"Incongruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 1648, when the troubles of the Fronde commencing, its habitues were dispersed or absorbed by political interests. The presiding genius of this salon, the Marquise de Rambouillet, was the very model of the woman who can act as anamalgam to the most incongruous elements; beautiful, but not preoccupied by coquetry, or passion; an enthusiastic admirer of talent, but with no pretensions to talent on her own part; exquisitely refined in language and manners, but warm and generous withal; not given to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the desert of coarseness and vulgarity came oases of delicate fancy and imagination. The 'Cherry Duet' in 'L'Amico Fritz,' and the Cicaleccio chorus in 'I Rantzau,' are models of refinement and finish, which are doubly delightful by reason of their incongruous environment. Unfortunately such gems as these only make the coarseness of their setting the more conspicuous, and on the whole the sooner the world forgets about 'L'Amico Fritz' and 'I Rantzau' the better it will be for Mascagni's ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... bachelor days, he comforted himself by thinking that his lot was the lot of all married men who are blest with active, managing, economical wives. Such were Mr. and Mrs. Pullens; and the appearance of the house offered no inadequate idea of the mistress. The furniture was incongruous, and everything was ill-matched—for Mrs. Pullens was a frequenter of sales, and, like many other liberal-minded ladies, never allowed a bargain to pass, whether she required the articles or not. Her dress was the same; there was always something to wonder at; caps that had ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... zealous enemies of slavery can use) than that the Constitution recognizes slavery as existing or capable of existing in those States. The Constitution, then, admits that slavery and a republican form of government are not incongruous. It associates and binds them up together and repudiates this wild imagination which the gentlemen have pressed upon us with such an air of triumph. But the Constitution does more, as I have heretofore proved. It concedes that slavery may exist in ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... forbidden the latter to aspire to these functions, has made excuses unnecessary. The effect of this enactment is that no pupil or person under twentyfive years of age is to be called to a statutory guardianship; for it was most incongruous to place persons under the guardianship or administration of those who are known themselves to need assistance in the management of their own affairs, and ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... the slaying of the dragon, it seems at first sight that an incongruous element has been introduced. That Hott is compelled to eat some of the dragon's heart is good saga-material, as is evident from the similar episode in the Volsungasaga (i.e., Sigurd's eating some of Favnir's heart); but the dragon is also a troll, and there is no sanction in ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... with General Merritt for General, was a workshop, and the highly decorated apartments, lofty and elaborate, were put to uses that had an appearance of being incongruous. The cot of the soldier, shrouded in a mosquito bar, stood in the midst of sumptuous furniture, before towering mirrors in showy frames, and from niches looked down marble statues that would have been more at home in the festal scenes of pompous life in the sleepy cities ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... gown and long transparent veil, is an exquisite figure. Tintoretto bathes all his pageantry in golden light and air, and yet we feel that these huge official subjects, with the prosaic old Doges introduced in incongruous company, neither stimulated his imagination nor satisfied his taste. It is on the smaller canvases that he finds inspiration. He never painted anything more lovely, more perfect in design, or more gay and tender in idea, than the cycle in the Ante-Collegio. The ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... in his white flannels; his modern athletic figure seemed oddly incongruous. He looked ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... have always been deluded with the idea that what they gave to the church and the priesthood was given unto the Lord, as if the Maker of the universe needed anything at our hands. How incongruous the idea of an Infinite being who made all the planets and the inhabitants thereof commanding his creatures to kill and burn animals for offerings to him. It is truly pitiful to see the deceptions that have been played ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... together. According to Froude, it was on the 18th September, 1795, that a peace was formally signed at Portadown between the Peep-o'-Day Boys and the Defenders, and the hatchet was apparently buried. But the incongruous elements were drawn together only for a more violent recoil. The very same day Mr. Atkinson, a Protestant, one of the Defender subscribers, was shot at. The following day a party of Protestants were waylaid and beaten. On the 21st both parties ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... steps away. She followed him, keeping her eyes on him in a wondering sort of way. The grizzly's reddish eyes were on David. A few yards away Baree was lying flat on his belly between two stones, his eyes on the bear. It was a strange scene and rather weirdly incongruous. David no longer sensed it. He still held the girl's hand as he seated her on the rock, and he looked into her eyes, smiling confidently. She was, after all, his little chum—the Girl who had been with him ever since that first night's vision in Thoreau's ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... shore-side bushes, expecting their arrival; when a silly lad, in mere lightness of heart, fired a shot in the air. My native friend, Mrs. Mary Hamilton, ran out of her house and gave the culprit a good shaking: an episode in the midst of battle as incongruous as the grazing cow. But his sillier comrades followed his example; a harmless volley warned the boats what they might expect; and they drew back and passed outside the reef for the passage of the Fuisa. Here they came under the fire of the right wing of the Mataafas on the river-bank. The beach, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my Golden Bed to find a stranger quietly smoking a cigarette on my paepae. Against the jungle background he was a strangely incongruous figure; a Frenchman, small, thin, meticulously neat in garments of faded blue denim and shining high boots. His blue eyes twinkled above a carefully trimmed beard, and as he rose to meet me, I observed that the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... mutually-jarring factors could be wrought into a whole, intelligible to the scientific musician, though unedifying to the public. In the neglect of their art, considered as an art of interpretation and expression, they abandoned themselves to intricate problems and to the presentation of incongruous complexities. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Wren. It is said that an earthquake had occurred some few years before, and had caused some damage which was not suspected at the time. However much we may admire Wren's constructive genius, we cannot justify the incongruous door in the north wall of the transept, for which we take it for granted he was responsible. It is in the classical style, utterly out of keeping with the architecture near. The arch and jambs of the Norman window above it were replaced; but this again is ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... young asses like Laurie Baxter such things were not so hopelessly incongruous, though obviously they were bad for him; they were all part of the wild credulousness of a religious youth; but for Cathcart, aged sixty-two, a solicitor in good practice, with a wife and two grown-up daughters, and a reputation for exceptionally sound shrewdness—! But ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... who reads it by the fireside may smile at the incongruous mixture of a sanguinary menace with bad spelling. But deeds of blood had often followed these scrawls in Hillsborough, and Henry knew it: and, indeed, he who can not spell his own name correctly is the very man to take his ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... their individual voices, than those of the elective House. And when a bill of many clauses does succeed in getting itself discussed in detail, what can depict the state in which it comes out of committee! Clauses omitted which are essential to the working of the rest; incongruous ones inserted to conciliate some private interest, or some crotchety member who threatens to delay the bill; articles foisted in on the motion of some sciolist with a mere smattering of the subject, ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... our country the public business which devolves on the heads of the several Executive Departments has greatly increased. In some respects the distribution of duties among them seems to be incongruous, and many of these might be transferred from one to another with advantage to the public interests. A more auspicious time for the consideration of this subject by Congress, with a view to system in the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... Butterfield, whose confidence in his own creations prevented him from being influenced by the great architectural beauties of Oxford, and caused him to have no hesitation in setting up buildings, so incongruous with the spirit of Oxford, as Balliol Chapel and Keble College. It is, then, for its mental, rather than its physical beauty, that Balliol claims attention. The inevitable mention of the College has taken up ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... incident had not served to draw Harry's thoughts from his project. All his life he had seen his Uncle Jonnie treated as a child, and there was nothing incongruous in the situation, even 'when the grey-haired boy was rated for neglecting to shave or sent supperless to bed for similar sins of omission or commission. To Mrs. Hardy also it was a simple serious business of domestic government. Ever since she was ten years old Uncle John, who was many years ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... distance there floated to him a sound strangely incongruous here in the early stillness, a subdued screech or scream, a wild, clamorous, shrieking noise which for the life of him he could ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... Distends her sallying nerves and chokes her tongue; What were it but to count each crystal drop Which Morning's dewy fingers on the blooms Of May distil? Suffice it to have said, [Endnote FF] Where'er the power of Ridicule displays Her quaint-eyed visage, some incongruous form, 250 Some stubborn dissonance of things combined, Strikes on the quick observer: whether Pomp, Or Praise, or Beauty, mix their partial claim Where sordid fashions, where ignoble deeds, Where foul Deformity are wont to dwell; Or whether these with violation loathed, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... be the subject or the character of his thoughts what it may: it is, as it were, the dough out of which all the contents of his mind are kneaded. When Eulenspiegel was asked how long it would take to walk to the next village, he gave the seemingly incongruous answer: Walk. He wanted to find out by the man's pace the distance he would cover in a given time. In the same way, when I have read a few pages of an author, I know fairly well how far he can ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... each day more and more interested in the work; there was in the subject and the part much scope for novel and fanciful treatment. If the sleep of twenty years was merely incongruous, there would be room for argument pro and con; but as it is an impossibility, I felt that the audience would accept it at once, not because it was an impossibility, but from a desire to know in what condition a man's mind would be if such ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... that if the Libretto, as they call it, is not approved, the opera, notwithstanding the excellence of the music, will be condemned. For the Italians justly determine, that the very music of an opera cannot be complete and pleasing, if the drama be incongruous, as I may call it, in its composition, because, in order to please, it must have the necessary contrast of the grave and the light, that is, the diverting equally blended through the whole. If there be too much of the first, let the music be composed ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... the last chapter, my perfectly sincere praises of the country, an incongruous reminiscence suddenly froze the genial current of my soul. Something, I know not what, reminded me of the occasion when Mrs. Bardell and her friends made their memorable expedition to the "Spaniards Tea-Gardens" at Hampstead. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... in mythology is the same. In civilised religion and myth we find rudimentary survivals, fossils of rite and creed, ideas absolutely incongruous with the environing morality, philosophy, and science of Greece and India. Parallels to these things, so out of keeping with civilisation, we recognise in the creeds and rites of the lower races, even of cannibals; but there the creeds and rites ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... was more and more surprised at the nature of the incongruous revelations coming to him in the surroundings and in the atmosphere of the open sea. It is difficult for us to understand the extent, the completeness, the comprehensiveness of his inexperience, for us who didn't go to sea out of a small private school at the age of fourteen ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... from the rock, who loudly declared that he had done no wrong, but had justly slain him in vengeance for his father, whom this wretch had killed at Leontini. Several of those present bore witness to the truth of his story, and they marvelled much at the ways of Fortune, how she makes the most incongruous elements work together to accomplish her purposes. The Corinthians honoured the man with a present of ten minae, because he had co-operated with the guardian angel of Timoleon, and had put off the satisfaction of his private wrong until a time when ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... of the James River. A dozen years later a pitiably feeble company of Pilgrims shall make their landing at Plymouth to try the not hopeful experiment of living in the wilderness, and a settlement of Swedes in Delaware and of Hollanders on the Hudson shall be added to the incongruous, unconcerted, mutually jealous plantations that begin to take root along the Atlantic seaboard. Not only grandeur and sagacity of conception, but success in achievement, is illustrated by the comparative area occupied by the three great ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... suddenly unaccountably glad to be back again. She liked the smoke and the noise, the movement, the sense of things doing. And the sight of her mother, small, faultlessly tailored, wearing a great bunch of violets, and incongruous in that work-a-day atmosphere, set her ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and embossed leather, but the rest of the seats consisted of divans, improvised by ingenious fingers out of packing-boxes and cushions covered with Morris chintzes; or brown Windsor chairs, evidently imported straight from the kitchen. A battered old writing-desk had an incongruous look when placed next to a costly buhl clock on a table inlaid indeed with mother-of-pearl, but wanting in one leg; and so no valuable blue china was apt to pass unobserved upon the mantelpiece because it was generally found in company with a child's mug, a plate of crusts, or a painting-rag. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the land where a man loved but one woman. She remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love. As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something incongruous in this spectacle. She observed the seamed and hardened features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening, beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married, and she thought of his score or so of wives ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... flit about the passages of dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed for ever in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at once the hundred ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... reached me I was the sole inhabitant of O'Malley Castle,—a very ruinous pile of incongruous masonry, that stood in a wild and dreary part of the county of Galway, bordering on the Shannon. On every side stretched the property of my uncle, or at least what had once been so; and indeed, so numerous were its present claimants ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Latish, on the very first day of the hiring, close upon dark, he had despatched imperative orders to Phippun and Company to take the glass out of his house on the spot. And why? Because, as he maintained, there was a fault in the glass causing an incongruous and absurd reflection; and he was at that moment awaiting the arrival ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... prood woman the day, for I am now Estaiblished!" and Francesca, clad in Miss Grieve's Sunday bonnet, shawl, and black cotton gloves, entered and curtsied demurely to the floor. She held, as corroborative detail, a life of John Knox in her hand, and anything more incongruous than her sparkling eyes and mutinous mouth under the melancholy ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... that it had come." When Beauclerk was dying (in 1780), Johnson said, with a faltering voice, that he would walk to the extremity of the diameter of the earth to save him. Two little anecdotes are expressive of his tender feeling for this incongruous friend. Boswell had asked him to sup at Beauclerk's. He started, but, on the way, recollecting himself, said, "I cannot go; but I do not love Beauclerk the less." Beauclerk had put upon a ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... tale came floating back in trailing mist across the dusty baseball diamond and obscured the sight of Sloppy Hedrick sliding to his base. It was a tale of one, Judas, who betrayed his best Friend with a kiss. It came with strange illogical persistence, and seemed curiously incongruous with the sweet air of summer blowing over the hard young faces and dusty diamond. What had Judas to do with a baseball game, or with Billy Gaston and what he meant to do on the mountain that night?—and earn good money—! Ah! That was it. Make good money! But who was he betraying he ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... one little part, we dimly scan, Through the dark medium of life's feverish dream; Yet dare arraign the whole stupendous plan, If but that little part incongruous seem. Nor is that part, perhaps, what mortals deem; Oft from apparent ill our blessings rise. O then, renounce that impious self-esteem, That aims to trace the secrets of the skies: For thou art but of dust; be humble, and ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... agent; and this, by the preposition by, is made an adjunct to a passive verb. Even the participial noun of this form, though it actually drops the distinction of voice, is awkward and apparently incongruous ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... erected a better? You behold around you, it is true, a medley of architectural embellishments. The chastity of Ionia is offended by antediluvian devices, and the sphynxes of Egypt are outstretched upon carpets of gold. Yet the effect is incongruous to the timid alone. Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent. Once I was myself a decorist; but that sublimation of folly has palled upon my soul. All this is now the fitter ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... life-giving air, and looks out across its gardens and glittering gables and spires, and again meets her French acquaintances, and throws herself into their arms and into their interests with all her old warmth and excitability. The little grey bonnet only gives certain incongruous piquancy to her pleasant, kind-hearted exuberance. She returns to England, but far-away echoes reach her soon of changes and revolutions concerning all the people for whom her regard is so warm. In August, 1830, came the news of a new revolution—'The ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... never forget the vivid, disagreeable effect it produced upon me. What was she doing there at half-past eleven at night, all alone in the darkness? She was sitting upright, stiff, in a big chair below the clock. It gave me a turn. It was so incongruous and odd. She rose quietly as I turned the corner of the stairs, and asked me respectfully, her eyes cast down as usual, whether I had finished with the library, so that she might lock up. There was no more to it than that; but ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... Dombey and Mrs Skewton; and it was settled that the festive proceedings should commence by Mrs Dombey's being at home upon a certain evening, and by Mr and Mrs Dombey's requesting the honour of the company of a great many incongruous people to dinner on the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... have introduced a more incongruous proposition. It made clear to Carrie that he could not sympathise with her. She could not have framed thoughts which would have expressed his defect or made clear the difference between them, but she felt it. It was his first ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community, and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common counsels and modified ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... relates a pleasing anecdote of affection, which existed between two incongruous animals—a horse and a hen, and which showed a mutual fellowship and kindness for each other. The following anecdote, communicated to me by a clergyman in Devonshire, affords another proof of affection ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... That fiction, where every character can, by reason of its consistency, be comprehended at a glance, either exhibits but sections of character, making them appear for wholes, or else is very untrue to reality; while, on the other hand, that author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at different periods, as much at variance with itself as the butterfly is with the caterpillar into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... classify; and this feeling is so common and natural that it runs through all our lives and influences our opinion of things inanimate and irresponsible: —the book of such inconvenient size or shape that it will not fit the shelf in our book-case, how many an impatient toss it gets! The incongruous garment which suits no other garment we have, and seems out of place on every occasion, how we hate it! Although it may be of the finest material ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... overturnings of the last two centuries. This northern half of the great American continent, however, seems to have been kept back by Nature as a tabula rasa, a clean blackboard, on which the great problem of civil government might be worked out, without any of the incongruous drawbacks which have cast perplexity and despair upon those who have undertaken its solution in the elder world. All the elements of the demonstration were of the most favorable nature. Settled by races who had inherited or achieved whatever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... wrath and perturbation"; "heavenly with hellish, fitness with unfitness," &c. "God commands not impossibilities," he bursts out, "and all the ecclesiastical glue that Liturgy or Laymen can compound is not able to sodder up two such incongruous natures into the one flesh of a true beseeming marriage." Or take this remarkable passage, repeating an opinion we have already had from him, "No wise man but would sooner pardon the act of adultery once and again committed by a person worth pity and forgiveness than to lead a wearisome ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... breakfast—the meal which is associated with that particular hour of the four-and-twenty to all well regulated minds and stomachs—it consists here of thin veneers of old mahogany-coloured thunny, varnished with oil, and relieved by an incongruous abomination of capers and olives. The cold fowls are infamous. The wine were a disgrace to the sorriest tapster between this and the Alps, and also fiery, like every thing else in this district. Drink it, and doubt not the old result—de conviva ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... great treat for you," he stated, smiling, "but I want to ask you to overlook anything that may seem incongruous, for the ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... themselves to be jolted along in silence. They were livid with the chill of morning. They all wore linen trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into wooden shoes. The rest of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements were horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal than the harlequin in rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps, hideous woollen nightcaps, and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat broken at the elbow; many wore women's headgear, others had baskets on their heads; hairy breasts were visible, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... empty passage beyond. On the threshold stood Karamaneh. She held in her hand a common tin oil lamp which smoked and flickered with every movement, filling the already none too cleanly air with an odor of burning paraffin. She personified the outre; nothing so incongruous as her presence in that place could well be imagined. She was dressed as I remembered once to have seen her two years before, in the gauzy silks of the harem. There were pearls glittering like great tears amid the cloud of her wonderful hair. She wore broad ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... playfully, in many of the lines. The croak of the raven is taken up and moulded into rhyme by a nimble, if not a mocking spirit; and, fascinating as is the rhythmic movement of the verse, it appears like the dancing of the daughter of Herodias. This looks incongruous; and so do the words of the fool which Shakspeare has intermingled with the agonies and imprecations of Lear. In the tragedy, this is held to be a consummate stroke of art, and certainly the reader is grateful for the relief. Had Poe a similar design? Closely analyzed, this song ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... in the other books. For in the greater number of passages which may be cited for and against this theory the objector may argue that the generally extravagant praise bestowed upon Soma through the Veda is in any one case merely particularized, and that it is not incongruous to say of the divine soma-plant, "he lights the dark nights," when one reads in general that he creates all things, including the gods. On the other hand, the advocate of the theory may reply that everything which does not apply to the moon-god Soma may be used metaphorically of him. ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Puritan conscience which we all possess would lead us again into all extravagance, witch-burnings, Quaker-stoning, heresy trials, and intolerance of politics and religion. From all these we are saved by our feeling for the incongruous. A touch of humor recalls us to our senses. It ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... the art of illusion and also of compromise, and no rule connected with the stage can be pushed quite home to its apparent logical conclusions: therefore one must have some amount of appropriate scenery, and costumes may not be flagrantly incongruous; but when once these modest demands have been satisfied the audience will be well content with mounting in which nothing more is involved if the play be well written and acted, and agreeable in style to its taste; and we know very well that some of the longest runs have been enjoyed ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... after week, month after month, in America and England. He preferred rather to let himself fancy that he was dreaming the whole thing; and he would gladly have dreamed on indefinitely, forgetting the smoky atmosphere, forgetting the long-haired students and all the incongruous surroundings. The gracious dream gave him peace and pleasure such as he had not known since the ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... commissaire, pronouncing the incongruous sounds as nearly as he can. "Why, he must ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... to think myself into a fright!" Mrs. Travers laughed lightly, and in the gloom of his thought this flash of joyous sound was incongruous and almost terrible. Next moment the night appeared brilliant as day, warm as sunshine; but when she ceased the returning darkness gave him pain as if it had struck heavily against his breast. "I don't think I could do that," she finished in ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the third sat upright in a military fashion. All his body beneath his shoulders was hidden by the boat's sides, but his coat was of the Continental buff and blue, while a border cap of raccoon skin crowned his round head. Such incongruous attire detracted nothing from the man's dignity and presence. Henry saw that his face was open, his gaze direct, and that he was quite young. He was looking straight toward the five who had come with their new friends down to the river's edge, and, when he sprang lightly ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in without speaking, pulled a chair from the corner of the porch, and flounced down among the cushions. David could not restrain a smile. She looked so babyishly young, and so furiously cross. To David, youth and crossness were incongruous. ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... the same artist, is a large engraving on stone: an incongruous medley of palms, sorbs and oaks grown together, heedless of seasons and climates, peopled with monkeys and owls, covered with old stumps as misshapen as the roots of the mandrake; then a magical forest, cut in the center near a glade through which a stream ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... ones, Mamma and Papa, their relations to her, and so on—and these pictures of the future had given him pleasure. But with Princess Mary, to whom they were trying to get him engaged, he could never picture anything of future married life. If he tried, his pictures seemed incongruous and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... he could think or reflect, was the rush of a poignant and searching tenderness. This intimate, human sound, heard amid the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so pitifully incongruous—and so vain! Tears—in this vast and cruel wilderness: of what avail? He thought of a little child crying in mid-Atlantic.... Then, of course, with fuller realization, and the memory of what had gone before, came the descent of the terror ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... incongruous group, but touching with one accord the border of holier things, banished differences of creed and race and cemented ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... interval of awkward silence, Briscoe remained motionless in his easy chair, a rueful reflectiveness on his genial face incongruous with its habitual expression. When a sudden disconcerted intentness developed upon it, Bayne, every instinct on the alert, took instant heed of the change. The obvious accession of dismay betokened the increasing acuteness of the crisis, and Briscoe's attitude, as of helpless paralysis, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... heated discussion, a long whiff of pipe-smoke trails through the sunlight from the bar-room; the clink of glasses, the chink of silver, and the high treble of a woman's voice scolding a refractory child, mingle in incongruous melody. ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... The sidewalks quivered with life—soberly dressed coolies, making green background for the gauds of their women, bespangled babies late out of bed that they might gain good luck and blessing from those rites, priests in white robes, dignitaries in long tunics, incongruous Caucasian tourists ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... is an incongruous mixture of Latin and Saxon. The strictly South-European effect of the houses and churches is a mute protest against the alien presence which keeps the streets so clean and maintains order by means of policemen ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... to false inference. Furthermore, folkways have been formed by accident, that is, by irrational and incongruous action, based on pseudo-knowledge. In Molembo a pestilence broke out soon after a Portuguese had died there. After that the natives took all possible measures not to allow any white man to die in their country.[44] On the Nicobar islands ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... good taste keep you from the extremes of fashion; and regulate the form so as to combine utility and beauty, while the known rules of harmony in colors save you from shocking the eye of the artist by incongruous mixtures. ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto, I must plainly confess to you, I have seen yet nothing parallel in our language." The criticism was just. It is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is discharged from the labor of uniting two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even above himself. Then, like his own good Genius bursting from the earthly form and weeds of Thyrsis, he stands forth in celestial freedom and beauty; he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his best part, his soul; and how changing and variable in his frame of body! the constancy of the one shook by every notion, the temperament of the other affected by every blast of wind! What is ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... is a sort of elemental force that enters the human world, both for good and evil, and leaves its lasting impression. It is like a new river, of waters sweet and bitter, clear and muddy, bearing on its bosom ships and wrecks, the lovely and the ugly, the incongruous elements of human life and human contrivance. When it floods and overflows, the critics run away; when it subsides the critics come back and begin to analyze it, and say, "It wasn't much ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... impossible archeries and axestrokes, the incredibly opportune appearances of Locksley, the death of Ulrica, and the resuscitation of Athelstane, are partly boyish, partly feverish. Caleb in the Bride, Triptolemus and Halcro in the Pirate, are all laborious, and the first incongruous; half a volume of the Abbot is spent in extremely dull detail of Roland's relations with his fellow-servants and his mistress, which have nothing whatever to do with the future story; and the lady of Avenel ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... else exist. The divinity they never had; the human they had forgotten; they did no great wrongs,—thieving, quarrelling, deceiving,—but they failed to do any rights, and their worship was animal, and almost profane. They sang incongruous mixtures of hymns ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... The whole incongruous covering of the east end of the choir shown on p. 77 was then removed, and the change effected was most striking. It was evident that long before the introduction of the Grecian screen in 1717, the original arrangement had been disturbed by the insertion of a Perpendicular window, to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... is comparatively unimportant in politics, but it affords a good instance of the way in which a practical politician has to allow for pre-rational impulse. It is apparently an immediate effect of the recognition of the incongruous, just as trembling is of the recognition of danger. It may have been evolved because an animal which suffered a slight spasm in the presence of the unexpected was more likely to be on its guard against enemies, or it may have been the ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... He was that in the sense that the characters he created had much of the audacity of the American spirit, the thirst for adventures in untried fields of thought and action, the subconscious seriousness in the most incongruous situations, the feeling of being at home no matter what happens. But how amazingly he mingled a broad philosophy with his fun, a philosophy not less wise and comprehending than his fun was compelling! If his humor was American, it was also cosmopolitan, and ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... strange, chaotic, incongruous impression, exactly as though they had all hastily pooled not merely their clothes, but their hands, feet and heads as well. There was a man with the splendid profile of a Roman senator, dressed in rags and tatters. Another wore an elegant dress waistcoat, from the deep opening of which ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... see that the object, with its strange incongruous head, its long arms, of which it now seemed to have three or four, was advancing toward them over the uneven ground; and he gave the order to fall back until they ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... is committed to such apparently incongruous lips reiterates a former message by 'a man of God.' Eli was a kindly, and, in his way, good man, but wanting in firmness, and acquiescent in evil, partly, perhaps, from lack of moral courage and partly from lack of fervent religion. He is not charged with faults in his own administration ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was not altogether a pleasant woman to look upon. Her cheeks were thin and hollow, her eyes a little too prominent, some hidden expression which seemed at times to flit from one to the other of her features suggested a sensuality which was a little incongruous with her somewhat angular figure and generally cold demeanour. But that she was a woman of courage and ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... bobbed about among the rocks, with the large white face of the Nonconformist minister smiling from beneath it. He had a thick lance with which to support his injured leg, and this murderous crutch combined with his peaceful appearance to give him a most incongruous aspect—as of a sheep which has suddenly developed claws. Behind him were two negroes with a basket and ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the buffaloes and the Piegans, and was about to say that the idea of there being these immense wheat fields in the very heart of a wilderness, hundreds and hundreds of miles beyond the utmost verge of civilization, may appear to some gentlemen as rather incongruous, as rather too great a strain on the "blankets" of veracity. But to my mind there is no difficulty in the matter whatever. The phenomenon is very easily accounted for. It is evident, sir, that the Piegans sowed that wheat there and plowed it with buffalo bulls. (Great laughter.) Now, sir, this fortunate ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... east. To the left were the Louther Hills, with their smooth-green magnificence, bearing away into the distance, and placed, as it were, to shelter this happy valley from the stormy north and its wintry blasts. At present, however, all idea of storm and blast was incongruous, for they seemed to sleep in the sun's effulgence, as if cradled into repose by the hand of God. To the south, and hard at hand, were the woods and the fields of Collestown, with the echoing Linn, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... something incongruous to most people in the idea of a young girl hardly out of the schoolroom bearing a ponderous title. The pomp and circumstance that surround historic names connect them (through our reading) with stately ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... the impression that a heroine must have straight vision, and a Grecian nose. Hers is a face that will look very arch and piquante, when she acquires more sense, and lays aside her lack-a-daisical airs; but, at present, the expression and the features are very incongruous. It is excessively mortifying! but it cannot be helped; many times a day does she cast her eyes on the glass, but the obstinate pug remains a pug, and Alice is forced to conclude that she is not intended for a heroine. Yet ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... Mormon, on his knees, with his hands in a pan of dough, and his shirt all covered with flour, presented an incongruous figure of a man actuated by pathos and passion. Yet the contrast made his emotion all the simpler and stronger. Shefford grew closer to ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... night, in the soft light of the candles, the traces of year-long neglect being subdued and hidden, a spirit of festivity and gaiety pervaded the house as of natural wont, while the Moorish attendant's red knee-breeches, gold-braided coat, and blue-feathered turban, hitherto so incongruous in the general grayness, now seemed part of the normal color. And Uriel, too, grown younger with the house, made a handsome be-ruffed figure as he sat at the board, exchanging merry sallies with ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... curiously out of place in this unwholesome, gaslit building with its atmosphere of cheese and bacon. He would have been noticeably good-looking upon the cricket field or in any gathering of people belonging to the other side of life. Here he seemed almost a curiously incongruous figure. He passed through the glass-paned door and stood respectfully before his employer. Mr. Weatherley—it was absurd, but he scarcely knew how to make his suggestion—fidgetted for a moment and coughed. The young man, who, among many other quite ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake? The love of Life and the fear of Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hours at their work, and were just desisting because of the fading light, when the door opened and there entered a figure strangely incongruous with the current of their thoughts and with the suggestions of every object around them. It was the figure of a short stout black-eyed woman, about fifty, wearing a black velvet berretta, or close cap, embroidered ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... "thought" she was a good sailor—though she acknowledged that this was her first sea-trip—and elected to remain on deck. But before the harbour lights had faded behind us a sympathetic mariner supported her limp form—the feathers of her incongruous hat drooping in unison with their owner—down the swaying cabin staircase and deposited her on ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... bring with us to such perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters at the Harlot's Funeral, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful assemblage of depraved beings, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the characteristics ascribed ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... life's first foster-mother, still preserves in her depths many of those singular and incongruous shapes which were the earliest attempts of the animal kingdom; the land, less fruitful, but with more capacity for progress, has almost wholly lost the strange forms of other days. The few that remain belong especially to the series of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... fallacy, is supposed to be a necessary appurtenance of my window, has long been to me a source of curious interest. The fact that the asperities of our summer weather will not permit me to use it but once or twice in six months does not alter my concern for this incongruous ornament. It affects me as I suppose the conscious possession of a linen coat or a nankeen trousers might affect a sojourner here who has not entirely outgrown his memory of Eastern summer heat and its glorious compensations,—a luxurious providence against a possible but by no means probable ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... each separate detail a work of art, intrinsically beautiful apart from its constructive use, would require a corresponding treatment in the setting of the doors and windows; but the most of what is commonly considered ornamental work, in such cases, is wholly incongruous with walls and ceilings of lath and plaster and floors of cheap boards. I know you will paste mouldy paper to the walls and spread dirty carpets on the floors (beg your pardon, I mean the paper will be mouldy before you know ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... that it wasn't much more incongruous for the emperor to cruise in a canoe, than it was for the prime minister to attempt to build one with his ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... day closed all was made plain to her, all the awfulness, all the cruel, inhuman truth of things which seemed to lose their possibility in the exaggeration of proportion which made their incongruous ness almost grotesque. ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... through scented shadow to Graham's homestead and discussed crops and cattle with the rancher. On these occasions, he had long conversations with Helen Savine, who, finding no person of liberal education thereabouts, was pleased to talk to him. There was nothing incongruous in this, for petty class distinctions vanish in the bush, where, when his daily task is done, the hired man meets his master on ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... laburnums, lilacs, red hawthorn, Banksia roses and all the pleasant border plants that go with box and lavender. Never before did the flowers answer the spring roll-call with such a rush! Upstairs, in the Empire bedroom which the General has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruous to see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps, trench-plans, aeroplane photographs and all the documentation of modern war. Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, and one felt, close by, behind the walls of other ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the middle of it, which is not possible in every house. Deer skins spread on a raised platform at the further end make two beds. In that open box are hymn-book, liturgy-book, and some volumes of the Eskimo Bible. Next it are a set of very fair cups and saucers, but it seems incongruous for the china to stand on the mud floor. Various utensils lie about, but there is neither ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... could not remember that there was a boat about the place. I had not seen one. As I thought all this in a wild, excitable way, I snatched up some of my clothes, slipped them on partly as I ran; and even then, incongruous as it may sound, I could not help thinking how the wet hindered me. Then running on, I came upon Gunson, with his face cut and bleeding, struggling back from ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... this that in the newly built Prussian capital society, utterly artificial as it was, an improvised amalgam of incongruous elements, was predisposed, so to speak, to dissoluteness. Berlin swarmed with army men who had no family life and whose whole day was not occupied with military duties. Men of letters, adventurers of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... secular concerns. "Few," he adds with the true breadth of genius which converted the Baptist shoemaker into the Christian statesman and scholar, "who are extensively acquainted with human life, will esteem these cares either unworthy of religion or incongruous with its highest enjoyments." When Carey wrote, the millions of five-acre farmers in India were only beginning to recover from the oppression and neglect of former rulers and the visitation of terrific famines. Trade was as depressed as agriculture. Transit duties, not less offensive than those ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... that it was forbidden by statute. An attempt was made also to prevent fees or robes being given to the masters, but the statute doubtless proved inoperative, and was afterwards repealed. Another custom, which the authorities vainly prohibited, and was plainly incongruous at the season of Lent, was the holding of feasts by bachelors ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... was irrepressible. Carried round again and again, on a wheel that to her was far more like Ixion's than that of the spheres, she never cleared her perceptions as to where he was, and only was half-maddened by the fantastic whirl of incongruous imagery, while she barely sat out Mercury's lengthy harangue; and when her wheel stood still, and she was released, she could not stand, and was indebted to Charon and one of her fellow-nymphs for supporting her to a chair in the back of the scene. Kind Charon hurried to ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... immense distances to be traversed, the natural difficulties presented by the face of the country, the remoteness of the region from civilization, and the mixed, incongruous and hostile character of the inhabitants, we might naturally expect that its occupation by peaceful settlers,—by those forms of household life in which woman is an essential element—would be indefinitely postponed. But that ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... murmured these persuasive words was irresistible to the man who already loved her madly; and the idea of following his divinity in a humble disguise, as many a noble knight had done of old, reconciled him to what would otherwise have seemed too incongruous and humiliating. It could not be considered derogatory to any gentleman to accompany his lady-love, be she what she might, actress or princess, and to attach himself, for love of her bright eyes, to even a band of strolling players. ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... Love and Pleasure, Madam, so incongruous?—Methinks the very name of Love exhilerates; meaner delights were meant but to persuade us, Toys to provoke and heighten our desires, which Love confirms and ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... habit. To-day, therefore, found him in a favorite suit of baggy, wrinkled linen and with a week's stubble of beard upon his chin. He was so plainly an outdoor man that the air of erudition lent him by the pair of gold-rimmed spectacles owlishly perched upon his sunburned nose was strangely incongruous. ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposed beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Pagan statues of the Renaissance; but this at least is certain, that Rondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of marble or of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... are you going to write those sketches of Spanish life?" he asked, with a cheery society laugh, which sounded rather incongruous. "Never, I suppose. Well, the loss is mine. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better. It was going from Philip now, and therefore he gave ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster |
