"Stilted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 12. This rather stilted letter is nearly identical with one to the other consul-designate, another aristocrat, Claudius Marcellus. Cicero is in each case trying to do his own business, while writing to a man of higher social rank ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... of the Nights is not Lane of the Dictionary—and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale's Koran by their anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to the student, but utterly out of place for readers of "The Nights;" re-published, as these notes have been ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... in stilted phrases, inconsecutive. They dared not converse naturally, each fearing to say too little or too much. For the memory of that surge of emotion, transient though it had been, in which their discussion had culminated, that afternoon, stood between them like a warning ghost, an ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... defence, threatened to resign his office if such officers were indicted while they continued to obey their paroles, and such was the logic of his argument and the force of his character that those indictments were soon after quashed. So that he penned no idle platitude; he fashioned no stilted epigrams; he spoke the earnest convictions of an honest heart when he said, "Let us have peace." [Applause.] He never tired of giving unstinted praise to worthy subordinates for the work they did. Like the chief artists who weave the Gobelin ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... left the room and the newcomer regarded his retiring figure with a twinkle in his eye. Then he took a turn around the room in stilted fashion—like one who "carried about with him his pits, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... a high, stilted voice, and as she sat primly in the straight-backed old chair, knitting away at nothing, she presented a ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... have no children anywhere in their environment to whom they can talk intimately soon become queer and lop-sided. They may not always realize it but others will find them awkward and stilted and covered with cobwebs and dust. Such people will be found hard to get on with and full of snippiness. It is half what ails folks, that so many of them have no children in their lives and it affects them like malnutrition. Let a baby enter a street car filled with moldy, musty grown-ups ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... grantor, in the formal and diffuse rhetoric peculiar to his generation, and, perhaps, too much contemned by ours. To say the least, we are no more warranted in despising the utterances of noble, self-sacrificing philanthropists, because they are clothed in phrases now deemed verbose and stilted, than we would be in disparaging the deeds of historic heroes, because they wore armor now antiquated and struck their doughty blows with weapons obsolete. When Peter Cooper wrote, in the letter now before me, "The great object I desire to accomplish ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term "second class," though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... desire to vary the diction and to avoid the repetition of the same word. To find four different terms for nearly the same idea "difference," "odds," "distinction," and "contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. While it is true that the term "euphuism" has come to be applied to any stilted, antithetical style that pays more attention to the manner of expressing a thought than to its worth, we should remember that English prose style has advanced because some writers, like Lyly, emphasized the importance of artistic form. Shakespeare occasionally employs euphuistic ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Lucy filled in for him. That was another of Peter's expressions; they shared together a number of such stilted, high-sounding phrases, mostly culled either out of Adelphi melodrama or the fiction of ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... endured extremity; this second peace again drifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor were overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts. Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in sabots. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, "An honorable scar, your honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting for his most gracious Majesty, King George!" ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... likewise spoke a brand of idiomatic English which immediately put him in a class by himself. He regarded words as sacred things. He used them, in his writing or in his speech, with the utmost care and discrimination; yet this did not result in a halting or stilted style; he spoke with the utmost ease, going rapidly from thought to thought, choosing invariably the one needful word, lighting up the whole with whimsicalities all his own, occasionally emphasizing a good point by looking downward and glancing over his ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... known of them is his Farewell Address, issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In the composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the United States, and his Diary, kept from 1755-85, should also be mentioned as important sources for a full ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... went to welcome in Christmas. The church of San Moise is in the highest style of the Renaissance art, which is, I believe, the lowest style of any other. The richly sculptured facade is divided into stories; the fluted columns are stilted upon pedestals, and their lines are broken by the bands which encircle them like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible point theatrical saints and angels, only sustained from falling to the ground by iron bars let into their ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... all smoking and exchanging compliments in the high-flown, stilted Samoan style, there entered the house a strapping young warrior, carrying a wickerwork cage, in which were two of the rare and famous Manu Mea (red-bird) of Samoa—the Didunculus or tooth-billed pigeon. These were the property of the young chief commanding the rebel troops, ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... Through the stilted language of this somewhat unlettered Indian we catch faint glimpses of the poetic beauty with which the tradition glowed when actually related at the wigwam door. An attempt has been made to retain and crystallize this poetic beauty ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... ear-rings observed the form of Aunt Amanda on the ground. He stooped down and examined her, and stood up again. Then he eyed the company of travellers with a hard cold eye, and spoke deliberately and in a low voice. His manner of speech was somewhat stilted and precise, and scarcely what might have been expected ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... consigned to the dingy digits of an unidistinguishing printer's-devil; so doth Caesar's dust come to stop a bung-hole. One morsel more, about children, blessed children, and for this bout I shall have tilted sufficiently in the Muses' court; or, if it must be so said, unhandsome critic, stilted to satiety in false heroics: stay—not false; judge me, my heart. Suppose then an imaginary parent thus to speak ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the direct narration of the Tale of the Baryufu Kwannon. So also with the translations of the gidayu and the ko[u]dan attached. These are for recitation. In the original the pronoun is rarely written in. But the literal translation of the honorifics would appear stilted. To westerners these are appellations; to the native they ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... in love. He could have wished to have his letter back again. It was an absurd letter. There were a thousand and one things, now that he came to think of it, that he might have said, things infinitely better and more moving than those stilted phrases of his, those accursed, sophisticated, pretentious, fine-spun phrases, though, luckily, the punctuation had been pretty bad and the lines shockingly crooked. He tried not to think, not to feel; but he felt and thought, ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... then the evidence of this unreal life, which she was leading, was made apparent to Octavius and Romanzo by some stilted mode of speech. At such times they humored her; it provided amusement of the richest sort. She also continued to invent "novels" for Romanzo's benefit, and many a half-hour the two spent in the carriage house—Aileen aglow with ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... Mr. Merrill's house, the three girls and the one young man were seated around the fire, and their talk, Merrill as it had begun, was becoming minute by minute more stilted. This was largely the fault of Susan, who would not be happy until she had taken Jane upstairs and left Mr. Worthington and Cynthia together. This matter had been arranged between the sisters before supper. Susan found her opening ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the following study is not to revive the reputation of a forgotten author or to suggest that Mrs. Haywood may yet "come into her own." For the lover of eighteenth century fashions her numerous pages have indeed a stilted, early Georgian charm, but with the passing of Ramillies wigs and velveteen small-clothes the popularity of her novels vanished once for all. She had her world in her time, but that world and time disappeared with the French Revolution ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... so humane, so full of a brave delight in life, was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of circumstance, broke into the stilted literary world of 1742; and Murphy's Irish rhetoric is not too warm when he talks of this sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when his genius broke forth at once, with an effulgence superior to all the rays of ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... long words and stilted phrases, while in conversation one's thoughts seek expression through lines of least resistance—familiar words and short sentences. But in writing, these same thoughts go stumbling over long words and groping ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... is framing stilted tragedies with chorus and declamation in the grand Senecan manner, not in his complimentary addresses to lords, ladies and royalty, nor in the classic masques and philosophical dialogue, but in the less ambitious poems of Delia and Rosamond, especially in such a sonnet as ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... straight up all over his head, and a haughtiness in his voice, in all his movements, in his every attitude which plainly showed the esteem in which he held himself. They were people who had a strict etiquette for everything, and whose feelings seemed always stilted, ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... not ask of thee," Fra Paolo answered, suddenly unbending from the stilted mood of his last words. "By the light that is given him must ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Vicenza, which arrived at Padua every night of the year, brought with it in particular on the night of October 13, 1721, a tall, personable young man, an Englishman, in a dark blue cloak, who swang briskly down from the coupe and asked in stilted Italian for "La sapienza del Signer Dottor' Lanfranchi." From out of a cloud of steam—for the weather was wet and the speaker violently hot—a husky voice replied, "Eccomi—eccomi, a servirla." The young man took off his hat ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... composed with the obvious purpose of surpassing them; in which attempt they succeed as much as a hollow hyperbole would in competition with a most fervent truth. Every tragical common-place is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase; and even the most common remark is forced and stilted. A total poverty of sentiment is dressed out with wit and acuteness. There is fancy in them, or at least a phantom of it; for they contain an example of the misapplication of every mental faculty. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... cannot possibly enjoy a luncheon-no matter how carefully the menu has been prepared, no matter how delightful the environment—if there are awkward lapses in the conversation; if there are moments of painful, embarrassing silence; or if the conversation is stilted, affected ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... Gladmans, with their homely dwellings and hospitality, drew him to them like magnets. There was nothing too fine nor too lofty in these friends for his tastes or his affection; they did not "affront him with their light." His fancy always stooped to moralize; he hated the stilted attitudes and pretensions of poetasters and ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... foregone, the mind is prepared for it. But these men will have nothing but fifth acts; and seem to skip, as unworthy, all the circumstances leading to them. This, however, is part of the scheme—the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime, that our teachers have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and other antihumbuggists should heartily, according to the strength that is in them, endeavor to pull down. What, for instance, could ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reached Lord Blandamer at Fording the next morning as he sat over a late breakfast, with a Virgil open on the table by his coffee-cup. He read the Rector's stilted periods without a smile, and made a mental note that he would at once send a specially civil acknowledgment. Then he put it carefully into his pocket, and turned back to the Di patrii indigetes et Romule Vestaque Mater ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... enough to observe the visitors closely soon began to look upon Richard and Nathan as a couple of quaint, harmless, exceedingly well-bred old gentlemen, rather provincial in appearance and a little stilted in their manners, who, before the evening was over, would, perhaps, become tired of the gayety, ask to be excused, and betake themselves to bed. All of which would be an eminently proper proceeding in view of their extreme age and general infirmities, old gentlemen of three score ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... fifteenth century falls naturally into three classes, corresponding to three currents of influence; and all three frequently appear in the work of one man, not blended, but distinct. One is the conventional love-poem of the Galician school, seldom containing a fresh or personal note. Another is the stilted allegory with erotic or historical page xvi content, for whose many sins Dante was chiefly responsible, though Petrarch, he of the Triunfi, and Boccaccio cannot escape some blame. Third is a vein of highly moral reflections upon the vanity of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... the tragedians and comedians you speak of, at least if the former are men in heavy stilted shoes, and clothes all picked out with gold bands; they have absurd head- pieces with vast open mouths, from inside which comes an enormous voice, while they take great strides which it seems to me must be dangerous in those ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... were ridiculously stilted, John turned with a song on his lips and skipped across to the home porch swing, where his mother found him a moment later, and made him come in and get ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... says: "In the practice of acting, a most important point is the study of elocution; and, in elocution one great difficulty is the use of sufficient force to be generally heard without being unnaturally loud, and without acquiring a stilted delivery. I never knew an actor who brought the art of elocution to greater perfection than the late Charles Mathews, whose utterance on the stage was so natural, that one was surprised to find when near him that he was really speaking in a very loud key." ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... pronoun who may be said to have no objective form in spoken English. We regularly say, "Who did you see?" or, "Who were they talking to?" etc. The more formal "To whom were they talking?" sounds stilted in conversation, ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... was the birthplace of Madison. His maternal grandfather, whose name was Conway, had a plantation at that place, and young Mrs. Madison happened to be there on a visit to her mother when her first child, James, was born. In the stately—not to say stilted—biography of him by William C. Rives, the christened name of this lady is given as Eleanor. Mr. Rives may have thought it not in accordance with ancestral dignity that the mother of so distinguished a son should have been burdened with so commonplace and homely a name as Nelly. But we are ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... what description you gave of his appearance;—a sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white neckcloth, and stilted up on ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... The insipid Tony speaks his lines perfectly, if he fails to grasp the idea that a little acting thrown in would be an improvement; a very charming Cousin Con is made out of Miss Villiers; a rather stilted but strictly correct old lady out of Lady Gertrude Vining. But Florence Delmaine, as Kate Hardcastle, leaves nothing to be desired, and many are the complimentary speeches uttered from time to time by the audience. Arthur Dynecourt too had not overpraised his own powers. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... becomes poor in flesh, the coat is rough and lusterless, and the skin tight and harsh, producing a condition termed "hidebound," with considerable "tucking up" of the abdomen. The horse shows a short, stilted, choppy gait, which later becomes stiffer and more restricted, while on standing a position simulating that in founder is assumed, with a noticeable drop to the croup. The animal at this stage usually lies down and remains recumbent for several days at a time. Bed sores frequently arise ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... was easy, colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... to present-day standards, somewhat pompous and stilted, but all boys should read this account of the New York settlers' warfare against the Iroquois and know Deerslayer, the ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... and said, "I have just done it." Apelles replied, "Without your telling me, I should know it was painted quickly; I only wonder you haven't painted more such in the time." As then (for I now return from my digression), I advise to avoid stilted and bombastic language, so again do I urge to avoid a finical and petty style of speech; for tall talk is unpopular, and petty language makes no impression. And as the body ought to be not only sound but in good condition, so speech ought to be not only not feeble but vigorous. For a safe mediocrity ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... literary point of view, and I don't like his underground cavern with the stream running through it. It sounds like one of the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. Nor do I like his description; he evidently is writing for effect. Besides, his style is vicious; it is too stilted. Finally, he has recourse to the ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... her fear, she walked, not sideways as always, but erect, her chest thrown out, which gave her figure a droll, stilted air of importance. Her shoes made a knocking sound on the floor, and ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... unnatural note in his voice when he was reciting sentences that he had learned by rote: she who had helped in so many rehearsals before his public utterances could not be mistaken. However, she had to be contented with it. And, stilted and stiff as it was, it certainly seemed to imply that she ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... each author's style—the stateliness of De Quincey's, for instance, the vividness of Webster's, the oratorical character of Macaulay's, the ruggedness of Carlyle's, the poetical beauty of Emerson's, the humor of Irving's, and the brilliancy of Holmes's—the last lines from whom are purposely stilted, as ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... stately and magnificent, this morning! that speech sounded grand and stilted enough to ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... that were stilted and shoddy and speak them in a way to make them sound natural and distinctive and real. She was a clear blonde, but her speaking voice had in it a contralto note ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... be noticed that, instead of the usual elegant inclination in a continuous curve from the spring to the apex, they rise perpendicularly for some distance above the piers on either side, and then take rather an abrupt turn inwards, suggesting the imposition of a pointed heading on an original stilted form. Further signs of alteration appear on the northern side, where the capitals have been recut in the Perpendicular fashion; but the Norman pilasters and mouldings on the south remain untouched. On ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... Rouen is Pierre Corneille,[73] "ce vieux Romain parmi les francais" as Voltaire called him; and we may be grateful that after getting the second prize for Latin verses in the third class of the Jesuit College,[74] he gave up stilted affectations for the vigorous phrases of his mother-tongue. Though his brother Thomas passes over the little episode in silence, his nephew Fontenelle lets us into a literary secret which reveals Corneille's first love affair ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... in it, guided ever by Fifanti's lady. And whatever we read by way of divergence, ever and anon we would come back to the stilted, lucid, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... the true Stoic with the motto 'all or nothing'. But he has nothing of the stilted Stoicism that is such a painful feature of the plays of Seneca; nor, however perverse and affected he may be in diction, do we ever feel that his Stoicism is in some respects no better than a moral pose, a distressing feeling that sometimes afflicts as we read Seneca's letters ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... passes to the bear:— 'How changed, my friend, from what you were! How sightly once! how ugly now!' 'Humph! truly how?' Growl'd Bruin in his way— 'How else than as a bear should be, I pray? Who taught your stilted highness to prefer One form to every other, sir? Doth yours possess peculiar powers The merits to decide, of ours? With all respect, I shall appeal my case To some sweet beauty of the bearish race. Please pass it by, if you dislike my face. I live content, and free from care; And, well remembering ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... lords and ladies spent their time at court, filling idle hours with compliment, love-making, veiled jibe and swift retort; if we read our Euphues again, renewing our acquaintance with its absurdly elaborated and stilted style, its tireless winding of sentences round a topic without any advance in thought, its affectation of philosophy and classical learning; if we remember that to speak euphuistically was a coveted and studiously cultivated accomplishment, and that to pun, to utter caustic jests, to let ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... the breath of the great wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled with thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to translate into the written word. And the result of the effort seemed always to be bathos! Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, obscurity, and awkwardness clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win the great secret of language; the stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished away in clearer light. The periods of despair were often long and ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... of Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... stilted English. "Honorable Skylark shall be marvelous wonder. If permitting, I shall luxuriate in preparing ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... judgment in the liberty of his fancy may as well shew the want of it in its confinement." [Footnote: Preface to Four New Plays: ib. 498.] Besides, he adds in effect on the next page, so far from "confining the fancy" rhyme is apt to lead to turgid and stilted writing. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... his keen appreciation of its beauty and its value, have tended to inflate his sentences with an appearance of display. His poetic diction is simpler than that of his prose; but here, too, he is habitually over-elevated, whence he becomes sometimes stilted, and oftentimes he drops below pitch with an inadequate and disappointing close. But we must honour him in the position which he holds. He is the leader of that noble series of English scholars who represent the first endeavouring ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... is, for Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The noble type and the stilted attitude of the St. Joseph suggest the St. Mark of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... personage whose subsequent fortunes must be briefly glanced at here. Cassiodorus, the minister of Theodoric and Amalasuentha, remained, as we regret to find, in the service of Theodahad when sole king and composed his stilted sentences at the bidding of Amalasuentha's murderer. Witigis also employed him to write his address to his subjects on ascending the throne. He does not seem to have taken any part in the siege of Rome, and ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... colored engravings, or stiff steel and wood illustrations, that were produced for juvenile amusement in the early part of the nineteenth century,—all are as interesting to the lover of children as they are unattractive to the modern children themselves. The little ones very naturally find the stilted language of these old stories unintelligible and the artificial plots bewildering; but to one interested in the adult literature of the same periods of history an acquaintance with these amusement books of past generations has a peculiar charm and value ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... to find so much fault with one another, and grudged each other every little bit of praise wrung from the world's cold, death-doomed lips. It is to me pathetically absurd to see gifted persons all struggling along, and rudely elbowing each other out of the way to win—what? A few stilted commonplace words of approbation or fault-finding in the newspapers of the day, and a little clapping and shouting from a gathering of ordinary minded persons, who only clap and shout because it is possibly the fashion to do so. It is really ludicrous. ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... Bronte was not much otherwise minded; her own Marianne Dashwood would doubtless have thought the same. Readers without some touch of letters may think her style old-fashioned: it has even been termed "stilted." Not merely may amateurs of blood and thunder, of passion and sensation, think her tame, but the more modern devotees of "analysis" may consider her superficial. On the other hand, it is notorious that, from her own day to this, she has never wanted partisans, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... man," argued Hall, "because he doesn't live in accordance with our stilted notions. Professor Young says that the girl is a genius—that she has a beautiful voice. I promised that if he took up—a contribution for the family that I would send him ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... in the upper button-hole, and the corner of a colored silk handkerchief visible from a side pocket. Dignified, as became his exalted station, he never slapped his visitors' shoulders, or called them by their Christian names, but he treated them as entitled to his consideration without that stilted courtesy which rebuffs even when veneered with formal civility. He was a good listener and he conversed freely, although he carefully avoided committing himself upon political questions, and never indulged in criticisms of those arrayed in opposition to him. The code of etiquette first ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... the stilted Oxfords or buttoned in the arching insteps of those who sat in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.," which was the other side of the double-backed bench whose obverse was the "Gents' Dept.," but also he took upon the glistening surface of his trousers the muddy soles of merchants, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Plato, or any study of the great masters of literature, at one bound he leapt to a high level of thought and composition. His earliest book, "Some Gospel Truths Opened," "thrown off," writes Dr. Brown, "at a heat," displays the same ease of style and directness of speech and absence of stilted phraseology which he maintained to the end. The great charm which pervades all Bunyan's writings is their naturalness. You never feel that he is writing for effect, still less to perform an uncongenial piece of task-work. He writes because he had something ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... clear idea of his life. Without boasting, modestly and naturally, he describes the adventures of an aviator in the great World War. It could well serve as a guide to those who are studying aviation. Although he has avoided the stilted tone of the school-master, still his accomplishments as a knight of the air must fascinate any who know aviation. For the aviators as well as their machines have accomplished wonders. They are rightly called the eyes of the army—these iron-nerved boys who know no fear. Admiral Schley's ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... noble conduct; a dashing haughty Tybalt of a brother; a wicked poor cousin, a pretty maid, and a fierce buccaneer. These people might pass three hours very well on the stage, and interest the audience hugely; but the author fails in filling up the outlines. His language is absurdly stilted, frequently careless; the reader or spectator hears a number of loud speeches, but scarce a dozen lines that seem to belong of nature to ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had been deeply impressed by the judge's manner during his charge to the jury, searched his face a moment and then, as if abandoning all hope of mercy, drew himself erect and in his stilted English said: "Your Excellency, I make no petition for mercy. Let the criminal make such a plea. I stand convicted of crime, but I am no criminal. The traitor, the thief, the liar, the murderer, the criminal, sits there." As he spoke the word, he swung sharply about and ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... somewhat stilted English easing off into a mixture of good American slang and the Mexican dialect spoken by peons and some a grade higher up the ladder. He was not more than seventeen, and while Johnny recalled his instructions to put any greaser on the run, he took the liberty of interpreting ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... as there is no trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the corbel table of a form common in Portugal but ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... a very human man. Slyly he wrote poetry,—stilted, pleading things from a soul astray. He loved women in his masterful way, marrying three beautiful wives in succession and clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic, affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure,—hard, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... heed. One of the men who suffered at the hands of the savages was a wandering schoolmaster, named John Filson, [Footnote: Do., John Small to G. R. Clark, June 23, 1786.] the first historian of Kentucky, and the man who took down, and put into his own quaint and absurdly stilted English, Boone's so-called "autobiography." Filson, having drifted west, had travelled up and down the Ohio and Wabash by canoe and boat. He was much struck with the abundance of game of all kinds which ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... indignant glance, just as Professor Enoch Crabbe, of the Riverside Academy, stepped up and greeted Joe. He was earnest in his congratulations, but his manner was so stilted that they looked at each other with an amused smile, as ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... whether it is because the persons entitled to be so addressed do not think that even these mild titles are consistent with American democracy, or because the American public feels awkward in employing such stilted terms of address, they are not often used. I remember that on one occasion a much respected Chief Executive, on my proposing, in accordance with diplomatic usage and precedent, to address him as "Your Excellency", begged me to substitute instead "Mr. President". ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... the agony drew to an end, and the heroine died amid the sobs of ten thousand readers. Yet the story had power, and the central figure of Clarissa was impressive in its pathos and tragedy. The novel would still be readable if it were stripped of the stilted conversations and sentimental gush in which Richardson delighted; but that would leave precious little ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... this is "word-painting." I can see the picture also—some kings, and possibly queens, seated on gorgeous thrones, engaged in the festive occupation of grinding bones! Oh, I degrade the subject, do I? Nonsense! The term is a stilted affectation, perhaps never better applied than to Mrs. Browning's descriptive spasms. Still, she was undoubtedly a poet. She wrote many beautiful subjective poems, but she wrote much that was not poetry, and which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... lilies lave, Or plash upon the shadow'd wave; While birds, with darken'd pinions, fly Across that still intenser sky; Fish, with cold plunge, with startling leap, Or arrow-flight across the deep; And stilted insects, light-o-limb, Would dimple o'er the even brim; If, with my hand, in play, I chose The cold, smooth current to oppose, As fine a spell my senses bound ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... reasons it is sometimes necessary or advisable to have one's camp on stilts, so to speak. Especially is this true in the more tropical countries where noxious serpents and insects abound. A simple form of stilted shack is shown by Fig. 63. To build this shack we must first erect an elevated platform (Fig. 64). This is made by setting four forked sticks of equal height in the ground and any height from the ground to suit the ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... the "Works of Margaret Fuller":—"Life Within and Without," "At Home and Abroad," "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," "Art, Literature, and Drama,"—he would be prepared to find eccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances, attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however, find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simply a writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair English style, perfectly intelligible, intent upon conveying an idea in the simplest manner and generally an idea which approves ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... the stilted fooling of the period to cover his confusion and to gain time; for the matter was of moment and it had taken him unaware—he did not know ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... more true to say that her husband interested me more, being less familiar? His accent told me he was French; but when he took off his hat I could see that he had come from the tropics— Algeria I thought; not unlikely a soldier. His talk was less stilted than a soldier's, and I began to notice that he did not look like a Frenchman, and when he told me that he lived in an oasis in the desert, and was on his way home, his Oriental appearance I explained by his long residence among the Arabs. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... delicately varied outline. None are so stately and so magnificent; and there is hardly a church in Europe that appears so vast as the minster viewed from the north. Compared with it the great French cathedrals, with their stilted roofs so often unbroken, except by a small fleche and with their outlines concealed in a crowd of flying buttresses, are apt to look short and huddled ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... semi-circular, but they were by no means universally so, for a form frequently found is one in which the spring of the arch does not take place from the abacus, or upper member of the capital, but at some distance above it and when it assumes this form it is called a "stilted" arch, suggested by some authorities to have been unintentional and the result of imperfect construction or planning. ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... that she came upon the Count in one of the paths of the Kleine Rugen. He was walking slowly toward her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully upon the ground. When she accosted him, he was plainly confused, as she had said. After the first few passages in polite though stilted conversation, his keen, grey eyes resumed their thoughtful—it was even a ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... good analogy and in consonance with the general spirit of the language. "Truthful," for example, is said to be an Americanism, and at one time gave offence on that account. It is not only a vast improvement on the stilted "veracious," but one of the prettiest and most thoroughly English words in ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... lacking qualities to which it makes no pretension. Tacitus is not a 'bad military historian'. He is not a 'military' historian at all. Botticelli is not a botanist, nor is Shakespeare a geographer. It is this fault which leads critics to call Tacitus 'a stilted pleader at a decadent bar', and to complain that his narrative of the war with Civilis is 'made dull and unreal by speeches'—because they have not found in Tacitus what they had no right to look for. Tacitus inserts speeches for ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... amongst you, and I am glad that I have got so much left; though Heaven knows how I retain it: I hear none but from my valet, and his is Nottinghamshire: and I see none but in your new publications, and theirs is no language at all, but jargon. Even your * * * * is terribly stilted and affected, with 'very, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... you if you were a little less pathetic," said the king. "You not only assert, but you declaim. There is too little of nature and truth in your tone; you remind me a little of the stilted French tragedies, in which design and premeditation obscure all true passion; in which love is only a phrase, that no one believes in, dressed up with the tawdry gilding ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... occasion which has quickened their pulses in anticipation during their whole lives. But the bridegroom was not so supported. He was manifestly agitated and nervous, especially during the reception which followed the ceremony. He stood with forced amiability responding to the stilted congratulations and gazing with wondering admiration at his bride, whose manner ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... clanked the door closed, and came with stiff, stilted steps back into the center of the cage. I heard the hollow rumble of its voice, chuckling, as ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... continual change of tempo will go a long way towards establishing it. Mr. Howard Lindsay, Stage Manager for Miss Margaret Anglin, recently said to the present writer that change of pace was one of the most effective tools of the actor. While it must be admitted that the stilted mouthings of many actors indicate cloudy mirrors, still the public speaker would do well to study the actor's ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... wooed, unconscious of the gaze of mortal eyes. A hand organ—Philomel by the grace of our stage carpenter, Fancy—fluted and droned in a side street. Around the enchanted boundaries of the little park street cars spat and mewed and the stilted trains roared like tigers and lions prowling for a place to enter. And above the trees shone the great, round, shining face of an illuminated clock in the tower ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... higher learning, and continued so even after the later Emperors, by seizing the power of the State, had taken away the inspiration that comes from a love of freedom and had thus deprived the rhetorical art of practical value. The work of the schools then became highly stilted and artificial in character, and oratory then came to be cultivated largely as a fine art. [26] Men educated in these schools came to boast that they could speak with equal effectiveness on either side of any question, and the art came to depend on the use of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... was learning to act tragedy, I had frequently to perform comic parts, in order to acquire a certain ease of manner that my serious parts might not appear too stilted; so you must endeavour in your letters, in your conversation, and your general deportment, to be easy and natural, graceful and dignified. But remember that dignity does not consist of over-becoming pride and haughtiness; self-respect, politeness and gentleness in all ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... Wordsworth; in The Rape of the Lock no less than in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted conventions of the late literary epic. The Iliad is the story of a quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... arms against the new monarchy of July, yet being a republican he would take no oath to defend it. The only amusement that Comte permitted himself was a visit to the opera. In his youth he had been a playgoer, but he shortly came to the conclusion that tragedy is a stilted and bombastic art, and after a time comedy interested him no more than tragedy. For the opera he had a genuine passion, which he gratified as often as he could, until his means became too narrow to afford even that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... nobody has time to write letters these days, and yet the post office department handles millions of them each year. True, they are not the formal, lengthy, somewhat stilted epistles of a century ago, when a lad began his home letters "Honoured Parents," and your correspondent announced, "I take my pen in hand to inform you," etc. The letter of today, however, is not less the messenger of good-will and remembrance than it was in those days. It remains largely ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... who followed, if less grand, was more pathetic. We find, however, in writers of genius,—even in the great preachers, as Bourdaloue and Massillon, who formed a type of pulpit eloquence peculiar to France,—a tendency to what seems now a stilted style. The master in comedy was Moliere (1622-1673), an actor, as well as an author of inimitable humor. One of the most popular of French authors has been La Fontaine (1621-1695), whose fables ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... by tradesmen, each proclaiming himself the only honest outfitter and "agent for all good export firms." Monty departed to call on British officialdom (one advantage of traveling with a nobleman being that he has to do the stilted social stuff). Yerkes went to call on the United States Consul, the same being presumably a part of his religion, for he always does it, and almost always abuses his government afterward. So Fred and I were left to repel boarders, and it came about ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... — comes in singing* — And when we asked him what way he'd die, And he hanging unrepented, "Begob," says Larry, "that's all in my eye, By the clergy first invented." SARAH. Give me the jug now, or you'll have it spilt in the ditch. MARY — holding the jug with both her hands, in a stilted voice. — Let you leave me easy, Sarah Casey. I won't spill it, I'm saying. God help you; are you thinking it's frothing full to the brim it is at this hour of the night, and I after carrying it in my two hands a long step from Jemmy Neill's? MICHAEL ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... had put something more of his sitter than usual. He had painted the soul of the girl in the body of the woman of thirty, and if he rendered his subject in a manner more stilted than usual, he repaid her in the real interest with which her portrait was invested. He liked Olga. He had accepted her warily at first until he had proved to his own satisfaction the disinterestedness of her regard and then he had given her his friendship without reserve, his ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... play do the boys and girls like, and in what sort do we like to see them take part? It should be a play, surely, in which the dialogue is simple and natural, not stilted and artificial; one that seems like a bit of real life, and yet has plenty of fancy and imagination in it; one that suggests and helps to perpetuate some of the happy and wholesome customs of Christmas; above all, one that is pervaded by the Christmas ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... fond of stilted expressions, and the thought of "a tributary tear" seemed so incongruous to Janetta when compared with her own deep grief, that—much to Mrs. Colwyn's horror—she burst into an agitated little laugh, as nervous people sometimes do on the ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... also connected their pedestals with the spring of the vault by a series of inverted curves sweeping upwards along the height of the shallow attic. The omission of these details not only weakened the support given to the arches of the dome, but it also lent a stilted effect to the cupola by abruptly separating the perpendicular lines of the drum and attic from the segment of the vaulting. This is an error which could even now be repaired, if any enterprising Pope undertook to complete the plan of the model. It may, indeed, be questioned whether the omission ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... very pretty," murmured Lysbeth, through whose bewildered brain the stilted and meaningless words buzzed like bees in an empty hive, "though I am sure I cannot guess how you find the heart in such times as these to write poetry to fine ladies whom you do ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... sit in the inn playing at cards with a crowd of Philistines or to be stilted with his honour, the prefect of the county! God forbid! I have enough of that nonsense! It couldn't tempt me out of the house! If it weren't for the bit of hunting a man could do—if one couldn't shoulder one's gun ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... attention studiously to this line of literary effort, we feel encouraged to believe that our success in a field of late so popular would be marked, and that we should obtain a degree of fame herein, beside which that of the moat shining light in the stilted firmament would pale its ray. But so long as God gives us the glorious privilege of emulating the stars, we shall not seek to win a place among the 'tallow ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the air of the man with the brown eyes had been that of banter, of impish desire to harry and confuse by stilted language the ignorant stranger who had come ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... towel, as FRANK POLLITT—"VALMA"—appears at the window on the left—a well, if rather showily, dressed young fellow, wearing a frock coat, white waistcoat, and patent-leather boots. He is handsome in a commonplace way, and, though stilted and self-conscious, earnest in ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... well enough," answered Janey, as she shot a sudden mischievous glance from the corners of her downcast eyes; "but I reckon he'll think more of me, ef he thinks I's goin' to die. I am not very happy," she resumed, in the same stilted tone as before; "an' las' night you came to me in a dream, an' tol' me you was dead. I done specks he'll cry like everything, when he reads dat," she interpolated, with a nod of triumph. "Sometimes I reckon we sha'n' never see each ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... Write to me—not a stilted, legal kind of letter like the last. Tell me about yourself—your feelings, your conditions. We are old friends—friends long before Bridget came either into my life or yours. You can trust me. If you do not want me to repeat to Bridget anything you may ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... smell as sweet. 'The Faultless Father,' 'The Mysterious Mother,' 'The Lame Lover,'—such names as that she was aware would be useless now. 'Mary Jane Walker,' if she could be very simple, would do, or 'Blanche De Veau,' if she were able to maintain throughout a somewhat high-stilted style of feminine rapture. But as she considered that she could best deal with rapid action and strange coincidences, she thought that something more startling and descriptive would better suit her purpose. After an hour's thought a name did occur to her, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... era been marked in the history of literature. For here was a tongue born which was destined to mate even with that of Greece in richness and flexibility, to make the language of Cicero and Virgil seem stiff and stilted in comparison, and, if not to vie with the French in airy grace, or with the Italian in liquid music, to excel them far in teeming resources and robust energy. Memorable and hallowed for ever be the hour when the 'well of English undefiled' ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... me favourably. Mr. Damon introduced me to a very handsome half white gentleman, a lawyer of ability, and lately interpreter to the Legislature, Mr. Ragsdale, or, as he is usually called, "Bill Ragsdale," a leading spirit among the natives. His conversation was eloquent and poetic, though rather stilted, and he has a good deal of French mannerism; but if he is a specimen of native patriotic feeling, I think that the extinction of Hawaiian nationality must be far off. I was amused with the attention that he paid ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... was, at that time, a high wooden trestle stilted up on spliced spruce piles with ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... of New England had not dropped into the careless modes of speech that were to come later on and be adopted as a sort of patois. They read their Bibles a good deal and the older divines, and if their speech was a little stilted it had a certain correctness. Then Chilian Leverett was rather fastidious ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... articles of which its own priests had forgotten to commit to writing, and which those of another creed had dashed to pieces and destroyed, wherever their zealous hands could reach. In the two Eddas, therefore, in the early Sagas, in Saxo's stilted Latin, which barely conceals the popular songs and legends from which the historian drew his materials, we are enabled to form a perfect conception of the creed of the heathen Norsemen. We are enabled to trace, as has been ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... would be." Mazie, grown suddenly a bit stiff and stilted, was obviously trying to be very polite and "grown up." "There must be an awful lot to do here. Mother says she don't ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... gracious, and only succeeded in being stilted, for the shadow of impending disaster lay black upon her. Medenham's only thrill came when Cynthia asked for letters or telegrams at the Green Dragon, and was told there were none. Evidently, Peter Vanrenen was not a man to create ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... learnt to love you." It chilled Philip to hear her make use of the sort of phrase she read in the penny novelettes which she devoured. Then he wondered whether what she said had any meaning for her: perhaps she knew no other way to express her genuine feelings than the stilted language ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... ingenious measures he had resorted to in order to acquire more information about her, when suddenly the murmur of a human voice attracted his attention. He heard whispers, the complaining tones of a woman's voice mingled with entreaties, smothered laughter, sighs, and half-stilted exclamations of surprise; but above them all, the woman's voice prevailed. Saint-Aignan stopped to look about him; he perceived from the greatest surprise that the voices proceeded, not from the ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... will be the next novel done. But it is to be clearly understood that I promise nothing, and may throw in your face the very last thing you expect—or I expect. St. Ives will (to my mind) not be wholly bad. It is written in rather a funny style; a little stilted and left-handed; the style of St. Ives; also, to some extent, the style of R. L. S. dictating. St. Ives is unintellectual, and except as an adventure novel, dull. But the adventures seem to me sound and pretty probable; and it is a love ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and, like that, promises to visit us quarterly. It is the first fruit of a spirited and apparently well-matured plan set on foot by students in Yale College, and heartily entered into by those of several other institutions. Its objects are clearly stilted in the well-written Prospectus and Introduction. They are briefly these:—"To record the history, promote the intellectual improvement, elevate the moral aims, liberalize the views, and unite the sympathies of Academical, Collegiate, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... suddenly interrupted by a piteous whine at his elbow, and a deplorable appeal for alms. He looked around in some irritation, and with a sudden shock found himself confronted with the embodied proof of his somewhat stilted fancies. There, close beside him, his face altered and disfigured by poverty and disgrace, his body barely covered by greasy ill-fitting rags, stood his old friend Charles Herbert, who had matriculated on the same day as ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... J. Burks, although a master artist in comparison to Knight, is pretty poor—terrible, in fact. His style is dull, repetitious, and stilted. His melodrama is exaggerated to the point of nauseating absurdity. His characters are lifeless and unnatural puppets. So much for ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been though worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charadrius himaniopus, with no back toe, and therefore "liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations"! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance in Sussex of "an old family ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... of Ronnie to curb the glowing words he must have longed to pour forth. The very effort of that curbing, had reduced him to a somewhat stilted adjective. ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... blind and drunk with rage, Deroulede leant towards him automatically, quite kindly, and helped him to his feet. He would have asked the lad's pardon for his own thoughtlessness, had that been possible: but the stilted code of so-called honour forbade so logical a proceeding. It would have done no good, and could but imperil his own reputation without averting ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... spring into our minds when we think of the Romantic School are men like Mendelssohn and Schumann, who drew much of their inspiration from the young writers of their time who were making war on stilted rhetoric and conventionalism of phrase. Schumann touches hands with the Romantic poets in their strivings in two directions. His artistic conduct, especially in his early years, is inexplicable if Jean Paul be omitted from ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... a day or two's voyage in his flat-boat, and, in short, fascinated him. For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to poor Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for a ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... "NOTES." Can any man, in his wildest dream of imagination, conceive of any thing that may not be—nay, that has not been—treated of in a note? Thousands of things there are, no doubt, which cannot be sublimed into poetry, or elevated into history, or treated of with dignity, in a stilted text of any kind, and which are, as it is called, "thrown" into notes; but, after all, they are much like children sent out of the stiff drawing-room into the nursery, snubbed to be sure by the act, but joyful in the freedom of banishment. We were going to say ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various |
