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Incomparable   /ɪnkˈɑmpərəbəl/   Listen
Incomparable

adjective
1.
Such that comparison is impossible; unsuitable for comparison or lacking features that can be compared.  Synonym: uncomparable.  "The computer proceeds with its incomparable logic and efficiency" , "This report is incomparable with the earlier ones because of different breakdowns of the data"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Incomparable" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the street and the opposite hill of Ludgate give an incomparable majesty to the Cathedral, crowning the populous hill, soaring serenely above the vista of houses, gables, chimneys, signals, and ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... feathers," said Zillah, shaking her head. "You must allow that Mathilde is incomparable. I often feel that were she to have the least idea of the appearance which I presented, when I first came here, there would be nothing left for me but suicide. I could not survive her contempt. I was always fond of finery. I have Indian blood enough for ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... quietest place imaginable, with a simple and remote life, hardly aware of itself, flowing tranquilly through it; yet this little village, by some felicity of grouping and gathering, has the rare and incomparable gift of charm. I cannot analyse it, I cannot explain it, yet at all times and in all lights, whether its orchards are full of bloom and scent, and the cuckoo flutes from the holt down the soft breeze, or in the bare and leafless winter, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... quarters. He found his burdens intolerable to bear. His cares interfered with what were once his pleasures. The dreadful load of public affairs, which he could not shake off, weighed down his soul with anxiety and sorrow. He realized, more than most monarchs, the truth of one of Shakespeare's incomparable utterances,— ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord

... remember your little friend Emilie, do not think of her as a black-hearted criminal! The eternal God sees my heart. I have a bad morality (Ich habe eine schlechte moralitat) and I am feather-headed, but I am not a criminal. And I shall always love and remember you, my incomparable Florestan, and shall always wish you everything good on this earthly globe (auf diesem Erdenrund!). I don't know whether my letter will reach you, but if it does, write me a few lines that I may see you have received it. ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... faces, their blond hair and that unspeakable air of honesty and calm resolution, one instantly recognises the Belgians. Yes, the Belgians, come here in 1914, the Belgians who have taken up their abode, working anywhere and everywhere, with an incomparable good-will and energy. But they have never taken root, patiently waiting for the day when once again they may pull out their heavy drays that brought them down here, whose axles they have never ceased to grease, just as they have always kept their magnificent horses shod and ready to harness, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard

... village, or cluster of farmhouses, drawn with all its ins and outs, and haystacks, and palings, is sure to be lovely; much more a French one. French landscape is generally as much superior to English as Swiss landscape is to French; in some respects, the French is incomparable. Such scenes as that avenue on the Seine, which I have recommended you to buy the engraving of, admit no rivalship in their expression of graceful rusticity and cheerful peace, and in the beauty ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin

... being to the hamack tree, from the bark of which they were woven. However that may be, the modern hammock of these tropical Red Men is so light and so delicate in texture that during the day one may wear it as a sash, while at night it forms an incomparable couch. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... searching all his life for a perfect cook, and he had found, or believed he had found, such an one in Narcisse; wherefore the Marchesa was fully persuaded that, if that artist should evade the guillotine, she would again taste his incomparable handiwork, even though he were suspected of murdering his whole family as well as the partner ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters

... at the cottage, desperately fatigued after his long journey, but in perfect possession of his incomparable temper, nevertheless. ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins

... flocks afterwards which I examined with a great degree of attention; some few had very fine wool, which might be equal to his, but then the carcass was ill-shaped, and many had a good carcass with coarse wool; but this incomparable farmer had eminently united both these circumstances in his flock at Glynde. I affirm this with the greater degree of certainty, since the eye of prejudice has been at work in this country to disparage and ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale

... polished writers hesitated to name our incomparable allegorist, on account of his humble name ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... of raising it was hinted to me by Mr Betterton; the contrivance and working of it was my own. They who think to do me an injury, by saying, that it is an imitation of the scene betwixt Brutus and Cassius, do me an honour, by supposing I could imitate the incomparable Shakespeare; but let me add, that if Shakespeare's scene, or that faulty copy of it in "Amintor and Melantius," had never been, yet Euripides had furnished me with an excellent example in his "Iphigenia," between Agamemnon and Menelaus; and from thence, indeed, the last turn of it is borrowed. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... there came into the mind of His Majesty a first-class idea: he telegraphed for Mother Mitchel, the most celebrated of all pastry cooks. Mother Mitchel soon arrived, with her black cat, Fanfreluche, who accompanied her everywhere. He was an incomparable cat. He had not his equal as an adviser and a taster ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... society, should have become all but extinct. But this feeling was momentary, when I reflected that our sense of the beautiful, including the good and the true, had not diminished, but had merely gone into new channels; and, more especially, that Meyerbeer and Rossini, in order to hear their own incomparable works executed in perfection, must come to the city which the Exhibition of last year has indelibly stamped as the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various

... damascene. All these had she, but they are not peculiar characteristics. Other women are thus gifted. The traits of her beauty lay in the intellectual as much as the physical—in a happy combination of both. The soul, the spirit, had its share in producing this incomparable picture. It was to behold the play of those noble features, to watch the changing cheek, the varying smile, the falling lash, the flashing eye, the glance now tender, now sublime—it was to look on all this, and be impressed with an idea of the ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... confirmed the accuracy of their judgment. At any rate, by their bold and resolute deeds they established British freedom and her supremacy of the seas, and handed down to us an abiding spirit that has reared the finest seamen and established our incomparable merchant fleet, the largest ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman

... served in the councils and fought in the armies of Helium as a prince of the house of Tardos Mors. The people seemed never to tire of heaping honors upon me, and no day passed that did not bring some new proof of their love for my princess, the incomparable Dejah Thoris. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... the temptation, and voluntarily, and with "malice prepense" throw myself into the wickedness of translating (somewhat modernizing I own) the "Tabooed" ode, in defiance of, and purposely to offend, the Parisian, or other editor or editors, who shall ever show themselves such incomparable ninnies as to omit that or any other ode of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... palazzi, villas and churches; but there are some things I shall very frequently revisit and these are the two Museums of the Vatican and of the Capitol, St Peter's, the Coliseum and antiquities in its neighbourhood, the Pantheon, and last but not least the atelier of the incomparable Canova. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... The Emperor seemed thoroughly contented; he spoke to me very warmly of his satisfaction, which is shared by all his subjects with but few exceptions. Both when I came in and when I was leaving, he spoke to me in the most gracious manner possible, and especially about the incomparable benefit His Majesty had rendered to European civilization by restoring France to its real basis. He praised our army, and added that he would do what he could to aid those of our soldiers who still remained in the hospitals here. ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... my friend, Lady Fuddleston, mentioned that her dear girls required an instructress (I am too poor to engage a governess for mine, but was I not educated at Chiswick?)—"Who," I exclaimed, "can we consult but the excellent, the incomparable Miss Pinkerton?" In a word, have you, dear madam, any ladies on your list, whose services might be made available to my kind friend and neighbour? I assure you she will take no ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... troubled him long ago. What could he do? He could do nothing. That was the tragedy: he could do nothing. He could but rely upon Alice. Alice was amazing. The more he thought of it, the more masterly her handling of these preposterous curates seemed to him. And was he to be robbed of this incomparable woman by ridiculous proceedings connected with a charge of bigamy? He knew that bigamy meant prison, in England. The injustice was monstrous. He saw those curates, and their mute brother, and the aggrieved mother of the three dogging him either to prison or ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... you imagine," replied Aladdin; "the sultan is mistaken, if he thinks by this exorbitant demand to prevent my entertaining thoughts of the princess. I expected greater difficulties, and that he would have set a higher price upon her incomparable charms. I am very well pleased; his demand is but a trifle to what I could have done for her. But while I think of satisfying his request, go and get something for our dinner, and ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... must have been astonished at my silence, remembering, not only the affectionate relations we have held to each other ever since your first sojourn at Paris, but also the admiration I have never ceased to feel for the great and solid works which we owe to your sagacious mind and your incomparable intellectual energy. . .I approve especially the general conceptions which lie at the base of the plan you have traced. I admire the long series of physiological investigations, beginning with the embryology of the so-called simple and lower organisms ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... and the glorious examples of public virtue were in the mouths of all men, there was no power in them to avert the doom of that civilisation for which the blood of so many patriots and the genius of such incomparable writers had been wasted in vain. The liberties of the ancient nations were crushed beneath a hopeless and inevitable despotism, and their vitality was spent, when the new power came forth from Galilee, giving what was wanting to the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... with the low, was attracted to it. The charm of its gayety and good humor, its inexhaustible fun, its riotous overflow of animal spirits, its brightness and keenness of observation, and, above all, the incomparable ease of its many varieties of enjoyment, fascinated everybody. Judges on the bench and boys in the street, gravity and folly, the young and the old, those who were entering life and those who were quitting it, alike found it to be irresistible. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... to give so adequate a pen-picture of the World's Fair as to impart to the reader an accurate idea of its true grandeur. Many minds have essayed already to reproduce what they have witnessed there; many pens have attempted to record exactly the incomparable impression the exposition effected upon its visitors, but, it is safe to say, without even faintly describing it; for, can language convey to a blind man what "color" means, or to a deaf person the meaning of ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler

... "Pan Michael," preceded by short stories, "Lillian Morris," "Yanko the Musician," "After Bread," "Hania," "Let Us Follow Him," followed by two problem novels, "Without Dogma," and "Children of the Soil," and crowned by a masterpiece of an incomparable artistic beauty, "Quo Vadis." Eleven good books adopted from the Polish language and set into circulation are of great importance for the English-reading people—just now I am emphasizing only this—because ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,

... cavalry, and took his place on the Duke of Gandia's left hand. The duke attracted all eyes by his personal beauty, set off as it was by all the luxury he thought fit to display at this festival. He had a retinue of pages and servants, clad in sumptuous liveries, incomparable for richness with anything heretofore seen in Rome, that city of religious pomp. All these pages and servants rode magnificent horses, caparisoned in velvet trimmed with silver fringe, and bells of silver hanging down every here and there. He himself was in a robe of gold brocade, and wore at ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Jean-Baptiste Wicar wasted neither his time nor his money. What treasures were then to be picked up by such a man—for Wicar died not long after the Revolution of July 1830! Where he found his Masaccios, Robert Browning told me that he knew; but where did he find that incomparable bust in wax which charms with all the mystic feminine grace and more than all the feminine beauty of the Mona Lisa? Possibly M. Carolus Duran may be able to throw light upon this; for he was one ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... a mere reflection as he went out. It was very late. I do not know how the dinner, or rather the after-hours of it, had lengthened. It must have been the incomparable charm of the woman. She had come, this night, luminously, it seemed to us, through the haze that had been on her—the smoke haze of a strange, blighting fortune. The three of us had been carried along in it with no sense of time; my sister, the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... revolt. It would be beside our purpose here to dwell upon the great deeds by which in that terrible year our army, in all its branches, maintained its old renown; upon the recapture of Delhi; the deliverance of the incomparable defenders and preservers of Lucknow; the exploits of Lawrence, and Inglis, and Havelock, and Outram, and Peel, and Campbell; and, if we are forced to deny ourselves the proud gratification of dwelling on their combined ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... the strange woman; so the virtuous young female is sometimes led into ruin by the flattering tongue of the lurking enemy of beauty and innocence. I cannot give a more striking and pathetic illustration of this than the one portrayed by the incomparable hand of Pollok:— ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... she, "and I will introduce you to my friends to-morrow. My friends, I say proudly—for I have made friends since I came to England; and England, amongst other commodities excellent in their kind, produces incomparable friends—friends in adversity. We know their value. Adieu: settle all your affairs ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... fought over their rival charms, and were either killed or went away unable to make up their minds. The sad end was, if you'll believe me, that all the eight maidens died unmarried, martyrs to their own incomparable charms." ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... letter remained unanswered, nor is there any reason to suppose that Voltaire ever got through it, though Rousseau chose to think that Candide (1759) was meant for a reply to him.[340] He is careful to tell us that he never read that incomparable satire, for which one would be disposed to pity any one except Rousseau, whose appreciation of wit, if not of humour also, was probably more deficient than in any man who ever lived, either in Geneva or any other country fashioned after Genevan guise. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... and distinguished; but I declare it here to-day, that of any mortal man whom it has ever been my privilege to approach, he was the greatest; and I assert here, that, grand as might be your conception of the man before, he arose in incomparable majesty on more familiar acquaintance. This can be affirmed of few men who have ever lived or died, and of no other man whom it has ever been my fortune to approach. Like Niagara, the more you gazed, the more its grandeur grew upon you, the more its majesty ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke

... but the true friendship that I bear thee, Lovelace; which makes me plead thy own sake, and thy family's sake, in the justice thou owest to this incomparable creature; who, however, so well deserves to have her sake to be mentioned ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... incomparable order of the great St. Dominic, it is authentically related that one of the first of those holy, religious men was wont to say, that he found himself not so much concerned to pray for the souls in Purgatory, because they are certain of their salvation; and that, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... It is 2,600 miles from north to south, and 500 miles at its widest part. It is twelve times the size of Great Britain. Although the population of the country is about seven millions, only one per cent, of its cultivable area is now occupied, yet Argentina has an incomparable climate. ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... you say that you two women have carried these priceless things tacked in your cloaks, which, as I have seen, you throw down here and there and leave behind you? Oh, fools, fools, even among women incomparable fools! Fellow-travellers with Dr. Legh also, who would rob a baby of ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard

... their defeat. We are now taking our share in the guardianship of the world's great treasure house of historic memories and of the creations of genius. We have become, as it were, co-trustees of an incomparable, irreplaceable heritage of beauty. Italy has been the scene of many and terrible wars; but since she emerged from the Dark Ages I do not know that war has greatly damaged the glory of her cities. She has not, of recent centuries, had to mourn a Louvain or a Rheims. But if the Teuton, in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... on the absurdities of their religious ritual, he contrives to present such an outline of the prominent features of the Christian revelation, as might have convinced any candid and intelligent auditor of its incomparable superiority, as well to the doctrines of the philosophers, as to the fables of heathenism. In the very commencement of his observations he displays no little address. "Ye men of Athens," said he, "I perceive that, in every point of view, ye are carrying your religious ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... But against etched, lithographed, phototyped and otherwise-processed copies, these of Messrs. Bonner and John Byfield have one incontestable advantage: they are honest attempts to repeat by the same method,—that is, in wood,—the original and incomparable woodcuts of Hans Lutzelburger. ...
— The Dance of Death • Hans Holbein

... never be empty, with all that might thereby be given to others or kept for oneself: and then I thought of Sandy Tom—of his large, round, soft head; his fine eyes (they were yellow, not blue, and glared with infinite tenderness); his melodious purr; his expressive whiskers; his incomparable tail. ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... "Besides, what else should I do? If I name myself, the very people we are seeking to catch—who, you may be sure, will be the first to read this advertisement—will know that I, the great, the incomparable Hanaud, am after them; and I do not want them to know that. Besides"—and he spoke now in a gentle and most serious voice—"why should we make life more difficult for Mlle. Celie by telling the world that the police want her? It will ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... impregnable fortress and tower, so go thou not out [so says Wisdom], but bind thyself and ally thyself here as a disciple, to hold out to the end, then thou wilt be learned in the lofty spiritual art of the everlasting mystery, and be instructed how this incomparable composition or medicine of the healing elixir and balsam of life is prepared. Above all thou must enter a bond of silence and vow to reveal it to no one outside of your fellow learners, who are called ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... dead; let her not, when her lord is deceased, even pronounce the name of another man; let her continue till death, forgiving all injuries, performing harsh duties, avoiding every sensual pleasure, and cheerfully practising the incomparable rules of virtue.... The soul itself is its own witness, the soul itself is its own refuge; offend not thy conscious soul, the supreme internal witness of man, ... O friend to virtue, the Supreme Spirit, which is the same as thyself, resides in thy bosom perpetually, and is an all-knowing inspector ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... compare the others save Mary Byrne, as slightly suggestive of Villon's old woman. Mary Doul, blind Martin's blind wife, has a general likeness to some old witch out of a fairy tale, but she is far from being a witch; and Widow Quinn the incomparable might be compared, were she not too high-hearted, to the hag of "The Lout and ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... crowning star of Herrick. Shakespeare's last song, the exquisite and magnificent overture to "The Two Noble Kinsmen," is hardly so limpid in its flow, so liquid in its melody, as the two great songs in "Valentinian": but Herrick, our last poet of that incomparable age or generation, has matched them again and again. As a creative and inventive singer, he surpasses all his rivals in quantity of good work; in quality of spontaneous instinct and melodious inspiration he reminds ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... pas, incomparable Armand, Si j’ai mal contenté vos yeux et vos oreilles; Mon esprit agité de frayeurs sans pareilles Interdit à mon corps et voix et mouvement. Mais pour me rendre ici capable de vous plaire, Rappelez de ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch

... enthusiasm with comfort. He had, moreover, all our native mistrust for intellectual discretion, and our native relish for sonorous superlatives. As a critic he was very much more generous than just, and his mildest terms of approbation were "stupendous," "transcendent," and "incomparable." The small change of admiration seemed to him no coin for a gentleman to handle; and yet, frank as he was intellectually, he was personally altogether a mystery. His professions, somehow, were all half- professions, and his allusions to his work and circumstances ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James

... English Suffragists, aroused tremendous enthusiasm from one end of the country to the other. Never, until these women appeared, telling, with rare eloquence, their stories of struggle, of arrest and imprisonment, had the vote appeared such an incomparable treasure. Never before, except among a few enthusiasts, had there existed any feeling that the suffrage was a thing to fight for, suffer ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... what would, you call a tall, dry creature, growling and snarling, with hands and feet like a man, a face like a nut-cracker, and a nose—great heavens, what a nose!—as long as this knife, and red as a brick! But to be just, I must admit that this incomparable creature has yellow ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue

... leading feeling in his bosom—constitutes the principal element in their grandeur. It is curious, by the way, how few good descriptions there exist in poetry of views from mountains. Milton has, indeed, some incomparable ones, but all imaginary—such, at least, as no actual mountain on earth can command; but, in other poets, we at this moment remember no good one. They seem always looking up to, not down from, mountains. Wordsworth has given us, for example, no description of the view from Skiddaw; ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... audible, the "soul written in sound." All that I can faintly indicate is the way it affects me, this music with the petals of a glowing rose and the heart of gray ashes. Its analogies to Poe, Verlaine, Shelley, Keats, Heine and Mickiewicz are but critical sign-posts, for Chopin is incomparable, Chopin is unique. "Our interval," writes Walter Pater, "is brief." Few pass it recollectedly and with full understanding of its larger rhythms and more urgent colors. Many endure it in frivol ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... gives a deeper attention to the book, while Parker drives and gets wet. Getting wet is one of Parker's duties. And through rain and sunshine he moves on ever, through the peaceful and never dull—the incomparable beauty of an English pastoral land. The journey is accomplished without fatigue, without anxiety; for the end of it can only be the quiet corner of a moor, or some sleepy meadow. Speed is of no account—distance immaterial. ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman

... at Katherine, and smiled. "Yes, Miss Liddell ought to taste the incomparable delights of the season by all means. ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... situation. There may be too many episodic personages—Dietrich of Bern, for instance, has extremely little to do in this galley. But the strength, thoroughness, and in its own savage way charm of Kriemhild's character, and the incomparable series of battles between the Burgundian princes and Etzel's men in the later cantos—cantos which contain the very best poetical fighting in the history of the world—far more than redeem this. The Nibelungenlied is a very great poem; and with Beowulf (the oldest, but the least ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... the presence of and contact with others. Excess vitality may go into shouting or song,[1] but language as an instrument of specific utterance comes to have a more definite use and provocation. Man, as already pointed out, is a highly gregarious animal, and language is his incomparable instrument for sharing his emotions and ideas and experience with others. The whole process of education, of the transmission of culture from the mature to the younger members of a society, is ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... for many of the fixed ideas about Spain which it seems quite impossible to remove. Much that may have been true in the long ago, when he wrote his incomparable Guide Book, has now passed away with the all-conquering years; but still all that he ever said is repeated in each new book with unfailing certainty. Much as he really loved Spain, it must be confessed that he now and ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... LIFE OF THE UNIVERSITY.—Nearly four years had passed, when the Professor of music started out with a band of colored youth, who had been named the Jubilee Singers. That they could sing with incomparable sweetness he knew. That the songs they were to sing had incomparable pathos no one who heard them doubted. But nothing short of sublimest faith could have sent forth this band of friendless youth on their mission. They often were penniless as they went from town to town. ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various

... shepherds and shepherdesses, and other fancies of the time of Madame de Sevigne. Those little shepherds were supposed to have looked down upon la mere beaute, and upon la plus jolie fille de France as she danced her incomparable minuets. Those grand saloons were now devoted to the humble service of a school for young ladies. But on the third floor, to which one ascended by a fine stone stairway, broad and easy, with elaborate iron railings, there was a more simple set of rooms, comfortably furnished, where the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... This incomparable description of the New Jerusalem, read in a finely modulated voice, had a marked effect upon the audience, though the reader was conscious of the presence of but three, Rosa, grandpa, ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright

... slender Mandarin mustaches, and who expressed profound astonishment and equally profound satisfaction upon noting that I too had been enjoying the pleasures of cheese. Not once, but several times, this Excalibur appearance startled B. and me: in fact the extreme modesty and incomparable shyness of The Zulu found only in this procedure a satisfactory method of bestowing presents upon his two friends ... I would I could see that long hand once more, the sensitive fingers poised upon a half-camembert; the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... is incomparable master of the rare art of brief reply, wherein he presents pleasing contrast to the manner of his old master, GLADSTONE. Had he chanced to be Premier when the Fourth Party were struggling into notoriety their task would have been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various

... indeed possess that incomparable manuscript of the 'Golden Legend' which could not escape your keen observation. All-important reasons, however, forbid me, imperiously, tyrannically, to let the manuscript go out of my possession for a single day, for even a single ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... The distant branches of the trees were delicately etched against its glowing surface, and seemed to cling to it like tendrils, slipping further and further down as the sun leisurely disentangled itself, and at last stood in its incomparable grandeur full above ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr

... Qualifications) to help me to something that was near him; but he excused himself, and blushing told me, Of all things he could never carve in his Life; though it can be proved upon him, that he cuts up, disjoints, and uncases with incomparable Dexterity. I would not be understood as if I thought it laudable for a Man of Quality and Fortune to rival the Aquisitions of Artificers, and endeavour to excel in little handy Qualities; No, I argue only against being ashamed at what is really Praiseworthy. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... artists Tidemann and Achenbach. The Religious Service of the Haugians, by the first, is said by one critic to overwhelm the spectator by its spirit of earnest piety, before it allows him to admire the incomparable art of its execution. The members of the sect are represented as assembled in a simple room, which is lighted from above. The light is modified by the dust which is caused by the crowd. Simple grandeur, adds the writer, makes this picture one of the most remarkable productions ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... amanuenses or penmen of the Holy Ghost for the Scriptures were not contemptible or ordinary, but incomparable and extraordinary persons. As Moses, "the meekest man on earth," the peculiar favorite of God, with whom God "talked face to face;" the None-such of all the prophets in Israel. Samuel, the mighty man in prayer. David the King, "that man after God's own heart." King Solomon, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... cultivation of the ludicrous. I believe Charles Lamb could have told a like, and as true, but sadder story. He started on life with all the endowments of a great, ample, and serious nature, and he ended in being little else than the incomparable joker and humorist, and was in the true sense, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... exquisitely slender and delicate as that of a child of twelve years, by a girdle with floating tags. Her neck, delicately slender and flexible as a bird's, was uncovered, as were also her shoulders and arms, and all were of incomparable beauty. Despite the vulgarity of the comparison, the purest ivory alone can give an idea of the dazzling whiteness of her polished satin skin, of a texture so fresh and so firm, that some drops of water, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... for his blood, and repeatedly tried to shed it. Had he not been a man of imperturbable temper, dauntless courage and consummate skill in fence, his life would have been a short one. But neither anger nor danger ever deprived him of his presence of mind; he was an incomparable swordsman; and he had a peculiar way of disarming opponents which moved the envy of all the duellists of his time. His friends said that he had never given a challenge, that he had never refused one, that he had never taken a life, and yet that he had never fought without having his antagonist's ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... to the decision of your own incomparable judgment, sir," replied Elliot, bowing, with a sneer just visible on ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton

... the crests of the Maritime Alps and the intermediate ranges broken into fantastic forms, the lovely range of red porphyry Esterel to the south, with the intensely blue sea drawing a thread of silver about its base, together made a picture of incomparable loveliness. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... Amiability," saith he, "had I but thee in the Court, as is the only place meet for thee, then shouldst thou see how admired of every creature were thy wondrous wit and most incomparable beauties. Why, I dare be sworn on all the books in Cumberland, thou shouldest be of the Queen's Majesty's maids in one week's time. And of the delights and jollities of that life, dwelling here in a corner of England, thou canst not so much as cast ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... "This great (incomparable) endowment was made by the king for the monks. It is to be perpetuated by the (later) kings of the Sailendra dynasty, for the benefit of the successive reverend congregations of monks, and be respected ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid

... Hollander would not remove into the pleasant plains of Italy, the rude Thracian would not change his boggy soil for the best seat in Athens, nor the brutish Scythian quit his thorny deserts to become an inhabitant of the Fortunate Islands. And oh the incomparable contrivance of nature, who has ordered all things in so even a method that wherever she has been less bountiful in her gifts, there she makes it up with a larger dose of self-love, which supplies the former defects, and makes all even. To enlarge farther, I may well presume ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus

... nine times out of ten, who is queen of the entertainment. You have to reckon with her upon her throne of degrees, set up there like Hippolita, Duchess of Athens, to be propitiated and, if possible, diverted. For her sake, not for ours, her incomparable mother beckons from the wings character after character, and gives each his cue, having set the scene with her exquisite art. In a few cases her anxiety to please spoils the effects. As we should say, she "laboured" the Cardinal de Retz. ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... by the beauty of the stout, black-haired, red-cheeked Bohemian girls, and hopes that enough of them will emigrate to the United States to improve the fading pulchritude of our own houris. But most of all, he has praises for the Bohemian cuisine, with its incomparable apple tarts, and its dumplings of cream cheese, and for the magnificent, the overpowering, the ineffable Pilsner of Prague. This Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover. In the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... the results of the C set confirm the conclusions already reached, we must compare the conditions of the three sets to see whether the changes in the conditions in the C set have rendered it incomparable with the other two. The first change was the substitution of dissyllabic words in the verb and the movement series in the place of monosyllabic words. Since the change was made in both the verb and the movement series their comparability ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... us, however, two small but incomparable odes and a few scintillating fragments have survived, quoted and handed down in the eulogies of critics and expositors. In these the wisest minds, the greatest poets, and the most inspired teachers of modern days have found justification for the unanimous verdict of antiquity. The tributes of ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman

... midnight. The sun just dipped below the southern horizon. The scene was incomparable. The northern sky was gloriously rosy and reflected in the calm sea between the ice, which varied from burnished copper to salmon pink; bergs and pack to the north had a pale greenish hue with deep purple shadows, the sky shaded to saffron ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... means of the red glare from the glowing grate that she deciphered the print. Finally the lamp was brought in, and shed a mellow radiance over the dusky apartment. The volume was finished and dropped upon her lap. The spell of this incomparable sorcerer was upon her imagination; the sluggish, lurid tarn of Usher; the pale, gigantic water lilies, nodding their ghastly, everlasting heads over the dreary Zaire; the shrouding shadow of Helusion; the ashen skies, and sere, crisped leaves in the ghoul-haunted ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... is Duse herself who lives there, on the stage. But Sarah Bernhardt is always the actress as well as the part; when she is at her best, she is both equally, and our consciousness of the one does not disturb our possession by the other. When she is not at her best, we see only the actress, the incomparable craftswoman openly ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... the government at home. By this time the repeated victories of Wellington and his colleagues had raised the renown of British soldiers to at least an equality with that of Napoleon's veterans, and the incomparable efficiency, in particular, of the Light Division was acknowledged to be without a parallel in any European service. But in those departments of the army where excellence is less the result of intuitive ability, the forces under Wellington were still greatly surpassed by the trained ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... "this is the present state of affairs. I never pass a day without going to gaze on this incomparable beauty, and I am sure that if you would only accompany me you would think the sight well worth the trouble, and own that you ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.

... of Patterne; she could not have entertained becomingly; he must have seen that the girl was not the match for him in station, and off he went to conquer the remainder of a troublesome first attachment, no longer extremely disturbing, to judge from the tenour of his letters; really incomparable letters! Lady Busshe and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson enjoyed a perusal of them. Sir Willoughby appeared as a splendid young representative island lord in these letters to his family, despatched from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of Public Instruction, Helena, Mont.: "I have been a constant and eager reader of THE GREAT ROUND WORLD since my accession to this office, the first of this year. I regard it as unique, and of almost incomparable value, and I should be pleased to aid in its general use in all the schools of our State. You are authorized to use this letter and to quote me as strongly in ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 10, March 10, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... from you than from the Commander-in-Chief of the armies of the United States, you incomparable little soldier!—and I don't need to take any oath to that, for you ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain

... imitation of all the lovers of freedom throughout the world. How solemn, therefore, is the duty, how impressive the call upon us and upon all parts of our country, to cultivate a patriotic spirit of harmony, of good-fellowship, of compromise and mutual concession, in the administration of the incomparable system of government formed by our fathers in the midst of almost insuperable difficulties, and transmitted to us with the injunction that we should enjoy its blessings and hand it down unimpaired to those who ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk

... he is an idiot about women. Her complexions indeed! I could make as good a complexion for myself (we old women are painters too, in our way, Blyth). Don't tell me about her complexion—it's her eyes! her incomparable blue eyes, which would have driven the young men of my time mad—mad, I give you my word of honor! Not a gentleman, sir, in my youthful days—and they were gentlemen then—but would have been too happy to run away with her for her eyes alone; and what's more, to have shot any man who said as ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... to his worthiness the heir, or even to Sarah," said Herhor, smiling. "We must know everything. This secret, however, was not difficult to get at. With Sarah is her relative Tafet, an incomparable gossip." ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... when it was the resort only of a few of the best families of Philadelphia has departed from it—I fear forever! But, thank Heaven, its climatic characteristics remain intact. When you are older, Dorothy, and your liver asserts itself, you will appreciate this incomparable ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier

... you, nor to seem to undervalue the honour which you have done me, but the thing you desire may not be. Regardless of the foolish belief of the peoples of the outer world, or of Holy Thern, or ebon First Born, I am not dead. While I live my heart beats for but one woman—the incomparable Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium. When death overtakes me my heart shall have ceased to beat; but what comes after that I know not. And in that I am as wise as Matai Shang, Master of Life and Death upon Barsoom; or Issus, Goddess of ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... who afterwards became Lieutenant-General Gore, alludes to him in the following terms: "This incomparable officer was deservedly esteemed by the Duke of Wellington, who honoured him with his particular ...
— A Week at Waterloo in 1815 • Magdalene De Lancey

... Persona, Seignior, but by Speculation, I have, and made most considerable Remarks on that incomparable Terra Firma, of which I have the compleatest Map in Christendom—and which Gonzales himself omitted in his ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... ascendancy, and an impetus to more rational, consistent, and practical methods of colonization, in which great Companies and great fleets participated—fleets that prepared the way for the establishment and development of our incomparable Navy, the mighty bulwark of our Empire. The turning-point at the close of the sixteenth century is thus indicated by Mr Rogers: "Large creative ideals, the usual delusions about Cathay, gold, and silver, and a desire to ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead

... thereby becomes, for all his carelessness, one of the supremely great writers. There, again, is Brantome, not a supremely great writer, or even a writer who set out to be great. But he has in him the roots of great style. He possesses in an incomparable degree this High Familiarity. His voice is so exquisitely pitched that he can describe with equal simplicity and charm the secrets of monarchs' hearts or the intimate peculiarities of maids of honour. He knows that, as a fine critic has said, everything is serious and at the same time frivolous. ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... hurried lunch; nevertheless my aunt had time to read what the papers had to say about the future museum. It is strange how sensitive women are to public applause for their nearest mankind. My aunt fairly beamed at me through her spectacles, and was incomparable when she now and then, interrupting the reading, glanced keenly at Aniela, and then said ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of Scotland are incomparable in themselves—or I am only the more Scottish to suppose so—and their sound and colour dwell for ever in the memory. How often and willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... lifted me; How, seeming lone upon the gaunt, lone shore, I'll trust thee near, When thou'rt, to knowledge of my heart, no more Than a dream's heed Of lost joy track'd in scent of the sea-weed! Leave me to pluck the incomparable flower Of frailty lion-like fighting in thy name and power; To make thee laugh, in thy safe heaven, to see With what grip fell I'll cling to hope when life draws hard to hell, Yea, cleave to thee when me thou seem'st to slay, Haply, at close of some most cruel ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore

... which in its might controls victory in war, and in its frequency, plenteous crops at home, lies the secret of the serpent symbol. As the "war physic" among the tribes of the United States was a fragment of a serpent, and as thus signifying his incomparable skill in war, the Iroquois represent their mythical king Atatarho clothed in nothing but black snakes; so that when he wished to don a new suit he simply drove away one set and ordered another to take their places,[118-1] so, by a precisely similar mental process, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... would have been perfectly safe. I have purposely left the few grammatical errors it contains, as the smallest alteration of this gem would appear to me in the light of a treason against the character of this incomparable woman. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... really a good brother, sacrificing much to his orphan sisters, and living a moral and religious life—such as gained for him much credit, and made Mrs. Ledwich congratulate Averil on the great excellence and kindness of her incomparable brother. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... The salon has disappeared,—'Iran, indeed, is gone, and all his rose'; but she was born with the trick of it. You make your bow to her in her Sheraton chair, a buckle shoe engagingly discovered; and she rallies you with an incomparable ease, a delicate malice, in a dialect itself a distinction; and when she smiles it is behind or above a fan that points while it dissembles, that assists effect as delightfully as it veils intention. At times she is sensitive and tender, but her graver mood has no more of violence or ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley



Words linked to "Incomparable" :   incommensurable, unequalled, best, one and only, one, extraordinary, unrivaled, unmatchable, unrivalled, comparable, alone, nonpareil, unequaled, unique, peerless, all-time, unmatched, unparalleled, matchless



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