"Quaintness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... English with the precision of the adults from whom they had learned it. They had never heard the argot of American childhood, but from mammy and from the tongue of their adopted land they had acquired a soft slurring of speech which gave a certain quaintness to their diction. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... and of about the same date. Unfortunately Abelard was a noble scholar, who necessarily wrote and talked Latin, even with Heloise, and, although the Latin was mediaeval, it is not much the better on that account, because, in spite of its quaintness, the naivetes of a young language—the egotism, jealousies, suspicions, boastings, and lamentations of a childlike time—take a false air of outworn Rome and Byzantium, although, underneath, the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... mid-Victorian, viz., one in Boston, that takes you upstairs to see Edwin Edgett, the gentle-hearted literary editor of the Boston Transcript), we walked down the stairs, peeping into doorways in great curiosity. The whole building breathed a dusky and serene quaintness that pricks the imagination. It is a bit like the shop in Edinburgh (on the corner of the Leith Walk and Antigua Street, if we remember) that R.L.S. described in "A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured"—"it ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... plants in large, high earthen pots beside or upon the tiled benching that faced the fountains and would have been easier to sit on if you had not had to supply the back yourself. The flowers were not in great profusion, and chiefly we rejoiced in the familiar quaintness of clumps of massive blood-red coxcombs and strange yellow ones. The walks were bordered with box, and there remains distinctly the impression of marble steps and mosaic seats inlaid with tiles; all Seville ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... curiousity respecting their name might be fully satisfied, and his interest increased, if he should happen to be in Bristol on some sunny afternoon in the later part of May, or the beginning of June, by a sight of this bright "regiment of women"—the gay colour of their gowns subdued by the quaintness of their fashion, and the clean whiteness of their aprons, collars, &c.—proceeding, in double file, towards the downs, for air and recreation. An account of their foundation may be found in Barret's Hist. of Bristol, p. 415. "Blue-Boys," so called for a similar reason, are a parallel case ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... fine sonnets by the Corn Law Rhymer, and a fine although too dreamy ballad, "The Poet's Vow." We are almost tempted to pause and criticise the work of a writer of so much inspiration and promise as the author of this poem, and exhort him once again, to greater clearness of expression and less quaintness in the choice of his phraseology; but this is not the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Warton prefers the rejected verse. The latter, he thinks, has too much of modern quaintness. The difficulty of choice lies between that naked simplicity which scarcely affects, and those strokes of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... women were even now lying helpless and unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a fine night with that ironical air nature always ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... beyond both) in the singular knack of endowing or investing known places and commonplace actions with a weird second essence and second intention. He is like Charles Lamb in his power of dropping from quaintness and almost burlesque into the most touching sentiment and emotion. Mr. Lang, in his Introduction to Poe, has noticed how Gerard resembles America's one "poet of the first order" in fashioning lines "on the further side of the border between verse and music"—a remark ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... into which he ushered me showed why he cherished so marked a dislike for visitors. It was bare to the point of discomfort, and had it not been for a certain quaintness in the shape of the few articles to be seen there, I should have experienced a decided feeling of repulsion, so pronounced was the contrast between this poverty-stricken interior and the polished bearing of its owner. He, I am sure, could have shown no more elevated manners if he had been ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... misleading to give to this collection an air of having been inspired by its most famous contributor. The little lyrics of this little book must surely be counted individual, even by those who may count them mysterious. A variety verging on quaintness is the very note of ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... by the quaintness of some of the advertisements of this sheet for the people, that style of literature being new to me; and found myself smiling over the perfections set forth as necessary, by the paragons of the earth, in both wife and servant, when I came to a dead stand. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... dress was worthy of attention. He had on a full-laced uniform; his lank unpowdered hair was tied in a stiff Hessian tail, of an extraordinary length; the old-fashioned flaps of his waistcoat added to the general quaintness of his figure, and produced an appearance which particularly attracted my notice; for I had never seen anything like it before, nor could I imagine who he was, nor what he came about. My doubts were, however, removed when Lord Hood introduced me to him. There was something irresistibly pleasing ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... with delight at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely touching it with his fingers. The washing had made it fine and brilliant. His heart was brimming over with happiness. Just when he was wishing for it ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... in the post-waggon for Paris, and arrived there after thirty-six hours' travel. Harry was struck with the roads, which were far better tended and kept than those in England. The extreme flatness of the country surprised him, and, except in the quaintness of the villages and the variety of the church towers, he saw little to ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... style of service which prevailed at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the most extraordinary announcements were frequently made by the clerk, and very numerous stories are told of the laxity of the times and the quaintness of the remarks ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... of nature makes all the world akin, and there is certainly a touch of nature about the colored man; indeed, I had almost said, of Anglo-Saxon nature. They have the quaintness and homeliness of the simple English stock. I seem to see my grandfather and grandmother in the ways and doings of these old "uncles" and "aunties;" indeed, the lesson comes nearer home than even that, for I seem to see myself in them, and, what is more, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... answering: "Do you know," she said at length, "he forgets often to remember that the children are not his very own. The little Margaret there creeps into his lap nights, calls him daddy, and melts the heart of him. And the boy with his quaintness, follows him about the house on Saturdays, and Reynolds says often enough: 'He'll be a great man, this chap, Peggy. He says some of the things I thought when I was his age.' He's taken to calling me Peggy since the children came ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... and "The Sixpennyworth of Divine Spirit:" one of these works bears the following elaborate title: "Some fine Biscuits baked in the Oven of Charity, carefully conserved for the Chickens of the Church, the Sparrows of the Spirit, and the sweet Swallows of Salvation." Sometimes their quaintness has some humour. Sir Humphrey Lind, a zealous puritan, published a work which a Jesuit answered by another, entitled "A Pair of Spectacles for Sir Humphrey Lind." The doughty knight retorted, by "A Case for ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... savouring of quaintness, is yet in keeping with the object of this volume. As we press onward in the journey of life, to each of us the path is new and strange. Often it is rough and thorny; often it winds through places beset with difficulties and danger; often the sky is so dark that we ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and queerness characterises not only Browne's choice of words, but his choice of feelings and of thoughts. The grotesque side of his art, indeed, was apparently all that was visible to the critics of a few generations back, who admired him simply and solely for what they called his 'quaintness'; while Mr. Gosse has flown to the opposite extreme, and will not allow Browne any sense of humour at all. The confusion no doubt arises merely from a difference in the point of view. Mr. Gosse, regarding ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... door, is marked with a little tablet, telling us that there was Dr. Johnson's chosen place. Several pictures of that noted gentleman adorn the walls. It always seems very much out of keeping with the quaintness of the room, to find it full of laughing, chattering Americans. A few quiet English clerks come there for their noon meal, but the majority of the patrons of the Cheshire ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... letters, contrary to modern usage, are printed with all the peculiarities of eighteenth century orthography. It was felt that they would lose their quaintness and charm if Holbach's somewhat fantastic English were trifled with or his spelling, capitalization ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... and quaintness of those stories set them apart in a niche of distinction, where they have no ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... and Another.' He says something about the Court of Crown Cases Reserved... Ah, what place on this earth bears a name so mystically majestic? Even in the commonest forensic phrases there is often this solemnity of cadence, always a quaintness, that stirs the imagination... The grizzled junior dares interject something 'with submission,' and is finally advised to see 'my learned brother in chambers.' 'As your Lordship pleases.'... We pass to the business ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... have his choice of hundreds and thousands of those delightful curiosities and knickknacks, recommendable less for their quaintness than for the certainty one feels that there is no possible use in the world they may be ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... our New-England songsters, to the Red Thrush, otherwise called the Mavis or Brown Thrasher. I have never heard the Mocking-Bird sing at liberty; and while the caged bird may surpass the Red Thrush in volume of voice and in quaintness of direct imitation, he gives me no such impression of depth and magnificence. I know not how to describe the voluble and fantastic notes which fall like pearls and diamonds from the beak of our Mavis, while his stately attitudes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... what are the noble characters of man in his association with his fellows. What grace of manner and refinement of habit are in society, grace of line and refinement of form are in the association of visible objects. What advantage or harm there may be in sharpness, ruggedness, or quaintness in the dealings or conversations of men; precisely that relative degree of advantage or harm there is in them as elements of pictorial composition. What power is in liberty or relaxation to strengthen or relieve human souls; that power precisely in the same relative ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... study of English language and literature. The early English period had always interested me, and we had not been together for two months before Field was inoculated with a ravenous taste for the English literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its quaintness and the unintentional humor of its simplicity cast a spell over him, which he neither sought nor wished to escape. He began with the cycle of romances that treat of King Arthur and his knights, and followed them through their prose and metrical versions of the almost ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... maliciously have perceived how ill the four candle-snuffers crawled as elephants, and the triumphal car discovered its want of a lid. But having pre-excited attention, we had full leisure to sharpen our eye. To these imprudent authors and actors we may apply a Spanish proverb, which has the peculiar quaintness of that people, Aviendo pregonado vino, venden vinagre: "Having cried up their wine, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... in the "Night Thoughts," with more quaintness than good taste, compares the sceptic who can remain unmoved in the contemplation of the starry heavens to a ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... with a half-serious quaintness that vexed her, and forced her to turn away to let the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had lost half its charm and quaintness since the fire, we are surprised to find so much of interest when we are out at the "top of the morning" next day, and are reluctant to leave; but here the Octave disintegrates, scatters to finish the season elsewhere; and each member, on arrival at home, probably invests in reams ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... street and tavern as the other to the country and the life of animals and plants. Yet they are close akin. They give out the same tone and are pitched in about the same key. Their methods are the same; so are their quaintness and scorn of rhetoric. Thoreau has the drier humor, as might be expected, and is less stomachic. There is more juice and unction in Lamb, but this he owes to his nationality. Both are essayists who in a less reflective age would have been poets pure and simple. ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... xenomania and unweakened by purism, as Daniel. Whatever unfavourable things have been said of him from time to time have been chiefly based on the fact that his chaste and correct style lacks the fiery quaintness, the irregular and audacious attraction of his contemporaries. Nor was he less a master of versification than of vocabulary. His Defence of Rhyme shows that he possessed the theory: all his poetical works show that he ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... characters, scenes and situations with the faithfulness and reverence due to the masterpiece of a race; using as much as possible, especially in the dialogue, the words of the original.... (The language) should be simple, though not untinged with quaintness, and even in places a certain degree of archaism.' ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... of the streets, I do not know of much else of any great interest to the casual globe-trotter, who, it must be said, very seldom thinks it advisable to venture as far as that. No, there is nothing beautiful to be seen in Seoul. If, however, you are on the look-out for quaintness and originality, no town will interest you more. Let us go for a walk round the town, and if your nose happens to be of a sensitive nature, do not forget to take a bottle of the strongest salts with you. We ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... a stranger visiting Chesterton would get? He would, I think, be impressed by his genial kindliness; he would be amazed by his extraordinary powers of memory and the depths of his reading; he would be gratified by the interest that Chesterton displays in him; he would be charmed by the quaintness of his home. That Chesterton has humour is abundant by his conversation; that he has pathos is not so apparent. I am not perfectly sure that he can appreciate the things that make ordinary men sad. It has been said that he is not concerned with the facts of everyday ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... a century and half had Rascality ventured to step forth in this fashion; not for so long, showed its huge rude lineaments in the light of day. A Wonder and new Thing: as yet gamboling merely, in awkward Brobdingnag sport, not without quaintness; hardly in anger: yet in its huge half-vacant laugh lurks a shade of grimness,—which ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of quaintness in both of these attitudes. We of the present are in the habit of acknowledging the autonomy of science, and the unimpeachable validity of the results of experimental research in so far as they are ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the De Burgs arrived with Wulf, while Agnes expressed herself delighted with the quaintness of the old Saxon home, her father and mother were ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... impress them less favourably. The rooms were large, and low, the ceilings, walls, floors, and staircase all of oak. The diamond-lattice windows, and narrow, tortuous passages, and innumerable nooks and crannies and cupboards, created an atmosphere of combined quaintness and comfort that irresistibly appealed to the Murphys. Viewed under the searching rays of the sun, and cheered by the voices of the visitors, the interior of the house, for artistic taste and cheerfulness, would indeed be hard to beat; but, as Mrs. Murphy's eyes wandered up the stairs and down ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... predicament had been certainly well said; I would say that over again to-day. It was the boy and the meaning of his words which escaped me still, baffled me, and formed the whole subject of my attention, even when I was inside the Tern Creek church; so that I retain nothing of that, save a general quaintness, a general loneliness, a little deserted, forgotten token of human doings long since done, standing on its little acre of wilderness amid that solitude which suggests the departed presence of man, and which is so much more potent in the flavor of its desolation than the virgin wilderness ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... Taylor, Milton, Brown, Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the Greek and the Latin. A page of the Magnalia is almost as richly mottled with italics as one from the Anatomy of Melancholy, and the quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas Hooker as having "angled many scores of souls into the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... road for some minutes together, the stranger admiring all the way the golden tresses of the laburnum and the rich perfume of the lilac, and talking much as he went of the quaintness and prettiness of the suburban houses. Philip thought them pretty, too (or rather, important), but failed to see for his own part where the quaintness came in. Nay, he took the imputation as rather a slur on so respectable ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... just the chance that any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be the same that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must begin, and it had better be just where another man might stop. Something about that flight of steps up to the shop, something about the quietude and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all the detective's rare romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike at random. He went up the steps, and sitting down at a table by the window, asked for a ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... is apt to be altogether agreeable, Dr. Sandford?" Daisy said, with a demure waiving of the subject which was worthy of much older years. The quaintness ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... produce a thoroughly charming little table with a quaintness and a touch of femininity ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... the airy regions of the tower on village and hamlet and cottage, calling aloud—for who could dissociate the words from the music, though the words are in the Scotch psalms?—written none the less by an Englishman, however English wits may amuse themselves with laughing at their quaintness—calling aloud, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... old inns attract to-day not only because of their quaintness and the old-world atmosphere which adheres to them, but because of the tradition which clings to them; and the most popular tradition of all, and the one of which the proprietors are most proud, is ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... fact, more than forty years of age, and even in her adolescence she had never been beautiful. On the other hand, her face wore too amiable an expression to be considered very plain, and there was an almost captivating quaintness in the old-fashioned figure she presented. She seldom added to her wardrobe unless Jimmy bantered her into it and gave her a cheque which, as a matter of honour, was to be used for that especial purpose. Even then Sybil sometimes ventured ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... he have an antiquarian taste, will find himself embarrassed by the number of localities and buildings that appeal to his interest. Many of these buildings were new and undoubtedly commonplace enough at the date of Washington's visit; time and association have given them a quaintness and a significance which now make their architecture a question of ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... his day, with what result we know only too well; but Mr. Morris, who uses his archaisms with the tact of a true artist, and to whom indeed they seem to come absolutely naturally, has succeeded in giving to his version by their aid that touch, not of 'quaintness,' for Homer is never quaint, but of old-world romance and old-world beauty, which we moderns find so pleasurable, and to which the Greeks ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... been the first to name Washington Irving as the most renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure, reproduced characteristically and with simple quaintness, should decorate the Park. To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should open, as every heart would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of the head and almost the twinkling eye, that ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... the Leviathan, a sketch of an ideal commonwealth. Baxter, with his Saints' Everlasting Rest sent a book of religious consolation into every household. In 1642 Dr. Thomas Browne, with the simplicity of a child and a quaintness that fascinates, published his Religio Medici; and in 1653 dear old simple-hearted Isaak Walton told us in his Compleat Angler how to catch, dress, and cook fish. Thomas Fuller, born a score or more of years before Dryden, in the same town, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... Lay Reader. "Bibles? Why, really, Miss Flame, I couldn't countenance any sort of mock service! Even just for—for quaintness,—even for Christmas quaintness!" ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... other three celebrated prose authors of this time has anything in common. He stands apart from them in his fervently religious and romantic temperament, in his richness of representation and ingenuity of analogy, and in his forcible quaintness of style, as completely as he did in social status and in personal surroundings. In complete contrast to the romantic productions of the self-educated tinker of Bedford, the works of Walton and Evelyn ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... Mount which appeared in the first volume of Once a Week. Coleridge, of course, has made a number of notes in it, and in one of these he describes the translation as 'an exquisite poem, spite of its frequent and perverse quaintness and harshnesses, which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... there was a good deal of pleasant rivalry about these gardens, both proprietors having impressed their own individuality upon their pleasure-grounds. Semple's had nothing of the Dutchman's glowing prettiness and quaintness,—no clipped yews and hollies, no fanciful flower-beds and little Gothic summer-house. Its slope was divided into three fine terraces, the descent from one to the other being by broad, low steps; the last flight ending on a small pier, to which the pleasure and fishing boats were fastened. ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... and offer up thanks for all of us to our governesses, to those dear women, dead, dispersed, faded into distance, but not forgotten; our spiritual foster-mothers who put a few drops of the milk of German kindness, of German simplicity and quaintness and romance, between our lips when ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... will be found of such impressive though simple language that it clings long in the memory. Such is this verse of gentle quaintness over the grave of a tender Puritan blossom, the child ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... literary type out of the solid Dutch burgher whose phlegm had long been an object of ridicule to the mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very tardiness and prolixity of the story are skilfully made to heighten the humorous effect. The next few years were unproductive. Upon the death of his father, Irving had become a sleeping partner in his brother's commercial house, a branch of which was established at Liverpool. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... enforcing the lesson with which this incident closes, 'The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.' It is because of the light that it throws upon that great thought that he tells this fascinating story of Zacchaeus. I need not repeat it. We all remember it, and the quaintness and grotesqueness of part of it fix it in people's memories. We know how the rich tax gatherer, pocketing his dignity, and unable to see over the heads of the crowd, scrambled up into the branches of the sycamore tree that overhung the road; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... language, one hears, especially in the Hebrides, phrases of amusing quaintness, due no doubt to the speaker handling a foreign tongue. The school in one of the Mull villages is very small, and I made a remark to that effect in the hearing of the hotel-porter. "Oh, no," said he, "it is a good deal bigger than you would wonder." The same waiter, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Earle's readers appear to be chiefly impressed with his book as furnishing "a picturesque idea of a period now remote, and as possessing much of the affected quaintness of its age."[H] The picturesqueness I find, and a good deal of quaintness; but the total impression is that of a man who has got beyond words, ancient or modern, in his studies of ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness—who shall say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment;—"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... now and then meet with a touch of his pencil, which, from its simplicity and vigor, may be called truly Dantesque. Indeed, the Castilian Muse never before ventured on so bold a flight; and, notwithstanding the deformity of the general plan, the obsolete barbarisms of the phraseology, its quaintness and pedantry, notwithstanding the cantering dactylic measure in which it is composed, and which to the ear of a foreigner can scarcely be made tolerable, the work abounds in conceptions, nay in whole episodes, of such mingled energy and beauty, as ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... making believe that he had no conscience, or at least that blankness, in the field of duty, did reign for an hour; a small game to which the few persons near enough to have caught him playing it, and of whom Mrs. Assingham, for instance, was one, attached indulgently that idea of quaintness, quite in fact that charm of the pathetic, involved in the preservation by an adult of one of childhood's toys. When he took a rare moment "off," he did so with the touching, confessing eyes of a man of forty-seven caught in the act of handling a relic of infancy—sticking on the head of a broken ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... such numerous traditions about the tricks of Tezcatlipoca in Tollan, as Father Sahagun. They are, no doubt, almost verbally reported as he was told them, and as he wrote his history first in the Aztec tongue, they preserve all the quaintness of the original tales. Some of them appear to be idle amplifications of story tellers, while others are transparent myths. I shall translate a few of them quite literally, beginning with that of the ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... full of Biblical quaintness, and my estrangement from the language only added to the bizarre effect of its terse grammatical construction. I read a number of the poems, and several of the things in the prose volume. His Hebrew is truly marvelous, and much of the strength and charm of his message is bound up in it. As I read ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... so," Eleanor remarked. "You have been brought up in the style of one hundred years ago, and yet, except for a certain quaintness in your speech, one would not think you very different from any girl brought ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is precisely what we have—always with a vein of the finest autobiography—a kind of select and indirect self-revelation—often with a touch of quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be allowed the word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a friend. He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... and keeping a store thereof in her thread-case, which she had cut from the "Christian Mirror." Miss Roxy sometimes, in her brusque way, popped out observations on life and things, with a droll, hard quaintness that took one's breath a little, yet never failed to have a sharp crystallization of truth,—frosty though it were. She was one of those sensible, practical creatures who tear every veil, and lay their fingers on every spot in pure business-like good-will; and if we shiver ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... woods; he also indulged pleasant reminiscences of later years, when, with Uncle Daniel and Tom Anderson, he attended the secret prayer-meetings. Iola rode along, conversing with Aunt Linda, amused and interested at the quaintness of her speech and the shrewdness of her intellect. To her ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... it, have left traces of that city in almost everything he wrote. From the time when Mr. Snodgrass first discovered the castle ruin from Rochester Bridge, to the last chapter of Edwin Drood, we observe hints of the city's quaintness or silence; the unending pavements, which go on and on till the wisest head would be puzzled to know where Rochester ends and where Chatham begins, the disposition of Father Time to have his own unimpeded ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... holidays, and going under the suspension bridges with levelled chimneys, entered the picturesque hills above, which are covered with vineyards nearly to the top; the villages scattered over them have those square, pointed towers, which give such a quaintness ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... the greater part of Giusti's political poems are written, and none of them is wanting in point and bitterness, even to a foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point and the tang of their local expressions. It was the habi the satirist, who at least loved the people's quaintness and originality—and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to demand of a poet—it was Giusti's habit to replenish his vocabulary from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his satires a racy local ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... boiling water does on the lobster by dyeing his dark coat scarlet. The man was evidently a denizen of the north, his accent harsh, skin white, of an angular and bony build, and self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. The precision and quaintness of his language, as well as his eccentric remarks on common things, stimulated my mind. Our icy islanders thaw rapidly when they have drifted into warmer latitudes: broken loose from its anti-social system, mystic ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... have some bright-colored ribbons around their high-peaked, conical felt hats. But I must not forget to mention the costume of the children. It consists of an exact copy in miniature of that of their elders; and the inconceivable quaintness and queer old-world look produced is not to be imagined by those who have never witnessed it. Fancy a little imp of six or seven years old dressed in little blue jacket, bright-yellow leather breeches, blue stockings, sheepskin sandals on his little bits of feet, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... tried to explain the marvelous popularity of Pickwick Papers. Certainly its honest fun, its merriment, its quaintness, good humor and charity appealed to every reader. More than all, it made people acquainted with a new company of characters, none of whom had ever existed, or could ever exist, and yet whose manners and appearance were pictured so really that they seemed to be actual persons whom one might meet ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... upper part, had evidently at one time formed a covering of a floor, though what the original pattern and colours had been, could not now be made out. With all this quaintness of attire, the old man had the general appearance of neatness and cleanliness, and had it not been for the expression of his countenance, would ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... of the walking-trip he was to have made with Morton, Mr. Wrenn crossed by ferry to Birkenhead, quite unhappily, for he wanted to be discussing with Morton the quaintness of the uniformed functionaries. He looked for the Merian half the way over. As he walked through Birkenhead, bound for Chester, he pricked himself on to note red-brick house-rows, almost shocking in their lack of high ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... masters who followed Van Eyck's system were in the constant habit of relieving their principal figures by the darkness of some object, foliage, throne, or drapery, introduced behind the head, the open sky being left visible on each side. A green drapery is thus used with great quaintness by John Bellini in the noble picture of the Brera Gallery; a black screen, with marbled veins, behind the portraits of himself and his brother in the Louvre; a crimson velvet curtain behind the Madonna, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... priests, moreover, are interwoven with the remains of Aztec theistic influence, and the superstitions of both systems hold the ignorant peasantry of Mexico in enduring thrall. Much of beauty and pathetic quaintness there is in this strong religious sentiment, which no thinking observer will deride; much of retrograde ignorance, which ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... large, built with gables turned towards the street, quaint, picturesque, and eloquent of much burghers' wealth. There could be no such square in a city which was not or had not been very rich. And among all the houses in the Egidien Platz, there was no house to exceed in beauty of ornament, in quaintness of architecture, or in general wealth and comfort, that which was ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... intimately connected with the great transactions of the period, and the editor himself more frequently favours us with some specimen of his happier manner, where concentration of style, a spirit of humour and reflection, and a power of vivid portraiture, have not degenerated into mere quaintness, into a species of slang, into Carlylisms, into vague generalities about infinitudes and eternities. At all times the interspersed commentary—written in that peculiar, fantastic, jingling manner which, illegitimate as it is, disorderly and scandalous to all lovers of propriety in style and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... mentioned), one or two gigantic statues of great mechanicians, who contributed largely to the material welfare of England, sitting familiarly in their marble chairs among forgotten kings and queens. Otherwise, the quaintness of the earlier monuments, and the antique beauty of some of them, are what chiefly gives them value. Nevertheless, Addison is buried among the men of rank; not on the plea of his literary fame, however, but because he was connected with nobility ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sparingly produced on slightly foliaged stems, 18in. to 3ft. high; there are, however, such marked distinctions belonging to C. p. alba fl.-pl. in two forms that they deserve special notice; they are very desirable flowers, on the score of both quaintness and beauty. I will first notice the kind with two corollas, the inner bell of which will be more than an inch deep, and about the same in diameter. The outer corolla is much shorter, crumpled, rolled back, and somewhat marked with green, as if ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... did nothing of the sort," retorted the General. "I trust I am not so lacking in manners. I merely remarked its beauty and quaintness and massiveness and general artistry. My host expressed pleasure at my appreciation of its qualities and volunteered the information that it was a little thing he had picked up in a curio shop ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... occasional bits of slang from I do not know; but her little foreign staccato pronunciation gives them unusual quaintness. I laughed, and Carlotta, throwing Polyphemus off her lap, laughed too, and sidled up against me. The cat regarded us for a moment with a disgusted eye, then stretched himself as if he had quitted Carlotta of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... own. This kindly feeling (in some cases, at least) extended to the author, who, on the internal evidence of his sketches, came to be regarded as a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic, exceedingly sensitive, and not very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name, the quaintness of which was supposed, somehow or other, to symbolize his personal and literary traits. He is by no means certain that some of his subsequent productions have not been influenced and modified by a natural desire to fill up so amiable an outline, and to act in consonance with the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Medici in particular is due the honour of having first introduced the rustic speech of the people. His two poems written in the language of the peasants about Florence, La Nencia da Barberino and a canzonet In morte della Nencia, possess a grace to which the quaintness of the diction adds point and flavour. A short extract must suffice ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... fairly refuses to grapple with it. Even killing—exciting as an incident—becomes monotonous when it is continued ad infinitum, and no other occurrence ever comes to vary its tediousness. Campion the Elizabethan historian, whose few pages are a perfect magazine of verbal quaintness, apologizes in the preface to his "lovyng reader, for that from the time of Cambrensis to that of Henry VIII." he is obliged to make short work of his intermediate periods; "because that nothing is therein orderly written, and that the same is time beyond any man's ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... place as the yard was, it had an air of completeness, a pretty quaintness. Two tiny brick walks curved from the door to the gate. On either side of these spread out microscopic flower-beds, crowded tight with plants. Late-blooming dahlias and asters made spots of starry color in the green. A vine, running over the ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... no sooner were they in the hall than Emilia called for her bedroom candle in a thin, querulous voice that made Tracy shout with laughter and love of her quaintness. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... said. Many of the village people were there to see Katy off, and in the crowd Mark had no means of distinguishing the Barlows from the others except it were by the fond caresses given to the bride. Aunt Betsy he had observed from all the rest, both from the hanging of her pongee and the general quaintness of her attire, and thinking it just possible that it might be the lady of herrin' bone memory, he touched Wilford's arm as she passed ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... are debased by disgusting circumstances, or which owe their signification and point to technical or professional allusions. A truly natural or familiar style can never be quaint or vulgar, for this reason, that it is of universal force and applicability, and that quaintness and vulgarity arise out of the immediate connection of certain words with coarse and disagreeable or with confined ideas. The last form what we understand by cant or slang phrases.—To give an example of what is not very clear in the general statement, I ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... concomitant ornament, a profusely-carved mantel-piece of the usual time-stained oak, was at least five feet high, and more than two feet broad; its ingenious workmanship occupied his attention, and kept him for some time engaged in curious admiration of its exquisite quaintness. The other furniture consisted of chairs, a chest-of-drawers, and a table, all the work of a former age. An easy chair was placed in the middle of the room, in which the stout gentleman composed himself luxuriously for a short time. The room however was too large to be easily warmed, and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... sun, and no words of mine can give any idea of the motley crowd in the most brilliant costumes, the perfect orgie of colour presented by the neighbourhood of the plaza, on which, as a finishing touch to the quaintness of the scene, a squadron of yellow dragoons did duty as police! From Cadiz we sailed in company with the frigates La Gloire and La Medee and two steam corvettes which we had found there, and reached Cape Saint ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... There is a peculiar horror about the relations between parent and child, which are being now brought about by our variously degraded forms of European white slavery. Here is one reference, I see, in my notes on that story of Cleobis and Bito; though I suppose I marked this chiefly for its quaintness, and the beautifully Christian names of the sons; but it is a good instance of the power of the King of the Valley of Diamonds[153] ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... his mental album, a series of portraits of these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses, their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their "Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister, ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... was certainly one of the most agreeable and most interesting and most amiable beings that could be imagined. His face had a sort of Quixote quaintness, so had his talk, while his humour had a pleasant flavour. He lived at his place in the country, but I always looked forward—and now look back, alas!—to the many pleasant talks we would have together, each more than an ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... of the word "kind" at the beginning of Act v. reminds one of similar elaborate trifling in Humour out of Breath; and the amoebaean rhymes in the contention between Gemulo and Silvio (Act i.) are, in their sportive quaintness, as like Day's handiwork as they are unlike Lilly's. In reading the pretty echo-scene, in Act iv., the reader will recall a similar scene in Law Trickes (Act v., Sc. I). On the other hand, the delightful songs of the fairies[97] (in Act iii.), if not ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... continue the esteem I had of those exercises which are the employments of the Schools: I knew that Languages which are there learnt, are necessary for the understanding of ancient Writers, That the quaintness of Fables awakens the Minde; That the memorable actions in History raise it up, and that being read with discretion, they help to form the judgment. That the reading of good books, is like the conversation with the honestest persons of the past age, who were the Authors of them, and even a ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... distraction to the real Christminster life. He now sought it out in an obscure and low-ceiled tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies of the place, and in brighter times would have interested him simply by its quaintness. Here he sat more or less all the day, convinced that he was at bottom a vicious character, of whom it was ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... livery had an immense success. According to agreement, the nobles who had dined with the treasurer ordered it for all their servants. Never did a new dress become so soon the fashion. The unpopularity of the minister assisted the quaintness of the device. The fool's-cap livery became the rage. Never was such a run upon the haberdashers, mercers, and tailors, since Brussels had been a city. All the frieze-cloth in Brabant was exhausted. All the serge in Flanders ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... The incidents never exceed probability but seem perfectly natural. In the style there is much quaintness, in ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... when he first found that his artless rhymes could touch the heart of the ewe-milker who partook the shelter of his mantle during the passing storm. If "the shepherd" of Professor Wilson's "Noctes Ambrosianae" may be taken as a true portrait of James Hogg, we must admit that, for quaintness of humour, the poet of Ettrick Forest had few rivals. Sir Walter Scott said that Hogg's thousand little touches of absurdity afforded him more entertainment than the best comedy that ever set the pit in a roar. Among the written productions ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... throughout the orientation of the verses and figures of speech instead of Anglicising them. It is this, combined with his profound oriental scholarship, his fine old-world style, and the richness, variety, and quaintness of vocabulary, which has given to his original edition ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... of-lofty peaks is reflected on fields of golden maize and on meadows that gleam and glitter in the bright sunlight as if paved with emeralds. It is contrast, not similitude, that attracts the eye, novelty more than beauty, and quaintness rather than such gorgeous sights as one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... fun from fires (I sincerely trust the insurance premiums were not overdue); culled quaintness from street rows; extracted merriment from catastrophes the most ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... bluff by the river At Berrien Springs. There is a cottage that eyes the lake Between pines and silver birches At South Haven. There is the inviolable wonder of wooded shore Curving for miles at Saugatuck. And at Holland a beach like Scheveningen's. And at Charlevoix the sudden quaintness Of an old-world place by the sea. There are the hills around Elk Lake Where the blue of the sky is so still and clear It seems it was rubbed above them By the swipe of a giant thumb. And beyond these the ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... of Charles Lamb are an excellent illustration of the value of reserve in literature. Below his quiet, his quaintness, his humour, and what may seem the slightness, the occasional or accidental character of his work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in his life, a genuinely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at its darkest ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... limestone at Keld Head was utilised to give the town a water-supply, and thus the wells and pumps were superseded. Before the Local Board came into being about half a century ago, piles of timber were allowed to lie in Eastgate, and generally one may imagine the rather untidy quaintness so strongly characteristic of the engravings that illustrate country scenes in ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... She has, indeed, the radiance and repose of an immortal; but she wears her immortality youthfully. When you get among the streets of Quebec, the mediaeval, precipitous, narrow, winding, and perplexed streets, you begin to realise her charm. She almost incurs the charge of quaintness (abhorrent quality!); but even quaintness becomes attractive in this country. You are in a foreign land, for the people have an alien tongue, short stature, the quick, decided, cinematographic quality of movement, and the inexplicable ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... of the prettiest, reminding us in its quaintness and tender pathos of Mrs. Ewing's delightful tales. This is quite one of the best stories Miss Green's clever pen ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... on cap and bells, and by the pruriency which stains his best work. Like many contemporaries he was reading old authors and turned them to account in a way which exposed him to the charge of plagiarism. He valued them for their quaintness. They enabled him to satisfy his propensity for being deliberately eccentric which made Horace Walpole call Tristram Shandy the 'dregs of nonsense,' and the learned Dr. Farmer prophesied that in twenty years it would be necessary to search antiquarian shops for ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... front row of seats a prim little body, full of a severe quaintness in every quirk of dress, tilted her head toward a neighbor, and whispered, "It's that ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... prospering and singing praises with them, some in full blossom and perfume, some waiting their turn, like parts of a choir. In the midst of all, where a broad path eddied quite round an irregular open space, and that tender quaintness of decay appeared which is the unfailing New Orleans touch, the space was filled with roses. This spot was lovely enough by day and not less so for being a haunt of toddling babes and their nurses; but at night—! Regularly at evening there comes into the New Orleans air, from Heaven ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... wrap round the vase, and so place it that the leaves, flowers, and fruit can spring from it so as to be seen to the best advantage. The stalks might be placed in such a way as to form handles. Get a certain quaintness into the modelling, and don't be too intent upon imitating nature, for, do what you will, you will find it impossible to accomplish this. Therefore, be content to decorate your vase with a graceful spray of bramble, with all essential characteristics ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... the freshness of youthful enjoyment. I felt also an interest in the scene, from the consideration that these fleeting customs were posting fast into oblivion, and that this was, perhaps, the only family in England in which the whole of them were still punctiliously observed. There was a quaintness, too, mingled with all this revelry, that gave it a peculiar zest; it was suited to the time and place; and as the old Manor House almost reeled with mirth and wassail, it seemed echoing back the joviality ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... "The Cabbage Bard," and the caustic reviewer proceeds to write: "We had a Dennie and a Clifton, yet the classical elegance of the one has not availed to preserve his countrymen from being intoxicated by the quaintness and affectation of the Salmagundi school, and the purity and wit of the other have as little proved powerful to save his work from being deserted for the bathos and silliness of the 'Backwoodsman.' I remember them both. In private ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... taste, to whom his poetical talents were unknown. He was familiar with the whole of the British poets, and had committed their best passages to memory. Possessing a keen relish for the ludicrous, he had at command a store of delightful anecdote, which he gave forth with a quaintness of look and utterance, so as to render the force of the humour totally irresistible. His sarcastic wit was an object of dread to his opponents in burgh politics. His appearance was striking. Rather mal-formed, he was under the middle size; his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... most interested himself. To him Bible was Bible, and he now turned to the passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which the voyage of St. Paul from Judea to Rome is related. This he read with steadiness, some quaintness of pronunciation, and with a sort of breathing elasticity, whenever he came to those verses that touched ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the ludicrous are inextricably blended. Sir Thomas, however, is in the 'Inquiry' content generally with bringing out the strange curiosities of his museum, and does not care to draw any explicit moral. The quaintness of the objects unearthed seems to be a sufficient recompense for the labour of the search. Fortunately for his design, he lived in the time when a poet might have spoken without hyperbole of the 'fairy tales of science.' To us, who have ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... more than half that height. The bark is reddish-grey, and may be partly hidden by brown, grey and green patches of lichen. The bark is both beautiful and quaint, but in the main the tree owes its beauty to its luxuriance of prosperous leaves, and its quaintness to its pods. ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... the clerk walked away to his home, an ivy-covered cottage not a stone's-throw off; the clergyman lingered in the churchyard, reading the memorials on the tombstones. He was smiling at the quaintness of some of them, when the sound of hasty footsteps caused him to turn. A little girl was climbing over the churchyard-railings (as being nearer to her than the entrance-gate), and came dashing towards him across ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... definition would not include the most curious ones, which have not always circulated among the populace, nor even belong to them; nor does it designate the vital qualities of a proverb. The pithy quaintness of old Howell has admirably described the ingredients of an exquisite proverb to be sense, shortness, and salt. A proverb is distinguished from a maxim or an apophthegm by that brevity which condenses a thought or a metaphor, where one thing is said and another ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... mortified, so shocked was I, that I sank into a chair, and almost abandoned my resolution to go on; the very gesture I had assumed for vindication only increased the ridicule of my appearance; and the strange quaintness of the costume totally obliterated every trace of any characteristic of the wearer, so infernally cunning was its contrivance. I don't think that the most saturnine martyr of gout and dyspepsia could survey me without laughing. ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... safe place. Of course I can't show you that," said Newman. "You might want to take hold of it," he added with conscious quaintness. "But that's a very correct copy—except, of course, the handwriting. I am keeping the original to ...
— The American • Henry James
... uncouth-looking monster that was emerging from a pool and advancing ponderously toward the unwilling victim with widely opened, cavernous jaws thickly set with most formidable-looking teeth. The figures were executed in rather high relief, and there was a certain quaintness and stiffness of outline in their delineation that marked them as the work of an untutored artist, yet the action of them was depicted with a spirit and vigour which proved that the sculptor, although untutored, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... with 'Little Prudy.' Compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature only; she alone is the real thing, all the quaintness of childhood, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite unconscious drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the natural religion of its plays and the delicious oddity of its prayers—all these ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf. The tide was high, there ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... beard, and the dreamy blue eyes of a mystic. His two assistants are Poles, and the two dogs in the yard are called Kruk and Kurta,—in short, the place has the appearance of a northern isle in a southern sea. I like to go there for the quaintness of the thing, and I like to watch Lukomski at his work. There is in him at the same time so much power and simplicity. He is especially interesting when he stands back a short distance so as to get a better view of his work, and then suddenly goes back as to an attack. He is a very talented sculptor. ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing itself ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... translation, and says that it is not unlike what Homer himself might have written in his youth—surely not a grudging praise. But though this is true, I will venture to assert that Chapman also sins, not merely by his love of quaintness, but by constantly indulging in sheer doggerel. If his lines do not stagnate, they foam and fret like a mountain brook, instead of flowing continuously and majestically like a great river. He surpasses ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... before the vogue of the bungalow. And now, when she beheld Aunt Isabel's enchanting house, the solid, substantial furnishings left behind in Cherryvale lost all their savour for her, even the old-fashioned "quaintness" ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... months of the twelve; the rest of the year in Baltimore and Washington. The New England winter too many for the old gentleman. The daughter is called Marjorie—Marjorie Daw. Sounds odd at first, doesn't it? But after you say it over to yourself half a dozen times, you like it. There's a pleasing quaintness to it, something prim and violet-like. Must be a nice sort of girl ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 286. 342.).—Sir Thomas More details in his Dialoge, with his usual quaintness, the attributes and merits of many saints, male and female, highly esteemed in his day, and, amongst others, makes special mention of St. Uncumber, whose proper name, it appears, was Wylgeforte. Of ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... the crowds on the sidewalks and the carriages in the street. The whole scene was as different from the effect made by that thoroughfare to-day as though five hundred and not fifty years had elapsed since the little book was printed. The picture breathed an atmosphere of calm and nameless quaintness that one finds now only in old provincial cities which have escaped the ravages ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... legend, called "Carl the Shepherd," being the name of the original story. The genius of Washington Irving transplanted the tale to our own Catskills. The grace with which he paints the scene, and, still more, the quaintness of the story, placed it far above the original. Yates, Hackett, and Burke had separate dramas written upon this scene and acted the hero, leaving their traditions one to the other. I now came forth, and saying, "Give me leave," set to work, using some of the before-mentioned tradition, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... and confusions which delighted the eye by their quaintness, and in a measure reasonableness, in this rare old market-town, were metropolitan novelties to the unpractised eyes of Elizabeth-Jane, fresh from netting fish-seines in a seaside cottage. Very little inquiry was necessary to guide her footsteps. Henchard's house was one of the best, faced with dull ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy |
