"Unpolished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ask the favour of your mother to take you to Thomson's Marble Works in South Leith, and you will see marble in all its stages, and perhaps you may there find Portsoy marble! The use I wish to make of this is to tell you that, without education, a man is just like a block of rough, unpolished marble. Notice, in proof of this, how much Mr. Neill and Mr. M'Gregor [the tutor] know, and observe how little a man knows who is not a good scholar. On my way to Fochabers I passed through many thousand acres of Fir timber, and saw many ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Early Cultures.—It is convenient to divide the early culture of man, based upon his development in art into the Paleolithic, or unpolished, and the Neolithic, or polished, Stone Ages.[2] The former is again divided into the Eolithic, Lower Paleolithic, and the Upper Paleolithic. In considering these divisions of relative time cultures, it must be remembered that the only way we have of measuring prehistoric time is through ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... thankfulness, and he breaks into song as he laughs from gladness or groans from pain. This directness and naturalness give Scottish ballad and German hymn their highest charm. The poetic gold, if rough and unpolished, and with no elaborate devices carved upon it, is free at least from the alloy of conceit and simulation. Modern writers might, with benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish and dexterity for that pure innocence of nature, and child-like simplicity and fearlessness, full of its ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... her—there was none to be compared with him. At all events, all the other boys that used to call and bring me candy and send me flowers at about this time suffered woefully in comparison with him! I remember that. So tame they were—so crude and young and unpolished! ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... when the fire was out, of a winter's night you could see the stars; over which of a windy night you could imagine the witches riding by, borne on the deep howling of the blast; the great beam and the gun slung to it; the heavy oaken table, unpolished, greyish oak; the window in the thick wall, set with yellowish glass; the stone floor, and the walls from which the whitewash peeled in flakes; the rude old place was ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... avoid close contact with the populace and to preserve an esprit de corps. They believed that their only associates, on terms of equality, should be of their own order, as the clergy or medical profession, representing an educated aristocracy. The masses were illiterate, unpolished and, in the estimation of the lawyers, unfit for companionship with the cultivated classes, whose policy it was to inspire the plain people with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... stigmatizes the language of the Pelasgic settlements. In corroboration of Mueller's opinion we may also observe, that the "barbarous-tongued" is an epithet applied by Homer to the Carians, and is rightly construed by the ancient critics as denoting a dialect mingled and unpolished, certainly not foreign. Nor when the Agamemnon of Sophocles upbraids Teucer with "his barbarous tongue," [6] would any scholar suppose that Teucer is upbraided with not speaking Greek; he is upbraided with speaking ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... flowers and mowing his lawn. He had worked really hard, and when the evening began to close in he thought he would go into the tea-house and have a rest. On each side of the curly-legged tea-table of unpolished wood stood a wicker arm-chair. Into one of these chairs Mr. Jenkins-Smith sank with a sigh of content. Then he lighted his pipe, stretched out his short legs, and, gazing at his beautifully trimmed garden, prepared to enjoy a delicious hour of well-earned repose. Things were going well with ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... back again. Yet it never seemed to occur to the nervous woman that "Cousin Sophia" was harmless, and that her trouble came entirely from the way in which she constantly resented and resisted little unpolished ways. ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... passing among the fields, all that lived was found busy at its long day's work. Roger did not interest himself in these things, in the wasps that left the gate as he approached—they were making papier-mache from the wood of the top bar,—in the bright poppies brushing against his drab unpolished boots, in the hue of the wheat or the white convolvulus; they were ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... in reply: 'I went away (to Rochester) like a rascal, without taking leave, dear wife. It is an unpolished way of proceeding, which a modest man ought to be ashamed of. I have left you a prey to your own imaginations amongst my relations, the worst of damnations. But there will come an hour of deliverance, till when, may my ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... minute divisions to assist the memory, and its colloquial language, indicate that it was first intended for the pulpit and then enlarged to form a more complete treatise; while the frequent recurrence of the words "I say," shew the unpolished style in which he was in the habit of committing his thoughts to paper, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... mortal. The boat then returned on board and we made sail for the Mulgrave Islands. Here was another sacrifice; an innocent child of nature shot down, merely to gratify the most wanton and unprovoked cruelty, which could possibly possess the heart of man. The unpolished savage, a stranger to the more tender sympathies of the human heart, which are cultivated and enjoyed by civilized nations, nurtures in his bosom a flame of revenge, which only the blood of those who have injured ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... profound, if less exquisitely graceful. Off came the hats of the gentlemen; the bows were of the lowest; snuffboxes were drawn out, handkerchiefs of fine holland flourished; the welcoming speeches were hearty and not unpolished. ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... unpolished as it was short. Yet it impressed the mind of Morris, and its curious allegorical note appealed to his imagination. The grey moss broken by stagnant pools, lonesome and primeval; the dreary pipe of the wildfowl, the red and ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... commonplace citizen of some free Imperial town. At that time, therefore, savagely broken-up, barren mountain scenery was considered the ideal type of natural scenic beauty, while, a few centuries later, such forms were found much too unpolished and irregular to be considered beautiful at all. Even old historical painters of the Netherlands, who had perhaps never in their lives seen such deeply fissured masses of rock, liked to make use of them in their backgrounds. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... him; his captives were from Germany, Syria, and Egypt, and among them were the Emperor Tetricus and the beautiful Zenobia, bound with fetters of gold. A whole day was consumed in the passage of the triumphal procession through the streets of Rome. But Aurelian, who was illiterate, unpolished, and severe, failed to win the regard of his people, and was plainly more at his ease at the head of his army than in the cultivated society of Rome. He returned, therefore, to the East, where he died, as was usual with so many of the ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... Menefee felt crushed, humiliated, relegated. Second place galled him. Why had this blatant, obtrusive, unpolished man of windmills been selected by Fate instead of himself to discover the sensational apple? He could have made of the act a scene, a function, a setting for some impromptu, fanciful discourse or piece of comedy—and have retained the role of cynosure. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... have at length been obliged to unite the strength of their talents, and the disgrace which they have experienced, has not affected any of those inferior playhouses where subaltern performers establish their success on an assemblage of scenes more coarse, and language more unpolished. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... a Socialist after the habit is once firmly established. But while at first these considerations were all against my putting on my armor, in the end the instinct of eating and fighting, which is as forceful in the modern savage, under the veneer of civilization, as in our unpolished progenitors, overcame all considerations of prudence, and here I am to do battle according to my ability. I promise to strike no foul blows and not to dodge the most portentous of whacks, but to ride straight at you and hit ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... is finished, the fowl is killed, and its blood mixed with rice is placed in nine dishes and one polished coconut shell. From these it is transferred to nine other dishes and one bamboo basket. These are placed in a row, and nine dishes and one unpolished shell are filled with water, and placed opposite. In the center of this double line is a dish, containing the cooked flesh of the rooster, also some rice, and one hundred fathoms of thread, while between the dishes are laid ten half ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... matrimonial experience is sure to furnish, accustoming themselves to the uses of housekeeping, to life in partnership, with all the discoveries and mental and spiritual adaptations that belong to the close association of marriage. They were far, very far, apart on many subjects. He was unpolished, untrained, impulsive, sometimes violent. Twichell remembers that in the earlier days of their acquaintance he wore a slouch hat pulled down in front, and smoked a cigar that sometimes tilted up and touched the brim of it. The atmosphere and customs of frontier life, the Westernisms ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with a noble severity and fearless independence the vices of the monks and the priestcraft of the established religion, he is always elegant, amusing, and, what pleases and surprises most in a writer of so unpolished an age, strikingly delicate and chastised. I prefer him infinitely to Chaucer. If you wish for a good specimen of Boccacio, as soon as you have finished my letter, (which will come, I suppose, by dinner-time,) send Jane ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... printed, being entirely written for the satisfaction of a friend's curiosity, in relation to the original manners and customs of the people of which it treats, and which, being those of savages in the primitive state of unpolished nature, may perhaps, to a philosophical enquirer, afford more amusement and instruction than those of the most refined societies. What man really is, appears at least plainer in the uncultivated savage, than in the ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... good peas. The rest of her women of the better sort had pendants of copper hanging in either ear, and some of the children of the King's brother and other noblemen have five or six in either ear; he himself had upon his head a broad plate of gold, or copper; for, being unpolished, we knew not what metal it should be, neither would he by any means suffer us to take it off his head; but feeling it, it would bow very easily. His apparel was as his wife's, only the women wear their hair long on both sides, and the men but on one. They are of color yellowish, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... a calamitous year for the people of Ferrara, for there occurred a very tragical event in the court of their sovereign. Our annals, both printed and in manuscript, with the exception of the unpolished and negligent work of Sardi, and one other, have given the following relation of it,—from which, however, are rejected many details, and especially the narrative of Bandelli, who wrote a century afterwards, and who does not accord ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... turned over. Glory! Its runners were of the round-spring variety—the very best. They were dull blue and unpolished as yet, of course; but that fact was merely an incentive to much coasting. Another knife filled his heart with joy! for naturally the birthday knife was broken-bladed by now. A large square package proved to contain a model steam engine with a brass boiler ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... to the point under discussion. A pearl, or a glass bead, may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its lustre as well as to its roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete loveliness in distant effect to the finishing of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a mere ball of Istrian ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... who shalt stop, where Thames' translucent wave Shines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave, Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distil, And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill, Unpolished gems no ray on pride bestow, And latent metals innocently glow, Approach! Great Nature studiously behold, And eye the mine without a wish for gold Approach—but awful! Lo, the Egerian grot, Where, nobly pensive, ST JOHN sat and thought, Where British sighs from dying WYNDHAM ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... was a range of wild land, far away even from the suburbs of the city, and owned by a plain, plodding merchant, whose son is the munificent and benevolent James Lenox, of whom New York may be justly proud. A strong-minded German of unpolished aspect, and with something of a foreign accent, kept a fur store at the corner of Pearl and Pine Streets, and displayed upon his sign the name of John Jacob Astor. He was then buying up from time to time pieces of land in the vicinity of the city, and the advance of price has at ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... established forms, not through want of genius, or of learning, but guided by his own good sense and superior judgement. He saw that the public ear was formed to a new manner; and eloquence, he knew, was to find new approaches to the heart. In the early periods of the commonwealth, a rough unpolished people might well be satisfied with the tedious length of unskilful speeches, at a time when to make an harangue that took up the whole day, was the orator's highest praise. The prolix exordium, wasting itself in feeble preparation; the circumstantial narration, ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... comprises 75 million. From several of these repositories pottery and ornamental sculpture have been taken, and various articles in silver and copper, also stone weapons, some composed of hornstone unpolished, and much resembling in shape some ancient flint implements found near Amiens and other places in Europe, to be ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... having staring windows, and devoid of a front porch, or slightest attempt at shade to render its uncomely front less unattractive. Hampton could scarcely refrain from forming a mental picture of the woman who would most naturally preside within so unpolished an abode—an angular, hard-featured, vinegar-tempered creature, firm settled in her prejudices and narrowed by her creed. Had the matter been left at that moment to his own decision, this glimpse of the house ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... Father, in whom throughout my life, I have never yet had much belief, all's well with me. Hallowed be thy name—so far as I am concerned. Thy kingdom come, that is, my bags of gold, my polished diamonds, and my unpolished Alemannia. Thy will be done, if thou wilt destroy my enemies. Give me this day champagne and truffles and pheasant, and all else that is delectable, for I have a very good appetite.... Lead me not into temptation to return to this country, for, even if I were bullet-proof, I might be arrested, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... power to facilitate his host's schemes would bring him a certain measure of civility and complaisance. He is fond of, and seeks the patronage of Europeans of position. In manners, the Negros and Panay Visayo is uncouth and brusque, and more conceited, arrogant, self-reliant, ostentatious, and unpolished than his northern neighbour. If remonstrated with for any fault, he is quite disposed to assume a tone of impertinent retort or sullen defiance. The Cebuano is more ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... lion-skin thrown over his shoulders, gold bangles on his arms and ankles, a beautifully worked coronet of gold adorned with crimson feathers of the flamingo, two necklaces—one composed of lions' teeth and claws, and the other, and larger, of unpolished stones that seemed to emit a faint glint of ruddy fire—round his neck. He was armed with a sheaf of short, broad-bladed stabbing spears, and was seated on a sort of throne entirely covered with an immense kaross of lions' skin. Behind him stood eight savages, as finely ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... sometimes it happens that the bride doesn't like the groom, nor the groom the bride: then the lady falls into a great rage. She even goes out of her head. She took a notion to marry one protegee to a petty shopkeeper in town; but he, an unpolished individual, was going to resist. "The bride doesn't please me," he said, "and, besides, I don't want to get married yet." So the mistress complained at once to the town bailiff and to the priest: well, they brought ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... possess, it had also shaped to certain generous instincts that were quite free from vanity. Her natural kindliness gave her the charm of good-breeding, and this settled her in the estimation of Mrs. Lawrence. She might have possessed all the virtues in the calendar, but an inharmonious, unpolished turn or act would have tabooed her. We generally ascribe this grace to life-long culture, or a certain inheritance of blood, but it ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... invention; and as they did not comprehend either the merit or utility of the Roman arts, they destroyed the monuments of them, with an industry not inferior to that with which their posterity have since studied to preserve or to recover them. The convulsions occasioned by the settlement of so many unpolished tribes in the empire; the frequent as well as violent revolutions in every kingdom which they established; together with the interior defects in the form of government which they introduced, banished security and leisure. ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... to him! Well, after all, it was no more than he had dreaded all along; he had been a fool, and worse than a fool, to suppose that he, a plain, unpolished seaman, could possibly have a chance of success when pitted against a fellow like Walford—curse him! No—no, not that, he did not mean that; why should he curse the man to whom Lucy had given her young, ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... ashes whitening the ground beside him. Or it might describe the outline simply in the air. Speech in its inception was as much expressed by the finger as the tongue; perhaps the fingers talked before the mouth, and in a sense writing preceded language. Uttering the unpolished sound which in their primitive society indicated the mammoth, the savage drew rapidly a figure with his finger, and his companions read his meaning written in the air. To this day it is common for the Italian peasantry to talk with their fingers; a few syllables ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... presented to the tidy little officer in his uniform and black tie: a haggard, unshaven lot of men, none too clean, all suffering from strain and lack of sleep, with nerves ready to snap; a white yacht, motionless, her sails drooping,—for not a breath of air moved,—with unpolished brasses and dirty decks; in charge of all, a tall youth, unshaven like the rest, and gaunt from sickness, who hardly knew a nautical phrase, who shook the little officer's hand with a ferocity of welcome that made him change color, and whose uniform consisted of a pair of dirty khaki trousers ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... history of the Christian faith. That faith, though it is a wisdom which comes from God, does not lend itself to pride of intellect. It is deliberately content to be counted foolish by the world; its sign is the cross, its converts are the poor and insignificant Corinthians, its eloquence the unpolished speaking of the apostle himself. And as to their personal preferences for receiving spiritual benefits from one Christian teacher rather than another, this shows a complete misconception as to the source of the benefit and the position of ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... Her flesh was cold and colourless,—there were no surface tints on it,—it warmed sometimes slowly from far within; her voice, quiet,—out of her heart; her hair, the only beauty of the woman, was lustreless brown, lay in unpolished folds of dark shadow. I saw such hair once, only once. It had been cut from the head of a man, who, unconscious, simple as a child, lived out the law of his nature, and set the world at ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... He saw the glow kindle in her eyes and illumine her sombre face; it was like the leaping of light to the surface. As she stood midway of the entrance, in a frame of unpolished logs, her white and black beauty against the smoky gloom of the interior, the red sunset before her feet, he recalled swiftly an allegorical figure of Night he had once seen in an old engraving. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... unpolished stipes, blending above with the substance of the thick unpolished walls; the ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... infancy of their state, were entirely rude and unpolished. They came from shepherds; they were increased from the refuse of the nations around them; and their manners agreed with their original. As they lived wholly on tilling their ground at home, or on plunder from their neighbours, war was their business, and agriculture the chief art they followed. ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... and I am now at Les Eyzies, in the valley of the Vzre: a paradise of exceptional richness to the scientific bone and flint grubber on account of the very marked predilection shown for it by the men of the Stone Age, polished and unpolished. It is about five in the morning, and the woods along the cliffs are just beginning to catch the pale fire of the rising sun. Just outside my open window are about twenty chickens in the charge of two mother hens, and as they have ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... you have had, my daughter, to let your mind run to such an unpolished young man. Drag a family down when a family is going up, and there's the end of that family—with society I mean." Mrs. Chapman tossed her head, and again returned to the mirror, saying as she viewed herself in it: "Drag a low bred fellow into a well bred family, ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... you yourself are toiling, and its turns more frequent. You have already come a distance of two leagues, and still one- third of the ascent remains unsurmounted. You are not yet in Galicia; and you still hear Castilian, coarse and unpolished, it is true, spoken in the miserable cabins placed in the sequestered nooks which you pass ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... usual manner. The whole equipment was that of a rude warrior, negligent of his exterior even to misanthropical sullenness; and the short, harsh, haughty tone, which he used towards his attendants, belonged to the same unpolished character. ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... statue of Peter the Great, which should be worthy of his renown. A French artist, M. Falconet, was engaged to execute this important work. He conceived the design of having, for a pedestal, a rugged rock, to indicate the rude and unpolished character of the people to whom the emperor had introduced so many of the arts of civilization. Immediate search was made to find a suitable rock. About eight miles from the city a huge boulder was discovered, forty-two feet long, thirty-four feet broad, and twenty-one feet high. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... out last among the band of liberated work-women. She did not care to be mingled in their noisy dispersal: once in the street, she always felt an irresistible return to her old standpoint, an instinctive shrinking from all that was unpolished and promiscuous. In the days—how distant they now seemed!—when she had visited the Girls' Club with Gerty Farish, she had felt an enlightened interest in the working-classes; but that was because she looked down on them from above, from the happy altitude of her grace and her beneficence. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... list had necessarily increased dissatisfaction among the Royalists, since the property of the emigrants had not been restored to its old possessors, even in those cases in which it had not been sold. It was the fashion in a certain class to ridicule the unpolished manners of the great men of the Republic compared with the manners of the nobility of the old Court. The wives of certain generals had several times committed themselves by their awkwardness. In many circles there was an affectation of treating with contempt what are called ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... for (circa 364 B.C.) from Etruria, who, without verses or any action expressive of verses, danced not ungracefully, after the Tuscan manner to the flute. In process of time the Roman youth began to imitate these dancers intermixing raillery with unpolished verses, their gestures corresponding with the sense of the words. Thus were these plays received at Rome, and being improved and refined by frequent performance the Roman actors acquired the name of Histriones, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... branches of mendicancy are languishing, and Yuen Yan can have no secret store of wealth. Do not hesitate to offer a higher wage than you would as an affair of ordinary commerce, for your safety depends upon it. Having secured Yan, teach him quickly the unpolished outlines of your business and then clothing him in robes similar to your own let him take his stand within the shop and withdraw yourself to the inner chamber. None will suspect the artifice, and ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... mechanical occupation had hitherto been a non-resident; and the schoolmaster, who did not aspire to the sublime heights of science I professed to communicate, was willing to admit me as a partner in the task of civilising the unpolished manners of the inhabitants. For the parson, civilisation was no part of his trade; his business was with the things of a better life, not with the carnal concerns of this material scene; in truth, his thoughts were principally occupied with his ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... window-curtains, which were of Indian muslin lined with rose-colored taffeta, and set off with a fringe of poppy-color and black. Six silver-gilt arms, each supporting two candles, were attached to the tapestry at an equal distance, to illuminate the divan. The ceiling, from the middle of which a lustre of unpolished silver hung, was of a brilliant whiteness, and the cornice was gilded. The carpet was like an Oriental shawl; it had the designs and recalled the poetry of Persia, where the hands of slaves had worked on it. The furniture was covered in white cashmere, relieved by black and poppy-colored ornaments. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Sunday, and, if possible, at a funeral; top-coat or water-proof never. His jacket and waistcoat were rough homespun of Glen Urtach wool, which threw off the wet like a duck's back, and below he was clad in shepherd's tartan trousers, which disappeared into unpolished riding-boots. His shirt was gray flannel, and he was uncertain about a collar, but certain as to a tie,—which he never had, his beard doing instead,—and his hat was soft felt of four colours and seven different shapes. His point of distinction in dress was the trousers, and they ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... common. To her he seemed to have but one idea,—the amassing of wealth. With her more intellectual cravings, the continual striving for this, to the exclusion of all higher aspirations, put him on a plane too narrow for her footing. Unpolished he certainly was, but the rough, exposed grain of his unhewn nature showed many strata of strength and virility. In this gentle mood a tenderness had come into view that drew her to him with a touch ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... new friend in the son of a small farmer named Turnill. The two youths read together, Turnill assisting Clare with books and writing materials. He now began to "snatch a fearful joy" by scribbling on scraps of paper his unpolished rhymes. "When he was fourteen or fifteen," to use his mother's own words, "he would show me a piece of paper, printed sometimes on one side and scrawled all over on the other, and he would say, 'Mother, this is worth silver and gold,' and I used to say to him, 'Ay, boy, ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... who therein have taste and pleasure. This I have striven to do with that accuracy and with that good faith which are essential for the truth of history and of things written. But if my writing, being unpolished and as artless as my speech, be unworthy of your Excellency's ear and of the merits of so many most illustrious intellects; as for them, pardon me that the pen of a draughtsman, such as they too were, has no greater power to give them outline and shadow; and ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... treachery and murder; and he drove into exile Timaeus, the son of Andromachus. Timaeus? He, evidently, of my Casa Timeo. I know him now, the once famed historian whom Cicero praises as the most erudite in history of all writers up to his time, most copious in facts and various in comment, not unpolished in style, eloquent, and distinguished by terse and charming expression. Ninety years he lived in the Greek world, devoted himself to history, and produced many works, now lost. The ancient writers read him, and from their criticism it is clear that he was ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... to the gem, which, unpolished as it was, cast forth strange reflections, giving her, as she afterwards explained, a "queer feel" and a sense of chill down the marrow ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... this way: You believe that you are doing what is best for my sake; I don't agree with you—and it does seem as if I should be permitted to judge what I desire." Then her dignity and her sweet calm went down before a flash of real, unpolished temper. "You two can take those nasty horses and ride clear to Dakota, if you want to. I'm going back to the hotel. And I'm going to tell somebody to let that poor fellow out of that box. I think you're acting perfectly horrid, both ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... comes from genuine and original talent, from his own musical individuality; but he is not master of himself; he has no style; he is an untrained musician. If he be a diamond, he is certainly in the rough and unpolished." ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which this essay is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet, produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows, and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age of the very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of prehistoric ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... especially in the last years of physical pain; he often tried to take short cuts to his ends, believing that his ends were worthy and knowing that life was short. He made many mistakes, but he retrieved them nobly. He was in some ways rough-hewn and unpolished, but he was ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... And, because they were drawn in to be laughed at in those times, they think themselves now sufficiently entitled to laugh at ours. Learning I never saw in any of them; and wit no more than they could remember. In short, they were unlucky to have been bred in an unpolished age, and more unlucky to live to a refined one. They have lasted beyond their own, and are cast behind ours; and, not contented to have known little at the age of twenty, they boast ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... a room with a door that closed on the outside with a hook. We slept there. The plaster on the once yellow walls was crumbling away; the beams of the ceiling bent beneath the weight of the slated roof, and on the window-panes was a layer of dust that softened the light like a piece of unpolished glass. The beds, four walnut boards carelessly put together, had big, round, worm-eaten knobs, and the wood was split by the dryness. On each bed was a mattress and a matting, covered with a ragged green spread. A piece of mirror in a varnished frame, an old game-bag on a nail, and ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... with difficulty indeed, yet nevertheless I bore it. And then I bade him at least take a myrtle-wreath and recite to me some portion of Aeschylus; and then he immediately said, "Shall I consider Aeschylus the first among the poets, full of empty sound, unpolished, bombastic, using rugged words?" And hereupon you can't think how my heart panted. But, nevertheless, I restrained my passion, and said, "At least recite some passage of the more modern poets, of whatever kind these clever things be." And he immediately sang a passage of Euripides, how a brother, ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... Edward, still speaking in French: for, though he could understand English, he had never learned to express himself in so barbarous and unpolished a tongue. "By my faith, sirs," he continued, half turning in his saddle to address his escort, "unless my woodcraft is sadly at fault, it is a stag of six tines and the finest that we have roused this journey. A golden St. Hubert to the man who is the first to sound the mort." He shook his ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him, and defying Englishes to touch him. Of course they cooked his geese, Koran or not. One warder does more than many Prophets in Gungapur Jail. (He! He! Quite good epigram and nice cynicality of educated man.) The degraded and unpolished fellow decoyed two little girls into empty house to steal their jewellery, and cut off fingers and noses and ears to get rings and nose-jewels and ear-drops, and left to die. Holy Fakir, gentleman of course! Pooh! and Bah! for all holy men. I give spurnings ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... men had nothing else, in those ages, than that kind of romantic gallantry to recommend them. Ignorant of letters, arts, and sciences, and every thing that refines human nature, they were, in every thing where gallantry was not concerned, rough and unpolished in their manners and behavior. Their time was spent in drinking, war, gallantry, and idleness. In their hours of relaxation, they were but little in company with their women; and when they were, the indelicacies of the carousal, or the cruelties of the field, were almost ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... civilization must in the end fail. Those plans can succeed only by active American support, and to secure this is now the supreme task and aim of British stealth and skill. Every tool of her diplomacy, polished and unpolished, from the trained envoy to the boy scout and the minor poet has been tried in turn. The pulpit, the bar, the press; the society hostess, the Cabinet Minister and the Cabinet Minister's wife, the ex-Cabinet Minister and the Royal Family itself, and last, but not least, even "Irish nationality"—all ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... excellent and useful things, which - we have no doubt - will be of great benefit to anyone sincerely seeking the truth, we did not wish to deprive you of them. And so that you would be aware of, and find less difficult to excuse, the many things that are still obscure, rough, and unpolished, we wished to warn ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... opposite side, but between them, instead of windows, were arched niches in which stood life-size plaster statues, chipped, broken, and defaced in an extraordinary fashion. The flooring, of diagonally set narrow boards, was uncarpeted and unpolished. The ceiling was adorned with frescoes, which at once excited Sir Charles's interest, and he noted with indignation that a large portion of the painting at the northern end had been destroyed and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... quarter pound dried Lima beans and one pound unpolished rice for twelve hours. Cook a half pound pearl barley for two hours. Blanch one pound carrots, one pound onions, one medium-size potato and one red pepper for three minutes and cold-dip. Prepare the vegetables ...
— Every Step in Canning • Grace Viall Gray
... him from the embarrassment of making any request and generally exhibiting a delicate courtesy and generosity which astonished those who judged him merely by his rough exterior. But Grant, though uncouth in appearance and unpolished in manners, was a gentleman in the best sense of the word, and he rose to the occasion with an ease and grace that left ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... and certain books which have fallen by chance into their hands, works treating of the vast regions hitherto unknown to the world, and of the Occidental lands lying almost at the Antipodes which the Spaniards recently discovered. Despite its unpolished style, the novelty of the narrative charmed them, and they besought me, as well on their own behalf as in the name of Your Holiness, to complete my writings by continuing the narrative of all that has since happened, and to send a copy to Your Beatitude so that you might understand ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Thou art uncouth to look upon: thy face is unshaven, thy shirt dirty, and lo! thy overalls smell of paint and grease; thy speech is ungrammatical, and thy manners unpolished—but give us the grasp of thy honest hand, and the warm feelings of thy generous heart, fifty, yes a million times sooner than the mean heart and niggard hand of the selfish cur ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... which occupied half the walls. Door or shutters, to be closed if the wind and rain were too violent, are all that is needed in a climate where the temperature changes but little, day or night, throughout the year. A table, unpolished, like the wooden walls, but, like them, of some precious wood; a few chairs or benches, not forgetting, of course, an American rocking-chair; a shelf or two, with books of law and medicine, and beside them a few good books of devotion: a press; ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... a diamond in the rough, and a 'gem,' too, 'of purest ray serene'!" I caught the old man's hand and wrung it with positive rapture; and it is needless to go further in explanation of how the readers of our daily came to an acquaintance through its columns with the crude, unpolished, yet most gentle genius of Benj. ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... up. Of course we passed them at the 'recover,' and the simple salutation of Vaya vd. con Dios! was interchanged. Had we omitted exchanging this compliment, even with the people we were now dealing with, we should have risked being thought unpolished." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... periods did this nascent race flourish?" the same impressive voice replies: "In prehistoric ages, the duration of which no one can now determine." Yet it must have been Sanskrit, however barbarous and unpolished, since "the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Slavonians, Germans and Kelts" were living within "the same precincts" with that nascent race, and the testimony borne by language has enabled the philologist ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... again in his path, at which (as I verily believe) he was more glad than sorry. As Rudolf entered, he had been half-way between window and table; he came forward to the table now, and stood leaning the points of two fingers on the unpolished dirty-white deal. ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... poor witticisms and conceits must be supposed to have fallen from his pen, yet as he hath put them generally into the mouths of low and ignorant people, so it is to be remember'd that he wrote for the Stage, rude and unpolished as it then was; and the vicious taste of the age must stand condemned for them, since he hath left upon record a signal proof how much he despised them. In his Play of The Merchant of Venice a Clown ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... safety in the midst of so many dangers. At length it occurred to me to write something to your Highness (whom my soul cordially loves) by which you may be made more safe at once and more cautious. Love conquers all things; ah! it has wrought in me not to fear, though in an uncultivated and unpolished style, to offer to so wise and glorious a Prince what I reflected upon in my mind, and to open to your serene Highness as I best may what I have conceived in my heart for your royal safety. Hence it is that I have endeavoured to draw up a brief table of events from ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... of love, but something finer—nothing less, indeed, than the jewel natural, uncut, unworked, unpolished, blazing out of a twofold crown that sat, yoke-like, upon their heads for all to see. Since, however, they met no ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... will be found at the end of "Nietzsche contra Wagner." While reading them, however, it should not be forgotten that they were never intended for publication by Nietzsche himself—a fact which accounts for their unpolished and sketchy form—and that they were first published in vol. xi. of the first German Library Edition (pp. 99-129) only when he was a helpless invalid, in 1897. Since then, in 1901 and 1906 respectively, they have been reprinted, once in the large German Library Edition (vol. xi. pp. 181-202), ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... poem on "The Ideal," which had all the worst faults of the author's earliest compositions in verse. The present poem (with the exception of a very few lines) has been entirely rewritten, and has at least the comparative merit of being less vague in the thought, and less unpolished in the diction, than that ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with brilliants; sleeves tapering into neat rufflets of lace clasped upon the wrist with diamond bracelets, a stomacher of chastely worked lace with brilliants in the centre, relieved by two rows of small unpolished pearls,—is ushered into the parlour, followed by groomsmen ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... he was giving his true reason; but he was not. A foolish notion had floated, like a grain of dust, into the over-delicate wheels of his thought,—that men would employ him the more readily if he looked needy. His hat was unbrushed, his shoes unpolished; he had let his beard come out, thin and untrimmed; his necktie was faded. He looked battered. When the Italian's gentle warning showed him this additional mistake on top of all his others he was dismayed at himself; ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... to this general description. A few young men had found their way hither from the distant seaports; and these were the models of fashion to their rustic companions, over whom they asserted a superiority in exterior accomplishments, which the fresh, though unpolished intellect of the sons of the forest denied them in their literary competitions. A third class, differing widely from both the former, consisted of a few young descendants of the aborigines, to whom ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... misconceived, but—horrible to think of!—some are misconceived even though they are loved. The simplest women in society exact a certain amount of conventional sham from the greatest men. A noble love signifies nothing to them if rough and unpolished; it needs the cutting and setting of a jeweller to give it value in ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... or marble, as it is sometimes called, has a delicate gray vein, which is brought out by polish on the cornice and balustrade, as a relief to the unpolished surface elsewhere displayed. There is no inscription; but visitors are usually told about Mrs. Charlotte Hart, the apparently impecunious pew-opener at the church, who surprised her friends by dying ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... muscular strength. His black nether garments and silk stockings fitted a leg which might have been envied by a porter, and his breadth of shoulder was extreme. He had a slouch, probably contracted by long poring over the desk; and his address was as abrupt as his appearance was unpolished. His forehead was large and bald, eye small and brilliant, and his cheeks had dropped down so as to increase the width of his lower jaw. Deep, yet not harsh, lines were imprinted on the whole of his countenance, which indicated ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... given for each of the Latin terms caelo and terra. The same schoolmaster uses seven synonyms in describing the "fashion" of speech of the ignorant constable, —"undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or, rather unlettered, or, ratherest, unconfirmed, fashion." When we remember that it was really Shakespeare who wrote this, we know that he had been led to study variety of expression. His large vocabulary could not have been ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... scan the appearance of my new acquaintance. He was rather above the medium height, squarely and somewhat stoutly built, and had an easy and self-possessed, though rough and unpolished manner. His face, or so much of it as was visible from underneath a thick mass of reddish gray hair, denoted a firm, decided character; but there was a manly, open, honest expression about it that gained one's confidence in a moment. He wore a slouched ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... solid; varying in color from bright red to dull, subdued purplish with a distinct brown; compact; convex, then depressed, dry unpolished; margin even, sometimes cracked ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... emptying out of my desk. The epigrams are wretched indeed, but they answered Stewart's purpose, better than better things. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. I never dreamt of acknowledging, either them, or the Ode to the 'Rain.' As to feeble expressions, and unpolished lines—there is the rub! Indeed, my dear sir, I do value your opinion very highly. I think your judgment in the sentiment, the imagery, the flow of a poem, decisive; at least, if it differed from my own, and if after frequent consideration mine remained ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... and say it in a pleasing and cultured manner; every phrase may be well placed, every sentence polished, every argument in its proper place. Another man may have no elegance of diction, his words may be unpolished, his sentences even ungrammatical, and yet he may move a great multitude, as the leaves of the trees are moved by the wind, through the intense earnestness and enthusiasm by which he is possessed. We see the same thing in Christian effort. The organization of ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... intellect may be cultivated in youth—however much it may be distinguished for great thoughts and wonderful attainments, still the peculiarities born of the forest cling about it in all its roughness—a fit setting to the unpolished ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... conscientious was she, that she allowed the question to be debated in her mind for half a minute, answering then, 'No, not uncivil. I cannot exactly explain . . . . He certainly did not intend to be uncivil. He is only an unpolished, vexatious ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Dog whose autobiography I have great pleasure in presenting to the world. Many may object to the unpolished style in which his memoirs are clothed, but all who knew him will easily pardon every want of elegance in his language; and those who had not the honour of his acquaintance, will learn to appreciate his character from the plain spirit of truth which breathes ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... easy in any one place when she thinks there is more company in another. The missing of an opera the first night would be more afflicting to her than the death of a child. She pities all the valuable part of her own sex, and calls every woman of a prudent, modest, retired life, a poor-spirited, unpolished creature. What a mortification would it be to Fulvia, if she knew that her setting herself to view is but exposing herself, and that she ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... enjoyment of a very large income, kept her carriage, had a box at the opera, and on opera nights had receptions after the performances. The wheel of fortune had turned, and she was now in the ascendant. Lord Wellington was among her admirers. But the brusque, unpolished duke disgusted the refined French lady by his boast to her, "I have given Napoleon a ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott |
