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More "Homely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Greek coins which shocked him in Caesarea. His memory of Mathias was as partial; but he knew the president's full face, and while pondering on it he remembered that he had never seen him in profile. Nor was this all that set the two men apart in Joseph's consciousness. The prior's simple and homely language came from the heart, entered the heart and was remembered, whereas Mathias spoke from his brain. The heart is simple and always the same, but the brain is complex and various; and therefore it was natural that Mathias should hold, as if in fee, a great store of verbal ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... begged that it mightn't be touched. Father let me have it for my very own. It was so different from all other rooms. I liked the pictures pasted on the walls, and the bits of poker-work nailed up. I knew some other girls must have been here, and it gave me a homely feeling, as if you had only gone away for a few minutes, and might come back any time and talk to me. Then there was your portrait. I wondered who 'Ingred' was! The name struck my fancy immensely, and so did ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... very sweet face of a woman, and as the boys looked at this they were conscious of having seen that face somewhere before. Two others showed country scenes, including a house. They were the kind of scenes that amateur photographers love to take; scenes with a homely familiarity about them—a woman sitting in a rocking chair on a porch, a dog skilfully caught by the camera in the moment of his resting his paws upon a fence, a back door with a churn standing near. Commonplace things, the last subjects that an artist would ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... my bonny chield; thou hast sharp ears and eyes, and good will—but take heed—I would not lose thee for two and a plack [an homely Scottish ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... enjoy, in removing or lessening prejudices; in conciliating good-will, and thereby making way for the less obstructed progress of truth; and in providing for its being entertained with candour, or even with favour, by those who would bar all access against it in any rougher or more homely form. He will make it his business to set on foot and forward benevolent and useful schemes; and where they require united efforts, to obtain and preserve for them this co-operation. He will endeavour ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... places, had not been in its best day becoming. But this was not all. Her hair looked stringy and dishevelled. She was delighted with herself. Except during an illness two years before never had she come so near to being downright homely. "Martha will die of shame," said she to herself. "And Mrs. Bertram will spend the evening explaining me to everybody." She did not definitely formulate the thought, "And I shall be the most talked about person of the evening"; but it was in her ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... state of my soul in its intercourse with Jesus! But since my Beloved wishes to sleep I shall not prevent Him. I am only too happy that He does not treat me as a stranger, but rather in a homely way. He riddles his "little ball" with pin-pricks that hurt indeed, though when they come from the Hand of this loving Friend, the pain is all sweetness, so gentle in His touch. How different the hand ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... the pavement—and I heard the car being driven back. Having slowly counted thirty I opened my eyes, and looked about me. This, and not the fevered moment when first I had looked upon the room with the golden door, seemed to be my true awakening, for about me was comprehensible world, the homely streets of London, with deserted Portland Place stretching away on the one hand and a glimpse of midnight Regent Street obtainable on the other! The clock of the neighboring church ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... infirmity of the natural feelings. They do not ask your sympathy, and you offer it quite at your own risk, with a chance of having it thrown back upon your hands. The contributor assumed the risk so far as to say, "Pretty rough!" when the stranger caused; and perhaps these homely words were best suited to reach the homely heart. The man's quavering lips closed hard again, a kind of spasm passed over his dark face, and then two very small drops of brine shone upon his weather-worn cheeks. This demonstration, into which he had been ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... drink a cup of coffee with "the boys," but he disposed of it in great haste, hot as it was, as if he hoped by his example to induce them to do likewise. But Bob and his companions were in no hurry. They lingered a long time over their homely meal, and then the smokers were allowed to empty a pipe apiece before the order was given to "catch up." The squatter began to breathe easier after that, and when he saw the troopers in their saddles and ready to start, his delight was so apparent ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... flippant assurance, 'Are these words your own?' BOSWELL. Sir Walter Scott shows where the humour of this motto chiefly lay. 'The counsel opposite,' he writes, 'was the celebrated Wight, an excellent lawyer, but of very homely appearance, with heavy features, a blind eye which projected from its socket, a swag belly, and a limp. To him Maclaurin applied the lines ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... reported to have said afterwards, of his table, "Treason lurks not under such a dinner," so Lycurgus perceived before him, that such a house admits of no luxury and needless splendour. Indeed, no man could be so absurd as to bring into a dwelling so homely and simple, bedsteads with silver feet, purple coverlets, golden cups, and a train of expense that follows these: but all would necessarily have the bed suitable to the room, the coverlet of the bed and the rest of their utensils and furniture ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... The homely mongrel whined a welcome to the little lad's appearance, and with his tail beat a friendly tattoo upon the kennel floor; but the woman spoke no word. With impassive face she watched the shivering little figure as it hurried into ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... brilliance, as if quite new-born From out the centre, not from off the face— Dazzled at first, I say, he soon began To see how little thought could sparkle well, And turn him, even in the midst of talk, Back to the silence of his homely toils. Around him still and ever hung an air Born of the fields, and plough, and cart, and scythe; A kind of clumsy grace, in which gay girls Saw but the clumsiness; while those with light, Instead of glitter, in their quiet eyes, Saw the grace too; yea, sometimes, when he talked, Saw the ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... mingle in the work, Half alters, half disowns. The tribes of men Thus from their different functions and the shapes Familiar to their eye, with art obtain, Unconscious of their purpose, yet with art Obtain the Beauty fitting man to love; Whose proud desires from Nature's homely toil Oft turn away, fastidious, asking still 640 His mind's high aid, to purify the form From matter's gross communion; to secure For ever, from the meddling hand of Change Or rude Decay, her features; and to add Whatever ornaments may suit her mien, Where'er he finds them scatter'd ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... as a citizen of Baltimore, who had been on a trip to England and elsewhere, and, being detained longer than he expected, and having had an attack of rheumatism, was now short of funds to pay his passage home, and hoped that I would supply the deficiency. He had quite a plain, homely, though respectable manner, and, for aught I know, was the very honestest man alive; but as he could produce no kind of proof of his character and responsibility, I very quietly explained the impossibility of my helping him. I advised him to try ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to you because I wish you to remember that, when religion is represented as hard and austere, it is the fault of those who administer religion, and not of religion itself. Religion in Ireland in the seventh and eighth centuries was clearly a homely thing, full of tender joy and hope, and the inspiration not only of poems, but of many churches and much ornament of all kinds, illuminated missals, carven porches. If Ireland had been left to herselfif it had not been for the invasion of the Danes, and ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... I are both laid up here, and Miss Logan nurses us devotedly. Our joy is having a sitting-room with a fire in it. Was there ever anything half so good as that fire, or half so homely, half so warm or so much one's own? I lie on three chairs in front of it, and headache and cold and throat are almost forgotten. The wind howls, the sea roars, and aeroplanes fly overhead, but at least we have our fire and ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... granite buttress of England has stood there, defying the fury of the Atlantic, the geologist alone, who is not awed by ages, would dare to tell us. But the historian is satisfied with antiquities of a more humble and homely character; and in bespeaking the interest, and, it may be, the active support of our readers, in favor of the few relics of the most ancient civilization of Britain, we promise to keep within strictly historical limits, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... occasion to confine myself mainly to a frank and homely discussion of the money question, as the most pressing, not that the tariff question is not equally important, but for the reason that I can only do one thing at a time, and the money question is a newer one, is now before us, upon which ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... as ample provision should be devised; Toleration of Dissent and of free expression of religious belief, but still on this side of Quakerism and other anomalies, heresies, and extravagancies: such, after all, was the homely outcome. If Vane and the theorists of the Harringtonian Club were disappointed, Ludlow was even in worse despair; and at the last moment he proposed an extraordinary addition. If the late Rump was not to be restored, and if they were to adopt a Constitution which threatened, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... consolatory poems on deaths would have had a more condensed effect than many. Scriptural— devotional topics—admit of infinite variety. So far from poetry tiring me because religious, I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms in our Prayer-books for an hour or two together sometimes ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... had spoken on the night when Trotty found him in the street. His voice was deeper and more husky, and had a trembling in it now and then; but he never raised it passionately, and seldom lifted it above the firm stern level of the homely ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... heap good to look at." Molly spoke wistfully. "Molly heap homely. You think that makes any difference ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... made its appearance in Lowell, and probably in other places. It is a coarse-looking little plant, delighting to grow in pure gravel; but its blossoms are pretty, and now, with not another flower of any sort near it, it looked, as the homely phrase is, "as handsome as a picture." Its more generally distributed congener, Senecio vulgaris,—also a foreigner—is, next to the common chickweed, I should say, our very hardiest bloomer. At the beginning of the month ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... be made of the liquor that meat has been boiled in. This soup has the advantage of being very soon made, with no more fuel than is necessary to warm a room. Those who have not tasted it, cannot imagine what a savoury and satisfying meal is produced by the combination of these cheap and homely ingredients. ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... to her husband's parishioners was sufficiently homely and simple. The Madeley kitchen was full of those who had come from a distance, and who were accustomed to take refreshments there between the two services. He led her forward into their midst, adding to his introduction the words, "I have not married this wife ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... common sense of the soul instead of the common sense of the understanding. This is the highest quality of the book, and indicates not only that the author has religion, but religious genius; but there is also much homely sagacity evinced in viewing what may be called the practical aspects of the subject, and answering from experience the objections which experience may raise. The writer is so deeply in earnest, has meditated so intensely on the subject, and is so free from the repellent qualities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... encouraged by his friends to continue his preparation for the ministry, and he persisted in reading hard, and going out between whiles to meditate in the depths of the glorious woods. It is curious that while his homely and rigid system precluded any conscious admiration of the beauties of nature, it is always evident from his journal that the lightenings of hope and joy which relieved his too frequent depression and melancholy, were connected with the scenery and the glories of day and night. Sunrise ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... that he was on the verge of prostration, although, making an effort, Blakely had appeared at breakfast after an early morning walk, had been most courteous, gentle, and attentive to her and to her wholesome, if not actually homely, Kate. How the mother's heart yearned over that sweet-natured, sallow-faced child! But after breakfast Blakely had wandered off again and was out on the mesa, peering through a pair of borrowed glasses over the dreary ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... would be out of place. It was not my dogged, inexplicable "hand" who was sitting before me in the bright moonlight on the baby's grave; it was a man with a hidden history of some tragic sorrow long kept secret in his homely breast,—perhaps a history very few of us could read aright. I would not question him, though I fancied he meant to explain himself. I knew that if he was willing to tell me the truth it was best that he should choose his own time for it, and so ...
— "Surly Tim" - A Lancashire Story • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... droll twist of her rather homely features. "I'll wager they've laid off one of the hands of the town clock. Business is dreadfully dull. I heard ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... age, which preceded it? or the prejudices, against which, He, who revealed it, had to contend? We find varying opinions among those who wrote it—the stamp of diverse authorship; here Judaistic narrowness, there freer elevation, homely simplicity, and again deep glow and feeling. We even find contradictions, historical and chronological, and yet, what unity in all that is essential—what agreement in all that contributes to peace in life and comfort in the hour ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... lodgment and spray of mid-Atlantic roller, and dust of that 1100 miles of railroad since New York was left behind, but still with many traces, under dust and seediness, of Scandinavian rustic fashion; altogether a homely people, but destined ere long to lose every vestige of their old Norse habits under the grindstone of the great mill they are now entering. That vast human machine Which grinds Celt and Saxon, Teuton and Dane, Fin and Goth into the same image and likeness ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... cousin Wally and his new baby sister?" As you know, if you've read A New Sugar Creek Mystery, I had a homely, red-haired cousin, named Walford, who lived in the city, who had a new baby sister. Mom had been to see the baby, and also Pop, but I hadn't, and didn't want to, and certainly didn't exactly want to see my red-haired cousin, Wally, but would like to see his crazy Airedale dog, ...
— Shenanigans at Sugar Creek • Paul Hutchens
... far inferior to his own; but with the loving and faithful study of nature which they showed, perhaps, too, with the fact that they were chiefly gathered from homely and homelike scenes, from level horizons and gray skies, Jan felt a sympathy which stirred him to the heart. His delight in them touched Lady Adelaide even more than it moved his father. But then no personal inconvenience ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... luxurious apartment; and for an instant I could hardly realize the fact that it was to be my home for an indefinite period. Some efforts had evidently been made to give it a look of welcome, homely as it was. A pretty china tea cup and saucer, with a plate or two to match, were set out on the deal table, and the cushioned arm-chair had been drawn forward to the hearth. I sat down in it, and buried my face in my hands, thinking, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the familiar and homely, which Nature so readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while Echo caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and elaborate harmony, of which the original ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... think," mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet with a bit of soft cloth, "that they'd welcome a homely one with relief. These goddesses ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... English deeds, had gone out of date with long locks and bearded chins. Nor there were the bishops and abbots and the lords of the Church,—for dear to them already the fame of the Norman piety, and they shared the distaste of their holy King to the strong sense and homely religion of Godwin, who founded no convents, and rode to war with no relics round his neck. But they with Godwin were the stout and the frank and the free, in whom rested the pith and marrow of English manhood; and they who ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the Lord, from the myriad field-flowers that gem the earth with beauty! And then in sickness! What, what is so refreshing as the perfume of sweet plants? We speak not of the glazed and costly things that come from foreign lands, but of the English nosegay—(how we love the homely word!)—the sweet briar, lavender, cowslip, violet, lily of the valley, or a sprig of meadow sweet, a branch of myrtle, a tuft of primroses, or handful of wild thyme! Such near the couch of sickness are worth a host of powdered doctors! Again we say, a blessing on sweet flowers! And now for ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... great, homely front door she saw a man break suddenly away from a group and, pulling up the skirts of his gown, run toward her. He was smiling, she noticed, and he looked very big and—and reliable. She stopped and waited, knew that her heart was beating ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... than enough to board and clothe me. But I felt proud of being able to accomplish even what I did. When any little sum for recreation was wanted, it was cheerfully handed out to me, but our recreations were rare and cheap, for we selected those which were moderate and homely. My father taught me to work in the garden; and there I spent many odd hours in hoeing among the vegetables and flowers, clearing the beds of weeds, and raking the ground smooth and even. This employment was beneficial to health and appetite, and afforded an excellent opportunity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... from the time we got out of the carriage until the moment we re-entered it—all too soon, but it is a long drive back in the short cold twilight—I felt as though I had stepped through a magic portal into the scene of one of Washington Irving's stories. It was all so simple and homely, so quaint and so inexpressibly picturesque. The house had stood there for a couple of hundred years, and looks as though it might last for ever, with its air of cool, leisurely repose and comfort ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... there was a man in Hatton to carry it on." As she was talking Mrs. Hatton had put her basket of herbs on a little table, and with glowing cheeks she now bent her head and inhaled their refreshing odors. John was silent for a few moments, and profoundly touched by the old homely story; ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... and see the fire Dance on the hearth, as he would never tire; The home-baked loaf, the Indian bean's perfume, Fill with their homely cheer the panelled room. Come, crazy storm! And thou, wild glittering hail, Rave o'er the roof and wave your icy veil; Shout in our ears and take your madcap way! I laugh at storms! for ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... morning he had left it, smiling in the autumn sunshine, a peaceful, prosperous-looking place, homely, quaint, and bright. Now his eyes rested upon a heap of smoking ruins, trampled crops, empty sheds; and upon a still more horrible sight—the remains of mangled corpses tied to the group of trees which sheltered the porch. It was enough ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... with this homely repast and the kindness of the ploughman and his wife; but he could not help seeing that though everything was neat and comfortable in the cottage, they seemed both be sad and much cast down. He therefore questioned them on the cause of their sadness, and learned they were miserable because ...
— The History of Tom Thumb, and Others • Anonymous
... and the millstones ground their monotonous music above his head, these sounds were only as a lullaby to his slumbers, and disturbed him no more than they troubled his foster-mother, to whom the revolving stones ground out a homely and welcome measure: "Dai-ly bread, dai- ly bread, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... one of the greatest of ethical philosophers, and a man without a parallel, in his peculiar field, in all the history of mankind. Greece produced none like him, and this homely and humble personage, who wrote not a line, has been unsurpassed in fame and influence upon mankind by any of the host of illustrious writers who have made ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... learning, can explain that which has puzzled Parson Grigg, who was in the parish before Mr. Inch came—aye, even puzzled the Bishop himself who came to visit the rectory some years since. All I undertake to do is to put down in plain, homely words the story of my life, in so far as it affects my good name and the good name of those who are associated with me. It may be that I shall have to touch upon matters peculiar to the part of the country in which I was born and reared, and ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... thus began) Then scorn a homely dinner, if you can. Your wine lock'd up, your butler stroll'd abroad, Or fish denied (the river yet unthaw'd), If then plain bread and milk will do the feat, The pleasure lies in you, ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... no splendid dower, no spoil Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth; 15 But homely love with common food and health, And nightly sleep to balance ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... was tall, round-shouldered, and homely, except when he smiled, which he did very seldom because he was generally too busy making every one within hearing of his low voice hysterical with laughter over his funny stories. He took an instant ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... often now. It is the instinct of a natural fineness in him, to escape when he can from that blank stone house, with so little to interest, and that homely old man and woman. The rudeness of his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces of life into a physical want, like hunger or thirst, which might come to greed; and methinks he perhaps overvalues these things. Still, made as he is, his hard fate in that rude place must needs ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... No "taint of bookishness" disturbed the local fellowships which gave him opportunity to express in "familiar and dramatic form" of story and illustration his more substantial philosophy and so find for it the perfect speech. His neighbors called him by homely, affectionate names, thinking he was entirely one of them—a little more clever, a little less ambitious in the usual channels of business and enterprise. He had no "moral strenuousness of the reformer" and no "exclusiveness" of learning. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... banjo aside, its strings still quivering, she was standing up, and the look of interest had given place to the old gravity. She had not a pretty feature, not even the usual pretty teeth. She was a homely ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... You look at it carefully, but there is nothing attractive about it. How rough and unsightly it appears! You close your eyes upon it for a brief space. You open them again. But what a change has taken place! That plain-homely looking bulb has disappeared, and in its place there stands before you the lily plant. It has reached its mature growth. Its flower is fully developed and blooming in all its matchless beauty! What a marvellous ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... show himself to the ladies; and reconnoitring the company through a glass (for no other reason but because it was fashionable to be purblind), perceived his mistress very plainly dressed, in one of the seats above the stage, talking to another young woman of a very homely appearance. Though his heart beat the alarm with the utmost impatience at sight of his Emilia, he was for some minutes deterred from obeying the impulse of his love, by the presence of some ladies of fashion, who, he feared, would think the worse of him, should they see him make ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... yes, and you have plates to match decorated with pinkish, lavender peacock feathers, and those dear little cups and saucers, decorated inside with pink and outside with green flowers, are certainly odd; and this queerly-shaped cream jug, sugar bowl and teapot, with pale green figures, and those homely plates, with dabs of bright red and green, they surely ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas
... This one-eyed, homely woman who cleaned up her room for three dollars a month, and Jane Anderson, were the only friends she had among the six million people whose lives centered ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... homely looking person with henna-assisted hair and the true British haughty manner," they put! They were not so disagreeable about me, but not flattering. Then they snap-shotted us, and Octavia really does look rather odd, as her nose got out of focus, I suppose, and appears like Mr. Punch's; ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... This is assuredly so of the "Christmas Carol," "The Chimes" and "The Cricket on the Hearth." This last is on a par with the other two in view of its double life in a book and on the boards of the theater. The fragrance of Home, of the homely kindness and tenderness of the human heart, is in them, especially in the Carol, which is the best tale of its kind in the tongue and likely to remain so. It permanently altered the feeling of the race for Christmas. Irving preceded him in the use ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... his mind with Scripture, and certainly always deemed that the first and most important of all his studies, which was perhaps not the case with the monk to whom he writes. In some of his letters we have pleasing pictures of the old times presented to us, and it is astonishing how homely and natural they read, after the elapse of 700 years. In more than one he launches out in strong invectives against the lawyers, who in all ages seems to have borne the indignation of mankind; Peter ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... singer that was ever winged, like the high angels of God's love. It is the living ecstacy of joy when it mounts up into its "glorious privacy of light." On the earth it is timid, silent, and bashful, as if not at home, and not sure of its right to be there at all. It is rather homely withal, having nothing in feather, feature, or form, to attract notice. It is seemingly made to be heard, not seen, reversing the old axiom addressed to children when getting voicy. Its mission is music, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the most scientific test of the uniformity of these fibers, I shall next refer to one more homely. It is simply this: The common garden spider, except when very young, cannot climb up one of the same size as the web on which she displays such activity. She is perfectly helpless, and slips down with a run. After vainly trying to make any headway, she finally puts her hands (or feet) ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... of very homely grievances to present; but such as they are, many a heart will feel them to be heavy—the ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... blunt-bowed affair, awakening the ideas of primitive solidity, like the wooden plough of our forefathers. And there were, about her, other suggestions of a rustic and homely nature. The extraordinary timber projections which I have seen in no other vessel made her square stern resemble the tail end of a miller's waggon. But the four stern ports of her cabin, glazed with six ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... Van Dorn, nor ask what had become of him, and his friend Sorden removed his body, unseen, to a spot in the pine woods, where his unmarked grave was dug, and standing round it were three mourners only, and Sorden said the final words with homely tears: ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... as usual," said Caleb. "Homely, but very snug. The gay colours on the walls; the bright flowers on the plates and dishes; the shining wood, where there are beams or panels; the general cheerfulness and neatness of the building,—make ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... worship of beauty can be of so purely artistic a nature as to be practically free from the physical element, certainly independent of it. I am taking you out of your depth, I know, but it is hard to make myself clear to an untrained mind. I might try a homely simile and suggest to you that you go a-fishing, not for love of the fish, but because it is your profession; but that does not wholly illustrate my meaning, for I love everything in the way of beauty that ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received as your person, though ever so well proportioned, would, if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters. It is not every understanding ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... cannot keep away And when they come spight of themselves they stay. And to our sorrow we have others known, That for their wit have Wit it self out-done, And yet you wits, that praise 'em seldom come. So the Goodman, oft-times for cause unknown, Leaves well-drest Beauteous Wife for Homely Joan. And you that Misses keep too, I'm afraid Do sometimes make e'm Jealous of the Maid; So if this Play not drest by rules of Art Should with some Trick of Nature catch the heart; We'd give you leave to rail, and never fear, Because we're sure you'd come to do it here. Gallants you ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... in passing; the white clover in the field behind the garden, got at easily through a hole in the privet hedge. The play of light and shadow over the hills of home, the dusk at nightfall, and the homely cawing of rooks. All the delicious things that went with the smell of ripe strawberries under nets, where thieving birds fluttered until the gardener let them free again; and the mystery of sparks flying up the chimney when the winter logs blazed. Every simple joy is ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... abundant and rich brown hair he wears in long curls falling over his shoulders, as did the cavaliers, and he is dressed with great care in the height of military fashion, evidently a gallant and debonair gentleman. He has just ceased from badinage with Rooke, in which that honest soldier's somewhat homely army jokes have been worsted by the graceful play of Graham's wit, who was ever gay, but never coarse, who was no ascetic, and was ever willing to drink the king's health, but, as his worst enemies used grudgingly to admit, cared neither for wine nor women. Silence falls ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... the lark. Surely the peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour and the scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... standards, and of coarse images and similes. To reduce the metrical irregularities, by such arbitrary methods as Duhm's, may occasionally enhance the music and sharpen the edge of an Oracle yet oftener dulls the melody and weakens the emphasis.(54) The figures again are always simple and homely, but sometimes even ugly, as is not infrequent in the rural poetries of all peoples. Even the dung on the pastures and the tempers of breeding animals are as readily used as are the cleaner details of domestic life and of farming—the house-candle, the house-mill, ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... spent at the university, he came to London. "At first I struggled with a great deal of persecution, took up with a lodging which had a window no bigger than a pocket looking-glass, dined at a three-penny ordinary enough to starve a vacation tailor, kept little company, went clad in homely drugget, and drunk wine as seldom as a rechabite, or the grand seignior's confessor." The old gentleman, who corresponded with the "Gentleman's Magazine," and remembered Dryden before the rise of his fortunes, mentions his suit of plain drugget, being, by the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... of their more foolish past, and when the roll of calico came from the cross roads, it contained also a quantity of fine linen, laces, small caps, and other trifles, somewhat in contrast to the more homely materials ordered. ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... looking out for acquaintances, and once, with a cry of joy, a stout, homely-looking young woman started up, exclaiming, "Sister Jane!" and flew into her arms. Upon which Miss Woodford was introduced to 'My sister Coles' and her husband, and had to sit down under a tree and share the festivities, while ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... say about Corra Harris's The Eyes of Love except that it offers such a study of marriage as only Mrs. Harris puts on paper? Shrewd and homely wisdom, sympathetic and ironical humour, the insight and the fundamental experience,—above all, imagination in experience—which made their first deep and wide impression with the publication of A Circuit Rider's Wife. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... been taught to do the simplest household task. Amy returned the loving kindness full measure, and, determined to be a help to those who so much helped her, advanced rapidly in the knowledge of her homely duties. Dressed in the plain working garb of a farm girl, with arms bare and face flushed by the heat of the kitchen, one would scarcely have recognized in her the beautiful young woman who moved with Boyd City's society leaders, or the brilliant novice who stood hesitating at the entrance ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... quite certainly. Yet I know not what there is of a pity which strikes deep, at the thought of a man, a while since so strong, turning his face to the wall from the things which most occupy men's lives. 'Tis that homely, but honest cure of Nogent he has caricatured so often, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... has the elements of good drama in it. St. John G. Ervine has written a very human drama in Mixed Marriage. He hails from the north of Ireland; but Rutherford Mayne is the best of the Northern playwrights, and his plays, The Drone and The Turn of the Road, are splendid homely ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... could have done something like them.' It first appeared in Hone's Year Book for April 30, 1831, with the title 'The Meadows in Spring,' and the following letter to the Editor. 'These verses are in the old style; rather homely in expression; but I honestly profess to stick more to the simplicity of the old poets than the moderns, and to love the philosophical good humor of our old writers more than the sickly melancholy of the Byronian wits. If my verses be not good, they are good humored, and that is something.' ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... rapidity in his homely task. A shining needle darted in and out of the gray cloth, and the rent that had seemed hopeless was being closed up with neatness and precision. No one derided him because he was engaged upon a task that was usually performed ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... water." When "thus made, it is wash rather, which one will have little heart to eat, and yet as little heart by eating." But the better gruel concocted elsewhere was "a wholesome Spoon meat, though homely; physic for the sick, and food for persons in health; grits the form thereof: and giving the being thereunto." In the border forays of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries all the provision carried by the Scotch was simply a bag of Oatmeal. But as a food it is ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... loving Proteus. I will not, like a sluggard, wear out my youth in idleness at home. Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits. If your affection were not chained to the sweet glances of your honored Julia, I would entreat you to accompany me, to see the wonders of the world abroad; but since you are a lover, love on still, and may your love ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... religious experience which the thin, cracked voice relates: how in visions of the night the Comforter has come to them, and henceforth the way of duty is clear, and the burden of life is lightened. Will you go with me, dear, into those homely houses, sit with me by the firesides, and hear the simple story of New England's farmers and farmers' wives? We cannot call those poor who are so rich in all the manly virtues, and in the deep ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... sez I, puttin on my most sweetest look and speakin in a winnin voice, "that so fair a made as thow never got hitched to some likely feller." [N.B.—She was upards of 40 and homely as a stump fence, but I thawt ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... has passed. A man is shot down by your side in battle, and the mangled body remains an object, and a real evidence; but at sea, the man is near you,— at your side,— you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss. Then, too, at sea— to use a homely but expressive phrase— you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... continued to make the homely dog work to good purpose, but the interview with the released Reformers was, it is believed, the first occasion upon which he made use of it. Certainly on no other occasion did the President do such ample justice to his reputation as ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... extravagant of space, though it may be made very effective in appearance and very pleasing and comfortable; (c) is suitable for ladies' baths; (d) is very practicable, and gives the apartment a pleasant, homely look; and (e) is best for cheap baths, being the simplest arrangement possible, wholly unsuited, however, to ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... loud and clear; and occasionally, when uttering them, he suddenly takes wing and flies directly away from the female to a distance of fifty yards, and performs a wide circuit about her in the air, singing all the time. The homely object of his passion always appears utterly indifferent to this curious and pretty performance; yet she must be even more impressionable than most female birds, since she continues scattering about her parasitical and often wasted eggs during four ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... popular mind and heart by the tender sympathies of his nature; who was a cautious conservative by temperament and mental habit, and led the most sudden and sweeping social revolution of our time; who, preserving his homely speech and rustic manner even in the most conspicuous position of that period, drew upon himself the scoffs of polite society, and then thrilled the soul of mankind with utterances of wonderful beauty and grandeur; who, in his heart the best friend of ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... spent during the present week, the torments and sufferings which I endure on your account; if you could but realize that I regard the world as less than nothing without you, I am certain you would pity me. A homely cot and a crust of bread with my adorable Lucretia would be a paradise, where a palace without you would be a hades. ["What in thunder is hades?" inquired Jack. We explained. He considered the figure rather bold, and requested us to close as soon as possible.] Now, dearest, in bidding you adieu, ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... the throne? Where the imperial canopy of state? Must she not set her tender foot, still used To softest treading, on the rugged ground? With common pewter, which the lowliest dame Would scorn, they furnish forth her homely table. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... into the world for the offspring of their creative fancies. Ours being a tale of truth,—yes, of bare, unvarnished truth, yet of truth more interesting, if not "stranger, than fiction,"—it is not to be wondered that, when we acknowledge the homely dame, and her alone, as our guide, inspirer, and preceptor, we lack the advantage of romancers, and cannot command "a special sunset," or a storm made to order, or other enchanting scenery, to introduce us ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... rapidly as though to give his lungs more air. The atmosphere seemed to have grown rarer and colder. Indeed, it was a different world, and the blanket-washing itself was transferred to some deliciously homely ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... Betty—the idea of liking a boy just because he was handsome, was too foolish to even consider. The fact that Dick Saxon—supposedly her arch enemy, but really her best friend—had flaming red hair and was undeniably homely—may, of course, had something to do with her disgust for good looks. Like lots of other girls, The Three judged boys by their ability to do; while the road to Fanny's heart was by way of graceful ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... life, though rude and slow-moving, was hearty and cheerful. As I went about the streets with my uncle William—gray-haired old pioneers whose names were startlingly familiar, called out, "Hello, Bill"—adding some homely jest precisely as they had been doing for forty years. As young men they had threshed or cradled or husked corn with my father, whom they still called by his first name. "So you are Dick's boy? How ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... clanging and jangling through endless rows of houses great and small, along main thoroughfares on either side of which crowded side-streets extended like fish-bones, over less crowded districts where the cottages were generally detached or semi-detached and where pleasant homely houses were thickly sprinkled, oven here he wondered how near those who lived in happier state were to the life of the slum, wondered what struggling and pinching and scraping was going on behind the half-drawn blinds that made homes ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... from point to point, admired them all, and thought several of them exceedingly quaint and venerable. The rectangular structures of old red brick especially gratified his eye; the afternoon sun was yellow on their homely faces; their windows showed a peep of flower-pots and bright-coloured curtains; they wore an expression of scholastic quietude, and exhaled for the young Mississippian a tradition, an antiquity. "This is the place where I ought to have been," he said to his charming guide. "I should have had ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... make him into a hearty lad of fifteen, it began to be high time for him to choose himself a final profession in life, such as he was able. And here already the born tastes of the boy began to show themselves: for he had no liking for the homely shepherd's trade; he felt a natural desire for a chisel and a hammer—the engineer was there already in the grain—and he was accordingly apprenticed to a stonemason in the little town of Lochmaben, beyond the purple hills to eastward. But his ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... girlhood, who had got her off to Chicago to study piano, and who had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match she would be likely to make in that part of the country. Johanna Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country. She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental. She was so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her niece because of her talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... of a peculiar vivid tint, verging on orange or red; in Magarornis the bosom is black, and beautifully ornamented with small leaf-shaped spots of a delicate straw-colour. There are several other very pretty birds in this homely family; but the finest of all is Thripodectes flammulatus, the whole body being tortoise-shell colour, the wings and tail bright chesnut. The powerful tanager-like beak of this species seems also to show that it has ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... west; it permeates the business world and stiffens the economic backbone of the nation. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole German people, barring the inevitable though small percentage of weaklings, is trying with terrific earnestness to live up to the homely Hindenburgian motto, "Durchhalten!" ("Hold out,") or, in more idiomatic American, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... close yet magical observation, used not so much in the Tennysonian way (for Tennyson was a close observer, make no mistake about that) as in what we now think of as the modern way, that is, as a part of the realistic record of homely events, with beauty only as a by-product, is well illustrated in the opening lines of a narrative poem called The School Girl, a New England Idyll. Here again a kinship with Frost is seen, rather than ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... flower-crowns drooping above her, her blue cotton dress rolled up to the elbows, her hands plunged in a small wash-tub in which she is washing some small linen, habit-shirts, pocket-handkerchiefs, collars, expresses the joy of homely life in the French suburb. Her home is one of good wine, excellent omelettes, soft beds; and the sheets, if they are a little coarse, are spotless, and retain an odour of lavender-sweetened cupboards. Her little child, about four years old, is with his mother ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... molds or cases, and so continue until you have the kettle filled. Put the lid on the kettle and cover with salt and ice. Make sure that you have a hole half-way up in the packing bucket or tub, so that there is no danger of salt water overflowing the kettle. This is a homely but very ...
— Ice Creams, Water Ices, Frozen Puddings Together with - Refreshments for all Social Affairs • Mrs. S. T. Rorer
... one day walking in one of those beautiful avenues that lead out of the village of Saratoga Springs, my attention was arrested by two of those insects, which children call by the homely name of "grand-father-long-legs." They were laboriously occupied in rolling a round ball, of the size of a walnut, covered with a glutinous substance, dried hard in the sun. I could not be so cruel as to ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... surprised me, to find Robert Southey express himself so coldly respecting the style and diction of the Pilgrim's Progress. I can find nothing homely in it but a few phrases and single words. The conversation between Faithful and Talkative [1] is a model of ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... leaving, or shifting berths; and from the moment the collision was seen to be unavoidable till the actual contact a whole minute elapsed. A minute,—an age under the circumstances. And no one thought of the homely expedient of dropping a simple, unpretending rope-fender between the destructive ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... bloody way The sea-dog trackt?—no—strange and new Is all that meets her wondering view. Upon a galliot's deck she lies, Beneath no rich pavilion's shade,— No plumes to fan her sleeping eyes, Nor jasmine on her pillow laid. But the rude litter roughly spread With war-cloaks is her homely bed, And shawl and sash on javelins hung For awning o'er her head are flung. Shuddering she lookt around—there lay A group of warriors in the sun, Resting their limbs, as for that day Their ministry of death were done. Some gazing on the drowsy sea ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of battle and to final victory; and then again in Henry V and Henry VI, the unhappy position into which a prince not formed by nature to be a ruler falls between violent contending parties, until he envies the homely swain who tends his flocks and lets the years run by in peace: lastly the path of horrible crime which a king's son not destined for the throne has to tread in order to ascend it: all these are ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Campbell had set the hour for four, and several conveyances would be down from the emigrant camp. The wagon arriving shortly afterward, we had barely time to lay the corpse in the coffin before the emigrants drove up. The minister was a tall, homely man, with a flowing beard, which the frosts of many a winter had whitened, and as he mingled amongst us in the final preparations, he had a kind word for every one. There were ten in his party; and when the coffin had been carried out to the grave, the two granddaughters of the ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... brown hair, staring blue eyes, fat, pink cheeks, and flinty shoulders. The gift, aided by the confidences of the Swede boy, had almost shaken her belief in Santa Claus, whom she had asked in a letter to give her a bought riding-whip and a book that told more about Robinson Crusoe. Instead, the homely head had been left, and she felt sure (and the Swede boy assured her) that it could only have been picked out for her by the eldest brother. And when, after gazing down upon her stupidly for two or three months from the clock-shelf, it was finally fastened, by thread ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... fearful sign Of human frailty, folly, also crime, That love and marriage rarely can combine, Although they both are born in the same clime; Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine— A sad, sour, sober beverage—by time Is sharpen'd from its high celestial flavour Down to a very homely household savour. ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... infuse poetical feeling into the common people, and to sweeten and soften the rudeness of rustic manners without destroying their simplicity. Indeed, it is to the decline of this happy simplicity that the decline of this custom may be traced, and the rural dance on the green, and the homely May-day pageant, have gradually disappeared in proportion as the peasantry have become expensive and artificial in their pleasures, and too knowing for simple enjoyment. Some attempts, indeed, have been made by men of both taste and ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... songs and psalms, stopping suddenly, mingling the Psalms of David, and the diviner words of his Son and Lord, with homely odds and ends and scraps ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... in fee simple for the race. My grain shall pass out into the world's mart, sent forth with love and prayer. Such a farmer is the incarnation of moral grandeur. Let men laugh, if they will, at his overalls and plough, his wide-brimmed hat, his simple manners, and his homely, racy speech. His feet are by the furrow, but his heart is in heaven, and his treasure is there also. Says the author of Nine Acres on the Hillside, "The agriculturist walks side by side ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... give special merit to these letters. They were not written for publication, but for an intimate circle of relatives and friends. And because of this they are not artificial, but are free and graceful, with homely touches here and there which add so much to their value. Amidst the incessant roar of mighty guns; surrounded by the wounded and the dying; shivering at times with cold, and wearied almost to the point of exhaustion, these letters were hurriedly penned. No time ...
— 'My Beloved Poilus' • Anonymous
... the moss-covered trunk of a large fallen tree, on the broadest part of which she had spread a snow-white cloth and arranged what were left of the bright pewter vessels that had been her pride in the settlements. It had a strange aspect that one little spot of homely comfort in the desolate heart of Nature. The sunshine yet lingered upon the higher branches of the trees that grew on rising ground; but the shadows of evening had deepened into the hollow where the encampment was made, and the firelight began to redden as it ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Pill and hurried along the cliff towards the harbour. Deep-chested, full-throated, weather-stained, compacted of brawn and sinew, he looked the ruddy-faced, daring sailor-man, every inch of him. From crown to toe he was clad in homely gray; but if, on the one hand, the ass peeps out from the borrowed lion's skin, so will royalty shine through fustian; and the newcomer had the air of a king among men. He hallooed to the ships, and then hastily ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... same time insisting on the repast being any thing but extravagant. "I shall give your royal highness a leg of mutton, and nothing more, by G——," warmly replied the gratified colonel, in his plain and homely phrase. The day was nominated, and the colonel had sufficient time to recur to his budget and bring his ways and means into action. Where is the sanguineless being whose hopes have never led him wrong? if such there be, the colonel was not one of those. Long destitute of credit and ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... But the homely back gate swings over the charred stump of the boorish tree burnt flush with the ground. Twelve months and a fortnight after the firing of the shot which did not echo round the world, but was merely a local defiant and emphatic promulgation of authority, a fire was set to the base of ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... till she could see no more at all. Unbidden and unconscious there came upon her lips a faint smile, and then a door in front of her was opened, and she was inside another room—not a bedroom as she had expected, but a room where the Dutch simplicity and homely sincerity had been invaded by something English and military. This she felt before her eyes fell on a man standing beside a table, fully dressed. Though shaken and worn, it was a figure which had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... never have been heard of. As it is, he has some difficulty to contend with the hebetude of his intellect, and the meanness of his subject. With him "lowliness is young ambition's ladder;" but he finds it a toil to climb in this way the steep of Fame. His homely Muse can hardly raise her wing from the ground, nor spread her hidden glories to the sun. He has "no figures nor no fantasies, which busy passion draws in the brains of men:" neither the gorgeous machinery of mythologic lore, nor the splendid colours of poetic diction. His style is vernacular: ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... connection with Prof. Billroth's case of cancer of the breast, which was so excessively foul smelling that all his deodorizers failed, but which, on applying a poultice made of dried figs cooked in milk, the previously unbearable odor was entirely done away with, gives an importance to this homely remedy not to be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... This homely origin the race of men does not deny; they are a hardy people, accustomed to work. Every moment of the day they remember from what sturdy stock ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... dimples. Might as well have all the ear-marks of a beauty to begin with, anyhow," giggled Louise. "She'll probably develop into a homely little freckle-faced imp by the time she's ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... Parisians. But deeper than this; Moliere was by nature a great satirist. I call him a great satirist, because of the affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite—namely, a clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense, shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the comic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was the best field, and for Moliere especially, gifted as he was with histrionic genius. The vices and abuses, the follies and ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... light, born of a life's devotion and the happy memories of half a century, lead me to mere naturalness and the use of simple homely words, even my own native telegraphese! that I may haply blunder at length into some fit form of expression which ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... a joke. "How you got here? Not on horseback! A little ship brought you, but to the ship I carried you on these shoulders of mine. They are broad, they bore you to the shore. And now you are safe at home, on your own land, the right land, the native land, where amid familiar pastures and homely joys, under the rays of the old sun, from death and wounds you blessedly shall recover!" The rough fellow presses his cheek to his master's breast, like a woman. There is silence. Tristan stares vacantly ahead, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... tracts invented for those who could not read, wherein the substance of pages was condensed and gave itself to the eye and the touch. Let us not, from the height of our day, with the better appliances which a universal press gives us, sneer at the homely rounds of the ladder by which the first multitudes of the Lord's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... with notes, of the poetical books of the Old Testament, beginning with Job in 1827, were of great importance as aids, to the interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. His translation of the New Testament, which appeared after his death, in 1868, gave the best results of critical studies in homely prose, and with painstaking fidelity to the original. That Noyes was in advance of the criticism of his time may be indicated by the fact that, when he published his conclusions in regard to the Messianic prophecies in 1834,[5] ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... battle of the kitchen gardens the foreigners beat us nearly all along the line, though I think that English asparagus is better than the white monsters of Argenteuil. A truffled partridge, or the homely Perdrix au choux, or the splendid Faisan a la Financiere show that there are many more ways of treating a game bird than plain roasting him; and the peasants of the south of France had crushed the bones of their ducks ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... wonderful beauty. In a dim way I knew this before, but the full mystery of your loveliness was not revealed to me until this third time. Can it be that love has transformed you a little and added grace to grace, or is it only my vision that has been purged of its earthly dulness? I could love a homely woman whose spirit was fair, but to love one who is altogether beautiful, in whose perfect grace I can find no spot or blemish—that is the miracle of my blessedness. There was a strange light in your eyes that haunts me yet. Such a light I ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... extend what he could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw it. In fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and daughter. Louisa May seldom misses a chance to bring out the moral of a homely virtue. The power of repetition was to them a natural means of illustration. It is said that the elder Alcott, while teaching school, would frequently whip himself when the scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher-God-was pained ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... hobbledehoy, of about twenty five, ran out to obey the command, and, when he returned from No. 6, informed Wilkinson civilly that the water was in his room. Something in his homely but pleasant face, in his shock head and in his voice, seemed familiar to the dominie, yet he could not place his man; when Coristine came along and said, "You've got a brother on the Susan Thomas, haven't ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... however, a confession to make which ill accords with my luxurious surroundings of the moment. It is that I am accustomed to press my trousers myself by the homely and ignoble expedient of sleeping on them. My only excuse is that I am a heavy sleeper. So automatic is the process, that I was wrapped in sheets and darkness before it occurred to me that I had placed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life; I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me, for—though it ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... right in the word used. God is lonesome, though for an utterly different reason than was in the child's mind. God was lonesome that day, left standing alone under the trees of the garden. He is lonesome for fellowship with every one who stays away from Himself. That homely human word may well express to us the longing ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... this turns out to be a curious business, doesn't it?" he exclaimed, when, after leaving the public room of the Golden Ball, wherein the inquiry had been held, we had strolled on through the long straggling village of homely cottages with thatched roofs, and out upon the ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... A homely chime of bells was repeated from the town; a ship's fast strained resinously with the changing tide. "It will be getting on toward supper," Nettie told him. They walked slowly from the wharf, turned silently ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... singular compensation, the pride of ancestry increases in the ratio of distance. Adam was valiant, and did so well at Poictiers that he was knighted—a hearty, homely country gentleman, who lived humbly to the end. But young Lucifer, his representative in the twentieth remove, has a tinder-like conceit because old Sir Adam was so brave and humble. Sir Adam's sword is hung up at home, ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... aspect of the room itself to surprise him. It was homely and neat. The table was spread with a clean white cloth, on which the breakfast equipage was displayed with a degree of care and precision that betrayed the master-hand of Hobbs; but on the edge of the table sat a large black cat, calmly breakfasting ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... cot. I have sent away Maria, who has gone to visit her parents, and no woman in service is to come on this place while I am here. I have been studying hard with Mrs. Parker at the hotel, who seems to be an excellent housekeeper and accustomed to homely fare, and I have learned how to make and to cook a great many things which are simple and nutritious; I have had appropriate dresses made, and Maria has gone to town and bought me a great variety of household linen, all good and ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... the devil, and they dare not stay within hearing of the sacrilegious rites. In spite of multiform discouragements like these, the evangelist and his wife, a motherly woman of much quiet strength, whose gentleness made sweet a very homely face, talked of their work and prospects with a matter-of-course hopefulness which it was not easy to share. Nothing in their habits, they told us, had more amazed their Roman Catholic neighbors at first than their lavish use of water. But in that particular, at least, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... because he was trying to find a reason for reprieving a soldier. "It is butchery day," he said one Friday morning, and he denied himself to a committee because he did not think that hanging would help the boy who was condemned to die. "They said he was homely," said a poor woman, going away from the White House with a reprieve for her son; "he is the handsomest man I ever saw." It is this sympathy that runs through his letter to that mother, whose five sons had died gloriously on ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... pale-faced babes whom I had left In arms, now rosy prattlers at the feet Of a pleased grandame tottering up and down; And growing girls whose beauty, filched away With all its pleasant promises, was gone To deck some slighted playmate's homely cheek. Yes, I had something of a subtler sense, And often looking round was moved to smiles Such as a delicate work of humor breeds; I read, without design, the opinions, thoughts, Of those plain-living people now observed With clearer knowledge; ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... maidens are digging up the soil with the spade, and often pulling up the stubble with their hands, preparatory to another crop. Switzerland could not afford to be a Kingdom,—the expense of a Court and Royal Family would famish half her people. Yet everywhere are the signs of frugal thrift and homely content. I met only two beggars in that long day's ride through sterile Switzerland, while in a similar ride through the fertile plains of Italy I should have encountered hundreds, though there each day's labor produces as much as ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... upon his own account for a tour of the country. Right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does any good toward the shaping of results Greeley's speeches surely should have elected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely and touching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a people not ripe or ready for generous impressions; convincing in their simplicity and integrity; unanswerable from any standpoint of sagacious statesmanship or true patriotism if the North had been in any mood to listen ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... would grow tired of flying alone, and after all, it is not necessary to fly to transact the ordinary business of the world. And perhaps at last he would learn to love somebody without wings, somebody who could not fly, and he would always want to be with her down on the homely earth, and not alone up in the heavenly heights. If a woman had all the genius of Plato or all the learning of Solomon, it would be forgotten at the touch of ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... that they have authority for the splendor of their descriptions. I cannot find a word in the older Chronicles about the jewels or dress of the brides, and I believe the ceremony to have been more quiet and homely than is usually supposed. The only sentence which gives color to the usual accounts of it is one of Sansovino's, in which he says that the magnificent dress of the brides in his day was founded "on ancient custom."[32] However this may have been, the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... back a little, because it is necessary to look at the three next pictures at one view: these are three sisters. She on the right hand, who is so beautiful, died a maid; the next to her, still handsomer, had the same fate, against her will; this homely thing in the middle had both their portions added to her own, and was stolen by a neighbouring gentleman, a man of stratagem and resolution, for he poisoned three mastiffs to come at her, and knocked down two deer-stealers in carrying her off. Misfortunes happen in all families: the theft of ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... road came arrow-straight to the first houses and their gardens, past them, and away to the streets. In every window and at each gate children, women, men, were looking down the road. Face after face was painted, various, by the sunlight, homely with line and wrinkle, curve and dimple, pallid or ruddy, but the look in the eyes of all these faces seemed the same. "I have waited so long," it said, "I cannot wait any more—I cannot!" Their ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... enjoyed a little pension from the Squire and a garden in which vegetables and flowers lived side by side in friendliest fashion. Bees worked and sang over the thyme and marjoram, blooming early in a sunny nook; and in a homely sty lived a solemn black pig, a pig ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... to the "highways and hedges" for their omens, to the felicitous encounters of the common road for their auguries and inspirations. They will listen reverently to the chatter of very simple people, and catch the shadow of the wings of fate falling upon very homely heads. The rough earth-wisdom of ploughed fields, heavy with brown sun-lit mud, will be redolent for them with whispers and hints and intimations of things that no philosophy can include ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... metrical irregularities, by such arbitrary methods as Duhm's, may occasionally enhance the music and sharpen the edge of an Oracle yet oftener dulls the melody and weakens the emphasis.(54) The figures again are always simple and homely, but sometimes even ugly, as is not infrequent in the rural poetries of all peoples. Even the dung on the pastures and the tempers of breeding animals are as readily used as are the cleaner details of domestic life and of farming—the house-candle, the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... was, as Slim had said, a hammer-headed brute of imposing proportions. But for his eyes no turfman would have looked at him twice. They were large, clear, and unusually intelligent; they redeemed his homely face. Without them he would have been ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... tenderness that forms one of its chief attractions. Besides, it was unavoidably scorched in the preparation; but the mixed pepper and salt sprinkled over it improved the flavor. But the great thing was their insatiate appetites, for it is a homely truth that there is no sauce like hunger. So it came about that they not only made a nourishing meal, but had enough left to serve them in ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... bony, awkward figure of Abraham Lincoln, then a young man of twenty-two, guiding a flatboat laden with prairie products down this same tortuous waterway, from the Sangamon to the sea. He was six feet four inches tall, homely, sad-faced, handy, and as little promising outwardly as any other pilot or boatman of those days. It is still remembered in prairie legends, however, that at the beginning of the voyage, his boat being stuck midway across a dam, he had ingeniously managed to release it and save all ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... entertaining as well as instructive for young people to read of the toil and privations in the homes of those who came into a new world to build up a country for themselves, and such homely facts are not to be found in the real histories ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... hung the amulet about Her throat—the medicine, a bag Of dried, misshapen skin, that held The healing herbs—a homely guise That promised for them little worth; For, ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... Ellwell had stirred the placid waters of meeting-house faith until something like a primitive revival had spread into neighboring parishes. His wife, a learned woman, had managed half a dozen young men who were preparing their Greek and Latin for Camberton. Those were the homely and kindly days ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... to tell, ever since her return from Baden-Baden, a sense of the incongruity of her circumstances had crept upon her. The tasteful surroundings, the cultured conversation, the musical evenings, the refinement of all around, had enchanted the young girl, and the humble lot and homely ways of her Forest friends had on her return to them stood out in striking contrast. And, alas! for the time being she refused to see in all these things the guiding hand of God. But after the day we have written of, things went better. The girl strove to conquer her discontent, ...
— Little Frida - A Tale of the Black Forest • Anonymous
... the office to talk to him; how he had talked gently about Fatima, how sure-footed she was and how wise, and how little likely to be frightened as long as she was carrying her master. He had wandered off into simple homely talk, about the supply of turf, how the fair had gone, the price the people were getting for their beasts; now and again leaving off to say, when the moan of the wind came and the house shook: "Glory be to God, it's goin' to be a wild night, so it is!" Or "That was a smart little clap o' win'. It's ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... for many thin little Belgian legs. Nora, from Ireland, viewed its departure with satisfaction—it made one less thing to polish. Many odds and ends of silver followed, and were put into the melting-pot, being too homely to survive—I'm saving enough for heirlooms for my grandchildren, of course. One must not allow sentiment to go by the board; we need it especially now that we have lost such quantities of it out of ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... coffee with "the boys," but he disposed of it in great haste, hot as it was, as if he hoped by his example to induce them to do likewise. But Bob and his companions were in no hurry. They lingered a long time over their homely meal, and then the smokers were allowed to empty a pipe apiece before the order was given to "catch up." The squatter began to breathe easier after that, and when he saw the troopers in their saddles and ready to start, ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... few lines in a postscript. The little angel was rapidly recovering, and our hero was rejoiced beyond expression. The favorable termination of her illness was a joy which far outbalanced the loss of his money, and he was as cheerful and contented as ever. As he expressed it, in rather homely terms, he had got "the streak of fat and the streak of lean." Julia was alive; was to smile upon him again; was still to inspire him with that love of goodness which had given her such an ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... means divorce or murder. For him, sweetness, gentleness, self-control, sound common sense, shrewdness, and domestic virtues are incomparably superior to any mental brilliance or physical comeliness. He needs a "homely" woman, and should remember that no banking account can match a sweet, womanly personality, and no charms compare to a sunny heart, and an ability steadfastly to "see the ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... The poor man had no natural, spontaneous human speech. If he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticulate. Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was due to the fact that he habitually expressed himself in a book learned language, wholly remote from anything personal, native, or homely. Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish to her own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive ear, until she went to school never spoke at all, except ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... calls for death, my friend, for all his scorns? With Aesop's slave will leave his bush of thorns. But since these trait'rous lords will have my head, Their lordships here upon this homely bed Shall find me sleeping, breathing forth my breath, Till they their shame, and I my fame, attain by death. Live, gentle Marius, to revenge my wrong! And, sirrah, see they stay not over-long; For he that erst hath ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... three sons; but her bad temper has rendered her name proverbial for a conjugal scold. His physical constitution was healthy, robust, and wonderfully enduring. Indifferent alike to heat and cold the same scanty and homely clothing sufficed him both in summer and winter; and even in the campaign of Potidaea, amidst the snows of a Thracian winter, he went barefooted. But though thus gifted with strength of body and of mind, he was far from being endowed ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... reluctance on the part of England. The wearied Minister wrote to Mrs. Adams on the 30th of May, 1783: "Our son is at the Hague, pursuing his studies with great ardor. They give him a good character wherever he has been, and I hope he will make a good man." On the 9th of June he wrote in these homely, but manly words: "I am weary, worn, and disgusted to death. I had rather chop wood, dig ditches, and make fence upon my poor little farm. Alas, poor farm! and poorer family! what have you lost that your country might be free! and that others might catch fish and hunt deer and bears ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... vibrating force from lips unaccustomed indeed to such an outburst. The speaker stood a moment longer in silence beside the figure in the chair, and it seemed to Robert, gazing at him with fixed eyes, that the man's whole presence, at once so homely and so majestic, was charged with benediction. It was as though invisible hands of healing and consecration had been laid upon him. The fiery soul beside him had kindled anew the drooping life of his own. So the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... found much to admire in the works of the people who had passed on. From the river had been taken out great canals of good gradient, and it was clear that they had been dug by a people of homely thrift and of skill in the tilling of the soil. There still were to be seen piles of earth that marked where at least seven great communal houses had formed nuclei for a numerous people. These were served by 123 ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... picturesque. The fishing was the best in the bay, and the rocks were very attractive to people from the city. The harbor had deep water at any time of tide. For a summer residence, the only disadvantage was the want of suitable hotels or boarding-houses. Of the former there were two, of the most homely and primitive character, and not many of the inhabitants who had houses suitable for city people were willing to ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... arrival we were marched to General Scott's headquarters, and while drawn up in line Mr. Lincoln came out. He said a few words to us. His appearance was strange to me. A tall stooping figure, in what our village calls 'store clothes,' but very neat; the face big, homely, with a look of sadness in the eyes. He shook hands with each of us in turn, saying a word of encouragement. Why he spoke specially to me, I do not know. He asked my name. I said 'Penhallow.' 'Oh,' he said, 'a Cornish name—the great iron-works. Do you know the Cornish ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... cottage feeding a mare and foal which were tied in a small plot of ragged grass. He was much older now than when she had first seen him; daring and danger can lengthen time. He had the same indomitable frankness in his dark eyes, but his face was hardened and fanaticism was stamped thereon. It was a homely precinct, with utensils of house and stable-work lying about. The mare was drinking from a bucket, her gentle head so near his shoulder that her love for him ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... availed themselves of his benefaction, and the children for six miles around used to attend the little school which was started in the large hewn-log school-house on the roadside known as "Hall's Free School". Few people knew the plain, homely, hard-working man, or wholly understood him. Some thought him stingy, some weak-minded, some only queer, and at first his benefaction was hardly comprehended; but in time quite a little oasis began about the little fountain, which the poor farmer's bequest had opened under the big oaks by the wayside, ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... developed physique. It was so warm below the ground that the fire in the stove was maintained at the lowest state possible; but when the western light quickly vanished from the window, the glowing coals gave homely cheer to the ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... apologising for a venial offence, you forget it is to a man guilty of the same error. I knew your person, from having seen you on the Continent; and finding you disposed to go by the homely name of Sharp, in a moment of thoughtlessness, I took its counterpart, Blunt. A travelling name is sometimes convenient, though sooner or later I fancy all deceptions bring with them their ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... say That majesty dwelt here? Where is the throne? Where the imperial canopy of state? Must she not set her tender foot, still used To softest treading, on the rugged ground? With common pewter, which the lowliest dame Would scorn, they furnish forth her homely table. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... for homely features to keep home— They had their name thence: coarse complexions And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply The sampler and to tease ...
— What Great Men Have Said About Women - Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 77 • Various
... noble father, Three times to-day I holp him to his horse, Three times bestrid him; thrice I led him off, Persuaded him from any further act; But still, where danger was, still there I met him; And like rich hangings in a homely house, So was his will in his old feeble body. But, noble as he is, look ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... most ten or twelve in a homely, comfortable little salon, equally propitious to conversation and contemplation. Chopin took the place of Madame Viardot at the piano, and plunged us into ineffable raptures. I do not know what he played to us; I do not know how long our ecstasy lasted: we were no longer on earth; he had ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Stephen was perforce laughing in response. He had never been able to resist Pixie's laugh. Tea was brought in, and the young hostess did the honours with a pretty hospitality. It was the first meal of which they had partaken a deux, and its homely intimacy brought back the wistful look into Stephen's eyes. Perhaps Pixie noticed it, perhaps a point had been reached when she felt it impossible to go on talking generalities; in any case, she laid down her cup, straightened herself in her chair ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... turned scarlet. "No," she answered, "it's two of them and I can't decide. One is rich and homely as a hedge fence and always says 'drawring' and 'reel,' but has lots of money and a fair enough family back of him. The other is handsome and oh, my! gay as a lark, but he had about run through with a fortune, and I'm afraid he will flirt now ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... your earnings? Is she thoroughly versed in all domestic affairs, so that she herself could do all things connected with household matters, should necessity require it? These, I acknowledge, are very ordinary, very homely inquiries; but nevertheless they are of the highest importance. A young man who will marry, without having thoroughly made all such investigations, and becoming satisfied that his intended is not ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... "get him now—before Hermy comes t' him!" Shuddering, Spike levelled the weapon he held, but at that moment Ravenslee was filling his pipe, and something in this homely action checked the lad, paralysed finger on trigger, and shrinking, he cowered down upon the grass despite the fierce hand that gripped him. "Get him now, Kid—get him now! Aim f'r his chest—y' can't miss ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... so intent upon hearing Voices which spoke for her ear alone, that an unwonted stir at the cottage door failed to rouse her, and it was not until Mrs. Palling hurried in, with excitement and pleasure written large on her homely face, that Isabella became aware that she had ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... to my shame, hang loose and tattered around you, and some of your faces are ink-stained or thumb-worn from contact with the years and my own carelessness. I would dress you in purple and fine linen if I may, yet you would reproach me and think I was weary of your homely faces. Like the beggar-maid you would entreat to be allowed to go back from queenly glory and pomp to the tatters and contentment of your years. So shall it be! but between you and me there must be no divorce, so long as time shall last for ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... go away on vacations. He was a homely man, with a large family, and he took serious views of life. He was country bred, and he had never outgrown a certain rusticity of appearance. It was said that his wife always cut his hair, and the concentric circles made by the neatly ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... "Wherefore has the Word of God been likened to wine and milk?" The reply made was, "As these fluids cannot be preserved in golden vessels, but only in those of earthenware, so those minds will be the best receptacles of learning which are found in homely bodies." ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the countess, "are small, blond, sickly, and homely; all as like one to another as a pair of old boots. You have seen them. X. Z.—you know him—had a very pretty talent for verses; but he has ruined it and his mind, and made himself quite an idiot, by following my ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... over the fire, in drying her muslin dress. That did very well instead of talking. Mrs. Williams presently came in again, bearing a little tray with berries and a pot of cream. Julia eagerly played hostess and dealt them out. The service was most homely; nevertheless the wild berries deserved her commendation. The girls sat by the fire and eat, and their host from the corner of his couch watched them with his keen eyes. It was rather a romantic adventure altogether, Eleanor thought, in the midst of ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... the turkey, Bill?" began Master Robert Peabody, the flat-featured, rising from his pillow like a homely porpoise. ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... morning but for my thinking of that album, which I'm glad has amused you both, my dears, so well. Ah, children, children, there's nothing like having something to do. I'll tell you something one of the poets, Cowper I think, has written about this in his homely verse:— ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... in the second letter) gave the larger part of his originally large fortune to the founding of St. George's Guild. This was intended to be a sort of agricultural community of "old-world virtues" for young and old, "and ancient and homely methods." One of his great aims was the promoting of home industries. As regards Newman's reference to politics at the end of letter No. 2 in 1888, Gladstone's Government was but just breathing after ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... at night; it turns the mind toward meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegaic and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... never lost the plain, downright, almost awkward ways of conversation and manner of his simple home—ways which might have seemed abrupt and rough but for the singular sweetness and charm of his nature. To those who looked on the outside he was always the homely, rigidly orthodox country clergyman. On Isaac Williams, with his ethical standard, John Keble also impressed his ideas of religious truth; he made him an old-fashioned High Churchman, suspicious of excitement and "effect," suspicious ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... of sun-rays—very bright and lovely. Where it came from I never thought, but of course it could not come from the sun, because there he was, with his bright coat off, playing the father of his family in the most homely Old-English-gentleman fashion possible. That it was a ladder of rays there could, however, be no doubt: if only I could climb upon it! I often tried, but fast as I lifted my feet to climb, down they came again upon the boards of the floor. At length I did succeed, ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... has taught him this. What learn our youth abroad, but to refine The homely vices of their native land? Give me an honest home-spun country clown Of our own growth; his dulness is but plain, But theirs embroidered; they are sent out ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... angel of gentleness, whose ugliness day by day decreased, driven out by the ineffable expression of moral qualities which shone upon her face. She was all soul. The spirit of prayer seemed to purify her and refine those homely features and make them luminous. Who has not seen the phenomenon of a like transfiguration on sacred faces where the habits of the soul have triumphed over the plainest features, giving them that spiritual illumination whose ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... stopped at the news stand on her way to the gymnasium. She was a homely woman at any time, and in her bloomers she looked like a soup-bone. Under ordinary circumstances she'd have seen the puffs from the staircase and have asked what they cost and told me they didn't match, ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... afternoon, did stay talking and playing the foole almost all the afternoon, and there saw two or three foolish sorry pictures of her doing, but very ridiculous compared to what my wife do. She grows mighty homely and looks old. Thence ashamed at myself for this losse of time, yet not able to leave it, I to the office, where my Lord Bruncker come; and he and I had a little fray, he being, I find, a very peevish man, if he be denied what he expects, and very simple in his ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... villages a great proportion are now occupied for several months in the year by people who, though willing to pay for simple accommodation, will not tolerate dirt, squalor, or want of sanitation. To their surprise they have found hundreds of cottages, homely, but not uncomfortable, kept with scrupulous neatness, and furnished by no means badly. Nearly all have ample kitchen accommodation, fair beds, and an equipment of glass, china, and crockery, which shows how cheap and good are the necessaries of life in England. The well-to-do agricultural ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... the full value he intends it to carry, connotes all he wishes it to cover, and has the full emotional power and suggestion that it has for himself. Two quite simple illustrations may serve. The English-born clergyman in Canada who spoke of a meeting of his congregation as a "homely gathering" did not produce quite the effect he intended; "home-like" is one thing in Canada, "homely" quite another, and the people laughed at the slip—they knew, what he did not, that "homely" meant hard-featured ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... till James had nearly dined, when Gowrie took them to their dinner, separately in the hall; 'he sat not down with them as the common manner is,' but again stood silent beside the King, who bantered him 'in a homely manner.' ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... Presbyterian Church was one of the first morgues opened and who has lived among dead bodies ever since is the cheeriest man in Johnstown. He made a prayer and an address. It was all straight-from-the-shoulder kind of talk, garbed in homely phrase. ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... course of which we follow from the determination to prepare for it, to the risk of battle and to final victory; and then again in Henry V and Henry VI, the unhappy position into which a prince not formed by nature to be a ruler falls between violent contending parties, until he envies the homely swain who tends his flocks and lets the years run by in peace: lastly the path of horrible crime which a king's son not destined for the throne has to tread in order to ascend it: all these are great elements in the history of states, and are not only ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... unpopular. Other men, thoughtless, and headlong, and irritable as he, have lived and had friends; but there was something about O'Grady that was felt, perhaps, more than it could be defined, which made him unpleasing—perhaps the homely phrase "cross-grained" may best express it, and O'Grady was essentially a cross-grained man. The estate, when he got it, was pretty heavily saddled, and the "galled jade" did not "wince" ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... of the best fighters in the Revolution. He was a homely little man. He was also a very good man. Another general said, "Mar-i-on ...
— Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans • Edward Eggleston
... Bush. Looking through the open door into the general living-room, which was also lighted, he could see a red twinkle beneath the register of the stove, beside which a woman was sitting sewing. She was a hard-featured, homely person in coarsely fashioned garments, which did not seem to fit her well, and Nasmyth felt slightly disconcerted when he glanced at her, for she was not the woman whom he had expected to see. Then his glance rested on a man, who had also figured in his uncertain memories, and now sat not far ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... most childish way, though she's our age. Her eyes are gray with dark lashes and when she looks at you they are like surprised stars. And she has the most beautiful complexion in the world, just pink and white. She is lovely to look at and I feel like a tanned, homely gipsy beside her. She's sweet too, but very easily shocked and I'm afraid she's not only good but pious. She can never take your place so don't worry, only, as I have to be here, I might as well have some fun ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure: Nor grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... said the homely Mrs Twitter, "we won't be so hard on you here. I want you to assist me with my sewing and darning—of which I have a very great deal—and help to take care ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... like to have it between me and my village. I could not help preferring that homely relation in which the houses are built up like swallow-nests on to the very walls of the cathedrals themselves, to the arrangement here, where the river flowed, with what flow there was in it, between the ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... and we must, as far as possible, receive her in the way she has been used to here, a very homely dinner, served as she has always seen it—no fruit or flowers on the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... of a shy, lonely girl, homeless, hopeless and despondent in a great city, then the picture of two old people waiting in some distant farmhouse, sick at heart and uncertain, seeing their daughter's face in the firelight, hearing her sigh in the night wind. He talked in homely words that left the baggage-man's face grave, then he told how Burns, in a cruel jest, had sent a starving boy out to solve the mystery that had baffled the best detectives. When he had ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... first big dance, the woman looking out from under the narrow brim of a snug winter hat, great furs framing her beautiful face, and her slender figure wrapped in furs. Here also was a picture of Florence Haviland, her handsome face self-satisfied, her trio of homely, distinguished-looking girls about her, and a small picture of Gardner, and two of Clarence's dead mother: one, as they all remembered her, a prim-looking woman with gray hair and magnificent lace on her unfashionable gown, the other, taken thirty years before, showing ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... those places where we might have spent half a day to advantage, and familiarized us only with one branch of knowledge,—the merit and demerit of most of the inns on the roads, whose characters I shall not fail to give as we found them. Homely as this species of information may be, I have often regretted the want of it beforehand; and concluding that others may be of the same opinion, I shall therefore afford it as far as I am able: premising, that it is as well not to vary, on this or any other road, from the practice of ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... point, for it claims to recall a series of adventures which we know nothing about—Till crossing the market place and smacking his whip at the good women there; Till in priestly attire delivering a homely sermon; Till making love to a young woman who rebuffs him; Till making a fool of the pedants; Till tried and hung. Strauss's liking to present, by musical pictures, sometimes a character, sometimes a dialogue, or a situation, or a landscape, or an idea—that is to say, the most ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... chafed in spirit at this time because I heard no word from friend Hicks. I am convinced at this present moment that had he felt it borne in upon him to indite me some words of homely comfort, I should have been gratified exceedingly. But his mind lay otherwise presumably, for no ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... When he came down to the evening meal, he found himself wondering foolishly upon what food the child lost in the sea had fed while she grew so rapidly to a woman's stature. The present meal was such as fell to the daily lot of that household. In homely blue delft cups a dozen or more eggs were ranged beside high stacks of buttered toast, rich and yellow. The butter, the jugs of yellow cream, the huge platter heaped with wild raspberries—as each of these met his eye he was wondering if the sea-maid ever ate ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... from the north down the valley of the Rhone, and everything is so cold that I have been obliged to indulge in a fire. There is a fine crackle and roar of burning wood in the chimney which is very homely and companionable, though it does seem to postulate a town all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to be a piece of very homely, well-worn, and yet always needful, practical counsel to try not to magnify and prolong grief, nor to minimise and abbreviate gladness. We can make our lives, to our own thinking, very much what we will. We cannot directly regulate our emotions, but we can regulate them, because ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the eye, and therefore when worn as an ornament it competes with the eye, and in effect lessens the beauty it is supposed to enhance. He said that gems should be worn only by women who are not beautiful, who must rely on something extraneous to attract attention, since it would be better to a homely woman that men should look at her to admire a diamond or sapphire than not to look at her at all. She had laughed and asked him who the man was who had such strange ideas, and he had replied that he had ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... living-room, with its big fireplace and homely things, when they came chattering out of the enchanted place. She was sitting by the window which gave her a view of the dim gray road where it came over the grassy swells from Meander and the world, knitting a ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... animate or inanimate, to the very hours and lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome fulness of expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the personal ornaments, of the people on the highway. Even Jacques Bonhomme at his labour, or idling for an hour, borrowed from his love, homely as it was, a touch of dignity or grace, and some secret of utterance, which made [57] one think of Italy or Greece. The voice of the shepherd calling, the chatter of the shepherdess turning her spindle, seemed to answer, or wait for answer,—to be fragments ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... Glendower, and that I saw two females, whom his marauders had carried off from Cheshire or Shropshire to toil and slave in the Welshery, walking together after the labours of the day were done, and bemoaning their misfortunes in their own homely English. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... parlor Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man, was at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago. He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, with friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I did not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furniture salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... and robs each part o'th world With borrowed beauties to enflame thine eye: The Sea, to fetch her Pearle, is div'd into; The Diomond rocks are cut to make her shine; To plume her pryde the Birds do naked sing: When my Enanthe, in a homely gowne— ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... him wearily, with a faint smile. It was a calm, sunny day. Bathing machines were on the beach; children were playing here and there; and white sails of pleasure boats were visible in the offing. The dullness of Sandyseal wore a quiet homely aspect which was pleasant to the eyes of strangers. Sydney said, absently, "I think I shall like the place." And Herbert added: "Let us hope that the air will make you feel stronger." He meant it and said it kindly—but, instead of looking at her while he spoke, he continued to look at ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... diffidence, or humility, from religious talk. I know it was from no lack of deep spiritual conviction. If ever the world contained a purer, sweeter sisterhood, I have not known it. Their work was homely, as their lives were secluded, but no one ever saw them idle or impatient. In one straight and narrow path they walked through earth's temptations ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... dales round Tavistock, and lovingly described them in his verse. Frequently he indulges in descriptions of sunrise and sunset; they leave no vivid impression, but charm the reader by their quiet beauty. It cannot be denied that his fondness for simple, homely images sometimes led him into sheer fatuity; and candid admirers must also admit that, despite his study of simplicity, he could not refrain from hunting (as the manner ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... balconies were crowded with spectators, and every pane of glass showed a face. In the open country, where timber was scarce, the houses were, between studs, impaneled with clay-red, white, or blue. One of the Spaniards who came over in the suite of Philip remarked the large diet in these homely cottages: "These English," quoth he, "have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the king." "Whereby it appeareth," comments Harrison, "that he liked better of our good fare in such coarse cabins, than ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... certain influence with Bessie, whom she had known all her life. It was she who had inspired Bessie with the desks to come to Mauleverer Manor, to be finished, after having endured eight years of jog-trot education from a homely little governess at home—who grounded the boys in Latin and mathematics before they went to Winchester, and made herself generally useful. Miss Rylance was the daughter of a fashionable physician, whose head-quarters were in Cavendish Square, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Mozart's head with a vengeance. According to his picture of her, she was so ugly and untidy that even Mozart could not flirt with her. He draws an amusing picture of his predicament—a sort of Venus and Adonis affair, with a homely Venus: ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... finished, Jean had also brought his communication to a close. He passed it over the table for me to read, and I found that it was substantially to the same effect as I had suggested, but written in his own homely and not very precise style of composition. I looked it very carefully through to see that there was no covert suggestion therein of a character intended to betray me; but as far as I could see it was a perfectly straightforward affair ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... scholars, which at that time, from the imperfect culture of philology, they could not easily have been; men they were whom religious feeling guided correctly in choosing their expressions, and with whom the state of the language in some respects cooperated, by furnishing a diction more homely, fervent, and pathetic, than would now be available. For their apostolic functions English was the language most in demand. But in polemic or controversial cases Greek is indispensable. And of this Lady Carbery was sufficiently convinced by my own demur on the word metanoia. If I were right, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... humus filling the fissures, and, contrary to the general rule, the plants, especially the sorrel (Rumex) and the dandelion (Taraxacum), instead of dwindling, gained in stature. The strong-smelling Ferula looked like a bush, and the Sarh grew into a tree: the Ar'ar,[EN23] a homely hawthorn (hawthorn-leaved Rhus), whose appearance was a surprise, equalled the Cratgus of Syria; and the upper heights must have been a forest of fine junipers (Habbah Juniperus Phnicea), with trunks thick as a man's body. The guides spoke of wild figs, but we failed to find them. Our ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... Some linger in the drear poor-house—some are beyond the sea; One died behind the cold ditch—back beneath the open sky, And every star in heaven was a witness from on high. None dared to ope a friendly door, or lift a neighbor's latch, Or shelter by a warm hearthstone beneath the homely thatch. ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... under the sloping roof struck a chill to her heart as she entered; but when she had lighted the lamp (a new investment that helped up the temperature besides giving light), and set her little oil-stove going with the kettle on it, her surroundings took on an air of homely comfort that was grateful. As she busied herself preparing the tea, she noticed that her neighbour in the next attic was coughing a good deal, and then it occurred to her that she had not seen him about lately, and she wondered if he could be ill. The thought of a young man of small means, ill ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the theoretical niceties of wifely submission, but with his creature comforts. His instructions as to how to make a husband comfortable positively palpitate with life; and at the same time there is something indescribably homely and touching about them; they tell more about the real life of a burgess's wife than a hundred tales of Patient Griselda or of Jehanne la Quentine. Consider this picture (how typical a product of the masculine imagination!) of the stout bread-winner, ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... thoughtless once Of beauty or of grace, Simple and homely in attire, Careless of form and face; Then whence this change? and wherefore now So often smoothe your hair? And wherefore deck your youthful form ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... solid lady with a fine white bosom and strong white arms. Her face was homely and kind; I saw at once that she adored her husband; her placid smile carried beneath its placidity a tremulous anxiety that he should be pleased, and her mild eyes swam in the light of his encouragement. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... would you do with Nancy if you didn't marry her off? If she were homely she'd have to fill in chinks in other people's lives, but with her nice little basket of eggs, good looks, money, not too much wit, and a desire to please, she just naturally is put up for ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... outstretched hand. She wore a blue skirt and a white blouse and brown boots. She was twenty-eight, but her rather small proportions and her plentiful golden, fluffy hair made her seem about twenty. Her face was less homely than Susan's, and more mobile. She smiled somewhat shyly, with an extraordinary radiant cheerfulness. It was impossible for her to conceal the fact that she was very good-natured and very ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the woman just the opposite is the case. I am leaving out of consideration sexual impotence, because this is a real disability, and a man suffering with it only irritates the woman without satisfying her. For this she will not stand. But where the man is sexually potent—he may be aged and homely—his other physical attributes play but a small role with woman; his mental and spiritual qualities count with her for a good deal more. While a woman may be able to give a man perfect sexual satisfaction, and she may have an angelic character, if her body is not all that could be desired, the ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... and character of female education. It is dolefully affirmed that young ladies learn how to sing operas but not how to keep house,—that they can conjugate Greek verbs, but cannot make bread,—that they are good for pretty toying, but not for homely using. Doubtless there is foundation for this remark, or it would never have been made. But I have been in the East and the West, and the North and the South; I know that I have seen the best society, and I am sure I have seen very bad, if not the ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... waiting. He wrote of his handsome farm he had cleared with his own hands, and the beautiful wild country he lived in, telling her he hoped her future life would be free from all care. All this, and even more, dear reader, he told her—in plain, homely words, it is true; but love's language is always sweet, be it in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... sparrows came familiarly about the palm cabins and whitewashed houses and trilled on the rooftrees. It was a simple song, with just a hint of our northern white-throat's sweet and plaintive melody, and of the opening bars of our song-sparrow's pleasant, homely lay. It brought back dear memories of glorious April mornings on Long Island, when through the singing of robin and song-sparrow comes the piercing cadence of the meadowlark; and of the far northland woods ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... personal life in its simplicity and happiness has been a standing contrast to the turmoil and passion of his public energy. Meet Lloyd George among his family, and it is hard to realize that such a homely, genial person could be the man who tackled so rancorously the House of Lords. I went to 11 Downing Street one day after the Budget fight was over, and when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George was preparing further legislative changes. Eleven Downing Street, it should be explained, ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... of any of her sex. Fifty miles from a doctor or a friend, except her weary and perhaps morose husband, she must keep strong under labor, and be patient under suffering, till death. And thus the household, the hamlet, the village, the town, the city, the state, rise out of her "homely toils, and destiny obscure." Truly she is one of the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... synagogue toward law, philosophy, and literature. The study of Spinoza (whose works he translated) gave form to his convictions concerning human life. It led him to spend his literary talents on materials so various as the homely simplicity of peasant scenes and peasant souls, on the one hand, and on the other the popularization of a high social and ethical philosophy, specially inculcated through his larger fictions. His college education was obtained at Tuebingen, Munich, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... wicked!" they cried. "They are simply flatterers," replied Madame de Gontaut. Little Mademoiselle resumed: "After having praised us without end, and telling us a hundred times that we were pretty,—for I heard it all perfectly,—to want to give me medicine because I was so homely and ill-looking! Oh, this is too much! I know now what flattery is,—to say just the contrary of the truth. But it's a sin. I ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... he had talked thus long to let her recover from her emotion. At last she thought to herself: "You can surely show that you are not too homely to speak to a noble gentleman, Elsalill! For you are a maiden of good ...
— The Treasure • Selma Lagerlof
... not a popular woman. She was conscious that she had married beneath her—more conscious lately that there had been no necessity to make the marriage, and she had grown a little soured. She could never mix with the homely wives of local millionaires; she professed a horror of the vulgarities with which she was surrounded, hated and loathed her lord and master's flamboyant home, which she described as something between a feudal castle and a picture-palace; and ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... reaching his awkward arms out to clasp her when Verrinder burst into the homely scene of their tragedy. He caught up the broken bottle and saw the word "Poison." Beneath were the directions, but no word of description, no ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... "Somehow it's homely when you can call a chap Mac, somehow! Now, if you was to do a play for us, and it went well, it'd put heart into you for something better. If you can find your way to the heart of a music-hall audience, Mac, my boy, you can find your way anywhere. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... A similar homely parallel will serve to explain the Adriatic situation. You will imagine Seattle and the shores of Puget Sound, with its maze of islands, in Canadian possession. Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria are strongly fortified bases for Canadian battle-fleets and flotillas ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... who "dine on homely fare" Were true and brave and a' that, And none whose garb is "hodden gray" Was fool or knave and a' that, The vice and crime that shame our time Would disappear and a' that, And plowmen be as great as kings, And churls ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the business world and stiffens the economic backbone of the nation. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole German people, barring the inevitable though small percentage of weaklings, is trying with terrific earnestness to live up to the homely Hindenburgian motto, "Durchhalten!" ("Hold out,") or, in more idiomatic American, "See the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... less greasy or more noble, and so cast his thoughts upon the commonwealth, he will have leisure for her and she riches and honors for him; his sweat shall smell like Alexander's. My Lord Philautus is a young man who, enjoying his L10,000 a year, may keep a noble house in the old way, and have homely guests; and having but two, by the means proposed, may take the upper hand of his great ancestors; with reverence to whom, I may say, there has not been one of them would have disputed his place ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... the opening of the dawn, Still sprinkled with heaven's gracious dew, Her beauty and her bosom on the lawn Doth charmingly disclose, For nymphs and amorous swains with love to view; So delicate, so fair, Lucrezia yields New pearls, new purple to our homely fields, While Cupid plays and Flora ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... anything—I very much doubt whether the dunces of this world are not the very happiest people in it—Yes, Clara; leave to others the vain and empty distinctions of literary renown, which is but a bubble, and be happy in the homely path of obscure but ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... hands off these venerable stones! Parian marble, wrought with consummate skill, could not replace them. Connected with these homely monuments are historical associations that ought not to be forgotten. The scarcity of better materials, the rudeness of monumental sculpture, the poverty of the country, the early struggles and pecuniary embarrassments ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... who is He, with modest looks, And clad in homely russet brown? [B] He murmurs near the running brooks A music sweeter ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... ranged abroad, hatchet in hand, in search of fuel, and made the yet slumbering and dreaming wood resound with our blows. Then with our fire we burned up a portion of the loitering night, while the kettle sang its homely strain to the morning star. We tramped about the shore, waked all the muskrats, and scared up the bittern and birds that were asleep upon their roosts; we hauled up and upset our boat and washed it and rinsed out the clay, talking aloud as if it were broad day, until ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... dreariest of all the dreary ones they had already passed in their extemporised dwelling—"home" they called it, as people will style any shelter to which they can retreat from all the trials and exposures of the outside world, "no matter how homely!" ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... unconventional manners, who, without the slightest effort to put on dignity, treated all men alike, much like old neighbours; whose speech had not seldom a rustic flavour about it; who always seemed to have time for a homely talk and never to be in a hurry to press business; and who occasionally spoke about important affairs of State with the same nonchalance—I might almost say irreverence—with which he might have discussed an every-day law case in his office ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... work, hunt, exercise (he thus begun), Then scorn a homely dinner if you can; Fried eggs, and herbs, and olives, still we see: This much is left of ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... elm-shaded. Such hath it been depicted in their legends who went before me; What therefore, I have seen and heard, declare I unto you In measures artless and untuneful. Fearless of hardship, In costume, as in manners, unadorn'd and homely Were our ancestral farmers, the seed-planters of a strong nation. Congenial were their wives, not ashamed of the household charge, Yoke-fellows that were help-meets, vigorous and of a good courage; Revolting not at life's plain intent, but its duties ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... are both very much grown and very much improved," replied Edward, "but I must confess to you that I think it is high time that they were, if possible, removed from their present homely occupations, and instructed ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... The great philosopher, Dr. Franklin, inspired the mouthpiece of his own eloquence, "Poor Richard," with "many a gem of purest ray serene," encased in the homely garb of proverbial truisms. On the subject of frugality we cannot do better than take the worthy Mentor for our text, and from it address our remarks. A man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, "keep ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... was a spring time of blossoming but once in a hundred years! How would men look forward to it, and old men, who had beheld its wonders, tell the story to their children, how once all the homely trees became beautiful, and earth was covered with freshness and new growth! How would young men hope to become old, that they might see so glad a sight! And when beheld, the aged man would say, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... typographically, William Caxton, with no fine models in contemporary English manuscripts to guide him, produced no single book that can stand comparison with the best work of foreign printers. But if he was a poor printer, he was a most enterprising and skilful publisher, and in his homely way a genuine and most prolific journeyman of letters. As the word journeyman is written, shame bids us strike out the first half of it, lest we seem to cast a slight upon one who did so excellent a work for English literature, ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... here wealth came in to do away with the resemblance. True, she was tall and angular, but she made up superbly, so that on looking at her one would exclaim: 'What a stylish woman!' True, her features were homely, and her complexion without freshness, but over these were spread the magic atmosphere of fashion and assured position. She had a consciousness which repelled any idea that she could be otherwise than handsome, fascinating, intelligent, and everything else ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... holding his opinions he kept to himself. The arguments of those who held contrary views he would listen to with great patience, even with interest; but his only reply would be a slow, irritating smile and a shake of the head. Peevy was homely, but there was nothing repulsive about his homeliness. He was tall and somewhat angular; he was sallow; he had high cheek-bones, and small eyes that seemed to be as alert and as watchful as those of a ferret; and he was slow and deliberate in all his movements, taking time to digest ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... be upon his Guard. That there are such, every one will agree with me, who hears me name *** with his first Friend and Favourite ***, not to mention *** nor ***. These People may cry Ch-rch, Ch-rch, as long as they please, but, to make use of a homely Proverb, The Proof of the P-dd-ng is in the eating. This I am sure of, that if a certain Prince should concur with a certain Prelate, (and we have Monsieur Z—n's Word for it) our Posterity would be in a sweet P-ckle. Must the British Nation suffer forsooth, because ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... ruins and in the scattered half-destroyed dug-outs amongst the trenches which criss-crossed the village. All this had to be done in pouring rain. When at last we settled down it was found that our new homes were also shared by huge rats who capered about in a most homely manner. ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... you may be right," exclaimed Randal, as if struck and half-convinced by his companion's argument—"very possible; and certainly I think that the homely folks at the Hall would fret and fume at first, if they heard you were married to Madame di Negra. Yet still, when your father learned that you had done so, not from passion alone, but to save him from all pecuniary sacrifice—to clear yourself ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... and the child reluctantly let it fly. It made straight for the distant roofs behind them, but the rest of the pigeons still strutted and pecked round the perambulator with tiny mincing steps, like court ladies practising the minuet. Malcolm looked on with unabated relish—the homely idyll ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... could, to make her take good heed of what she went about, to consider it well; and had urg'd all the Inconveniencies of Severe Life, Watchings, Midnight Risings in all Weathers and Seasons to Prayers, hard Lodging, course Diet, and homely Habit, with a thousand other things of Labour and Work us'd among the Nuns; and finding her still resolv'd and inflexible to all contrary persuasions, he consented, kiss'd her, and told her, She had argu'd according to the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... and was literally deluged with a stream of Spanish. She stood there, hands clasped on her tremendous bosom, staring unbelievingly at the bearer of these tidings of great joy, the while tears cascaded down her flat, homely face. With a snap of his fingers, Pablo dismissed her; then he darted into the house and emerged with his rifle. A cockerel, with the carelessness of youth, had selected for his roost the limb of an adjacent oak and ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... we spent together. Shaw played some tunes on an accordion which I had purchased for him at Zanzibar; but, though it was only a miserable ten-dollar affair, I thought the homely tunes evoked from the instrument that night were divine melodies. The last tune played before retiring was ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... any poem he might have produced on this subject would certainly have wanted that tinge of chivalrous feeling which the manners of the age and the character of the king alike demanded. But with Burns's ardent admiration of Bruce, and that power of combining the most homely and humorous incidents with the pathetic and the sublime, which he displayed in Tam o' Shanter, we cannot but regret that he never had the leisure and freedom from care, which would have allowed him to try his hand on a subject so entirely ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... same as usual," said Caleb. "Homely, but very snug. The gay colours on the walls; the bright flowers on the plates and dishes; the shining wood, where there are beams or panels; the general cheerfulness and neatness of the building,—make ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... man, in the midst of his civilization, instinctively goes back to some half-hidden reminiscence of the forest and the wilderness in which his savage forefathers dwelt. My lord seeks his highland moor, Norvegian salmon river, or more homely coverside; the retired grocer, in his snug retreat at Tooting, builds himself an arbour of rocks and mosses, and, by dint of strong imagination and stronger tobacco, becomes a very Kalmuck in his back-garden; and it is by no means improbable ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... plain. She was, however, one of those girls who start by being "ugly" or "queer-looking," or downright "homely," and end by becoming "interesting" or "picturesque" or "fascinating," according to the divagations of the individual vocabulary. She had the beaute troublante. At first sight, you might have called her gipsy, Indian, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... he saw his ideal. Her beauty was remarkable for a fullness, a perfection of outline, combined with a fairness and delicacy which suggested that she was not made of ordinary clay. Miss Wildmere prided herself upon giving the impression that she was remote from all that was common or homely in life. She cultivated the characteristic of daintiness. In her dress, gloves, jewelry, and complexion she would be immaculate at any cost. Graydon's fastidious taste could never find a flaw in her, as regarded externals, and she knew the immense advantage of pleasing his eye with ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... considerable concession—by placing herself before him in a more favourable light. In her dress, her manner, her bearing there was a certain half-alien delicacy, finesse, aloofness. She would not lay this altogether aside, even at home, even in the informal country; but she would provide a homely medium, suited to Abner's rustic vision, through which her exotic airs and graces might be more ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... generation something of its transparency, and at last degenerated into a gross superstition. But traces still remained, even down to the times of Christian ascendency, of the deep, philosophical spirit in which it had been originally conceived; and through its homely imagery there ran a vein of tender humour, such as still characterises the warm-hearted, laughter-loving northern races. Of this mixture of philosophy and fun, the following story is no bad specimen. [Footnote: The story of Thor's journey has been translated from the Edda ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... impending threat of death, as well. His life had been one of scant ease and of unmitigated warfare with the hostile forces of Nature. Yet he had built up a modest competency after a life time of struggle. With a few more years of industry he might have claimed material victory. In the homely parlance of his kind he had things "hung-up," which signified such prosperity had come to him as came to the pioneer woodsmen who faced the famine times of winter with smoked hams hanging from their nails, and tobacco and pepper and ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... bloodroot were blooming while the last patches of snow still lingered; the rapture of the hermit thrush in Vermont, the serene golden melody of the wood thrush on Long Island, would be heard before we were there to listen. Each was longing for the homely things that were so dear to him, for the home people who were dearer still, and for the one who was dearest of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... a townsman who was held to be his equal; not one who was considered his superior. Though he was little over thirty yet, he was at the head of all municipal affairs. He had already held the office of mayor for one year, and might have been re-elected, if his wife had not somewhat scorned the homely bourgeois dignity. There was no more popular man in the whole town ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... explained with homely earnestness the nature of the sheep, her time of lambing, etc., and showed Jacky how the sheep and cattle would always keep him fed and clothed, if he would but use them reasonably, and not kill the breeders ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, "No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bearing precisely on this case, then it was all the more important that this should be made the occasion of a settlement of the question so unequivocal and positive as effectually to guard against future complication and embarrassment. Now how did the Premier deal with this issue? He disregarded the homely wisdom contained in the pithy bull of Sir Boyle Roche, that "the best way to avoid a dilemma is to meet it plump." He dodged the dilemma. His resolutions, worded with ingenious obscurity, skilfully evaded the important aspect of the controversy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... neighbor's fields, once actually fording my lakelet to get to my precious potato patch. The number and variety of devouring pests connected with each vegetable are alarming. Here are a few connected closely with the homely cabbage, as given by a noted helminthologist under ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... to Mrs. Fogg that she sent for Clara Belle to live with her and go to school part of the year. "She'll be useful," said Mrs. Fogg, "and she'll be out of her father's way, and so keep honest; though she's so awful homely I've no fears for her. A girl with her red hair, freckles, and cross-eyes can't fall into no kind of sin, I ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... NIGHT; a rustic merry-making in a farm-house about Christmas, common in some parts of Yorkshire. There is abundance of homely fare, tea, cakes, fruit, and ale; various feats of agility, amusing games, romping, dancing, and kissing withal. They ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... with the freedom, the raciness, interest, and the freshness of the American pulpit orator. These discourses are orations which were delivered extemporaneously and taken down by a shorthand writer. Hence they are homely, yet eloquent; natural, yet cultivated, and come right home to the hearts of the readers. No one could tire reading these sermons. They are as racy as a magazine article, as instructive as a lecture, and as impressive and lofty as a message from God. They are thoroughly American for ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the girl's environment was wrong for him also. What had he to do with Chelsea? Chelsea was a parish; it was not the world. He had been gravely disappointed in Chelsea. Marguerite had no shimmer of romance. She was homely. And she was content with her sphere. And she was not elegant; she had no kind of smartness; who would look twice at her? And she was unjust, she was unfair. She had lacerated his highly sensitive pride. She had dealt his conceit a frightful wound. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... or springs of pure flowing water, were conducive to health. The vivifying air, the well cultivated gardens surrounding the shrine, the magnificent view, all tended to cheer the heart with new hope of cure. Many of these temples owed their fame to mineral or merely hot springs. To the homely altars, erected originally by sacred fountains in the neighbourhood of health-giving mineral springs, were later added magnificent temples, pleasure-grounds for festivals, gymnasia in which bodily ailments were treated by physical exercises, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... gossip amounted almost to a passion, and nothing came amiss to her; she liked to know everything about everybody, and in the main I think her interest was a kindly one, though she found that a little bit of scandal, every now and then, added a piquant flavour to the homely fare provided by the commonplace life of ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... rushing by. Little villas, with back-gardens running down to the rail, would give way for a mile or two to fields, and then start afresh. The fog was thin there, and England looked extraordinarily homely and pleasant. It was the known; he was conscious of rushing at fifty miles an hour into the unknown. He turned over the scrappy conversation of the last few minutes, and found it savoured of the unknown. It was curious the difference uniform made. He ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... and waked from my dream. It was a joyful shock to see Joseph beside me, in the homely clothes which had replaced his "Sunday best"; to see Finois and his pack full of my friendly belongings. But I clung to the comfortable present for a few moments only. The spell of dead centuries had me in its grip. Farther and farther back into the land of dead days, I journeyed ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... between the two brothers, who protectingly joined their hands behind her back, as if she were a delicate piece of statuary that a push might damage. Soon the King had passed, and receiving the military salutes of the piquet, joined the Queen and princesses at Gloucester Lodge, the homely house of red brick in which ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... most certainly, not comfort. Robin himself would have smiled contemptuously if you had pleaded for something homely, something suggestive of roaring fires and cosy armchairs, instead of the stiff-backed, beautifully carved Louis XIV. furniture that stood, each chair and table rigidly in its appointed place, as though bidding defiance to any one bold enough to ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... my girlhood like Marie Bashkirtseff, and about the rest of my days and my work like many other artists of the pen, who merely, by putting black upon white, have had the power to bring before their readers not merely themselves "as they lived," but the most homely and intimate details of their lives, the friend who had first impressed on me that I ought not to leave my story untold any longer, said that the beginning was easy enough: "What is the first thing you remember? Write that ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... whom I leant for guidance and advice, were more hopeful than myself; and so I came away from my beautiful country parish. You know, my friends, who have passed through the like, the sorrow to look for the last time at each kind homely face: the sorrow to turn away from the little church where you have often preached to very small congregations: the sorrow to leave each tree you have planted, and the evergreens whose growth you have watched, year by year. Soon, you are in ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... tablecloth. Oh, the innocent and funny makeshifts of poverty, and the goodly distance it can make a little go! Perhaps some of us, as we stand in our rich dining rooms, and gaze with pride at the silver, the gold, the cut glass, and the transparent china, can recall a little kitchen in a homely house far away, where our good mothers once set their tables for their guests, and what a brave show the few extra dishes made when they brought them out on the ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... distinctly in that clear air, still standing before his door. And then he appeared to make a parting gesture with his hand, and something like snow fluttered in the air above his head. It was only the torn fragments of Parker's draft, which this homely gentleman of the Sierras, standing beside his empty pork barrel, had ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... was not in the most celestial humour with the Mamelukes, who seemed inclined to defy his and every other person's authority; and, on hearing that the result of all the disorders and revolutions had been the elevation of Bibars Bendocdar to the throne of Saladin, he remarked, in homely oriental phrase, 'when the pot boils, the scum rises to the top.' Above all, Musteazem was a miser, and covetous to the last degree; and when it was explained to him by his grand vizier, whom the Templar had already ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... to celebrate the New Tear. Even the richest of the members of the German bourgeoisie is obliged to be educated gradually to the cultured usages of society, and are still far from accomplished in the art of easy familiarity. It finds in its homely culture no hard-and-fast traditions by which it can regulate its conduct, and by a deficiency of observation, or by the want of development of the finer feelings, is only imperfectly helped by foreign or aristocratic manners. Herr Ellrich, who loved ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... they would be bickerings without effect; and Ralph Newton, of Newton, would probably so live with this wife of his bosom, that they, too, might lie at last pleasantly together in the family vault, with the record of their homely virtues visible to the survivors of the parish on the same tombstone. The means by which each of them would have arrived at these blessings would not redound to the credit of either; but the blessings would be there, and it may be said of their ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... fine old order, large and lofty, full of wonders in the way of gables, porches, and oriels, carved doors and panels, in preservation that did them honour due, and the furniture betokening that best of taste which perceives the fitness of things. All had the free homely air of plenty and hospitality—the open doors, the numerous well-fed men and maids, the hosts of live creatures—horses, cows, dogs, pigs, poultry, each looking like a prize animal boasting of its ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not—and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... combined with her homely aspect, and perfectly unassuming manners, made a great impression upon many of those who met her in London. Ticknor says of Maria Edgeworth: "There was a life and spirit about her conversation, she threw herself into it with ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... am to home," sais I, "I have returned again to the old occupation and the old place; for, after all, what's bred in the bone, you know, is hard to get out of the flesh, and home is home, however homely. The stones, and the trees, and the brooks, and the hills look like old ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... and I proceed right onward to the performance of my duty. Be the consequences what they may, the responsibility is with those who have imposed upon me this necessity. The Senator from Massachusetts has thought proper to cast the first stone, and if he shall find, according to the homely adage, that "he lives in a glass house,"—on his head be the consequences. The gentleman has made a great flourish about his fidelity to Massachusetts. I shall make no professions of zeal for the interests ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Minnie, the elderly servant, sat by the table reading, amid the odor of roasting chicken; outside the door on the kitchen porch was the freezer containing the dinner ice-cream. An orderly Sunday peace was in the air, a gesture of homely comfort, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... duty to mere man vouchsafed Was laid on thee,—out of wild chaos, When the roused popular ocean foamed and chafed And vulture War from his Imaus Snuffed blood, to summon homely Peace, And show that only ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... silver-wired leaves, Through the salt-lick or orange glade, or under conical firs, Through the gymnasium, through the curtain'd saloon, through the office or public hall; Pleas'd with the native and pleas'd with the foreign, pleas'd with the new and old, Pleas'd with the homely woman as well as the handsome, Pleas'd with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously, Pleas'd with the tune of the choir of the whitewash'd church, Pleas'd with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, impress'd seriously ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... local journal into the hands of the enemy and reveal—nothing at all. The position of the barrier guard ceased to be—if it ever were—a sinecure, and he was kept busy picking pockets, examining bills, perusing love-letters, written in all sorts of prose, and in verse which was homely, if not ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... should be attracted to a woman who has devoted herself assiduously to understanding and to making known the aspirations of our country, especially in introducing the labors and achievements of our women to their sisters in France, of whom we also have much to learn; for simple, homely virtues and the charm of womanliness may still be studied with advantage on ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... is not very nice," Honor retorted coquettishly, "quite plain, almost homely, I should say, but I can't give his name, he did ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... had a terrifying effect on them for several days. They did not appear to pick up much food amongst the grass, but scratched away industriously all the same. I must say that they were very friendly and gave the place quite a homely aspect. One of them was christened "Ma" on account of her maternal ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... excellent cure for the rheumatism. I have been twice at the play; where, notwithstanding the excellence of the performers, the gayety of the company, and the decorations of the theatre, which are very fine, I could not help reflecting, with a sigh, upon our poor homely representations at Gloucester — But this, in confidence to my dear Willis — You know my heart, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose words in their best order;—poetry the best words in the best ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... find that Morgan hadn't been bored. Her mother, in whose strange, deep-cut features was suggested something of the spirit of Cleo's face, was a brisk-looking, homely matron of fifty. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... in this laconic description of the homely dreamer a richness of beauty which no efforts of the artist can adequately portray; and in the concise dialogue of the speakers, a simple sublimity of eloquence which any commentary could only weaken. While our feelings are excited by this description, we cannot ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... quitted the amphitheatre and reconnoitred the adjoining buildings. They found many stores, the remains of old days, mats, tents, and fuel, drinking-bowls, and other homely furniture. They fixed upon a building for their stable, and others for the accommodation of their band. They summoned their companions to the open place, the scene of Hassan Subah's fate, where Alroy addressed them ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... pleased with my prudent conduct that I can truly say I was a favourite for some days. Madame de Carignan was telling her one day that I was very homely, to which the Queen replied, "He has a very fine set of teeth, and a man cannot be called homely who has this ornament." Madame de Chevreuse remembered that she had often heard the Queen say that the beauty of a man consisted ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... walls. Here and there you may detect an ancient frame-house which has escaped the shocks of time and chance, and still holds its own against its sturdier neighbours. Nor is the memory of England wholly obliterated. Is there not a homely sound in Maiden Lane, a modest thoroughfare not far from Wall Street? What Englishman can feel wholly abroad if he walk out to the Battery, or gaze upon the austere houses of Washington Square? And do not the two churches of Broadway recall ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... my discretion," said he, "thou shalt arise from thy never-to-be-lamented-sufficiently-lowliness; thou shalt leave the homely occupations of that rude boor unto whom it beseemeth thee to give the appellation of father, and shalt attain to the-all-to-be-desired greatness of my love, even as the resplendent sun condescends to shine down upon ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... Truedale by the cold, steely gleam of his eyes which was driving lucidity home to the dulled brain. By a power as unyielding as death Jim was destroying the screen Truedale had managed to raise against the homely codes of life and was leaving his ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... that any place was ever more distinctly home to me. Over the rail, across the dancing waters of the harbour, where the buildings clustered about Circular Quay; as yet, of course, there could be nothing homely for me about all that. And, as to me, it never did become very homely; perhaps that is why my recollections of our first doings there are ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... a fortnight had elapsed, but Gordon Wright had not re-appeared, and Bernard suddenly decided that he would leave Baden. He found Mrs. Vivian and her daughter, very opportunely, in the garden of the pleasant, homely Schloss which forms the residence of the Grand Dukes of Baden during their visits to the scene of our narrative, and which, perched upon the hill-side directly above the little town, is surrounded with charming old shrubberies and terraces. To this garden a portion of ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... our boast of the indomitable courage, the many self-denials, the homely virtues of our forefathers, think you that we in America are degenerate sons of noble sires? ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... to herself. "She looks as though she could eat those children up. She seems so fond of them. Mothers are always that way. Mrs. Bowerman looks at Mary as though she was the prettiest thing in the world and Mary is homely—just ordinarily homely, and Jane Orr's mother—." The thought was too much for Hester. Her lips quivered, her eyes filled with tears so that she could scarcely distinguish the features of the picture which she held in her hand. "It's just a way that mothers have," ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... Mr. Maclaurin, with a face of flippant assurance, 'Are these words your own?' BOSWELL. Sir Walter Scott shows where the humour of this motto chiefly lay. 'The counsel opposite,' he writes, 'was the celebrated Wight, an excellent lawyer, but of very homely appearance, with heavy features, a blind eye which projected from its socket, a swag belly, and a limp. To him Maclaurin applied ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... from lips unaccustomed indeed to such an outburst. The speaker stood a moment longer in silence beside the figure in the chair, and it seemed to Robert, gazing at him with fixed eyes, that the man's whole presence, at once so homely and so majestic, was charged with benediction. It was as though invisible hands of healing and consecration had been laid upon him. The fiery soul beside him had kindled anew the drooping life of his own. So the torch of God passes on its way, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... beautiful pup, this Peter Pied-Bot—or Peter Club-foot, as Jolly Roger McKay—who lived over in the big cedar swamp—had named him when he gave Peter to the girl. He was, in a way, an accident and a homely one at that. His father was a blue-blooded fighting Airedale who had broken from his kennel long enough to commit a mesalliance with a huge big footed and peace-loving Mackenzie hound—and Peter was the result. He wore the fiercely bristling whiskers of his Airedale father at ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... faculty of historic imagination and in the finer artistic sense. It is, in a measure, because of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of real knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter of the multitude. "The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid," says Mr. S. P. Sherman, "refuses to sink his identity in the object contemplated—that, as Corporal Nym would have said, is the humour of it. He is the kind of travelling ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... deities of the Italian Olympus. This over, bonfires of hay and straw were lighted, music was made with cymbal and flute, and shepherds and sheep were purified by passing through the flames. A feast followed, the simple folk lying on benches of turf, and indulging in generous draughts of their homely wines, such, probably, as the visitor to-day may regale himself with in the same region. Towards evening, the flocks were fed, the stables were cleansed and sprinkled with water with laurel brooms, and laurel boughs were hung about them as adornments. ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... church in the evening, sheltered from curious eyes in her nook, and there for a moment she heard the peculiar brush and sweep of rich silk upon pavement, and wondered at so sophisticated a sound in the little homely congregation, but forgot it again in the exulting, joyous beauty of the chants and hymns, led by the rector himself, and, oh, how different from poor Mr. Touchett's best efforts! and forgot it still more in the unfettered eloquence of the preaching of a man of great natural ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... somewhat ungainly of figure and homely of face. But his large, deep eyes of velvety nut-brown were very beautiful and marvellously bright and clear for a man of his age. He wore a little pointed, well-cared-for beard, innocent of gray; but his hair was grizzled, and altogether he had the appearance of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... not equally beautiful, however, and cannot be; but all may be beautiful to a degree that will render them attractive. Let all little girls who want to be pretty, handsome, or good-looking, give attention and we will tell them how. Those who are homely should listen especially, for all may become good-looking, though all cannot become remarkably beautiful. First of all, it is necessary that the girl who wishes to be handsome, to be admired, should be good. She must learn to love what is right and true. She must be pure in mind ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... course, he had forgotten them. Later, they had disappeared again; it had never occurred to him to think. Often in the earlier days she had tried to talk to him about his work. Had he but looked into her eyes, he might have understood. But she had always been so homely-seeming, so good. Who would have suspected? Then suddenly the blood rushes into his face. What must have been her opinion of his work? All these years he had imagined her the amazed devotee, uncomprehending but admiring. He had read to her at times, comparing himself the while with Moliere reading ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... supper that night, and the German actor certainly ate enough to ward off any possible illness. And, in spite of the rather homely character of the hotel, the meal was an excellent one, and the moving picture players were more comfortable in the matter of rooms than they had expected. About the only ones to find fault were Miss Pennington, ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... expression on his grotesque face such as I had seen there once or twice before. When he glanced at me with that strange affection shining from his great eyes, he seemed like some big, benign dog. Never had I seen a calmer man. It seemed impossible that passion ever had contorted those homely black features. ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... relation respecting the stone of Ensisheim on the Rhine, at which philosophy once smiled incredulously, regarding it as one of the romances of the middle ages, may now be admitted to sober attention as a piece of authentic history. A homely narrative of its fall was drawn up at the time by order of the Emperor Maximilian, and deposited with the stone in the church. It may thus be rendered: "In the year of the Lord 1492, on Wednesday, which was Martinmas eve, the 7th of November, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the back of my eyes did not scorch with hot tears too. I thought of the likable little Arab, red-headed, freckled and homely, and I blamed myself bitterly that I had ever let him rejoin ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... favours were bestowed as fast as possible upon their countrymen. They had neither the bearing nor manner which men associate with royalty, nor the graces and power of attraction which distinguished the Stuarts. Commonplace and homely in manner, in figure, and in bearing, they were not men whom their fellows could look up to or respect; their very vices were coarse, and the Hanoverian men and women they gathered round them were hated ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... silent, and again the sound came from a farther pen like a belated echo; the fire flaring out from the open door of the nearest hut of the ranchmen's little hamlet gave a pleasant sense of hospitality and homely hearth-side cheer, for it requires only a few nights under a tent or the open canopy of heaven to make a woman, always the most artificially disposed of all creatures, exceedingly respectful to ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... ease,—the women among cushions on a rattan couch, the men stretched in long chairs. He put questions, indolent, friendly questions, opening vistas of reply and recollection; so that Rudolph, answering, felt the first return of homely comfort. A feeble return, however, and brief: in the pauses of talk, misgiving swarmed in his mind, like the leaping vermin of last night. The world into which he had been thrown still appeared disorderly, incomprehensible, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... beauty, of simplicity, and of rude strength. The new taste hailed with delight the appearance of a native lyric genius in Burns, whose first volume of poems was printed in 1786. It welcomed also the homely, simple sweetness, what Coleridge and Lamb called the "divine chit-chat," of Cowper, whose "Task" appeared in the preceding year. But it was in Coleridge himself and his close contemporaries and followers that the splendor of the new poetry showed itself. He was two years younger ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... all was peace by his cheerful fireside. No man was ever more blessed in his home. His children were intelligent, loving, and obedient; his wife was one of those rare women—seen nowhere more often than in the South—who, to a cultivated mind and polished manners, add the more homely accomplishments of a good housewife. It is years since she laid aside the weary cares of her plantation home, and entered on the higher duties of another life; but her gentle words are still as fresh ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to be a homely person, with no desire either to speak, or to be spoken to. She went out but seldom, and on those rare occasions did not in any way interfere with her daughter. Mr. Boncassen filled a prouder situation. Everybody knew that Miss Boncassen was in England because it suited ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... spite of their tameless days Of outcast liberty, They're sick at heart for the homely ways Where their gathered ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... on earth would you do with Nancy if you didn't marry her off? If she were homely she'd have to fill in chinks in other people's lives, but with her nice little basket of eggs, good looks, money, not too much wit, and a desire to please, she just naturally is put up for sale ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... collected into a single volume in 1879, and on the 7th of October 1886 Barnes died at Winterborne Came. His poetry is essentially English in character; no other writer has given quite so simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour of rural England. His work is full of humour and the clean, manly joy of life; and its rusticity is singularly allied to a literary sense and to high technical finish. He is indeed the Victorian Theocritus; and, as English country life is slowly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... friend I've got here and I'd be lost without her. We've been neighbors for forty-five years and we've never had a quarrel . . . though we came rather near it that time you flew at Mrs. Rachel for calling you homely and redhaired. ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sweet face, as fair and fresh as a damask rose, to be kissed, and submitted to Mrs. Kane's caresses rather from consciousness that she ought to do so, than from any warmth of gratitude in her own heart. So far from being grateful to the homely sun-burned woman who hugged her, she felt a sort of resentment towards her for finding her on the sea-shore and making a cottage child of her. It ought to have been Mrs. Rushton who found her, and perhaps she might ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... that wonder why little lads forget their homely ways, And little maids put their dolls aside and take to acting plays, Ah, let them be kings and queens awhile, for there's nothing sad or mean In their innocent thought, and their crowns were wrought by the touch o' the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... which was not common even in England during the period. "Eating with the knife," a step beyond the use of the fingers, gradually became an established custom, and the practice has survived among the homely folks, despite the many varieties of forks available ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... being—is to blunder. I defy competition. There are champion tight-rope dancers, billiard players, opera singers, swindlers, base-ballists, candidates for the Presidency. I am the champion blunderer. You remember the man who asked of another, "Who is that coarse, homely creature across the room?" and received for answer, "That creature is my wife!" Well, I ought to have been that man, although in that case I did not happen to be. My compliments always turn out to be ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... calibre of those for whom the books were primarily intended must be constantly borne in mind. He attained a splendid fulfilment of his own theories, employing the moujik's expressive vernacular in portraying his homely wisdom, religious faith, and goodness of nature. Sometimes the prevailing simplicity of style and motive is tinged with a vague colouring of oriental legend, but the personal accent is marked throughout. No similar achievement in the beginning Mr. Chertkov ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... leisure and went out to search for a barber. The quest was not difficult, and while he awaited his turn he sat against the wall, mildly amused at the scraps of local gossip that came to his ears couched in homely vernacular. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... bliss of an eternal existence hereafter. To the sceptic, examining the evidence for immortality by the cold light of reason, such peoples and such individuals may seem to sacrifice the substance for the shadow: to adopt a homely comparison, they are like the dog in the fable who dropped the real leg of mutton, from his mouth in order to snap at its reflection in the water. Be that as it may, where such beliefs and hopes are entertained in full force, the whole activity of the mind and the whole energy of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... about you. Some ways you're a powerful homely girl. Your hair's gettin' sunburned around the ends like Karen Jensen's. And your eyes—turn around, won't you, so I kin remember what color your eyes is. I sort of forgot, but they ain't much. Not that I care about it. Women is nothing ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... organ with the quaver in its tongue, Seemed to tremble in its fervor as the sacred songs were sung, As we sang the homely anthems, sang the glad revival hymns Of the glory of the story and the light ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... he laughed. "It is their game we play. They deal and shuffle all the cards... and take the stakes. Think not that you have escaped by fleeing from the mad cities. You with your vine-clad hills, your sunsets and your sunrises, your homely fare and ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... for threshing, grinding, and dressing it; and in numerous instances (though perhaps not quite so much now as it has been, on account of the present agricultural distresses) he would find something else too which he might not consider an improvement: instead of meeting the honest homely farmer, assisting personally in the gathering in his crops, and his daughter following the cart with a rake, he would find the former mounted on his Prad following the hounds, and the latter at boarding ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... has given us a series of reproductions of portraits, of the highest importance in the study of one who is not merely a difficult poet, but a very ambiguous human being. They begin with the eager, attractive, somewhat homely youth of eighteen, grasping the hilt of his sword so tightly that his knuckles start out from the thin covering of flesh; passing into the mature Donne as we know him, the lean, humorous, large-browed, courtly thinker, with his large intent eyes, a cloak folded elegantly about his ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... between his bare feet and the snow, probe around the south edge of melting drifts until he found brilliant little primroses to stick behind his ears. I have been ushered into the little-used, musty best-parlor of a New England farmhouse, and seen fresh vases of homely, old-fashioned flowers—so recently placed for my edification, that drops of water still glistened like dewdrops on the dusty plush mat beneath. I have sat in the seat of honor of a Dyak communal house, looked up at the circle of all too recent heads, and seen a gay flower ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... wouldst thou, thus betray, My easy faith, and lead my heart away. I might some humble shepherd's choice have been, Had I not heard that tongue, those eyes not seen; And in some homely cot, in low repose, Liv'd undisturb'd, with broken vows and oaths; All day by shaded springs my flocks have kept, And in some honest arms, at night have slept. Then, un-upbraided with my wrongs thou'dit been, Safe in the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... pupils; many a wavering line Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled, Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon, To jest at famine.... Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled; Die, if the multiple hazards ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... He could see the little warbler doing his best to entertain the weary moments of one who seldom heard the wild birds, or set her foot in the woods. He could also see the soft draperies about the window, the climbing ivy and growing ferns, and the much-used books and work-table, and from all these homely but precious belongings came uppermost the sweet smile of affection, the placid face which, in spite of age and sorrow and suffering, had always so tender a beauty for him. Quickly he turned back to ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... about her homely tasks with an alacrity that Mrs. Grubbling, knowing nothing of the hope that had been let in upon her dreariness, attributed wholly to the salutary effect of a "good scolding" she had administered the day before. The work she got out of the girl that Thursday forenoon! Never ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... and a thing that she very seldom ever did. She, like everybody else, had her pets and hobbies, such as flowers, trees, plants, dogs, horses, etc., and there was one dog in particular that was her favorite pet. This dog was with Her Majesty always and followed her wherever she went, and a more homely dog I never saw. It had absolutely nothing to recommend it in any way. Her Majesty thought it beautiful, and called ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... not stand here for a certain homely, useful quality of intellect, that guards a person from committing mistakes to the injury of his fortunes or common reputation; but for that master-principle of business, literature, and talent, which gives him strength in any subject ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... to have died in a colic. No less homely image expresses the contractions and contortions of the houses reaching out the appeal of their desperate chimney-pots and agonized girders. There is one view along the exterior of the town like nothing ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... "To use a homely illustration, just rising in my fancy,—shall the good housewife take such pains in pickling and preserving her worthless fruits, her walnuts, her apricots, and quinces—and is there not much spiritual housewifery in treasuring up our mind's best fruits—our ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... called 'the Branciani dress,' and once attired in it, and the rich purges and swelling creases over the shoulders puffed out to her satisfaction, and the run of yellow braid about it properly inspected and flattened, she would not return to her more homely wear, though very soon her mother began to whimper and say that she had lost her so long, and now that she had found her it hardly seemed the same child. Emilia would listen to no entreaties to put away her sumptuous robe. She silenced ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... midst of these simple and homely occupations, the supernatural life of prayer, and ecstacy, and communion with God, was never for a moment interrupted. Strange and beautiful sights were seen by many of those who were present in the church when she communicated: sometimes a column of fire ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... Does it worry you to think of crumps bursting and so on? But, really, it seems quite ordinary and in the day's work here. Men talk of crumps as you would talk of bread and butter. That is, perhaps, why letters from home that talk about homely things—cows and lavender and the new chintz—are ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... the cosy dining-room, and sitting down, he hammered the floor with his crutch. The homely sound of dishes being washed ceased suddenly in the adjoining room, and Mrs. Mathews ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the rails, looking down. Almost every one held flowers which had been brought to them: not costly bouquets, but homely bunches of marigolds or pinks. They carried, too, little German or American flags, which ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the moment he had seen those glaring headlights and realized that he was participating in a reality, he had been frantic, wondering what to do. Well, now he had "gone and done it" and he was terror-stricken at his own act. The mere wasting of so much gasoline was a terrible thing in the homely life of ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... dear," said the homely Mrs Twitter, "we won't be so hard on you here. I want you to assist me with my sewing and darning—of which I have a very great deal—and help to take ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... said—"Before you go I want yon to know a thing or two,—you may as well learn once for all my views on women. They're brief, but they're fixed. And they're straight! Women are nothing—just necessary for the continuation of the race—no more. They may be beautiful or homely—it's all one—they serve the same purpose. I'm under no delusions about them. Without men they are utterly useless,—mere waste on the wind! To idealise them is a stupid mistake. To think that they can do ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... through Russia after the Russian-Japanese War, I met one of the leading diplomats of that country who greeted me with, "Well, how do you like it?" "How do I like what?" I asked. "How do you like helping Japan to lick Russia?" Those were the homely expressions that he used. To which I replied, "We did not help Japan to lick Russia." "But," he said, "you did in effect. Your people and your press sympathized and they expressed the kindly sympathy that counts for so much at such a time." ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... as in any other. In the First Part he displays a great natural gift of lying. His lies are not of the highly imaginative sort that liars in fiction commonly indulge in; like Falstaff's, they resemble the father that begets them; they are simple, homely, plump lies; plain working lies, in short. But in the service of such a master as Don Quixote he develops rapidly, as we see when he comes to palm off the three country wenches as Dulcinea and her ladies in waiting. It is worth noticing how, flushed by his success in this instance, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... "That sounds homely," said the professor to Miss Carmichael and myself, who were standing with him on the gallery outside the car. "It's the sweetest music I've heard for many a day. Certainly Venus was a charming place, but I for one am jolly glad ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Miss Button, his stenographer, needed a little trip. Ten days at Atlantic City with her mother would pull her up. She had been looking badly lately—worried about her mother, Weeks had told him. Pity she was so homely. It was pretty unfair the way women had to work at both ends of the line. Weeks, too, could get his wife that fur coat he'd been wanting her to have for three years. What an honest old duck Weeks was!—and who would ever believe him as full of sentiment as a boy of ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... thinkers they had been taught to emphasize equality, freedom of conscience, and political liberty. These stocks differed somewhat from each other, but they were equally attached to practical religion, homely virtues, and democratic institutions.[7] Being a kind and beneficent class with a tenacity for the habits and customs of their fathers, they proved to be a valuable contribution to the American stock. As they had no riches every ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... lately seen her, the glory of the Chalet, the pride of Madame Latournelle and the Dumays. Modeste was living a double existence. She performed with humble, loving care all the minute duties of the homely life at the Chalet, using them as a rein to guide the poetry of her ideal life, like the Carthusian monks who labor methodically on material things to leave their souls the freer to develop in prayer. All great minds have bound themselves to some form of ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... girl herself he might have entertained during his ride were immediately dissipated as soon as Adelle entered the drawing-room from the class whence she had been summoned. She was a little larger, perhaps, than he remembered her, but essentially the same awkward, homely child, and she was now wearing an ugly harness upon her teeth that further disfigured her. Mr. Ashly Crane was an observant man, and he became at once merely the business man, solely intent upon performing his duty and getting back to Albany in time to catch his train. He presented his roses, ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... when the wearer is old and frail. We must take the merino for granted until she steps out of the astrakhan. She is dressed up to the nines, there is no doubt about it. Yes, but is her face less homely? Above all, has she style? The answer is in a stout affirmative. Ask Kenneth. He knows. Many a time he has had to go behind a door to roar hilariously at the old lady. He has thought of her as a lark to tell his mates about by and by; but for some reason that he cannot fathom, ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... love for her sister had been tinged with envy. No young lad had ever waited in the dusk to hear the sound of her footfall; no half-impudent but half-bashful glances had ever been thrown after her as she went through the village on her business. To be a homely, household thing, useful indeed in this world, and with high hopes for the future,—but still to be a drudge; that had been her destiny. There was never a woman to whom the idea of being loved was not the sweetest thought that her mind could produce. Fate ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... for their beauty depends closely upon the expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this dependence. A hand-wrought silver spoon, of a commercial value of some ten to twenty dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable—in the first sense of the word—than a machine-made spoon ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... de sole a la Delmonico," and as nothing to the contrary was said until dinner was over, he ate them under the impression that they were veritable filets de sole. Of course I can't pretend to say whether M. Delmonico imports his soles, or uses the homely flounder; but I do know that one of his frequenters ...
— Culture and Cooking - Art in the Kitchen • Catherine Owen
... she toiled at her self-appointed labour of love. She swept and dusted, she scrubbed and cleaned, with capable fingers, proud of the strength and skill that made her a good housewife; then bringing in the fragrant, homely fabrics, made up the beds and placed all back ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... ingratiated himself with the Fieldens, played with the children, made himself at home, and in the evenings when Mainwaring, as often as he could find the excuse, absented himself from the family circle, he contrived to draw Lucretia into more social intercourse with her homely companions than she had before condescended to admit. Good Mr. Fielden rejoiced; here was the very person,—the old friend of Sir Miles, the preceptor of Lucretia herself, evidently most attached to her, having influence over ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... utterances of one suffering from delirium tremens. Whether in its wrath, disdain, or its dismay, the countenance was infernal. I called once upon a time on a most respectable yeoman, and I was, in language earnest and homely, pressed to accept the hospitality of the house. I consented. The word to me was, 'Nah, Maister, yah mun stop an hev sum te-ah, yah mun, eah, yah mun.' A bountiful table was soon spread; at all events, time soon went while I scaled the ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... unwilling to part with his friend, used many arguments to prevail upon Valentine not to leave him: but Valentine said, "Cease to persuade me, my loving Proteus. I will not, like a sluggard, wear out my youth in idleness at home. Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits. If your affection were not chained to the sweet glances of your honoured Julia, I would entreat you to accompany me, to see the wonders of the world abroad; but since you are a lover, love on still, and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... misdemesnors of these bailiffs, they are therefore usually bound in a bond for the due execution of their office, and thence are called bound-bailiffs; which the common people have corrupted into a much more homely appellation. ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... judge you are ready for late supper or early breakfast, whichever you may prefer to call it. The provisions are homely, and I am an indifferent cook, but I can at least give you enough to eat. Those brigands of yours have stored sufficient food ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... Dutch wagons, guarded by the homely soldiery, jolted slowly over the stumps and roots of the newly made road, and the regiments followed at their leisure. The hardships of the way were not without their consolations. The jovial Irishman who held the chief command made himself ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... crusade against drink. No kudos to be gained; no acclaim of the multitude to ring in the pleased ear; no cheering clash of party conflict. GRANDOLPH gives a deprecating twirl to his modest moustache, and takes up his homely parable. Possibly he does this with the larger content, since he had his go at the Land Purchase Bill before Debate on Second Reading opened. His letters, published on eve of Easter recess, hurtled ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... a greyish-red colour, and have no particular style. The brickwork of the place is in fact very poor—inferior to that of the North Italian towns and quite wanting in the wealth of tone which this homely material takes on in general in the climates of dampness and greenness." And then my note-book goes on to narrate a little visit to the Capitol, which was soon made, as the building was in course of repair and ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... revealed in these touching words: "How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings." The imagery is homely, but oh! so impressively sublime. I can not do better than to use here the words of another. "Was ever imagery so homely invested with such grace and such sublimity as this at our Lord's touch? And yet ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... Gael. It's awful hard to say you had ought to be somethin' a person can't manage for themselves. I mean—" poor Joan, the inarticulate, floundered, but he left her, rather cruelly, to flounder out. "I mean, that's an awful hard sayin' fer a homely woman, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... of shrubbery, and a brook; to another house abutting a railroad, with infinite interests and astonishing playmates; and finally back to the quiet street on which I was born,—down a long lane and in a homely, cozy cottage, with a living-room, a tiny sitting-room, a pantry, and two attic bedrooms. Here mother and I lived until she died, in 1884, for father early began his restless wanderings. I last remember urgent letters for us to come to New Milford, where ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Darning has a homely sound, but it is useful for more than mending. In embroidery you no longer use it to replace threads worn away, but build up upon the scaffolding of a merely serviceable material what may be a ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... the quaint and dear absurdities which make up personality are embalmed in the leisurely, peaceable talk of the village, still enriched by all that they brought to it. We are not afraid of the event which men call death, because we know that, in so far as we have deserved it, the same homely immortality awaits us. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... while the elders sit, with their mugs of beer and long pipes, watching and gossiping, are very like what took place in the times of the old painters who were so fond of producing pictures of the kermesses. The dress of the people, of course, is different, but the spirit of the scene, with its homely festivities, is wonderfully ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... ever stole such a name as that," said Foley. "And for all he's homely enough to stop traffic, his face sorta lives up to his name. ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... again, Our homely cottage view, And hear us sing a cheerful strain, To thee, and ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... ready to marry him, he was still waiting. He wrote of his handsome farm he had cleared with his own hands, and the beautiful wild country he lived in, telling her he hoped her future life would be free from all care. All this, and even more, dear reader, he told her—in plain, homely words, it is true; but love's language is always sweet, be it in courtly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... opposite of such as yield a fine imagination, which is always based on a keen vision, a keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of definite knowledge as material for the construction of its inward visions. Witness Dante, who is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations. On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole and rapid development in descriptions of persons and ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... especially. She was a small person; I couldn't decide whether she was a child or a woman. I kept thinking her homely, and then when she spoke I forgot everything but the music of her voice,—it was so restful, so rich and mellow in tone, and she seemed so small for such a splendid voice. Somehow I kept expecting her to squeak like a mouse, but every word she spoke charmed me. Before the meal ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... as you liked my former illustration, I will explain myself by another one more homely. In a room to which you are accustomed there is a piece of furniture, or an ornament, which so exactly suits the place that you say: 'The prettiest thing I ever saw!' You go away—you return—the piece ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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