifferent until his attention is aroused by one or other of these vagrant effluvia, when he extricates it from the ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... skies, With lofty cedars there, And trees of humbler size, That fruit in plenty bear; Beasts wild and tame, Birds, flies, and worms, In ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... which delighted and made proud the whole population of Windyhill. The paper which contained it, and which, I believe, belonged originally to Miss Dale, passed from hand to hand through almost the entire community; the servants getting it at last, and handing it round among the humbler friends, who read it, half a dozen women together round a cottage door, wiping their hands upon their aprons before they would touch the paper, with many an exclamation and admiring outcry. And then her name appeared among the lists of smart people ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... same business—trying to make the human race fit to associate with. He looks after the minds; I look after the bodies. Mine's the humbler branch of the business, perhaps—but it's equally necessary, and it comes first. The chief thing that's wrong with human nature is bad health. I'm getting ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... is the picture. It is full summer. We have lunched, Madame and Ben and Andrew and I, at the little cafe restaurant at the near-by straggling end of the town. At other tables, other aristocratic members of the troupe. The humbler have cooked their food in the vague precincts of the circus. We have returned to all that Ben and his wife know as home. It is one o'clock. At two, matinee. An hour of blissful ease. We are in the shade of the great tent; but the air is full of the heavy odour of the dust and the flowers and ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... He would not leave without an interview with her—no! though a thousand deaths should be the penalty. The delay was fatal to his chances of escape. For more than a month he remained in concealment, protected by the fidelity of friends, many of whom belonged to the humbler walks of life, and one of whom in particular—the heroic Anne Devlin, from whom neither proffered bribes nor cruel tortures could extort a single hint as to his place of abode—should ever be held in grateful remembrance by Irishmen. ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... father's tenants, named Hobby, an honest, poor old man, who acted in the double capacity of sexton and schoolmaster. Of his skill as a gravedigger tradition is silent; but for a teacher of youth his qualifications were certainly of the humbler sort, making what is generally called an A, B, C schoolmaster. While at school under Mr. Hobby he used to divide his playmates into parties and armies. One of them was called the French and the other American. A big boy named William Bustle commanded the former; George commanded the ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... entertainment just tinged with Bohemia. Hers was the gate at which one stopped for a greeting and a chat as one drove past on the road; she was forever running to that gate. She knew the troubles of all her neighbors, both the town dwellers of her set and the humbler folk who made fruit farming more of a business. That rather silent husband of hers—a man getting an uncomfortable peace from the end of a turbulent and disappointing life which had just escaped great success—told her that she ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... both the greatest pleasures and the keenest pains of life lie much more in those humbler spheres which are accessible to all than on the rare pinnacles to which only the most gifted or the most fortunate can attain. It would probably be found upon examination that most men who have devoted their lives successfully to great labours and ambitions, and ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... around I saw the half-cleared space in front of me stretching over a square mile of ground. To the right was Coronel da Silva's house, already described, and all about, the humbler barracaos or huts of the rubber-workers. In the clearing, palm-trees and guava brush formed a fairly thick covering for the ground, but compared with the surrounding impenetrable jungle the little open space deserved its title of "clearing." A few cows formed ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... other Satire humbler arts has known, Content with meaner Beauties, tho' its own: Enough for that, if rugged in its course The Verse but rolls with Vehemence and Force; Or nicely pointed in th' Horatian way Wounds keen, like Syrens mischievously gay. Here, All has Wit, yet must ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... how you regard white spats, but I never see them without feeling that something ought to be done about it. I daresay the people who wear them are quite nice people, but I think they ought to suffer in some way for the jolt they give to the sensibilities of humbler mortals who could no more wear white spats than they could stand on their head in the middle of Fleet Street. I am aware that white spats are often only a sort of business advertisement. I have ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... survival of the feudal relation, long before the humbler men had risen from the condition of status to that of contract, when fixed pay in the ordinary sense was unknown, and where the relation between servant and master was one of ostensible voluntary service and voluntary support, was for life, and in its best aspect was a relation ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... deck is a space allotted to the humbler class of travellers known as "deck passengers." These are never Americans. Some are labouring Irish—some poor German emigrants on their way to the far North-West; the rest are negroes—free, or more ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... purpose of my journey being rather to see the manners of the people, than the brick and mortar of the towns, I had formed a resolution to seek the necessary refreshment as seldom as possible at inns, and as often as possible in the houses of the humbler farmers, and the better kind of peasantry. About fifteen miles from Calais my horse and myself were looking out for something of this kind, and one shortly appeared about three hundred yards on the left side of the road. ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... classes are badly served in this respect. "If we could see," says a public writer, "by the help of an Asmodeus, what is going on at the dinner hour of the humbler of the middle class,—what a spectacle of discomfort, waste, ill-temper, and consequent ill-conduct it would be! The man quarrels with his wife because there is nothing he can eat, and he generally makes up in drink for the deficiencies in the article of food. There ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... country boy is never without a good knife, it is his prime treasure), the pencil did double duty;—first in the skilful hands of Emily, whose faithful and spirited sketch does equal honour to the scene and to the artist, and then in the humbler office of attempting a faint transcript of my own impressions in ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... both these passions, but always so, that I could myself well enough distinguish them, and never in any degree of comparison with one another; the first maintaining its flight in so lofty and so brave a place, as with disdain to look down, and see the other flying at a far humbler ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the "Gadders." Others culled oddities from the provincial press, and so gave further scope to "The Enraptured Reporter," or offered selected gems of gaucherie from private correspondence, and thus added to the rich yield of "The Second Post." Still humbler helpers chipped in with queer bits of nomenclature, thereby aiding the formation of an "Academy of Immortals"—an organization fully officered by people with droll names and always tending, as will become apparent in the following pages, to enlarge ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... continued to pour along the wires from day to day, but the tone of those from the Colonial Office grew gradually humbler; thus we find Lord Kimberley telegraphing on the 8th February, that if the Boers would desist from armed opposition all reasonable guarantees would be given as to their treatment after submission, and that a scheme would be framed for the "permanent friendly ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... Chepe. High Tide in the mighty River City!—its banks wellnigh overflowing with the myriad-waved Stream of Man! The toppling wains, bearing the produce of a thousand marts; the gilded equipage of the Millionary; the humbler, but yet larger vehicle from the green metropolitan suburbs (the Hanging Gardens of our Babylon), in which every traveller might, for a modest remuneration, take a republican seat; the mercenary caroche, with its private freight; the brisk curricle of the ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Peter, and his humbler brothers Martin and Jack, in different degrees, are all of them obnoxious to the accusation; and Bossuet (Variations des Eglises Protestantes, xi. 201), who is assured that St. Paul predicted the 'doctrines of devils' ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... measure the imaginative power of great poets by the relative merits of their conceptions of Satan, we might find a humbler gauge for inferior capacities in the power of summoning awe-inspiring ghosts. The difficulty of the feat is extreme. Your ghost, as Bottom would have said, is a very fearful wild-fowl to bring upon the stage. He must be handled delicately, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... a short distance further, the woman paused before a house of much humbler appearance than the former one, and, encouraged by the motherly appearance of an elderly lady who sat knitting at her open door in the lingering twilight, she drew nigh to her, and asked if she would shelter herself ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... 'Our humbler province is to tend the fair, Not a less pleasing, though less glorious care; To save the powder from too rude a gale, Nor let th' imprisoned essences exhale; To draw fresh colours from the vernal flowers; To steal from rainbows, ere they drop in showers, A brighter wash; to curl their ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... supposed that in this representation of society, I chiefly refer to the humbler classes. I refer to those who are considered as [gentlemen], and who, if wealth, and public employment may be said to constitute gentility, are the gentlemen of the States bordering on the Mississippi. My readers may perhaps recollect a circumstance which occurred but a short ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... proved, would be in no indecent haste to remove their new member from his humbler environment. On Wednesday it was conveyed to Winona that they would come for Merle in a few days, which left the Penniman household and the twins variously concerned as to the precise meaning of this phrase. It sounded elastic. But on ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... humbler class sat with her child at her half-bared breast, silent amid that wailing throng: her cheek ashy pale; her eye calm; and her lips moved at times in silent prayer, but she neither wept, nor lamented, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemed to rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux was kneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that her humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald was getting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the least suggestion of anything ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... gaily hung with tapestries and cloths, rich and many-coloured, and men bravely dressed poured into their places all down the long rows of benches. The young king sat in his father's high seat, the highest-born and most honoured guests ranged beside him, and those of humbler standing in the farther places. First, they drank to the dead King Hakon, to his various great kinsmen in Valhalla, and to each of the gods in turn. Then as horns emptied faster toast after toast was called across the fires, and honoured with shouts of "Skoal!" that reached ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... no autocratic airs, In scorn of humbler days, But shapes her fortunes and affairs, To match the civic wreath she wears And justify ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... separated, pursuing each their different ways; the one, the Trent, the river of thirty fountains, betaking herself “to fresh woods and pastures new,” after brief dalliance with the Ouse, became bosomed in the ample embrace of the Humber; the other, the humbler stream of the two, retaining its previous course, pursued the even tenor of its way through the flats of the Fenland, with their “crass air and rotten harrs,” to find its consolation in the “dimpling smiles,” but restless bosom, of the shallow “Boston Deeps.” During the period ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... These and many other things Ithiel pointed out to Miriam, who listened eagerly till he wearied of the task. Then they looked downwards through the overhanging platforms of stone to the large market-place beneath and to the front, and upon the roofs of the houses, mostly of the humbler sort, that were built behind almost up to the walls of the Old Tower, whereon many people were gathered as though for safety, eating their morning meal, talking ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... into neither of the classes here noticed; we mean the Hermann and Dorothea, a narrative poem, in hexameter verse. This appears to have given more pleasure to readers not critical, than any other work of its author; and it is remarkable that it traverses humbler ground, as respects both its subject, its characters, and its scenery. From this, and other indications of the same kind, we are disposed to infer that Goethe mistook his destination; that his aspiring nature misled him; and that his success would have been greater had ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... discriminate and unravel these,—validly to separate the Ideal element which impregnates that Reality which we are for ever compelled to postulate and recognise, still remains the great problem of Philosophy—humbler perhaps and more practical, but not less profound than any vain attempt to discover to finite conception the Absolute as it is in itself. Therefore it is that the efforts of negative and agnostic criticism to dispense with the recognition of Reality as a necessary postulate ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... a supper from Gunter's (who, by the way, supplies most of the first-rate dinners which J. gives, as I know very well, having been invited to one of them to fill a vacant place, when I saw at once that these repasts are very superior to the common run of entertainments for which the humbler sort of J.'s acquaintances get cards)—who, I say, with the most good-natured feelings in the world, can help wondering how the Jenkinses make out matters? What is Jenkins? We all know—Commissioner of the Tape and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind: His soul, proud science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or Milky Way: Yet simple Nature to his hope has given, Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heaven; Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, Some happier island in the watery waste, Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To Be, contents his natural desire; He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... bonnets and shawls, and collars and ribbons, and the youngest showed a pretty little foot and boot under her modest gray gown, but his Highness of Fairoaks was courteous to every person who wore a petticoat, whatever its texture was, and the humbler the wearer, only the more stately ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... beyond Dragut and the proposed leaders of the expedition, the Sultan took no one into his confidence. Charles V., well served as he was by his spies, was as much in the dark as to the destination of this new armada as were humbler folk; in it he recognised the hand of Dragut again, and Doria had standing orders to catch that mischievous person if he could. At present, however, there was no chance of so desirable a thing happening, as Dragut was superintending ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... sight of the variety of concrete boys and girls in his abstract reasonings, necessary as these are. We are apt to forget that what is sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, and still more perhaps that what is sauce for the swan may not be sauce for either of these humbler but deserving fowl. But it is certain that in discussing education we ought constantly to envisage the actual individuals to be educated. Otherwise our "average pupil of fifteen plus" is only too likely to become a mere monster of ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... measured. There are things, Dr. Thorndyke, which are outside the range of our puny intellects; things that science, with its arrogant materialism, puts aside and ignores with close-shut eyes. I prefer to believe in things which obviously exist, even though I cannot explain them. It is the humbler and, I think, the ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... there was none in the spirit with which soldiers and civilians alike in the invested township faced the duties placed upon them. Writing on New Year's Day Mr. Pearse has a timely and a generous word for the humbler heroes ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... tenderness of a Buddhist for animals, whom the gospels despise. When he pities the animals, who are worth more than ourselves, their executioners, when he pities the elementary existences, the plants and trees, those exquisite creations, he unbends and pours out his heart. The humbler the victim, the more generously does he espouse its suffering. His compassion is unbounded for all that lives in misery, that is buffeted about without understanding why, that "suffers and dies without a word." And if he mourned Miss Harriet, in this unaccustomed ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... shades were up—an ominous sign, for the parlor would only be opened to a person of importance. Had the Professor visited us, the humbler sitting-room would have been quite good enough to receive him in, and it seemed a strange commentary on his harsh judgment that his brother should be ushered into the stately chamber where the very air grew old in dignified seclusion. Still more forcibly was this idea impressed ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... different and a humbler spirit that I went to Boston. I had received more warnings and more advice about Boston than about all the other cities put together. And, in particular, the greatest care had been taken to permeate my whole being with ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... Ishmael, as they took their seats in the carriage, "that we should take Katie immediately back to her owner. I understand from her that he is a man in the humbler walks of life, and therefore I think that he might be willing to close with us for a liberal advance upon ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... scholars and the fishermen and their wives, and all the humbler folk of the place, this story has nothing to do. But it would not be a true chronicle of Northbury if it did not concern itself with the Jenkinses and their love affairs, with Mrs. Gorman Stanley and her furniture, with ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... disagreeable to him. He created quite a sensation by appearing at one of Emerson's noon-day lectures in May, 1866, and as soon as the discourse was over he became the centre of a small circle of celebrities. Yet he seemed even more glad to meet his humbler and more familiar friends. He said, "If I come again, it will be to hear that man," referring to Wendell Phillips, who stood a little at one side watching Emerson and Whittier with the air ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... stood by him.' There was hilarity in the Court at his quaint sententious envelopment of the idiom of the streets, which he delivered with solemnity: 'He could only plead, not in absolute justification—an appeal to human sentiments—the feelings of a man of the humbler orders, returning home in the evening, and his thoughts upon things not without their importance, to find repeatedly the guardian of his household beastly drunk, and destructive.' Colney made the case quite intelligible to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the mournful idyll of the impossible loves of the Rose and the Nightingale. Nevertheless, there is one great difference: the bird and the flower are both beautiful; nay, are alike in their beauty. But here the humbler being, doomed to a place so far below, avows to himself that he is ugly and monstrous. But amidst his wailing he feels in himself a power greater than the East can know. With the will of a hero, through the very greatness of his desire, he breaks ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... a humbler tablet on the opposite side with a long inscription is of more interest, for it commemorates Pasquale de Paoli, the champion of Corsican independence, {40} who took refuge in England, the home of liberty, and died here in 1807. The ladies, leaving the men to ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... repetition of the same epithets applied to the same persons, and in the Greek realism of Goethe's nature. The theme is very un-Homeric; it is thoroughly modern and German,— "Germans themselves I present, to the humbler dwelling I lead you, Where with Nature as guide man is ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... takes up a plant his attention is naturally first drawn to its general appearance and structure, whether it is a complicated one like one of the flowering plants, or some humbler member of the vegetable kingdom,—a moss, seaweed, toadstool,—or even some still simpler plant like a mould, or the apparently structureless green scum that floats on a stagnant pond. In any case the impulse ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... to exist. You may call it interesting them, if you like; but, really, what is the difference? You do your little act, and because the stage is large and the house is fine, you fancy you are not of that sad brotherhood which aims to please in humbler places, with perhaps ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... neighbourhood—to Dordrecht by river, to Delft by canal, to Gouda by canal; or one may take longer voyages, even to Cologne if one wishes. But I do not recommend it as a city to linger in. Better than Rotterdam's large hotels are, I think, the smaller, humbler and more Dutch inns of the less commercial towns. This indeed is the case all over Holland: the plain Dutch inn of the neighbouring small town is pleasanter than the large hotels of the city; and, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... thought (to which I personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets. But it is to much humbler functions that I here call the awful power of such a distinction. Whether or no the living bird is at the beginning of our mental chain, it is absolutely necessary that it should be at the end of ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... dispute the enormous benefits to man of woman's supremacy, but we may fairly leave the statement of them to the numerous troup of poets who dispute with Mr. Tupper the theme of the affections. For ourselves, we may undertake, perhaps, the humbler task of pointing out very briefly some of the disadvantages which, as in all human things, counterbalance these benefits. In the first place, feminine rule is certainly not favorable to anything like largeness of mind or breadth of view. It creates, as we have seen, an excessive self-conceit and ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... where the lane opens out into the court, some women sit with their backs against the gray stones of the wall. Their dress is that common to the humbler classes of the country—a linen frock extending the full length of the person, loosely gathered at the waist, and a veil or wimple broad enough, after covering the head, to wrap the shoulders. Their merchandise is contained in a number of earthen jars, such as are still used ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... his career. If a man enters a profession simply because his grandfather made a great name in it, or his mother wants him to, with no love or adaptability for it, it were far better for him to be a motor-man on an electric car at a dollar and seventy-five cents a day. In the humbler work his intelligence may make him a leader; in the other career he might do as much harm as a bowlder rolled from its place upon a railroad track, a menace ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... touched, not what they have heard,—what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony to their words, that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas a Kempis, and many a humbler name whose life's story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and, preeminently, Christ. It is the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, fundamental, that preserves their influence in other lives. They help us by opening ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... read more she discovered that what she had fondly imagined were ideas originated by her own intellect, was, in reality, the echo only of thought long since given to mankind by other minds, in other words, often better than her own. Her own silent claim to genius was greatly modified; she was humbler than she had been. But she knew painfully that her name was now a hundred-fold better known than it had been while she was yet only the wife of a Riversborough banker. All her work for the last fourteen years had placed it more ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... told stories of his travels to her and anybody else who might drop in, that not only the wife but the neighbourhood was appeased. His old friends came back to him, he began to receive overtures to write in some of the humbler papers, to lecture on his adventures in the Yorkshire and Lancashire towns. Daddy expanded, harangued, grew daily in good looks and charm under ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... though thy foes be hard And cruel as their weapons, it shall guard Thy hearth-stones as a bulwark; make thee great In white and bloodless state; And haply, as the years increase— Still working through its humbler reach With that large wisdom which the ages teach— Revive the half-dead dream of universal peace! As men who labor in that mine Of Cornwall, hollowed out beneath the bed Of ocean, when a storm rolls overhead, Hear the dull booming ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... enchantment, on the site of his father's old weather-beaten farmhouse. The exterior was of marble, so dazzlingly white that it seemed as though the whole structure might melt away in the sunshine, like those humbler ones which Mr. Gathergold, in his young play-days, before his fingers were gifted with the touch of transmutation, had been accustomed to build of snow. It had a richly ornamented portico, supported by tall pillars, beneath which was a lofty door, studded with silver ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... her side for a moment—has uttered an undertone of bewildered complaint; then has gone back patiently to his old post, and is again watching. The great surgeon and the girl stand side by side, watching also. The humbler medico stands back a little, his eyes rather on his senior than on ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... be something of such potency, yet at the same time of such simplicity, that it should not so much require a lofty and elevated intellect to admit it, as tend, being received readily and easily by minds of a humbler order, to raise them up to itself. Now this, so far as I understand it, is the character of the Christian philosophy—for philosophy I must think it deservedly called. It is admitted into the mind with ease. ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... go," he had said, "the way of Napoleon; we do not desire to be the arbitrators or schoolmasters of Europe. We do not wish to force our policy on other States by appealing to the strength of our army. I look on our task as a more useful though a humbler one; it is enough if we can be an honest broker." He succeeded in the task he had set before himself, and in reconciling the apparently incompatible desires of England and Russia. Again and again when the Congress seemed about to ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... acquaintance with every remarkable object in the place, not excepting Count Nositz's small but excellent gallery,—one of the most creditable collections of modern growth which I have seen. Neither did we fail to form acquaintance with the people, as well of the humbler as of the more exalted stations; of which the result, in every instance, was, that the favourable impression which had been made upon me, while wandering among the mountains, suffered no diminution. I found them ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... the square, capacious scaffoldings had been erected to contain those who were privileged by rank, or those who were able to buy honors with the vulgar medium; while humbler preparations for the less fortunate completed the three sides of a space that was in the form of a parallelogram, and which was intended to receive the actors in the coming scene. The side next the water was unoccupied, though a forest of latine spars, and a platform ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... public execution, the proper death of a regicide, or had left him afterwards unmolested; but the second Charles was not less mean and malignant than his sire was unfortunate. Of the character of the humbler class of the doctrinal Puritans, the following hints are incidentally given in ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... of Devonshire, or him of Northumberland, or him of Norfolk—with the social power and state which wait upon him in his duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in degree down to the latest and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet humbler men who have been knighted for their merits and services in medicine, in literature, in art. The greater and greatest nobles are established in a fear which is very like what the fear of God used to be when the common people feared Him; and, though ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... vices of the old mode of living clung to them in their new and humbler abode, keeping them slaves to a new set of appearances. They had never done any work of consequence, hardly their own sewing. What was even worse, they had been brought up to consider work, for a lady, disgraceful. Women might work, but not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... daughter's health. Meanwhile, he spent the profits of her toil in luxuries, in which she shared not; still allowing her the miserable pittance which barely kept want from their dwelling, and would not permit of her making, either in her home or her person, an appearance above the humbler class of mechanics. ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... much for protection as for plunder, the banner of some more powerful house. In course of time, when the Marches grew peaceful and morals improved, when cattle-lifting, no longer profitable, ceased to be an honourable occupation, such humbler marauders drifted away into the wide world, leaving no trace behind, save the grey ruins of their grim fortalices, and the incidental mention of some probably disreputable scion in a chapman's ballad. Neither mark nor memory of the Jacksons remains in Scotland. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... preceding clause is: "Thus with the skill of life and keen observance of the ways of men, my humbler servants have done their work, each according to his nature ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... his life-time as a singular example of the genius rising from the humbler shades of life, Burns is now ranked as a classic among the poets of his country. The interest originally felt in his personal character and unhappy fate, has been deepened as the high absolute rank of the poet became appreciated. These changes might ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... 2nd.—The Lords seldom sit die Lunae, and were perhaps feeling what humbler folk call "rather Mondayish" at being summoned from their week-end pleasaunces to put the Local Government (Ireland) Bill through its final stages. Anyhow they developed some eleventh-hour criticisms. The sad case of the Belfast Water Commissioners attracted Lord STUART OF WORTLEY. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... doctors' tools," began to encroach more and more on the doctors' province, and to prescribe for and even cure the poor. In 1687 (James II.) open war broke out. First Dryden, then Pope, fought on the side of the doctors against the humbler men, whom they were taught to consider as mere greedy mechanics and empirics. Dryden first let ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... heartily, after the manner of old frontier days and men, the young officer administered to his humbler comrades; cheered, and warmed, and insisted on their eating with their second tumbler, and when in course of half an hour the two stood before him, glowing, grateful, and resuming their buffalo coats and fur caps and gloves, honest Cassidy tried to ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... compartment, where their granulated form and rich glossy colour give them a very tempting appearance. The husk is repacked in the empty bags, and exported to Ireland, where it is sold at a low price to the humbler classes, who extract from it a beverage which has all the flavour of cocoa, if not ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... Moreover, from Baghdad to the palace of the damsels is a year's journey, and this maketh up the seven years." When Hasan heard this, he marvelled with exceeding marvel and cried, "Glory be to God, Facilitator of the hard, Fortifier of the weak heart, Approximator of the far and Humbler of every froward tyrant, Who hath eased us of every accident and carried me to these countries and subjected to me these creatures and reunited me with my wife and children! I know not whether I am asleep or awake or if I ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... used to go only when in the most brilliant humor for listening, and my authority on Christmas observances is another and humbler barber, but not less a babbler, than the first. By birth, I believe, he is a Mantuan, and he prides himself on speaking Italian instead of Venetian. He has a defective eye, which obliges him to tack before ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... always at her side when she appeared in public, but they had no part in her domestic life and did not reside in the Imperial palaces. This privilege belonged to only six other women, who occupied a humbler position in the court hierarchy, but yet saw much more ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Gallais, though humbler, was much more complicated. Nor was he possessed of sufficient strength of character to choose a distinct path and steadily pursue it. Determined enough, as we have seen, under excitement he could fight with his back to the ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... in its stead was a plain marble slab with his simple name and birthday on it, and a blank left for the date of his death. Manifestly he had repented of the vaingloriousness of those herald angels and their dome; and practically took the hint of my dispraise in the adoption of that humbler tombstone. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... thank for his gout. Like many a man in humbler life, he had abused the laws of nature until they had avenged themselves upon him. The pleasures of the table with him far surpassed those of intellectual or business pursuits. He had an extraordinary appetite, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... Sincerity and Prudence, how shamelessly men compile second-hand references, and display in borrowed footnotes a pretence of labour and of accuracy! I mention this merely to show how, even in the humbler class of compilers, the Principle of Sincerity may find fit illustrations, and how honest work, even in references, belongs to the same category as honest work in philosophy ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... honors that wait upon it. And when I say this, having had before my eyes this beautiful vision of Zenobia reigning over subjects as a mother would reign over her family, dealing justly with all, and living but to make others happy—you must believe me. I seek and love a calmer, humbler lot. This, Piso, is the temple of Zenobia. ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... if all tales were true, paid the debt that his sex owed her with heavy interest. But those tales did not reach the ears of the sisters at home. To them—with the object of suitably impressing them—she wrote an occasional note, of which half the words were titles of nobility; and the humbler relatives accepted the fact of her unapproachable elevation above them. The Breens made easy jokes upon the subject; Mr Goldsworthy's jealousy of her was overcome by his pride in the connection. "We had a letter from my sister-in-law, the Countess, the other day," he ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... and tramway and motor-road a modern Cagnes of villas and hotels and pensions, with their accompaniment of shops and humbler habitations, has grown for a mile or more, and stretched out across the railway to the sea. Two famous French artists live here, and many Parisians and foreigners. There is also a wireless station. All this shuts off from the road the town on ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... crowd, towards people whom one knows, but must allow her vague thoughts to escape continually from her eyes in a flood of blue light which she was powerless to control, she was anxious not to distress in any way, not to seem to be despising those humbler mortals over whom that current flowed, by whom it was everywhere arrested. I can see again to-day, above her mauve scarf, silky and buoyant, the gentle astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to address it to anyone in particular, but ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... not critical, I can hardly agree with those who talk of Dumas' "wild imagination"! As the great Mr. Wordsworth was more often made to mourn by the gratitude of men than by its opposite, so I, in my humbler sphere, am more cast down sometimes by inapposite ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury |
