"Unpractised" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... face and the space immediately surrounding the eye is a uniform dull olive-green. If this distinction is once known and attended to the difference between the two birds may be immediately detected by even the unpractised eye. ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... from Brattleboro to try a case, which had suffered the usual "law's delay" of a continuance, and were whiling away the hours in the bucolic sport of their ancestors, while the idle villagers enjoyed their unpractised awkwardness. They all boasted how they could ring the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... enterprise would prove his strong conviction that it was a work so holy, so acceptable to God, that even those set apart for sanctuary service might feel called to have a hand in it. His prowess, brave as he was, was nothing; it was not his unpractised right arm, but his heart which he devoted to the service, and which would tell on the result, not merely of that special enterprise, nor of that battle only, but, by affording a powerful proof of love of country outweighing considerations of safety ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... contributed some smart prose pieces; Herbert Watson was clever at caricatures; Eleanor painted flowers sweetly; while Laura Wilson, ambitious to have something to show in Miss Rennie's album, had copied a number of riddles in a very angular hand, which was illegible to an unpractised eye. ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... in your own steadiness, which so much disdained my fears that the change of your residence might produce a change in your sentiments, is still as unshaken as when we parted in Suffolk? Or whether experience, that foe to unpractised refinement, has already taught ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... the earth Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God; And ocean too, with all its solemn noise, Has from thy sceptre pass'd; and all the air Is emptied of thine hoary majesty. Thy thunder, conscious of the new command, 60 Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house; And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands Scorches and burns our once serene domain. O aching time! O moments big as years! All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth, And press it so upon our weary griefs That unbelief has not a space to breathe. Saturn, sleep on:—O thoughtless, ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... in a pretty little bay, and the river, some 400 feet broad, was fronted, as is often the case, by the "palaver tree," a glorious Ceiba or bombax. All the people flocked out to enjoy the sight, and my unpractised eye could not distinguish them from Bakele. Above it, also on the right bank, is the now-deserted site where Messrs. Adams and Preston nearly came to grief for bewitching ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... howls of derision, which fell into silence as John Wendell made the trial. His unpractised hand in some way pulled down the goose, and the rebound of the sapling plucked the booty out of his grasp, and flung it high ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... fight, The Invaders march, of victory secure; Skilful their force to sever or unite, And trained alike to vanquish or endure. Nor skilful less, cheap conquest to ensure, Discord to breathe, and jealousy to sow, To quell by boasting, and by bribes to lure; While nought against them bring the unpractised foe, Save hearts for Freedom's cause, and hands ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... of the metals lie, in many places, so near the earth's surface that, in the earliest times, mining is unneeded and therefore unpractised. We are told that in Spain silver was first discovered in consequence of a great fire, which consumed all the forests wherewith the mountains were clothed, and lasted many days; at the end of which time the surface of the soil was found to be intersected by streams ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... himself. But the door from the parlor into the Tower offered insuperable difficulties. It was always locked; the lock was intricate; he had never so much as seen the key at close quarters and, even had opportunity offered, was quite unpractised in the art of taking impressions of locks—a thing not done with accuracy quite so easily as seems sometimes to ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... tempest's fury; and the wild tramp of excited feet outside, and above, made the huddled women shudder in face of the desperate fear that a fire upon the sea always awakens. But it had to be borne in inaction, for to move about in this furious pitching and swaying was utterly impossible to the unpractised. ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... suggestion that Potts be weighted with pig-iron and dumped into the healing waters, drunk or sober, was the mere playfulness of an excellent butcher unpractised in sarcasm. His offer to supply, free of cost, a quantity of pig-iron ample for the purpose left this hypothesis unavoidable, for Westley winked flagrantly and leered ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... me to postpone this rehearsal till late in the evening. Collected then round a cheerful hearth, exempt from all likelihood of interruption from without, and our babe's unpractised senses shut up in the sweetest and profoundest sleep, Mervyn, after a ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... really a certain amount of genius to guide her, and although all her ideas were crude and unpractised, she managed to be happy in the castle which she built, and her dark eyes grew bright once more, and her pretty face resumed its ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... followed he had presence of mind enough to seize a chair next to Kathleen. He saw Falstaff's burly figure enter, habited as the conventional "black beetle" of the church, and in the sharpened state of his wits noticed that the unpractised curate had put on his clerical collar the wrong way round. He rejoiced in Carter's look of dismay on finding his ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... entrance of the State House, and Wetherell followed Mr. Duncan in, to have a look at the woodchuck session himself. Several members hurried by and up the stairs, some of them in their Sunday black; and the lobby above seemed, even to the storekeeper's unpractised eye, a trifle active for a woodchuck session. Mr. Duncan muttered something, and quickened his gait a little on the steps that led to the gallery. This place was almost empty. They went down to the rail, and the railroad president cast his eye ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... thread our way among them, as we had done earlier in the day. Dinner was at two, but we were not much disposed to go down, for we had just passed one rapid, and were coming to the finest of all, the Cedars; but they turned out to be by no means alarming to an unpractised eye. The water is much disturbed, and full of small crests of waves. There were four men at the wheel, besides four at the tiller, and they had no doubt to keep a sharp look out; we stood on deck, and received a ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... am at hand To rescue and to heal? Oh, let thy soul Remember, what the will of heaven ordains Is ever good for all; and if for all, 550 Then good for thee. Nor only by the warmth And soothing sunshine of delightful things, Do minds grow up and flourish. Oft misled By that bland light, the young unpractised views Of reason wander through a fatal road, Far from their native aim; as if to lie Inglorious in the fragrant shade, and wait The soft access of ever circling joys, Were all the end of being. Ask thyself, This pleasing error did it never lull 560 Thy wishes? Has thy constant heart ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... hardly felt as he proceeded that it was the culmination of the day's utterances and that we were really then and there in an epoch-making event. Unfortunately for me my speech was yet to come and, unpractised as I was, I was uncomfortably nervous as to what I should say. I lost therefore the full effect of the masterpiece. One or two of the speakers on the programme had dropped out and behold it was my turn. The announcement of my name with a brief introduction from the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... but he insisted; and when his careless wife led the way up a ladder into the loft a British officer perceived at any rate one pair of khaki breeches. The patients of the Scottish Women's Hospital at Belgrade were so unpractised in the art of stealing that one of them—a typical case—returned one day to have her leg attended to, and in raising her skirt revealed on the petticoat, which had once been a tablecloth, a large "S.W.H." These felonious ways are in contrast ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Warblers, Thrushes, Finches, and Flycatchers; while, soaring above all, a little withdrawn and alone, rises the divine soprano of the Hermit. That richly modulated warble proceeding from the top of yonder birch, and which unpractised ears would mistake for the voice of the Scarlet Tanager, comes from that rare visitant, the Rose-breasted Grosbeak. It is a strong, vivacious strain, a bright noonday song, full of health and assurance, indicating fine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... couldn't eat buns. I was never, from a kitten, fond of such things. I got very hungry. Again and again the mice rushed through the straw, and I, heavily, helplessly, in my unpractised way, rushed after them. At first the elephant laughed heartily at my inexpertness; but when he saw how hungry and ...
— Pussy and Doggy Tales • Edith Nesbit
... to inspire such feeling, and to hold Joe in his place. She was neither so dull, nor so unpractised in the arts of coquetry, to make such a ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... beget. For by example most we sinn'd before, And glass-like clearness mix'd with frailty bore. But, since reform'd by what we did amiss, We by our sufferings learn to prize our bliss: 210 Like early lovers, whose unpractised hearts Were long the May-game of malicious arts, When once they find their jealousies were vain, With double heat renew their fires again. 'Twas this produced the joy that hurried o'er Such swarms of English to the neighbouring shore, To fetch that prize, by which Batavia made So rich amends ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... picture my palace—and must I call it mine? presented, upon my first arrival. The old steward, and the grey-headed lacqueys endeavoured to assume a look of complacency, but their recent grief appeared through their unpractised hypocrisy. "Health to our young master! Long life," cried they, with a broken and tremulous accent, "to the marquis of Pescara!" You will readily believe, that I made haste to free them from their ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... realizes that hands, arms, legs, and head have been given one to complicate things. One jams them against everything. And there are times, too, when the unpractised Briton is simply baffled. ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... kiss and a smile— Wae 's me! can I tak' it amiss? My laddie 's unpractised in guile, He 's free aye to daut and to kiss! Ye lasses wha lo'e to torment Your wooers wi' fause scorn and strife, Play your pranks—I hae gi'en my consent, And this nicht I 'm ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the test of merit to make the hardest things look easy. Moreover, there may be a distinction between two feats almost imperceptible to the eye,—a change, for instance, in the position of the hands on a bar,—which may at once transform the thing from a trifle to a wonder. An unpractised eye can no more appreciate the difficulty of a gymnastic exercise by seeing it executed, than an inexperienced ear, of the perplexities of a piece of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... station, mentioned on 3rd. September. The pack-horses were not got away until half-past 12, two, "Rasper," and the mule (as often provokingly happens when most wanted) being astray, and having to be hunted for. There was also the usual amount of "bucking" incident to a start, the unpractised pack-horses rebelling against the unwonted load and amount of gear, and with a few vigorous plunges sending pack-bags, pots, hobbles, and chains in scattered confusion all round them. Few starts of a large party occur without similar mischances, but a day or two, suffices ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... oo as heard in oo-ze, which sound rapidly slides into that of i, and then advances to that of ee as heard in e-ve, and on which it gradually passes off into silence."—Kirkham's Elocution, p. 75. Thus the "unpractised student" is taught that b-y spells bwy; or, if pronounced "very deliberately, boo-i-ee!" Nay, this grammatist makes b, not a labial mute, as Walker, Webster, Cobb, and others, have called it, but a nasal subtonic, or semivowel. He delights ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... only one has half a notion of directing the eyes to some other thing, a card may be laid on the lap, thrust into the sleeve, taken from the pocket, and God knows what else. Now who can say in such a case whether the sensory glance or the intellectual apprehension was unskilful or unpractised? According to some authorities the chief source of error is the senses, but whether something must not be attributed to that mysterious, inexplicable moment in which sensory perception becomes intellectual perception, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... framed a constitution was showing only, without realizing, the general happiness. This great work remained to be done; and America, steadfast in her preference, with one will summoned her beloved Washington, unpractised as he was in the duties of civil administration, to execute this last act in the completion of the national felicity." Thus spoke Gen. Henry Lee, the funeral orator of Washington, and the father of a later and more famous ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... to the end of "Hester," there is one unerring indication of an uncultivated mind and an unpractised pen. This is the writer's fondness for well-worn phrases, which authors of a severer taste have long discarded as suited only to the newspapers, but which Mr. Beckett has picked up with eager delight, and, having distributed them liberally throughout the poem, contemplates with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... which the latter was familiar as the property of Sir Christopher, and this thought, combining with his hatred, made him suddenly raise the weapon and fire at the approaching Pequot. The forest rang with the report, and as Quecheco, unpractised in the use of fire-arms, having discharged the piece but a few times, recovered himself, he beheld Towanquattick fitting an arrow to his bow. Seizing the tomahawk out of his belt, Quecheco hurled it ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... and of her hair—"a brown tress." She had gravely heard the words as "a brown dress," and she silently bore the poet a grudge for having been the accessory of Providence in the mandate that she should wear the loathed corduroy. The unpractised ear played another little girl a like turn. She had a phrase for snubbing any anecdote that sounded improbable. "That," she said more or less after Sterne, "is a ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... rise, An awful ghost confess'd to human eyes! Unnamed, methinks, distinguish'd I had been From other shades, by this eternal green, About whose wreaths the vulgar poets strive, And, with a touch, their wither'd bays revive. Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age, I found not, but created first the stage; And if I drain'd no Greek or Latin store, 'Twas that my own abundance gave me more. On foreign trade I needed not rely, Like fruitful Britain, rich without supply. In ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... little calculated to cope with the war-waging outlaws, it is quite apparent how gross the inequality of the struggle must necessarily be. While most of the merchantmen carried defensive armament, the unpractised, unskilled crew made the guns in their hands little more than ineffective. As the pirate ship approached, she displayed the same flag flying from the stern of the merchantman; and with the crew hidden below decks, in order not to betray their purpose, the vessels approached ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... respect to typography, as connected with the art of reading. The note of interrogation should be placed at the beginning, as well as at the end of a question; it is sometimes so far distant, as to be out of the reach of an unpractised eye. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... the cause. Both had long been loyal, and had earned many laurels against the rebels, while Champagny was still devoutly a Papist, and wavered painfully between his hatred to heresy and to Spain. Egmont and De Heze were raw, unpractised lads, in whom genius did not come to supply the place of experience. The Commander, De Goignies, was a veteran, but a veteran who had never gained much glory, and the chiefs of the cavalry, infantry, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... as an experiment or from idle amusement. Zoomorphs are conspicuous by their absence from all forms of decorative art amongst the Lawas Muruts, and the particular zoomorph noted here gives every evidence of an unpractised hand. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... upon his oar and with a thrust sent the boat's head outward; and directly after, dipping as lightly as they could, they pulled together with a wonderful regularity for such unpractised hands out towards the middle, till a scattered light or two appeared from beyond the trees, showing where ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... the individuals of which to an unpractised eye would appear absolutely similar, which would give, it might have been thought, no scope to selection, the whole appearance of the animal has been changed in a few years (as in the case of Lord ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... few opportunities to mail a letter, and none of them for receiving one. Unpractised in writing, his epistolary compositions were crude in the extreme, being wholly confined to bald statements of fact. Had he been as tender on paper as he was in his words and accents when he kissed away her tears at parting, her regard for him would have had ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... to Netley had been discovered during my absence, and our unpractised Americans had done little else than admire ruins for the past week. The European who comes to America plunges into the virgin forest with wonder and delight; while the American who goes to Europe finds his greatest pleasure, at first, in hunting up the memorials of the past. Each is in quest of novelty, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Division. Addition, as far as it required any rules, came naturally under Multiplication, while Subtraction was involved in the process of Division. These rules were all that were needed in Western Europe in centuries when commerce hardly existed, and astronomy was unpractised, and even they were only required in the preparation of the calendar and the assignments of the royal exchequer. In England, for example, when the hide developed from the normal holding of a household into the unit of taxation, the calculation of the geldage in each shire ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous
... prudence is required to adapt the practical rule founded on it to the ends of life, even tolerably, by making proper exceptions. But the moral law commands the most punctual obedience from everyone; it must, therefore, not be so difficult to judge what it requires to be done, that the commonest unpractised understanding, even without worldly prudence, should fail to ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... so this time. The master was a fencer, and something of a boxer; he had played at singlestick, and was used to watching an adversary's eye and coming down on him without any of those premonitory symptoms by which unpractised persons show long beforehand what mischief ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the power of an unblemished heart and a brave spirit is shewn, in the events of war, not only among unpractised citizens and peasants; but among troops in the most perfect discipline. Large bodies of the British army have been several times broken—that is, technically vanquished—in Egypt, and elsewhere. Yet they, who were conquered as formal soldiers, stood their ground and became conquerors ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Yes, sir; but suppose an active, adroit, strong man, had insulted an awkward, or a feeble, or an unpractised swordsman. ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Macedonians pursued him, when his government had expired, with a list of grievances of the usual kind. Young Caesar took up their cause, and prosecuted him. Dolabella was a favorite of the Senate; he had been allowed a triumph for his services, and the aristocracy adopted his cause as their own. The unpractised orator was opposed at the trial by his kinsman Aurelius Cotta and the most celebrated pleaders in Rome. To have crossed swords with such opponents was a dangerous honor for him; success against them was not to be ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... arrangement of the figures, but even now they are not, I imagine, quite as Tabachetti left them. The figure of Christ is greatly better in technical execution than that of either of the two thieves; the folds of the drapery alone will show this even to an unpractised eye. I do not think there can be a doubt but that Tabachetti cut this figure himself, as also those of the Magdalene and St. John, who stand at the foot of the cross. The thieves are coarsely executed, with no very obvious distinction ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... envied ignominy, sweet disgrace, When every god that saw thee wished thy place! By those dear pleasures, aid my arms in fight, And make me conquer in my patron's right: For I am young, a novice in the trade, The fool of love, unpractised to persuade, And want the soothing arts that catch the fair, But, caught my self, lie struggling in the snare; And she I love or laughs at all my pain Or knows her worth too well, and pays me with disdain. For sure I am, unless I win in arms, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... in the ditch leaning heavily upon the long handle of his axe. It was a straight stick of ash, roughly shaved down to some sort of semblance of smoothness, such as would have worked up an unpractised hand into a mass of blisters in ten minutes' usage, but which glided easily through those horny palms, leaving no mark of friction. The continuous outdoor labour, the beating of innumerable storms, and the hard, coarse fare, had dried up all the original moisture of the hand, till it was rough, ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... Hyperides there is a richer modulation, a greater variety of excellence. He is, we may say, in everything second-best, like the champion of the pentathlon, who, though in every contest he has to yield the prize to some other combatant, is superior to the unpractised in all five. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... arrow-root, sago, and refined sugar—the latter reduced to an impalpable powder—besides the flavouring substances. The quality depends entirely on the proportions of these ingredients, and on their unexceptionable character. The unpractised eye may not detect any difference between a cake of genuine chocolate, and another two-thirds composed of red earth and roasted beans. We have seen documentary evidence laid before the Board of Excise, shewing that a certain manufacturer ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... not to be subjected to the operation of punching, still less, as some strangely supposed, to the notion of fire. The letters, or figures, will be marked by cutting; and, so simple and ingenious is the method employed, that the most unskilful workman, even an ordinary person unpractised in any trade, can effect the process with the most perfect ease. Four figures and two letters are expected to suffice for designating the county or riding of a county, and the number of the piece; the time occupied in the engraving will be one minute. ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... from ennui. But to supply these in a style of proper and antique dignity was beyond the power of the poets. In the wild forests of the mind they could rarely capture a mature idea, and they were as yet unpractised artists. Yet contemplative leisure called eagerly for constant titbits of romance to tickle the palate and furnish a diversion, while the genius of Christian poetry was yet in infantile weakness. The dilemma lasted but a moment, and was solved by an heroic effort ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... likewise, what is more important; to THINK, in French; which was otherwise quite domesticated in the Palace, and became his second mother-tongue. Not a bad dialect; yet also none of the best. Very lean and shallow, if very clear and convenient; leaving much in poor Fritz unuttered, unthought, unpractised, which might otherwise have come into activity in the course of his life. He learned to read very soon, I presume; but he did not, now or afterwards, ever learn to spell. He spells indeed dreadfully ILL, at his first appearance on the writing stage, as we shall ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... to regard wealth in a husband, answered with a graceful modesty, that she would wish herself a thousand times more fair, and ten thousand times more rich, to be more worthy of him; and then the accomplished Portia prettily dispraised herself, and said she was an unlessoned girl, unschooled, unpractised, yet not so old but that she could learn, and that she would commit her gentle spirit to be directed and governed by him in all things; and she said, "Myself and what is mine, to you and yours is now converted. But yesterday, Bassanio, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... manuscript tightly clasped, I balanced myself on the curbstone, afraid to plunge into the boiling vortex of the crossing. Every time I made a start, a clanging street car snatched up the way. I could not even pick out my street; the unobtrusive street signs were lost to my unpractised sight, in the glaring confusion of store signs and advertisements. If I accosted a pedestrian to ask the way, I had to speak several times before I was heard. Jews, hurrying by with bearded chins on their bosoms and eyes intent, shrugged their shoulders at the name "Transcript," ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... Design or Thought for that Purpose: No Art used to inflame him, no Coquetry practised to tempt or intice him, and no Prudery or Affectation to tamper with his Passions; but, on the contrary, artless and unpractised in the Wiles of the World, all her Endeavours, and even all her Wishes, tended only to render herself as un-amiable as she could in his Eyes: Tho' at the same time she is so far from having any Aversion to his Person, that she seems rather prepossess'd in his Favour, ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... speechifying; especially to an unpractised orator. I never conceived, till now, what toil the temperance lecturers undergo for my sake. Hereafter, they shall have the business to themselves. Do, some kind Christian, pump a stroke or two, just to wet my whistle. Thank you, ...
— A Rill From the Town Pump (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... entirely immodeset, unmeasured, and (in evil sense) unmannered, execution with the fist; and the entirely modest, measured, and (in the noblest sense) mannered, or moral'd execution with the finger; between the impatient and unpractised doing, containing in itself the witness of lasting impatience and idleness through all previous life, and the patient and practised doing, containing in itself the witness of self-restraint and unwearied toil through all previous ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... horror that the queen here displayed. Though at a subsequent period of her life, if history speaks true, her imagination had grown familiar with deeds of this very nature, and she had become skilful in the art of poisoning, she was at this time young, and unpractised in crime, and received its first suggestions with the horror which it naturally inspires. She had sought for pleasure only in the society of Glinski; it was a cruel disappointment, it was a frightful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... more surprising to one who crosses a country inhabited by savages than the few marks of their presence which strike the eye, or at least an unpractised eye. The little plot of ground the Kafirs have cultivated is in a few years scarcely distinguishable from the untouched surface of the surrounding land, while the mud-built hut quickly disappears under the summer rains and the scarcely less destructive efforts of the white ants. Here in South Africa ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... time for Nelly to go to church on that Sunday, at any rate. She could not get through her work with her comparatively unpractised hands, and it was with a very weary body and mind that she read her evening verse, and repeated her favourite hymn, "I lay my sins on Jesus," as a sort of substitute for her usual Sunday school lessons, and then lay down to think of the kind friends she had left, and ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... be regained,—but it is indeed one of the advantages of defeat to teach men the preciousness of honor, the necessity of winning and keeping it at any cost. Honor and duty are but two names for the same thing in war. But the novelty of war is so great to us, we are so unpractised in it, and we have thought so little of it heretofore as concerning ourselves, that there is danger lest we fail at first to appreciate its finer elements, and neglect the opportunities it affords for the practice ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... later, Herman Mordaunt's followed; the poor, exhausted beasts struggling in the harness for freedom, that they might swim for their lives. Anneke heard the snorting of those wretched horses; but her unpractised eyes did not detect them, immersed, as they were, in the current; nor had she recognised the sleigh that whirled past us, as her father's. A little later, a fearful shriek came from one of the fettered beasts; ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... a time when the small islands were overcrowded with the increased population, and detachments began to cross the water and land at the furthest point of the Gulf, in the land of the great rivers. Here they found a people not unpractised in several primitive arts, and possessed of some important fundamental inventions—writing, irrigation by means of canals—but deplorably deficient in spiritual development, and positively barbarous in the presence of an altogether ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... is occupied by others—and what was considered as having substance and reality in their proceedings, is transferred to the head of physiology. The phrenologist is admitted into the hierarchy of science as an honest, though hitherto an unpractised, and not very successful labourer; the metaphysician, with his class of internal observations, is entirely scouted. M. Comte considers the mind as one of those abstract entities which it is the first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... net result? To an unpractised eye, if no indication of the source of these hymns had been given, could anything about them have suggested their source? To the unpractised eye, nothing. But no one who knows the Greek Offices will travel far before he overtakes ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... but he was fain to set the circumstance down to those very traces of barbarism which were the unavoidable fruits of their origin. As for supposing it possible that one who spoke with the ease and innocence of Raoul was inventing as he went along, it was an idea he was himself much too unpractised to entertain; and the very first thing he did on entering the palace was to make a memorandum which might lead him, at a leisure moment, to inquire into the nature of the writings and the general merits of Sir Cicero, the illustrious namesake ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... surrounding forests. Even amid the horrid discord, the quick ear of the Virginian, now painfully on the stretch, caught the same sound that had first attracted his attention. It was exactly at the angle of the roof, and only a pace or two from him. The peculiar noise was not to be mistaken even by an unpractised ear. It was, evidently, that of a knife, not very sharp, cautiously cutting through ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... Shakspere violated the unities; his plays were neither right comedies nor right tragedies; he had small Latin and less Greek; he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing anachronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, did not blot enough, and failed of the grand style. He was "untaught, unpractised in a barbarous age"; a wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules, unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding—when he did succeed—by happy accident and the sheer force of genius; his plays were "roughdrawn," his plots lame, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... oxygenated, so to say, by continual fresh apprehension of it and closer application of it to conduct. As soon as the stream stands, it stagnates; and the very manna from God will breed worms and stink. And Christian truth unpractised by those who hold it, corrupts itself and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Inside was an ordinary sheet of paper written over in a bold, firm, yet slightly unpractised writing that she knew well enough, and the sight of which filled her with a presentiment of evil. It was ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... side, and whilst you feel that a total change has been effected, you shall not always easily assign the secret of the change wrought. There then comes into view, it must be owned, something like an unpractised awkwardness in the gait of the great elder bard, which you less willingly believe, or to which you shut your eyes, when you have him by himself to yourself. The step of Dryden is rapid, and has perfect decision. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... spare waggon-pole, working quite methodically with saw and hammer and nails, and set it up, under the curious eyes he hated so, and wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt down stiffly, and made, with rusty, long unpractised fingers, the sacred sign upon his face and breast. He heard her still, asking him in that nearly extinguished voice of hers, to ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... she went by to starboard fairly shaving our side. The officer on her bridge, over which great waves of spray and water broke at every moment, "looked us over" and then bellowed orders to our Captain through a megaphone. My unpractised ear could not through the roar of the wind and the slap of the waves catch all he had to say, but it was something about submarines and a naval battle to the northward and orders to change and take a different course through the mine fields.[3] Whereupon we pursued a very zigzag ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... happens that specimens sent from distant places, by persons unpractised in geology, fail to give the instruction which is intended, from the want of attention to a few necessary precautions, that the following directions may perhaps be useful to some of those, into whose hands these pages are likely ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... in the writings of the Old Testament those primers for the rude Israelitish people, unpractised in thought, the doctrines of the immortality of the soul, and future recompenses, might be fairly left out: but they were bound to contain nothing which could have even procrastinated the progress of the people, for whom they were written, in their ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and fluent, and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised hand. I think it was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Star account in full, and I do so the more readily, not only because it contains the first detailed account of the man whose extraordinary audacity was shortly to raise the interest of the public to fever pitch, but also because it tells the story with a force and colour of which my unpractised pen is incapable. Apologising therefore to the editor for the liberty I have taken, I reprint the Star account verbatim. I think, however, the story ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... vieing in the toddy corner with his host, and when inevitably knocked under—for the other had not yet been limited by his doctor to that woman's wash, as he called it, sparkling moselle—he had contrived to find the common loft. It is said, of unpractised topers at any rate, that, after an extra indulgence, they either see nothing or see double. Whichever it was with Buchanan, he insisted on berthing for the night in Porter's occupied nest, while the latter, after standing the all-round ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... the Treviri and Lingones, and addressed 73 them as follows: 'Unpractised as I am in public speaking, for it is only on the field that I have asserted the superiority of Rome, yet since words have so much weight with you, and since you distinguish good and bad not by ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... They produced and read a copy of Joan's first effort at dictating—her proclamation summoning the English to retire from the siege of Orleans and vacate France—truly a great and fine production for an unpractised ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... thing she sees: True grief is fond and testy as a child, Who wayward once, his mood with nought agrees: Old woes, not infant sorrows, bear them mild; Continuance tames the one: the other wild, Like an unpractised swimmer plunging still, With too much labour drowns for ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... a public dinner, were particularly delighted. They were delighted by the speeches, though they had very few; they were delighted by the national anthem, all rising; particularly, they were delighted by "three-times-three, and one cheer more," and "hip, hip." It seemed to their unpractised ears like a great naval battle, or the end of the world, or any thing else of unimaginable excitement, tumult, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... her a little on the meaning of her words, till he presently found that she was too young and unpractised to be able to take his thrusts and return them, with equanimity. She could make a daring sally or reply; but it was still the raw material of conversation; it wanted ease and polish. And she was ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with her guitar, striking the bass strings, and trying to make an accompaniment to an air from an opera that she and Prince Andre had once heard together at St. Petersburg. The uncertain chords which her unpractised fingers sketched out would have struck the least experienced ear as wanting in harmony and musical accuracy, while to her excited imagination they brought a whole train of memories. Leaning against the wall and half hidden by a cabinet, with her eyes fixed on a thread of light that came ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... hyacinth, was hardly ever deceived in knowing each variety by the bulb alone. Hence we must conclude that the bulbs of the hyacinth and the branches and leaves of the camellia, though appearing to an unpractised eye ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... The pierced tympanum has a quatrefoil for the four cardinal virtues, or a trefoil for faith, hope, and charity. Compared with the lovely Angel Choir which flowered seventy years later, under our great King Edward, it may look all unpractised, austere; but Hugh built with sweet care, and sense, and honesty, never rioting in the disordered emotion of lovely form which owed no obedience to the spirit, and which expressed with great elaboration—almost nothing. He may ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... even a tuning-fork, in use at the Tabernacle. But the difficulties, apparently insuperable under these circumstances, of leading so vast a congregation in the singing of unpractised tunes is almost overcome by the skilful generalship of the gentleman who steps forward to the rails beside the preacher's table, pitches the note, and leads the singing. The hymn brought to a conclusion, Mr. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... waste, nor once be startled by one stag bounding by. Yet may a herd, a thousand strong, be drawn up, as in battle array, on the cliffs above your head. For they will long stand motionless, at gaze, when danger is in the wind—and then their antlers to unpractised eyes seem but boughs grotesque, or are invisible; and when all at once, with one accord, at signal from the stag, whom they obey, they wheel off towards the Corries, you think it but thunder, and look up to the clouds. Fortunate if you see such a sight once in ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... wayside inn with a painted fish upon the sign-board, and a hostess in a high hat and a stiff-bustled dress at the door. Then there were small wood-cuts which one might have framed for a doll's house; portraits of fish of all kinds, not easily distinguishable by the unpractised eye; and nicer wood-cuts still of country scenes, and country towns, and almost all of these with a river in them. By the time that my father and mother returned, I had come to the conclusion that the bank of a river was, of all situations, the most desirable ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... production from that of all others; by Human or Poetic Truth, that which may be said to exist exclusively in and for the mind, and as contradistinguished from the truth of things in the natural or external world; by Invention, any unpractised mode of presenting a subject, whether by the combination of entire objects already known, or by the union and modification of known but fragmentary parts into new and consistent forms; and, lastly, by Unity, such ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... calm of her mind, as, forgetting herself and her griefs, she watched the first efforts of this infant to acquaint himself with his own powers, and with the world about him; when she smiled at the ungainly stretching of the little limbs, and the unpractised movement of his eyes seeking the light. Holy and sweet were the tears which swelled into her eyes when she saw him at his mother's breast, and could not but gaze at the fresh and divine beauty now ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... Denmark was to obtain Holstein and Sleswick. But Denmark and Poland very soon withdrew, and left Russia to encounter Sweden single-handed. To this she was entirely unequal; her army, the bulk of it undisciplined, and even the disciplined part unpractised in the field, was no match for the veteran troops of Sweden, the terror of Germany. In the battle of Narva, a town on the river which runs out of the Peipus Lake, fought November 30, 1700, 9,000 Swedes defeated signally near forty thousand Russians, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... stranger, as yet, to my soul; I, still, am unpractised to varnish the truth: Then, why should I live in a hateful controul? Why waste, upon folly, the ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... "'Unpractised he to fawn or seek for power By doctrines fashioned to the varying hour: Far other aims his heart had learned to prize, More skilled to raise the wretched than ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... no choice in it—read that,' said Paula, handing Havill's letter, as if she felt that Providence had stepped in to shape ends that she was too undecided or unpractised ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... stood the triumphal car of the Goddess of Reason, the special feature of this great national fete. It was only a rough market cart, painted by an unpractised hand with bright, crimson paint and adorned with huge clusters of autumn-tinted leaves, and the scarlet berries of mountain ash and rowan, culled from the town gardens, or the country side ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... muse, unskill'd in venal praise, Unstain'd with flattery's art; Who loves simplicity of lays Breathed ardent from the heart; While gratitude and joy inspire, Resumes the long unpractised lyre, To hail, O HAY, thy natal morn: No gaudy wreath of flowers she weaves, But twines with oak the laurel leaves, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... a sentence; as a workman may be overladen not only with rubbish, which is of no use for him to carry, but with materials the most useful and necessary, when heaped up in loads too heavy for him at once.' A useful hint this, to unpractised writers. ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... indeed it is those men that are in fault who want the right way of addressing, the true and secret arts of moving, that sovereign remedy against disdain. It is you alone, my lord, like a young Columbus, that have found the direct, unpractised way to that little and so much desired world, the favour of the fair; nor could love himself have pointed his arrows with any thing more successful for his conquest of hearts: but mine, my lord, like Scaeva's shield, is already so full of arrows, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... wire that lay trailing on the ground. With new-found interest she examined the fracture, and stared at it in wonder. Dropping it, and kneeling excitedly in the grass, she searched another, and still another wire, and with the same result. Even to her unpractised eye the facts were plain: the four wires had not been broken; they had been cleanly cut, and very recently, as shown by the absence of rust on the severed ends. By whom? And why? Seth Huntington, Haig had said. Impossible! ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham |
