"Homely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... John Lubbock's list would be to prescribe an exclusive diet of richly seasoned dishes and rare wines to a convalescent patient—to feed him on strong meats, on cavaire and truffles, and to omit the simple, wholesome, homely fare on which, in his condition, health and efficient progress must in ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... yellow carcass, one of them, apparently, blotting out an eye. His ears were in tatters, for Monday was never successful in affairs of honour. But he possessed one talisman. He knew that not all dogs could be handsome or eloquent or victorious, but that every dog could love. Inside his homely hide beat the most affectionate, loyal, faithful heart of any dog since dogs were; and something looked out of his brown eyes that was nearer akin to a soul than any theologian would allow. Everybody at Ingleside was fond of him, even Susan, although his one ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a homely little bit of tin and bone; I'm beloved by the Legion of the Lost; I haven't got a "vox humana" tone, And a dime or two will satisfy my cost. I don't attempt your high-falutin' flights; I am more or less uncertain on the key; But I tell you, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... handed on its errors as faithfully as its perfections. But, such as it is, it is a fine specimen of fourteenth-century English. He translated not for scholars or for nobles, but for the plain people, and his style was such as suited those for whom he wrote—plain, vigorous, homely, and yet with all its homeliness full of a solemn grace and dignity, which made men feel that they were reading no ordinary book. He uses many striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Epistemon; Heraclitus, the grand Scotist and tenebrous darksome philosopher, was nothing astonished at his introit into such a coarse and paltry habitation; for he did usually show forth unto his sectators and disciples that the gods made as cheerfully their residence in these mean homely mansions as in sumptuous magnific palaces, replenished with all manner of delight, pomp, and pleasure. I withal do really believe that the dwelling-place of the so famous and renowned Hecate was just such another petty cell ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... of the Winthrop School, describes Starr King as he was when the father's death cut off his schooldays: "Slight of build, golden-haired, active, agile, with a homely face which everybody thought was handsome on account of the beaming eyes, the winning smile and the earnest desire of always wanting to do what was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the Emperor—so no doubt the Basilica Church of St. George on the Hrad[vs]any and its congregation did all honour to the crowning of Bohemia's first King. It is also interesting to note that Vratislav had "contributed to the party funds"; he had lent money to the Emperor. This should strike a homely, familiar ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... neither, now I think of it:—Thou art so homely, and so awkward a creature! Hast such a boatswain-like air!—People would think she had picked thee up in Wapping, or Rotherhithe; or in going to see some new ship launched, or to view the docks at Chatham, or ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... his marauders had carried off from Cheshire or Shropshire to toil and slave in the Welshery, walking together after the labours of the day were done, and bemoaning their misfortunes in their own homely English. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... girl. He had dreamed of her in that week of black night. He wondered if he had also talked of her. He had lain at death's door—Rosendo had said so—but he had had no physician. Perhaps these simple folk brewed their own homely remedies—he wondered what they had employed in his case. Above the welter of his thoughts ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Against the archaically homely background the beauty of the young girl appeared in most striking contrast. Her curls peeped out from under the white Dutch cap she wore. Her eyes sparkled with indignant protest, her face was piquant and was just then flushed, and her nose had the least bit of a natural ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... died in a colic. No less homely image expresses the contractions and contortions of the houses reaching out the appeal of their desperate chimney-pots and agonized girders. There is one view along the exterior of the town like nothing else on the ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... Consuello was standing by the open casement window, looking out into the night, her fingers touching the petals of the geraniums on the sill, in the same position in which she had stood when she had recited to him the little verse with its simple, homely philosophy. ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... of his delirium and his deathlike unconsciousness George Lester struggled slowly back to life. His reawakening was like a new birth. He seemed born again, this time an American—a Western American. In the measure of a good old homely phrase, some sense (a sense of the fundamental oneness of humanity) had been beaten into ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... derived from a picture in the dining-parlour, stiff and stately, in a huge full-bottomed wig, with gown, cassock, and bands, and his hand upon a copy of the only sermon he ever published—it was strange to read these letters. They were full of eager, passionate ardour; short homely sentences, right fresh from the heart (very different from the grand Latinised, Johnsonian style of the printed sermon preached before some judge at assize time). His letters were a curious contrast to those of his girl-bride. She was evidently rather ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... with a pointed nose, a long, shaved upper lip, and a tuft on the end of his chin. This was a face peculiarly unadapted to sculpture; but as a piece of modeling it was the best, and it was admirable. It reminded Rowland in its homely veracity, its artless artfulness, of the works of the early Italian Renaissance. On the pedestal was cut the name—Barnaby Striker, Esq. Rowland remembered that this was the appellation of the legal luminary from whom his companion had undertaken to borrow a reflected ray, and although in the ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... flowing army of the propaganda did not always engage him on the tragic note. One day a large fleshy man, of a stern but homely countenance and a solemn and dignified carriage, immaculate dress—"swallow-tailed coat, ruffled shirt of faultless fabric, white cravat and orange-colored gloves"—entered with the throng. Looking at him Lincoln was somewhat appalled. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Continental war, though now, by a curious perversion of terms, the easy domestic title distinguishes in England a formally-prepared and elaborately-collected assembly, in which everything and every person are careful to be as little 'homely' as possible. In France, on the contrary, 'tis on these occasions, and in this manner, that society carries on that degree and kind of intercourse which in England we attempt awkwardly to maintain by the medium of that unpopular species ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... there's nothing like picking out a good-looking wife, because even the handsomest woman looks homely sometimes, and so you get a little variety; but a homely one can only look worse than usual. Beauty is only skin deep, but that's deep enough to satisfy any reasonable man. (I want to say right here that to get any sense out of a proverb I usually find that I have to turn ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... as much of the world as I have, my dear, you would take little stock in the innocence of beautiful women; very homely women ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... opposite of Try, our guide said. He was always up to some sort of mischief, and his greatest delight was to get other people into trouble. The country people had long wished to be rid of him but he had a long lease of his house and he meant to stay there. He was a homely little elf, with bright red hair, a slight squint in one eye and a wart on his nose. If a lesson had not been prepared, this fellow, who was called "I Forgot," was sure to be on hand in time to whisper into the ear of the culprit, "Say 'I ...
— Silver Links • Various
... had just set and there was no colour in the west, but over all the homely, wind-swept landscape a solemn and unearthly light shone and slowly passed, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... looked about him at the homely kitchen, with its brown crockery set away neatly on the shelves. "If I stay with you," he said, "I should like to work in the fields, and help with the ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... lifelong possession, a sense of her natural charms: but no matter what their college may have been, no matter how little illustrious, historically or architecturally, it is round the college life, the rooms, the friendships, the homely details, that their loving memory hangs. It is there that first they knew what independence meant: there that the chairs and table were their very own: there that they could come and go almost as they liked: there that they first knew the delight of ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... therefore have been decided, a priori, that the most homely proverbs would abound in the most ancient writers—and such we find in Hesiod; a poet whose learning was not drawn from books. It could only have been in the agricultural state that this venerable bard could have indicated a state of repose by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... their rations. The object of the Pasha in the erection of this fortress, was to connect militarily The Mountains with the large and important oasis of Sockna. A few gardens have been laid out, several wells dug, and these, with the homely hovels, the very picture of "the day of small things," are still infinitely preferable to the naked desolation of Sahara. On proceeding upwards, water is here taken in for three or four days. The water is very good, although it has a fetid ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... snow-shoeing enough for one day, and the rest of the party discovered, when they took the shoes off, that their insteps ached more than they had ever before done. Still they were all ready to try again the next day. Mrs Norman proved to be exactly the sort of person her husband had described her; though homely, she was entirely free from vulgarity, and as she had lived all her life in Canada, she possessed and was glad to impart a large amount of information most valuable to Mrs Ashton and Sophy. She promised to remain a week with them, to give them instruction in numerous departments of domestic ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... of the post-office system, which regulate its administration, are well set forth in the Report of the House Committee in 1844: "To content the man, dwelling more remote from town, with his homely lot, by giving him regular and frequent means of intercommunication; to assure the emigrant, who plants his new home on the skirts of the distant wilderness or prairie, that he is not forever severed from ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... inventive gifts of individuals who, in seeking to meet a special need, stumble on something universal, both forces have been constantly at work. Discipline and initiative have been the twin conquerors, and the ablest men in the Army, to use a homely phrase, have been out for both. Many a fresh, and valuable bit of training has been due to some individual officer struck with a new idea, and patiently working it out. The special "schools," which are now daily increasing the efficiency of the Army, if ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stenographer, needed a little trip. Ten days at Atlantic City with her mother would pull her up. She had been looking badly lately—worried about her mother, Weeks had told him. Pity she was so homely. It was pretty unfair the way women had to work at both ends of the line. Weeks, too, could get his wife that fur coat he'd been wanting her to have for three years. What an honest old duck Weeks was!—and who would ever believe him as full of sentiment as a boy of twenty? He had overheard ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... soul did not profit by them. The precepts —and for these the Christian sought—in the poems were like serpents, born of the evil one; the characters, devils. Some Christians sighed as they thrust the tempting books away. Jerome frankly confesses he cared little for the homely Latin of the Psalms, and much for Plautus and Cicero. For a time he renounced them with other vanities of the world; yet when going through the catacombs at Rome, where the Apostles and Martyrs had their graves, ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... nothing in the aspect of the room itself to surprise him. It was homely and neat. The table was spread with a clean white cloth, on which the breakfast equipage was displayed with a degree of care and precision that betrayed the master-hand of Hobbs; but on the edge of the table sat a large black cat, calmly ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... hail Country-Squire, my Mother a witty Beauty of no Fortune: The Match was made by Consent of my Mothers Parents against her own: and I am the Child of a Rape on the Wedding-Night; so that I am as healthy and as homely as my Father, but as sprightly and agreeable as my Mother. It would be of great Ease to you if you would use me under you, that Matches might be better regulated for the future, and we might have no more Children of Squabbles. I shall not reveal all my Pretensions ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what he could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw it. In fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and daughter. Louisa May seldom misses a chance to bring out the moral of a homely virtue. The power of repetition was to them a natural means of illustration. It is said that the elder Alcott, while teaching school, would frequently whip himself when the scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher-God-was pained when his children of the earth ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing her hair before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat being so short that she stood on a pair of thick ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... generally Cut in the forehead above their eyes and Small ornimented plats in front of each Sholder the remainder of the hair is either twisted in with horse or buffalow hair divided into two plats over the Sholder or what is most common flow's back, Their women are homely, corse feetured wide mouthes they ware Simpially a leathe habit made in a plain form of two pieces of equal length and equal weadth, which is sewen together with Sinues from the tail to about half way from the hip ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... sensations than a series of events, the reader must bear in mind that these sensations are, in early youth, real events, the parents of actions, and the directors of destiny. The circle in which, in boyhood, one may be compelled to move, may be esteemed low; the accidents all round him may be homely, the persons with whom he may be obliged to come in contact may be mean in apparel, and sordid in nature; but his mind, if it remain to him pure as he received it from his Maker, is an unsullied gem of inestimable price, too seldom found, and too little appreciated when found, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... pursuits, and on the distaste of the mind to other engagements. If the affections of the heart be awake, and the passions of love, admiration, or anger, be kindled, the costly furniture of the palace, as well as the homely accommodations of the cottage, are neglected: and men, when roused, reject their repose; or, when fatigued, embrace it alike on the silken bed, or on the ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... story—a few years of gay life in the great city, then cruelty too great for endurance, tears, shut white lips, a firm resolve—and back to the old farm where homely, loyal hearts await, and outstretched arms welcome the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... to them as he would have spoken to his Sunday-school classes at home, earnestly and very simply, with none of the condescending blandness of the elder. Some of their homely phrases, their very accent, had crept unconsciously into his speech, a remnant of the impressionable days when he had lived for a while among mountain folk. Jacqueline realized that this unconscious adaptability was the secret of his hold on people, of their confiding trust in him. Whatever ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... Messrs. Henderson's and the New Zealand Shipping Co.'s, who seemed to turn up their splendid noses at the squat, dumpy, antiquated old serving-mallet that dared to mingle with so august a crowd. There had been a time, not so very far back, when I should have shared their apparent contempt for our homely old tub; but my voyage had taught me, among other things, that, as far as true comfort went at sea, not a "three-skysail-yarder" among them could compare with the CACHALOT. And I was extremely glad that my ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... heart has claim, because of poverty! Meetings with those I loved made impossible year after year; sadness, misunderstanding, nay, cruel alienation, arising from inability to do the things I wished, and which I might have done had a little money helped me; endless instances of homely pleasure and contentment curtailed or forbidden by narrow means. I have lost friends merely through the constraints of my position; friends I might have made have remained strangers to me; solitude of the bitter kind, the solitude which is enforced at times ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... pipe-smoker, and only rarely did he truly enjoy a cigar, however choice its pedigree. With a sigh of content he began to fill his briar. His mood was more restful, and covertly I watched him studying our host. The night remained very warm and one of the two windows of the dining room, which was the most homely apartment in Cray's Folly, was wide open, offering a prospect of sweeping velvet lawns touched by the magic ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... have done something like them.' It first appeared in Hone's Year Book for April 30, 1831, with the title 'The Meadows in Spring,' and the following letter to the Editor. 'These verses are in the old style; rather homely in expression; but I honestly profess to stick more to the simplicity of the old poets than the moderns, and to love the philosophical good humor of our old writers more than the sickly melancholy of the Byronian wits. If my verses be not good, they ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... not quite so bad as that, however. Farmer Eames turned in at the farmyard gate and led the two strangers into a good-sized kitchen, where the table was already set, in a homely fashion, for dinner. A stout, middle-aged woman, with a rather sharp face, turned from the fire, where she ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... living-room, with its big fireplace and homely things, when they came chattering out of the enchanted place. She was sitting by the window which gave her a view of the dim gray road where it came over the grassy swells from Meander and the world, knitting a ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... when the little lady who was a fairy grandmamma instead of a fairy godmother in the household told a certain story regarding this well! It was a story before the time of her own birth, when two of her older sisters were very tiny girls. One day, when the mother was busy in superintending some homely task (such as the manufacturing of the "cream cheese," perhaps, for which she was noted), the baby of two years toddled in and began to lisp over and over the same broken words, "Tatie in 'ell, Tatie in 'ell." She had repeated them many times, with increasing insistence, before ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... now and then; then, as the arch seemed to swallow them up, Eleanor was aware of an old man, lame and rugged, who bawled loud and seemed to be the highly displeased master; of calls for 'Barbe,' and then of an elderly, homely-looking woman, who would have assisted in taking Jean off the pony but that the knight was already in the act. However, he resigned her to her sister and Madame de Ste. Petronelle, while Barbe led the way, lamp in hand. It was just as well poor Jeanie remained unconscious ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Union Village were evidently men who did their work thoroughly; the dwellings and houses they built early in the century, all of brick, have a satisfactory solidity, and are not without the homely charm which good work and plain outlines give to any building. Two of these old houses in the Church Family are now used as the boys' and the girls' houses, and are uncommonly good specimens of early Western architecture. The whole village is a pattern of neatness, with flagged walks ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... the holding of fairs, the transfer of cattle, the driving of bargains in hide or ivory, or other goods necessary to traders. He has been described by a friend of his people "as, according to his own lights, a citizen pioneer, a rough, God-fearing, honest, homely, uneducated Philistine." ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... the rapids that a young man, clad in homely costume but with the appearance and bearing of a gentleman, was walking by the river's brink. By his side was a fair girl. He was speaking to her earnestly and gently, but she seemed to be turning an indifferent ear to ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... gown was mussed, had been mended obviously in several places, had not been in its best day becoming. But this was not all. Her hair looked stringy and dishevelled. She was delighted with herself. Except during an illness two years before never had she come so near to being downright homely. "Martha will die of shame," said she to herself. "And Mrs. Bertram will spend the evening explaining me to everybody." She did not definitely formulate the thought, "And I shall be the most talked about person of the evening"; but it was in her ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... nursery of foxes for that side of the Brake country. Gorse coverts make, no doubt, the charm of hunting, but gorse coverts will not hold foxes unless the woodlands be preserved. The fox is a travelling animal. Knowing well that "home-staying youths have ever homely wits," he goes out and sees the world. He is either born in the woodlands, or wanders thither in his early youth. If all foxes so wandering be doomed to death, if poison, and wires, and traps, and hostile ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... strain, and Ethel began to gather more distinct impressions of the Ward family. She saw that her present charge was warm and sound-hearted, and that the strength of his affections had been chiefly absorbed by the homely housewifely mother, comparatively little esteemed by the modernized brother and sister. Of the loss of his father he seemed to think less; it seemed, indeed, rather to reconcile him to that of his mother, by the grief it spared her; and it confirmed Ethel's notion, that Mr. Ward, a busy and dull ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... marries the local nobleman, and no doubt lives happily ever afterwards. Persons who are interested in the doings of the class JEAMES calls the "hupper suckles," will perhaps be a little disappointed, as, truth to tell, the narrative is rather homely. Many of the characters seem to have that exaggerated awe of rank which used to be characteristic of the tales in the London Journal. The book should, however, be welcome in the homes of some of the lower ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... homely red walls of Little Corton nestling among the elms brought to my mind a hundred memories of the past days, wherein Isabella's parents had ever accorded a welcome to myself—a muddy-booted boy then, with but an evil ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... SHAKESPEARE. In Shakespeare's day playwrights were producing various types of drama: the chronicle play, representing the glories of English history; the domestic drama, portraying homely scenes and common people; the court comedy (called also Lylian comedy, after the dramatist who developed it), abounding in wit and repartee for the delight of the upper classes; the melodrama, made up of sensational ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Bill, his big homely face leaning across a desk toward the viewer, talked in horrified tones of the "pest-sub" that had reputedly got stuck in the Suez ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... tracks—went first to the office to give warning to Nolan, then round to the compressor to instruct the little guard. Cawker poked a head from a window and looked anxiously toward the gaping mouth of the ravine. The darkness of night was already settling in its gloomy depths. The homely shed looked black and forbidding. Aloft on each side were precipitous slopes affording but slight foothold. Little likelihood was there of rioters sliding down to attack them, but, suppose they pried loose, or blasted out, some of those huge rocks up the mountain and sent ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... is true that when we come to know really great people we find that they are as much interested as any one else in the commonplaces of life. Indeed, the more intellectual people are, the more the homely things of life interest them. When Tennyson was once a passenger on a steamer crossing the English Channel, some people who had been assigned to seats opposite him in the dining saloon learned that their ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... not a product of homely little communities like Sequoia. And for that matter, neither is her wolf of an uncle. What did Miss Sumner have to say to ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... porker. These medals give us, as does the bust of Pietro Mellini, beauty of the portrait despite ugliness of the original. But there are two other medals, this time by Pisanello, and, as it seems to me, perhaps his masterpieces, which show the quite peculiar way in which this homely charm of portraiture amalgamates, so as to form a homogeneous and most seemingly simple whole, with the homely charm of certain kinds of pure and simple youthful types. One of these (the reverse of which fantastically represents the four elements, the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... this Princess Wilhelmina of Wurtemberg has until now been surrounded, especially that portion thereof which represents her as a lovely and interesting woman. The truth is that she is fearfully homely, both in face and figure, while her eccentricities are such that in America, for instance, she would be described as a "crank." Thus she distinguishes herself through her inordinate fondness for cats, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... kindly, gentle people, whose hands closed more readily round a pipe-stem than a sword-hilt—not out of want of valour, you understand, but because they are genial, open souls, who would rather be on good terms with all men. I did not know then that beneath that homely surface there lurks a devilry as fierce as, and far more persistent than, that of the ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... provide the German youth with that perfection of foreign accent for which the British tourist is in every land remarkable, but it has other advantages. The boy does not call his master "froggy," or "sausage," nor prepare for the French or English hour any exhibition of homely wit whatever. He just sits there, and for his own sake tries to learn that foreign tongue with as little trouble to everybody concerned as possible. When he has left school he can talk, not about penknives and gardeners ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... before. Here the girls began to shine into prominence, but there were very few good spellers, and they were presently reduced to two girls—Rosa Rogers, the beauty of the school, and Amanda Bounds, a stolid, homely girl with deep eyes and ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... made his entrance into the "great world" and he meant to hold his place in it as one "to the manor born." Its people should not find him lacking: he would wear their manner and speak their language—no gaucherie should betray him, no homely phrase escape his lips. ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... messless; now we crouch shivering in tents and talk lovingly of the good old times beneath our good old tin roof-tree, of the wonderful view of the mud we used to get from our window, and of the homely tune our shell-boxes used to perform as they jostled ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... good woman, best not make a pother." Poor Patience's homely garb and hard-worked looks shewed little of the yeoman class to which she belonged. "You've done your duty by the maid and here's the best I have to make ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... heart of it, hearing the flirtation, the theatrical chatter, the homely gossip about her, Norma knew that she was at home. Leslie, perhaps, might have loathed it had she been put down in the midst of it; to Aunt Annie it would always seem entirely beneath even contempt. But ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... authorities with each other and with himself, he may be forgiven for becoming thoroughly exhausted at last. He was growing "grey and grizzled" with perpetual perplexity. He had been fed with annoyance, as if—to use his own homely expression—"he had eaten it with a spoon." Having already loaded himself with a debt of six hundred thousand florins, which he had spent in the states' service, and having struggled manfully against the petty tortures of his situation, he cannot be severely ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ewers, shields and layers of silver and gold, which decorated his tables and sideboards, amazed the gaping crowd. He dined and supped in state every day, and the public were admitted to gaze upon his banquets as if he had been a monarch. It seemed, said those homely republicans, as if "a silver christening were going on every day ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... on Aunt Adelaide, reminiscently, "my little girl had blue eyes and golden hair,—they said she looked like me. She was very pretty. Her father was a plain-looking man. Good as gold, Henry was, but plain looking. Not to say homely,—but ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... clock, matches, pincushion, brush and combs, while below were stowed away other little things. A few nails on the wall held my dresses, but my trunk remained packed. A candle, tin wash basin, and bucket completed my room furnishings, simple and homely enough to satisfy the asceticism of a ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... to have promised,' he said to Squercum, sitting in the lawyer's office on a high-legged stool with a cigar in his mouth. He preferred Squercum to any other lawyer he had met because Squercum's room was untidy and homely, because there was nothing awful about it, and because he could sit in what position he pleased, and smoke ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Some homely work I was doing For the child of my love and care; Some stitches half-wearily setting In the endless need ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... domestic architecture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Amusing in their quaint and often rich and effective combinations, humanly interesting in proportion to the predominance of the Gothic element, association has grown up around these homely records of a mixed influence, until they have come to be regarded with affection, if not with ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... homely Mrs Twitter, "we won't be so hard on you here. I want you to assist me with my sewing and darning—of which I have a very great deal—and help to take ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in manners. But, thank God! even in those years I needed not the embellishments of novel accessories to conciliate my affections: plain human nature, in its humblest and most homely apparel, was enough for me, and I loved the child because she was my partner in wretchedness. If she is now living she is probably a mother, with children of her own; but, as I have said, I ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... docks, a third earns a few shillings weekly, as an errand boy, or office messenger; and the employment of the man himself, detains him at some distance from his home from morning till night. Sunday is the only day on which they could all meet together, and enjoy a homely meal in social comfort; and now they sit down to a cold and cheerless dinner: the pious guardians of the man's salvation having, in their regard for the welfare of his precious soul, shut up the bakers' shops. The fire blazes high in the kitchen ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... of his hands in hers. This sailor was a companion of her father's, one of the crew of the BRITANNIA. He had lived with Harry Grant, crossed the seas with him and shared his dangers. Mary could not keep her eyes off his face, rough and homely though it was, and ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... homely face is familiar to all. She has a truly tender and sympathetic expression there at all times. Her hair was once that of the fair one with golden locks, now it is of a rich brown colour—very neatly ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... would talk to him of themselves. He had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in the day coach, listening ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Ramanand was not much of a writer he gave his authority to the use of the vernacular: he did not, like Ramanuja, either employ or enjoin Sanskrit and the meagre details which we have of his circle lead us to imagine him surrounded by men of homely speech. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... foundations by the immediate presence of the supernatural,—palsied, as it were, with fear,—there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind opposes it with the homely and the familiar. The northern nations were too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of one made a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it has come about that in the sincerest terror of the north there is a touch of grotesque ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... was Eben Jackson, and the homely appellation was no way belied by his aspect. He never could have been handsome, and now fifteen years of rough-and-tumble life had left their stains and scars on his weather-beaten visage, whose only notable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... stay at Keeb stood out clear to me; a dreadful, a hideous pattern. I had done for myself, so far as THOSE people were concerned. And now that I had sampled THEM, what cared I for others? "Too low for a hawk, too high for a buzzard." That homely old saying seemed to sum me up. And suppose I COULD still take pleasure in the company of my own old upper-middle class, how would that class regard me now? Gossip percolates. Little by little, I was sure, the story of my Keeb fiasco would leak ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... that album, which I'm glad has amused you both, my dears, so well. Ah, children, children, there's nothing like having something to do. I'll tell you something one of the poets, Cowper I think, has written about this in his homely verse:— ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... jewel which no Indian mine can buy, No chemic art can counterfeit; It makes men rich in greatest poverty, Makes water wine, turns wooden cups to gold, The homely whistle to sweet music's strain; Seldom it comes, to few from heaven sent, That much in little, all ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... her common or beneath him! She towered up in his thought like the pines of her native mountains, as fresh and natural and wild as they. He would not have her different. She was far above him. Faith, and church, and simple homely virtues, and all that is holy, were linked in Job's mind with the memory of artless, honest, great-hearted Jane that came back to him in the ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... time, when the world was very new, the Blindworm was not quite blind, but had one good eye. Moreover, in those days the Nightingale also had but one eye. As for the Blindworm, it mattered very little; for he was a homely creature, content to crawl about in the dark underground, or under wood and leaves, where nobody saw him and nobody cared. But the Nightingale's case was really quite too pitiful! Fancy the sweetest singer among all the birds, the favorite chorister, ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... politics they are equally wise. But at the outset of an agricultural colony this postulate is as near the truth as politics want. There are in such communities no large properties, no great capitals, no refined classes—every one is comfortable and homely, and no one is at all more. Equality is not artificially established in a new colony; it establishes itself. There is a story that among the first settlers in Western Australia, some, who were rich, took out labourers at their own expense, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... sympathy, his eager freshness of view, his purity of motive, his perfect simplicity; and it is all this which I have attempted to depict, rather than to trace his theories, or to present a philosophy which was always concrete rather than abstract, and passionate rather than deliberate. To use a homely proverb, Father Payne was a man ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ragged pupils; many a wavering line Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled, Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon, To jest at famine.... Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled; Die, if the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... the boy was sent to be educated at the court of Sten Sture, then the administrator and virtual king of Sweden. Here he was not spoiled by indulgence, his mode of life and his food were alike simple and homely, and he grew up with a cheerful spirit and a strong body, his chief pleasure being that of hunting among the rocks and forests with his companions, all of whom grew ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... personal asset a girl can have is "nice manners;" they will contribute more to her lasting popularity than beauty or wealth. Girls sometimes wonder how it happens that a girl they have regarded as "too homely" to be accounted dangerous, still carries off the matrimonial prize of "her set." Ten chances to one it is because she has that charm of manner that makes a man overlook her physical deficiencies. Her manners, in such case, are the spontaneous expression of a kind and generous ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... supplying memoranda, occasionally arising to make remarks or explanations in a purely conversational tone. But so earnest and impressive was his manner, so ably did he answer every argument and reply to every objection, that he thoroughly convinced a tall, angular, homely man by the name of Patrick Henry of the righteousness of his cause. Patrick Henry was pretty thoroughly convinced before, but the recital of Boston's case fired the Virginian, and he made the first and only real speech of the Congress. ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... they worked later or earlier than the other sorting-clerks; but there was supposed to be something special in foreign letters, which required that the men who handled them should have minds undistracted by the outer world. Their salaries, too, were higher than those of their more homely brethren; and they paid nothing for their lodgings. Consequently there was a somewhat fast set in those apartments, given to cards and to tobacco, who drank spirits and water in preference to tea. I was not one of them, but was ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... of his own rank were pleasant to him, their mothers cordial, and no difficulty was ever put in the way of his enjoying their society. But he was not very susceptible. Deep in his heart, in some dim, unacknowledged corner, there lay a humble, homely desire that he might feel a great deal more strongly than he had felt yet, when the time and ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... to the fireplace their homely charm. Fire-dogs appear in the earliest inventories under many names of various spelling, and were of many metals—copper, steel, iron, and brass. Sometimes a fireplace had three sets of andirons of different sizes, to hold logs at different heights. Cob irons had ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Herein they are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her "Dutch painter's" portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately skilful reproduction of its homely wit and harmless absurdity. Happily neither these writers, nor the purveyors of mere sensation who cannot get on without crime and mystery, exhaust the list of our romancers, many of whom are altogether healthful, cheerful, and helpful; and it is no unreasonable hope that these may increase and ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... neighbourhood of the city pitched on different sitios, all or any of which might have answered the purpose. There is a charm in Defoe's works that one hardly finds, excepting in the Pilgrim's Progress. The language is so homely, that one is not aware of the poetical cast of the thoughts; and both together form such a reality, that the parable and the romance alike remain fixed on the mind like truth. And what is truth? Surely not the mere outward acts of vulgar life; but rather the moral and intellectual ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... drooping lilac-bush a few feet away from the open casement was mingled with the fainter odour of jessamine and homely stocks. In the soft morning sunshine the terrors of last night seemed a thing far removed from us. We sat at breakfast in our little sitting-room, and as though by common though unspoken consent we treated the whole affair as a gigantic joke. We ignored its darker aspect. We spoke of it as an "opera-bouffe" ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... snout and a stern ugly as a battle-ship's, and the Lord knows there was overhang and to spare to tail her out decent. Cut out the yellow and the red and the whole lot of gold decorations and she's as homely ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... country? There was the golden one whose showy speciousness might have tempted a vain man; the silver of compromise, which might have decided the choice of a merely acute one; and the leaden,—dull and homely looking, as prudence always is,—yet with something about it sure to attract the eye of practical wisdom. Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision perhaps longer than seemed needful to those on whom its awful responsibility was not ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of the homely narratives of the Indian wars in New England there is a touching account of the desolation carried into the tribe of the Pequod Indians. Humanity shrinks from the cold-blooded detail of indiscriminate butchery. In one place we read of the surprisal of an Indian fort in the night, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... art are set off by the foils of unnumbered pieces of unformed and not very promising mediocrity. Among them are the productions of many of the more humble painters of genre subjects—the class who delight in portraying homely cottage interiors, or troops of playing children, or bits of minutely-finished still life—or careful academical studies of groups with all the conventions duly observed: this class of pictures musters strong, and connoisseurs, without so much ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... other than the view; it was resting on a youthful figure, clad in Parisian draperies, and on a face rising above the draperies, that bent lovingly over the deep-throated fireplace, basking in its warmth, and revelling in its homely perfume. We were silent also, as the picture of that transfigured daughter of the house flitted across our own ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... to endure this homely, sick-nursish illustration of the effect produced upon one’s mind by the mere vastness of the great Pyramid. When I was very young (between the ages, I believe, of three and five years old), being then of delicate health, I was often in time of night the victim of a strange ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... a corpse opened its lips and told of horrors beyond the grave. It brought the other world into the homely room, and made it all demoniac. The women felt the presence of the unknown. It was their own flesh and blood that spoke the words, and by their own quiet hearth. But hell seemed with them ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... a rocke did rise A spring of water, mildly rumbling downe, Whereto approched not in anie wise The homely shepheard, nor the ruder clowne; But manie Muses, and the Nymphes withall, That sweetly in accord did tune their voyce To the soft sounding of the waters fall; That my glad hart thereat did much reioyce. But, while herein I tooke my chiefe delight, I saw, alas! the gaping earth devoure ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... The gate-keeper, homely and simple, opened to him courteously, and he went in to the first little courtyard, with its fig tree in the middle and old grass-grown well surrounded by olives and lilac bushes; and then he climbed the open stairs to the bastion, from whose battlements there is to be obtained ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... idea of leaving the Broadway Tabernacle church. I was brought up in it. I have been in its Sunday-School ever since I can recollect. It was dear to me in its old homely attire as a Congregationalist meeting-house. It is dear to me in its new aristocratic attire as a Congregationalist cathedral. And Harry was baptized there. And there are all our dearest and best friends. It would be like pulling a tooth to uproot ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... Can soften hearts, and lull this war to sleep,[5] I'll pile your altars with a hundred sheep; And this is not a small affair For a Parnassian mountaineer. Meantime, (if you have time to spare,) Accept a little incense-cheer. A homely, but an ardent prayer, And tale in verse, I give you here. I'll only say, the theme is fit for you. With praise, which envy must confess To worth like yours is justly due, No man on earth ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... over any engagement that chanced to have been made and carry her off for a day up the river, where a quiet little lunch, in the tranquil shade of overhanging trees, and the cosy, intimate talk that was its invariable concomitant, seemed like an oasis of familiar, homely pleasantness in the midst of the gay turmoil of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... Rev. Roper Ellwell had stirred the placid waters of meeting-house faith until something like a primitive revival had spread into neighboring parishes. His wife, a learned woman, had managed half a dozen young men who were preparing their Greek and Latin for Camberton. Those were the homely and kindly days ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... Bunyan's proverbs, which, however homely, is sure to make a lasting impression on the mind. Sin breeds the scorpions which will torment the sinner, unless they tormented the Saviour. O ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and closer to the catafalque rest the familiar faces of many of our greatest generals—the manly features of Augur, whose blood I have seen trickling forth upon the field of battle; the open almost, beardless contour of Halleck, who has often talked of sieges and campaigns with this homely gentleman who is going to the grave. There are many more bright stars twinkling in contiguous shoulder bars, but sitting in a chair upon the beflowered carpet is Ulysses Grant, who has lived a century in the last ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... tangled barberry-bushes Hang their tufts of crimson berries Over stone walls gray with mosses, 105 Pause by some neglected graveyard, For a while to muse, and ponder On a half-effaced inscription, Written with little skill of song-craft, Homely phrases, but each letter 110 Full of hope and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter;— Stay and read this rude inscription, Read this song of ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think all this high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be literal. And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting at cannot be set forth in plain and homely terms. For instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the floods ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... am I to raise objection? I'm a child, untaught and homely— When you tell me you're perfection, Tender, truthful, true, and comely— That in quarrel no one's bolder, Though dissensions always grieve you— Why, my love, you're so much older That, of course, I ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the scenery is beautiful—almost too trite to write—but the beauty is lonesome and terrifying, and my city-bred soul longs for some good, homely, human "blot on the landscape." There are no trees on the cliffs now. I understand, however, that Nature is not responsible for this oversight. The people are sorely in need of firewood, and not being far-seeing enough to realize ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... do look uncommonly sickly. But my poor cousin (he was never a Solomon) has got hold, he says, of a homely—homely—What's the word, Parson?" ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that smiled and sighed. From Dekker's eyes the light of tear-touched mirth Shone as from Shakespeare's, mingling heaven and earth. Wild witchcraft's lure and England's love made one With Shakespeare's heart the heart of Middleton. Harsh, homely, true, and tragic, Rowley told His heart's debt down in rough and radiant gold. The skies that Tourneur's lightning clove and rent Flamed through the clouds where Shakespeare's thunder went. Wise Massinger bade kings be ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... He, with modest looks, And clad in homely russet brown? [B] He murmurs near the running brooks A music ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... Calvin, John Knox, Andrew Melville, and George Buchanan. By these thinkers they had been taught to emphasize equality, freedom of conscience, and political liberty. These stocks differed somewhat from each other, but they were equally attached to practical religion, homely virtues, and democratic institutions.[7] Being a kind and beneficent class with a tenacity for the habits and customs of their fathers, they proved to be a valuable contribution to the American stock. As they had no riches every man was to be just what he could make himself. Equality and brotherly ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin, homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great willows; then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was resting on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and Josie, ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... economy. * * * The one step which separates civilization from savagery—which renders civilization possible—is labor done in excess of immediate necessity. * * * To inculcate this most necessary and most homely of all virtues, we have met with no better teacher than this ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... lads. Simple, homely, and unpolished as was his language, he had succeeded in giving utterance to a grand truth; one which all boys will do well to lay to heart and profit by to the utmost ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... embodies, she is almost identical with Agnes, in the beautiful romance which Mrs. Stowe has lately contributed to this magazine: the difference is in time and circumstance, and not in essential nature. The Puritan maiden, with all her homely culture and rough surroundings, is really as poetic a personage as any of Spenser's exquisite individualizations of abstract feminine excellence; perhaps more so, as the most austere and exalted spiritualities of Christianity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to have your tender and delicately sympathetic picture of village life. There is a note of true sentiment and a generous appreciation of homely virtue marking this story for which we desire to add an especial word of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... gleamed through the rude latticed casements of their cottage window. The earthern floor of the humble dwelling bad been freshly swept; a clean cloth of the matron's own spinning, was spread on the homely board, which was garnished with wooden bowls and spoons of the most snowy whiteness; and a kettle of fish-soup, with herbs, was stewing over the fire. Some flat oaten cakes, designed to be eaten hot with butter, were baking ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... this is one. Under any circumstances we should have bewailed the catastrophe at Washington; under any circumstances we should have shuddered at the means by which it was accomplished. But in the character of the victim, and even in the accessories of his last moments, there is something so homely and innocent that it takes the question, as it were, out of all the pomp of history and the ceremonial of diplomacy,—it touches the heart of nations and appeals to the domestic sentiment of mankind. ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... and their parting at Portsmouth. Not a jot of his theatrical manner remained; he put out his hand with an air which, if he could have summoned it at will, would have made him the best actor of his day in homely parts, and when Nicholas shook it with the warmth he honestly ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... his learning he made many enemies by his arrogance; and his restless and ambitious spirit carried him into enterprises which were outside the proper sphere of his philosophy. In this he followed the example of many other luckless authors, to whom the advice of the homely proverb would have been valuable which states that "a shoemaker should stick ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... the ace of spades, if that is what you mean. Suppose he is. All homely men are not suspicious characters. If they were, how would we be judged?" and the professor laughed in a ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... she walked home through the dark, the story grew into other comfort. A prodigal might see the face of God, then! He was no grand monarch, but a homely father. He would receive her one day, and let her look in ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... "What," said Croesus, angrily, "and dost not thou reckon us amongst the happy men at all?" Solon, unwilling either to flatter or exasperate him more, replied, "The gods, O king, have given the Greeks all other gifts in moderate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is a cheerful and a homely, not a noble and kingly, wisdom; and this, observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire any man's happiness ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... which he lived was of all English classes, I should suppose, the most reticent in matters of sex—the respectable, lower middle class; shopkeepers and the like, with a tradition of homely religion and virtue. The classes a little higher in the scale (to which, by the way, his mother had belonged) could far better sympathize with one in his position. Well, the family of his future wife was ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... traversed the half century with ease, and bids fair to build securely in the loves of our great-grandchildren. The six letters that comprise his name pursue every piano that is made. Chopin and modern piano playing are inseparable, and it is a strain upon homely prophecy to predict a time when the two shall be put asunder. Chopin was the greatest interpreter of Chopin, and following him came those giants of other days, Liszt, Tausig, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... work. I have told how I came by the strange history here given, and, without sacrificing altogether the quaint and characteristic Cornish vernacular, I have endeavoured to tell the tale in homely English, and, as far as possible, in the spirit of the time in which the ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... little graveyard which was in the yard of the prison. An Episcopal clergyman, who was chaplain of the prison, read the burial service over him. The prisoners were brought out to attend the homely funeral. The ball and chain, all the personal property left by Hall, were put aside for the next murderer sentenced for life, or for the next "ugly" prisoner. "If I were only treated better, and not abused so, I should be a better man." This is what Hall ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... destructions and strange births, a better answer than I can give. I have set forth, as far as in me lay, the data of my problem: and surely, if the premises be given, wise men will not have to look far for the conclusion. In homely English I have given my readers Yeast; if they be what I take them for, they will be able to bake ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... county of Cavan, called at a homely but hospitable house, where he knew he should be well received. The Lady Bountiful of the mansion, rejoiced to have so distinguished a guest, runs up to him, and with great eagerness and flippancy asks him what he will have for dinner. "Will you have an apple-pie, sir? Will you have ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... especially remarked, from her face and its habitual expression. Indistinguishable from the others in general appearance, it was only in glancing at her countenance that one thought to look at her a second time with close attention. She was not handsome, or even pretty, although not by any means homely; but her face was almost transfigured by its expression of earnest piety and goodness, remarkable in one so young. Quiet and sedate as was her habit, she was ever ready to enter freely into the fun and play of the other children; ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... lectures of Foch, the teacher of the Ecole de Guerre, recall the fugitive but impressive words of Foch, the soldier, uttered on the spur of the moment, filled with homely phrase, and piquant figure and underlying all, one encounters the same integral conception of war and of the relation of the moral to the physical, which fills the all too scanty pages ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... his wings and puffed up every feather. He certainly was a magnificent creature. The grown-up Sea-gulls felt quite ashamed of their homely dresses of black and white; but the young ones only gaped, and crowded open-mouthed to ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... evening when we were all packed and going away next day, and I do assure you that by that time though it was deliciously comfortable to look forward to the dear old house in Norfolk Street again, I had formed quite a high opinion of the French nation and had noticed them to be much more homely and domestic in their families and far more simple and amiable in their lives than I had ever been led to expect, and it did strike me between ourselves that in one particular they might be imitated to advantage by another nation which I will not mention, and that is in the courage ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... himself of such a remedial agent as the pilgrimages to the Notre Dame de Lourdes, is an evidence of the intelligent and enlightened practitioner, who has learned, what the Bible taught, long, long ago, that human nature must be taken as it is found, and that, like the homely saying of Mohammed, as the mountain would not come to him, he must go to the mountain. Moses and all the Scriptural writers were well aware of this state of affairs, and their manner of using their knowledge was adapted ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... great weight which he ever lifted, I suspect, was one which he carried with him always,—the immense dignity of his poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were fairly typical of his tastes: a cottage, (so called,) of homely material indeed, but with an ambitious elevation of gables and of chimney-stacks; a velvety sheen of turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberdasher; a mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant than showy ones; behind him the loveliest of wooded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Look at the catalogue of sins that lie side by side with this exhortation of my text! They are all small matters—bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil-speaking, malice, stealing, lying, and the like; very 'homely' transgressions, if I may so say. Yes, and if you pile enough of them upon the spark that is in your hearts you will smother it out. Sin, the wrenching of myself away from the influences, not attending to the whispers and suggestions, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... to all the gradations, if I may use the term, of the Homeric style; from the finished poetry of the numerous similes, in which every touch is nature, and nothing is overcoloured or exaggerated, down to the simple, almost homely, style of some portions of the narrative. Least of all can any other metre do full justice to the spirit and freedom of the various speeches, in which the old warriors give utterance, without disguise or restraint, to all their strong and genuine emotions. To subject these to the trammels of ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... W'y, hit 'll be the death of her. John, we cain't git to her too quick." And she ran from cupboard to press, from press to chest, from chest to bureau drawer, piling into John's arms the flask of brandy, the homely medicines, the warm garments, such bits of food as she could catch up that were palatable and portable. Pap, with more vulnerable emotions and less resolute nature, was incapable of speech; he could ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... so long. His Indian pictures came like a revelation. It is always so when a man of real genius dawns upon the world. It was so when Scott showed men and women the jewelled mines of romance which lay in the highways and byways of homely Scotland. It was so when Dickens bared the Cockney hearth to the sight of all men. Meg Merrilies, and Rob Roy, and Edie Ochiltree were all there—the wild, the romantic, the humorous were at the doors of millions of men before Scott saw them. In London, in the early days of Dickens, there were ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... window, and descended to the room below, where Nanny had prepared the evening meal of snowy bread and milk, and ripe purple whortleberries. It was very queer to see the three sitting at table—to see homely-looking, but kind-hearted Nanny, between the two children, like a ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the mules out of the road, they advanced towards a cliff, overhung with cedars, Emily following in trembling silence. They lifted her from her mule, and, having seated themselves on the grass, at the foot of the rocks, drew some homely fare from a wallet, of which Emily tried to eat a little, the ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... Burney observes, "at this time"—about 1737—"the rage for operas seems to have been very much diminished in our country; the fact was, that public curiosity being satisfied as to new compositions and singers, the English returned to their homely food, the Begger's Opera and ballad farces on the same plan, with eagerness and comfort." In 1741, Handel, after producing thirty-nine Italian lyric dramas, and after struggling against adversity, with a reduced establishment in a smaller theatre, was compelled by ruin ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... needs come breaking through, And now and then the office hum Dies like a mist, ... and there will come An Oxford breakfast scene: the quad All blue and grey outside—O God— And there sits Twiston at the feast Proclaiming he will be a priest! I see his eyes, his homely neb— Ring, telephones, ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... sometimes almost forgot, and addressed him in English. My landlady, who was an heiress in her own right, and the last of a family of former repute, told me that the old financier came to Capiz "poor as wood." She did not use that homely simile, however, but the typical Filipino statement that his pantaloons were torn. She took me behind a door to tell me, and imparted the information in a whisper, as if she were afraid of condign punishment ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... was impressed on us that we were mere homely, countrified beings, who could not presume to dictate to her ladyship, but who had ill requited her condescension in deigning ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... green and elm-shaded. Such hath it been depicted in their legends who went before me; What therefore, I have seen and heard, declare I unto you In measures artless and untuneful. Fearless of hardship, In costume, as in manners, unadorn'd and homely Were our ancestral farmers, the seed-planters of a strong nation. Congenial were their wives, not ashamed of the household charge, Yoke-fellows that were help-meets, vigorous and of a good courage; Revolting not at life's plain intent, but its duties discharging Patiently, lovingly, ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... enjoy the advantages of the college before its abolition was John Lawrence, who used to confess that he was never good at languages, but whose vigorous Hindostani made many an ill-doing Raja tremble, while his homely conversation, interspersed with jokes, encouraged the ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith |
