"Ungenial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knife, fork, and wine-glass; but where four such natures as Mr. Hall, David Sweeting, Shirley, and Caroline were assembled in health and amity, on a green lawn, under a sunny sky, amidst a wilderness of flowers, there could not be ungenial dullness. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the marriage-day. They, of course, walk to church; but then that walk usually leads across fields full of all the beauties of the spring or the summer. There is nothing in the walk itself to flatten down the occasion. But the procession is so dull—so utterly ungenial—a stranger might pass it without guessing that a wedding was toward. Except a few rude jests; except that there is an attempt to walk arm-in-arm (it is only an attempt, for they forget to allow for each other's motions); except the Sunday dresses, utterly ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... cathedral for service, to which he was always keenly devoted, uneventful holidays, filled up most of his school life. His letters at this date are very ordinary; his early precocity seemed, rather to the delight of his parents, to have vanished. He was not a prig, though rather exclusive; not ungenial, though retiring. "A dreadful boy," he writes of himself, "who is as mum as a mouse with his elders, and then makes his school friends roar with laughter in the passage: dumb at home, ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had a certain downright honesty about him, joined with an entire insensibility to those finer perceptions which would have interfered with plain speaking, where plain speaking was desirable; he had a broad, not ungenial humour, which showed him things and persons in their genuine light, and enabled him to picture them for us with a distinctness for which we ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... of Marcus, all war, even when accompanied with victories, was eminently distasteful; and in such painful and ungenial occupations no small part of his life was passed. What he thought of war and of its successes is graphically set forth ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... miles below the salt lagoon there is not a blade of grass either in the bed of the creek or on the neighbouring flats, the soil of both being a stiff cold clay. We passed this ungenial line, therefore, and encamped near a fine pool of water, where both our own wants and those of our horses, as far as feed and water ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... himself, he was a hunter of the Daniel Boone sort. The chase was his sole calling; and he would have indignantly scouted the suggestion that he ever followed it for mere amusement. Though not of ungenial disposition, he held all amateur hunters in lordly contempt; and his conversation with such was always of a condescending character, although he was not, after all, averse to their company. Being myself privileged with his acquaintance, many of my hunting excursions were made in ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the sphere of our own observation. From this most deplorable ignorance this boy had escaped; and the light of learning illumined his mind, as the sun in his daily return reveals anew those forms of life, which, even in an ungenial spring and early summer, his rays had warmed into existence, and nourished and cherished in ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... is founded on a total misconception of the nature of the colony, and a very superficial knowledge of its present state. That a period of twenty-two years has not been sufficient to render New South Wales independent of the mother country, is a reflection which must produce strong and ungenial suspicions of the prudence of those methods which have been pursued to accelerate such a desirable end; and the continuance of the late system, the inefficiency of which has been amply illustrated by recent events, and facts which are incontrovertible, is, of all ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... comported with his pursuits and habits. On the other hand, the quiet temperament of my mother required some more exciting cause than the affections of her husband, to quicken those germs of deep, placid, womanly love, that certainly lay dormant in her heart, like seed withering with the ungenial cold of winter. The last meeting of such a pair was not likely to be attended with any violent outpourings ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... splendidly entertained by the Duke of Orleans at St. Cloud, and by the Dauphin at Meudon. A Marshal of France was charged to do the honours of Marli; and Lewis graciously expressed his concern that the frosts of an ungenial spring prevented the fountains and flower beds from appearing to advantage. On one occasion Portland was distinguished, not only by being selected to hold the waxlight in the royal bedroom, but ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... looked into the windows and beheld the dim and quiet interior, a narrow space, but venerable with the consecration of many centuries. A well-trodden path led across the churchyard. Time gnaws an English gravestone with wonderful appetite. And yet this, same ungenial climate has a lovely way of dealing with certain horizontal monuments. The unseen seeds of mosses find their way into the lettered furrows, and are made to germinate by the watery sunshine of the English sky; and by-and-bye, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... when the ungenial earth, Man's work-place, lay in gloom. Return'st thou in her hour of birth, Of hopes and ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the wanderer in the lore that links the human heart to the gracious form and aspects of the Mighty Mother. In early youth he had been intended for the Church, and subsequent years of ungrateful and ungenial toils had not extinguished the fine scholarship that native aptitude for learning had acquired in the humble school of the village in which he was born. He had been ripe for College when the sudden death of his father, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... not be temptation. It would not be if your mind were full of your work—it would only be refreshment. I don't want my boy to turn stern, and dry, and ungenial. That would not be ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rushed off into the melancholy meadows, among the sodden hay-cocks still standing among the green growth of grass; but a shower, increasing the damp forlornness of the ungenial day, made him turn homewards. When, late in the afternoon, Ethel came into the schoolroom for some Cocksmoor stores, she found him leaning over his books on the table. This was his usual place for ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that the American hotel clerk is a mannerless despot is, me judice, rather too severe. He is certainly apt to be rather curt in his replies and ungenial in his manner; but this is not to be wondered at when one reflects under what a fire of questions he stands all day long and from week to week; and, besides, he does generally give the information ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Federal cavalry back upon their camps; and the same afternoon Jackson, leaving Elk Run Valley, which was immediately occupied by Ewell, with 8000 men, marched up the river to Port Republic. The track, unmetalled and untended, had been turned into a quagmire by the heavy rains of an ungenial spring, and the troops marched only five miles, bivouacking by the roadside. May 1 was a day of continuous rain. The great mountains loomed dimly through the dreary mist. The streams which rushed down the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... attract the notice of the writer; while the results forced upon her mind the conviction, that the tender bud, nurtured with so much care and fidelity, and watered with so many prayers and tears, would never be permitted to burst into full flower, in the ungenial soil of earth. ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... work. We may envy this opportunity to his old opponent, O'Shanassy, who, in power at the time, generously found him a small appointment—a station upon one of the railways—which gave him, at least, a comfortable, and, in a social way, by no means ungenial home for the ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... with me this year: but my grapes, that used to be forward and good, are at present backward beyond all precedent: and this is not the worst of the story; for the same ungenial weather, the same black cold solstice, has injured the more necessary fruits of the earth, and discoloured and blighted our wheat. The crop of hops promises ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... into a very tall weak youth. Mr. Hunt gave up teaching, and became editor of Littell's Magazine. I was sent to the school of Mr. Hurlbut—as I believe it was then spelled, but I may be wrong. He had been a Unitarian clergyman, but was an ungenial, formal, rather harsh man—the very opposite of Mr. Hunt. My schoolmates soon found that though so tall, I was physically very weak, and many of them continually bullied and annoyed me. Once I was driven into a formal stand-up ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Romano was not pure enough to detach him from "deformity and grimace" and "ungenial colour." Primaticcio and Nicolo dell Abate propagated the style of Julio Romano on the Gallic side of the Alps, in mythologic and allegoric works. These frescoes from the Odyssea at Fontainbleau are lost, but are worthy admiration, though in the feeble etchings of Theodore van Fulden. The "ideal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... agreeable address may be just as sincere as if he had the noble art of treading on everybody's toes. The "putter-down-upon-system" man is quite as often urged by love of display as by a love of truth; he is ungenerous, combative, and ungenial; he ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... sorts of ingenious inductions. The little medical lady struck him as a perfect example of the "Yankee female"—the figure which, in the unregenerate imagination of the children of the cotton-States, was produced by the New England school-system, the Puritan code, the ungenial climate, the absence of chivalry. Spare, dry, hard, without a curve, an inflexion or a grace, she seemed to ask no odds in the battle of life and to be prepared to give none. But Ransom could see that she was not an enthusiast, and after his contact with his cousin's enthusiasm this was ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... our most delicate and exquisite wines of Ay, all sparkle and sunshine, can only be made to yield those wines when they are planted in our poorest and most chalky soil, and in regions where the climate is so ungenial that the plants have to be set as closely as possible together in the ground. We really huddle them together, as we do sheep in the hurdles in winter, to keep one another warm. This M. Harmel did with his converts. He taught his workmen to associate more closely with one another, he brought ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... ever dreamed that this wall which they made to endure would after seventeen hundred years have no more important use than this—to afford shelter to a few little birds and to the solitary man that watched them—from the bleak wind. Many a strange Roman curse on this ungenial climate must these same stones have heard. Looking through a gap in the wall I saw, close by, on the other side, a dozen men at work with pick and shovel throwing up huge piles of earth. They were uncovering a small portion of that ancient ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... creeping hours would bring luncheon, when the same inharmonious party would assemble around the same ungenial table, and eat and drink ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... the ground in the morning, it melts soon, but the day is ungenial, with S.W. wind, and ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... divergence from the desired type. Before any over-tendency to the amenities and luxuries of civilization, in particular, he becomes unreasonable and relentless. Hence there appears something hard and ungenial in his views of life, utterly out of keeping with the delicate tenderness which he shows in the woods. The housekeeping of bees and birds he finds noble and beautiful, but for the home and cradle of the humblest human pair he can scarcely be said to have even toleration; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... it. It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the burning ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... The BOREAS arrived in England in June. Nelson, who had many times been supposed to be consumptive when in the West Indies, and perhaps was saved from consumption by that climate, was still in a precarious state of health; and the raw wet weather of one of our ungenial summers brought on cold, and sore throat, and fever; yet his vessel was kept at the Nore from the end of June till the end of November, serving as a slop and receiving ship. This unworthy treatment, which more probably proceeded from inattention than from neglect, excited in Nelson ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... traveling in mail coaches in December, and I almost felt, when I read the sentence, what my aunt Dall told me after I had requested you to come to us now, that it was a want of consideration in me to have invited you at so ungenial a season for traveling. I had one reason for doing so which I hope will excuse the apparent selfishness of the arrangement. Toward the end of the spring I shall be leaving town, I hope to come nearer your land, and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... so ungenial, and likely to be so, that I put off my journey to Ipswich till next week. I do not dislike the weather for my part: but one is best at home in such: and as I am to stay two days with the Hockleys, I would fain have tolerably fair days, and fair ways, for it: that one ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... is an abundance of still life in the Gardens at this ungenial season. We find the Elephant, the Antelopes, and the Zebra, in their winter quarters, and their mightinesses, the large cats, as the lions, tiger, and leopards, accommodated with a snug fire. The tropical birds, as the parrots, maccaws, &c., have been removed from the extremity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... in some few instances, the pleroma of aristocratic dignity undergoes a sort of acetic fermentation, and comes out in ungenial qualities. Now and then, at a public watering-place, a man or woman appears no otherwise distinguished than by a remarkable talent for being disagreeable; and it is amusing to find, on inquiry, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to accent its artless domesticity, it would be the group of boys, horse copers in ambition, possibly in achievement, who sit in a row under a fence, with their teeth grimly clenched upon clay pipes, their eyes screwed up in perpetual and ungenial observation. Their conversation is telegraphic, smileless, esoteric, and punctuated with expectoration. If Phaeton and the horses of the sun were to take a turn round the fair field these critics would find little in them to commend. ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... pleasures of life were not for her. She had been torn away from her happiness and had been compelled to go back to conditions she hated. Her passions were strong and her seventeen-year-old senses were highly developed by premature work and an irritating and ungenial home. So, in a kind of gloomy intensity, she let herself go in the ordinary way of unguarded young girlhood. She gave herself to a young fellow she met in the street one evening, without joy but with deep seriousness. She ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Northern Ocean, with a rocky coast, an ungenial climate, and a soil scarcely fruitful,—this was the material patrimony which descended to the English race—an inheritance that would have been little worth but for the inestimable moral gift that ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... ungenial ties have bound Thy fate unto another's care, That arm, which clasps thy bosom round, Cannot ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... cultivated fruit. Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that produces fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that most of the wild, unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold and ungenial districts the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had, Thoreau's sauce of sharp, November ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... again dashed their hopes in 1821, and threw a great part of the South and West into a state of decided famine. The spring of that year was wet and stormy, retarding the necessary work, especially the planting of potatoes. The summer was also unfavourable, May was cold and ungenial; in June there was frost, with a north wind, and sometimes a scorching sun. The autumn, like the spring, was wet and severe, rain falling to a very unusual extent. The consequent floods did extensive injury; not merely were crops of hay floated off the lowland meadows, but in various places ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... that the apostle thus pursued the most effective mode of advancing the Christian cause. It might, indeed, have been thought that Corinth was a very ungenial soil for the gospel, as Venus was the favourite deity of the place; and a thousand priestesses, or, in other words, a thousand prostitutes, were employed in the celebration of her orgies. [109:1] The inhabitants generally were sunk in the very depths of moral pollution. But the preaching ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... waited for that slow-coach of a Tom to bring them to her young master. No sweep of leaf-covered hills seen through bending branches laden with blossoms; no stretch of sky or slant of sunshine; only a grim, funereal, artificial formality, as ungenial and flattening to a boy of his tastes, education and earlier environment as a State asylum's would have been to a red ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... on the bosom of the Eternal. Brahma, the architect of the world, poised on a Lotus-leaf, floated upon the waters, and all that he was able to discern with his eight eyes was water and darkness. Amid scenes so ungenial and dismal, the god sank into a profound reverie, when he thus soliloquized: 'Who am I? Whence am I?' In this state of abstraction Brahma continued during the period of a century and a half of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... creation of fresh hopes. The impoverished merchant, who may no longer look out for his argosies, may yet be in glee when he finds it "a rare dropping morning for the early colewort." To another multitude, poverty involves loss of rank,— a letting down among strangers whose manners are ungenial, and their thoughts unfamiliar. For these there may be solace in retirement, or the evil may fall short of its threats. The reduced gentlewoman may live in patient solitude, or may grow into sympathy with her neighbours, by raising some of them up to herself, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... hall resounding like Pandemonium with the howls of operators, the assistant teacher left me to my own resources at my desk. The next boy was posting up his ledger, figuring his morning's loss, as I discovered later on; and from this ungenial task he was readily diverted by the sight ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... main supplies of strength from the sunshine admitted freely to her room, with the spring air, redolent with the delicious odors of the freshly-turned earth, the budding trees, and early blossoms from the garden heneath her windows. She shrank and shivered under the ungenial sky, while the drizzling mist soaked life and animation out of the fragile body. Occasional fits of delirium, increased difficulty of breathing, and a steady decline of the slender remains of vital force, warned her attendants that their care would not be required much longer. She ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... I call ungenial. We won't say anything about him,—will we? Have you seen much of the Earl?" This she asked as though such a question had no reference ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... to this truly charming and delectable, though much and unjustly abused town, when I may again have the pleasure of holding those agreeable conversations on subjects of interest which have formed the solace of many hours which might otherwise have been spent in the society of ungenial spirits, whose base-born spirits cannot soar to those exalted heights of poetical sentiment in which I, it must be confessed, with due humbleness, delight to roam. Hoping soon to receive a response congenial to my heart, no more at present from your attached friend, if I may take the liberty ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... At this ungenial period Louis XIII gave a splendid entertainment at the Louvre, to which he personally bade the Cardinal, who eagerly availed himself of so favourable an opportunity of mortifying the Queen-mother, by dividing with his sovereign the homage and adulation ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... feelings similar to those with which we see flowers disposed in vases, to ornament the drawing-rooms of a capital. We doubtless regard them with pleasure, with greater pleasure, perhaps, because, in the midst of a place ungenial to them, they remind us of the distant spots on which they flourish in spontaneous exuberance. But we miss the sap, the freshness, and the bloom. Or, if we may borrow another illustration from Queen Scheherezade, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... quietly gave up his own holidays, was always at his post, and had hitherto so far lightened Mr. Underwood's toil, that he was undoubtedly getting through this summer better than the last, for his bodily frame had long been affected by the increased amount of toil in an ungenial atmosphere, and every access of cold weather had told on him in throat and chest attacks, which, with characteristic buoyancy, he would not believe serious. He never deemed himself aught but 'better,' and the invalid ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... English genius was effecting in science a revolution which will, to the end of time, be reckoned among the highest achievements of the human intellect. Bacon had sown the good seed in a sluggish soil and an ungenial season. He had not expected an early crop, and in his last testament had solemnly bequeathed his fame to the next age. During a whole generation his philosophy had, amidst tumults wars, and proscriptions, been slowly ripening in a few well constituted minds. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... being a good sailor and a hardy young chap, albeit a prince of royal blood, was abroad early, after a breakfast that staggered the few who remained unstaggered up to that particular crisis. A genial sailor-man and an equally ungenial deck swabber advised him, in totally different styles of address, to stay below if he knew what was good for him, only to be thanked with all the blitheness of a man who jolly well knows what is good for him, or who doesn't care whether it is good for him ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... faith, and broken services of earth, there be a region of completeness where all that was tendency here shall have become effect; and all that was but in germ here, and sorely frostbitten by the ungenial climate, and shrivelled by the foul vapours in the atmosphere, shall blossom and burgeon into eternal life. The Christian life, as it is to-day, in its attainments and imperfections, is at once the witness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... at about eleven o'clock. The sky was cheerless and the air ungenial, which we regretted, as we were going to Loch Lomond, and wished to greet the first of the Scottish lakes with our cheerfullest and best feelings. Crossed the Leven at the end of Dumbarton, and, when we looked behind, had a pleasing view of the ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... indeed, herself a woman of extraordinary power, of heart as well as head. Many circumstances conspired to conceal some of her natural faculties. She lost her mother very young; her father—speaking with great diffidence, from a very slight and imperfect knowledge—appeared to me a harsh and ungenial man. She inherited from him her thin voice, but not the steel-edged sharpness of his own; and she inherited, not from him, but from her mother, a largeness of heart that entered proportionately into the working of her mind. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... beautiful sinner was evidently not the object which had brought the old monk of the desert into a neighbourhood so strange and ungenial to his habits; for, recovering himself in a few moments, he hurried on to the door of the Museum, and there planted himself, scanning earnestly the faces of the passers-out, and meeting, of course, with his due share ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... and to discover, with delight, where his force lay: is it not in the analysis of motive; and in a subtle perception of the most obscure and secret workings of the mind? Still, admire Balzac as we may, I think we do not like him; we rather feel towards him as towards an ungenial acquaintance who is for ever holding up in strong light our defects, and who rarely draws forth ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... travelled a good deal in Germany," I said, "and I have never anywhere found the people so stupid and stolid and ungenial ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... as a poet. It has been his lot to earn his bread by the exercise of the prose part of his mind,—by those qualities which he has in common with other men,—and his poetry has been written in the intervals and breathing-spaces of a life of regular industry. This necessity for ungenial toil may have added something to the shyness and gravity of the poet's manners; but it has doubtless given earnestness, concentration, depth, and a strong flavor of life to his verse. Had he been a man of leisure, he might have written more, but he could hardly have written better. And nothing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... clubs indulged in, was not injurious to men engaged in the barn and at the plough. A well-ordered mind will be strengthened, as well as embellished, by elegant knowledge, while over those naturally barren and ungenial all that is refined or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps of granite, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... who scarcely belonged to the rough world she was so soon to leave. And the chosen child of God, the little maiden on whom the mystic dove had rested in its flight, soon drooped like a flower in an ungenial air,—soon gave her fond mother a last kiss and a last smile; and then her gentle spirit went to seek her brother's kindred soul. They were buried together; and the day was now come for Francesca, when earthly happiness altogether vanishes, when life has its duties but has lost ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... of the graceful willow tribes, and all the neighbouring shrubs, which only a moment before I had shivered to look upon, bent down, as they appeared, beneath a load of ungenial icicles, were now, as though touched by some enchanter's wand, sparkling and brilliant, reminding one of the diamond-growing trees ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... went through an expressive pantomime of an overladen foot-soldier up and down the room, in time to the music. The only person who didn't laugh was James—which I thought ungenial. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... lives of both, must have been so far qualified to do justice between them. But justice he has not done; and to him chiefly we repeat that at this day are owing the false impressions of Pope's selfish, ungenial, or misanthropic nature; and the humiliating associations connected with Pope's petty manoeuvring in trivial domestic affairs, chiefly through Dr. Johnson's means, will never be obliterated. Let us turn, however, from Dr. Johnson, whom, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... of manners, as of character, is always the Home, where woman is the teacher. The manners of society at large are but the reflex of the manners of our collective homes, neither better nor worse. Yet, with all the disadvantages of ungenial homes, men may practise self-culture of manner as of intellect, and learn by good examples to cultivate a graceful and agreeable behaviour towards others. Most men are like so many gems in the rough, which need polishing by contact with other and better natures, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... every efficient officer, yet it is to be said that the one inspires and leads, the other moulds and compels. The one, though seemingly reserved, is in character sympathetic, and influences by example chiefly; the other, austerely courteous, is towards associates distant and ungenial, working by fear rather than by love. For these broad reasons of distinction it is Mathews's battle that best measures the reaction of which Hawke is the type, for there was especially illustrated defect of spirit, to cover which the letter ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... changed, and the crop was beaten down by the rain, in some places so thoroughly that it never rose again; and from that time to the day it was reaped (21st August), there were not more than six fine warm days. This cold and ungenial weather would, no doubt, materially affect both the quantity and quality of the crop,—the sample only being just fair. On thrashing out the crop, I find the result to be as follows:—Where the guano and chemical manure ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... cruelty, the folly of the boy: then comes that period, so trying to the faith of parents, when all their early care seems blasted; when the vineyard, which they had fenced so tenderly, seems all despoiled and trodden under foot. It is indeed a discouraging season, the exact image of the ungenial springs of our natural year. But after this there comes, as it were, a second beginning of life, when principle takes the place of innocence. There is a time,—many of you must have arrived at it,—when thought and inquiry awaken; when, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... them. It was the drums of Naseby and Dunbar that gathered the minute-men on Lexington Common; it was the red dint of the axe on Charles's block that marked One in our era. The Puritans had their faults. They were narrow, ungenial; they could not understand the text, "I have piped to you and ye have not danced," nor conceive that saving one's soul should be the cheerfullest, and not the dreariest, of businesses. Their preachers had a way, like the painful Mr. Perkins, of pronouncing the word damn with ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... some ungenial censors as the age of shams, may be described by more kindly critics as emphatically an age of "shows." Advancing from the time-honoured shows of Flora and Pomona—if not always improving on the type—and so on from the cattle show, suggestive of impending Christmas fare, we have ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... retaining more of the simplicity and quick susceptibility belonging to childhood, are unusually fond of waxen exhibitions. Too much worldly experience indisposes men to the playfulness and to the toyfulness (if we may invent that word) of childhood, not less through the ungenial churlishness which it gradually deposits, than through the expansion of understanding ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... talents of mediocrity are all exhausted in the monotony of the employment allotted to them; and that man must have no common head who brings with him the geniality of his powers unstripped of their freshness by the ungenial labors of life to the cultivation of the genial.' After insisting at some length on this wise, Schiller passes to the other side of the contemplation, and proceeds thus:—'It suited my immediate purpose to point out the injuries of this condition of the species, without ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... to make in an imperfect world. Such a man constantly misunderstands himself and is misunderstood. He takes severe, unpractical views of his own character and of life generally. Not necessarily morose or ungenial, he is always apt to be thought so. Gordon's conclusion that he had lost caste is a proof of supersensitiveness, and the deep effect produced upon his temperament by the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... sort who make a living, or try to make a living, out of their pretended theories. Indeed, these last he treated, as they deserved, with a scathing satire quite different from his humorous and not ungenial comments on the wonderful theories of the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... better, except sleep, and that of late has been at its old pranks. Last evening, I felt what I had not known for a long time, an inclination to walk for amusement; I took a short walk, and came back again neither breathless nor fatigued. This has been a gloomy, frigid, ungenial summer, but of late it seems to mend; I hear the heat sometimes mentioned, but I do not ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... sunlight! A pang went through him at the thought that one day he might be alone with Davie in the huge castle, untended by the consciousness that a living light and loveliness flitted somewhere about its gloomy and ungenial walls. But he would not think the thought! How that dismal Miss Carmichael must have worried her! When the very hope of the creature in his creator is attacked in the name of religion; when his longing after a living God is met with the offer of a paltry ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... than business, can be a remedy large enough for so large an evil. True it is, that a peculiarly frank or jovial temperament in a sovereign may do much for a season to thaw this punctilious reserve and ungenial constraint; but that is an accident, and personal to an individual. And, on the other hand, to balance even this, it may be remarked, that, in all noble and fashionable society, where there happens to be a pride in sustaining what is deemed a good tone in conversation, it is peculiarly aimed ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... mate to the Blenheim, of ninety guns, bearing the flag of Admiral Cavendish. Having arrived at the West Indies, he was appointed to the Dunkirk on the Jamaica station, anxiously waiting for promotion. He was above two years in that ungenial climate, where his health became much impaired before he received his commission. Several letters he wrote to his friends express his extreme desire to obtain it, as will be seen by the following ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... all, what is the head and front of Calvin's offending?—that he was cold, unsocial, and ungenial in character; and that, as a theologian, he fearlessly and inexorably pushed out his deductions to their remotest logical sequences. But he was no more austere than Chrysostom, no more ascetic than Basil, not even sterner in character than Michael Angelo, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... that a man such as has been described, of a morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of the sun into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely psychological phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial, and sometimes even hard, cold, and perverse. From the bent of his intellectual temperament it happens that in his simplest and sweetest passages he still seems to be studying and curiously observing, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... deficiency in the matter of humour. Life is regarded as too serious a business to be played with, and the delight in trifles, which is one of the surest signs of healthy energy, becomes ashamed and abashed in its presence. The atmosphere that it creates is oppressive, remote, ungenial. "I declare that Uncle John is intolerable, except when there is a death in the family—and then he is insupportable," said a youthful nephew of a virtuous clergyman of this type in my presence the other day, adding, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... unsocial, bigoted, relatively to occasions; and its force has no necessary connection with grandeur, generosity, and enlargement of soul. Even in great men, like Cromwell, there is something in its aspect which is harsh, ugly, haggard, and ungenial; even in them it is strong by the stifling of many a generous thought and tolerant feeling; and when it descends to animate sterile and stunted natures, endowed with sufficient will to make their meanness or malignity efficient, its unfruitful force is absolutely hateful. It has done good work ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... Lensky's father and mother, and hither came, early in the November that followed her meeting with Victor Joyselle, Lady Brigit Mead as the guest of the Lenskys. And here she stayed, while the mild, sunny winter days drifted by unmarked, a silent, ungenial guest. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him. But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Lawrence, especially, to capture and subdue. Her little arts to effect his subjugation were too subtle and impalpable to attract my observation; but I thought there was a certain refined affectation of superiority, and an ungenial self-consciousness about her, that negatived all her advantages; and after she was gone, Rose interpreted to me her various looks, words, and actions with a mingled acuteness and asperity that made me wonder, equally, at the lady's artifice and my sister's penetration, ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... atheism above mentioned, my own formulation of which, in another book some decade ago, I may as well, in a note,[477] borrow, instead of merely paraphrasing it. The milder idiosyncrasy referred to therein will certainly not adjust itself, whatever it might do to the not ungenial ideals of Fecondite, to those of Travail. This ends in a sort of Paradise of Man, where electricity takes every kind of labour (except that of cultivating the gardens?) off men's hands, and the Coquecigrues have come again, and the pigs run about ready roasted, and a millennium or milliardennium ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... regretted it, is equally natural, for, from that day, his good fortune deserted him. And he might also have discovered that he had committed a great crime, with no other fruit than that of making a useless alliance, encumbering himself with an ungenial companion, and leaving an orphan child dependant on strangers, and continually tantalised by the recollections of a fallen throne. Those feelings, in the solitude of his chamber, and the general dejection of his captivity, must have so often clouded his declining hours, that no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various |
