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More "Incongruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... could mentally congratulate his successor on having an hour still to sit in Miss Fancourt's drawing-room. He himself might use that hour for another visit, but by the time he reached the Marble Arch the idea of such a course had become incongruous to him. He passed beneath that architectural effort and walked into the Park till he got upon the spreading grass. Here he continued to walk; he took his way across the elastic turf and came out by the Serpentine. He watched with a friendly eye the diversions ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and as the soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified distinctness—or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all these incongruous features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter along the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows across the valley—the feeling grows upon you that this is a piece of nature in the most intimate sense; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... anything," "hateful," "horrible," may constantly be heard in conversation upon trivial and unimportant subjects in companies of young people whose educational opportunities and social advantages would lead us to expect a very different style of conversation. So of incongruous and inappropriate expressions. "My grandfather and grandmother died on the same day of the year? wasn't it funny?" said a young miss to a companion She meant that it was a strange circumstance or coincidence. It was the wise remark of a great ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... "Well, I think the perfection of sacred music is Gregorian set to harmonies; there you have the glorious old chants, and just a little modern richness." Campbell: "And I think it just the worst of all, it is a mixture of two things, each good in itself, and incongruous together. It's a mixture of the first and second courses at table. It's like the architecture of the facade at Milan, half-Gothic, half-Grecian." Reding: "It's what is always used, I believe." Campbell: "Oh, yes, we must not go against the age, it would be absurd ...
— Cardinal Newman as a Musician • Edward Bellasis
... ere she stood in Isabella's presence, Marie knew not. The most incongruous thoughts floated, one after another, through her bewildered brain—most vivid amongst them all, hers and her husband's fatal secret: had it transpired? Was he sentenced, and she thus summoned to share ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... incongruous to hear the English of a girl's finishing school from the mantilla'd young woman who beamed mischievously at him. She had the delighted air of one aiding a romance. It was doubly incongruous because of the dark and shadowy Cathedral in which they were, and the raucous noises of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... on the occasion of his second visit to Cherry Orchard haunted Anstice for days. There was something so incongruous in the notion of this woman having served a sentence of imprisonment for an offence which, of all others, might well be supposed the most impossible for any decent person to commit; yet Anstice knew instinctively ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... guides and saves you. You can feel in a moment the presence or influence of a base, sensual, and unworthy nature. An electric-like thrill animates you, and you are naturally repulsed from him. When your suitor is a man of incongruous temper, ungenial habits, and of a morose and unsympathetic disposition, this same precious, divine instinct acts, and the man feels, though he cannot tell why, that all his arts and aspirations are in vain. It will seldom be necessary for you to tell him verbally of his failure; but should such ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love. As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something incongruous in this spectacle. She observed the seamed and hardened features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening, beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married, and she thought of his score or ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... amends for much. The incongruous elements were not so apparent. Everybody was hungry, and even the most fastidious had to acknowledge the fare of the best. Captain Bertram quite retrieved his character in Beatrice Meadowsweet's eyes, ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... of trade became clogged and blocked by its constant increase. Auction houses became the means of brokerage; and their number increased to such an extent that half a dozen red flags at last dotted every block on Main street. And incongruous, indeed, were the mixtures exposed at these sales, as well as in the windows of the smallest shops in Richmond. In the latter, bonnets rested on the sturdy legs of cavalry boots; rolls of ribbon were festooned along the crossed barrel of a rifle and the dingy cotton umbrella; while ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... carols, and from excellent carols: but I protest that with 'choirs and places where they sing' they will be found incongruous. Indeed, Mr. Bramley admits it. Of his collection "some," he says, "from their legendary, festive or otherwise less serious character, are unfit for use within ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... prepared, where the meaning seems plain and obvious, to believe that the writer meant what he said, and to reject any interpretation which implies that when he came to speak of himself he said what he did not mean, or filled the picture with descriptions, situations or emotions, incongruous or inappropriate. And if in so reading they seem clear and connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted. We should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... a woodbine, trimmed, however, so as to leave the openings clear. A few rickety steps, at the sides and between the cracks of which sprouted tall blades of grass, led down to the path which terminated in the gate. This path was distinguished by an incongruous pavement of white limestone slabs, which were always kept carefully clean. The gate was a rattle-boned affair, hanging feebly between two grandfatherly old posts, which hypocritically tried to maintain an air of solidity, though perfectly aware that they were wellnigh rotted away ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... is nothing incongruous in Nature, as everything is admirably adapted for its purpose, as unity of design is perceptible in all things, as every effect proceeds from a cause, and becomes a cause in its turn of succeeding effects, so God has willed that ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... about half a mile our side of Ypres. Its grounds are ploughed up by shells and bombs, but most of the fountains and wretched garden statuary remains with the fishponds which perhaps gave the villa its army name, and rustic bridges most egregiously incongruous with ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... are repetitions of the Persian leaf or tree of life, and the border consists of kneeling hares or fawns between a Persian arabesque and a corded line. The mixture of Egyptian and Assyrian styles is remarkable throughout, till we come to the centre of the rosace, where we find a most incongruous man in armour on horseback with a hawk on his wrist, giving the Norman stamp of the reigning house and influence in Sicily. The central subject is exactly repeated on an embroidered twelfth century chasuble in the treasury of the Cathedral of Bamberg, only that a royal crown and robes ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... themselves of these circumstances in order to deceive and induce mankind to believe that the Godless revolution was in sympathy with Pius IX. and the Church. The venerable Pontiff was still able to take to task the indiscreet writers who, from mistaken zeal, maintained that such an incongruous coalition had ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... shook, clinging to him, only his arm keeping her from falling. A man had thrown his coat about her, and Garland pulled it over her, then, looking down, saw her feet, bare and scratched in pointed, high-heeled slippers. The sight of them, incongruous reminders of the intimate aspects of life, brought him down to the moment and her place ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom Castleton and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after the manner of youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one another's shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the quartette were gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals and the intellectual capacity of the absent fourth were discussed with admirable lack of reticence. So it came to pass that ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... and read the story of Christ's birth in Matthew and Luke, Mark and John having never heard of it or forgotten it. What an incongruous jumble of absurdities! A poor fairy tale of the world's childhood, utterly insignificant beside the stupendous revelations of science. From the fanciful story of the Magi following a star to Shelley's "World on worlds are rolling ever," what an advance! As I retired ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... the old vaulted chambers of the Dominican monastery at Perth echoed with sounds that would seem incongruous in such a home of austerity, but that the disturbed state of Scotland rendered it the habit of her kings to attach their palaces to convents, that they themselves might benefit by the "peace of the Church," which was in general accorded ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... certain, and in that he was very probably correct. To be sure, there was the character of the country girl, Mary, which he had taken from his own little waiting-maid: but that was a very subordinate element, and although, on the whole, he rather regretted having introduced anything so incongruous and unimaginative, he decided to let it go. The romance, as a whole, was too great to be injured by one little country girl, drawn from real life. "And by the way," murmured the author to himself, "I wish Mary would bring ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... bore his name. It was visible for several miles before he even entered the park, so proud and prominent was its position, on the richly- wooded steep of a considerable eminence. It was a castellated building, immense and magnificent, in a faulty and incongruous style of architecture, indeed, but compensating in some degree for these deficiencies of external taste and beauty by the splendour and accommodation of its exterior, and which a Gothic castle, raised according to the strict rules of art, could scarcely ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... restoring the old system entirely, and he dwelt much on its being the title which Caesar had borne. He often said, "One may be the Emperor of a republic, but not the King of a republic, those two terms are incongruous." ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the coast had long combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it, throwing into extraordinary discord all architectural attempts at newness there. To restore the grey carcases of a mediaevalism whose spirit had fled, seemed a not less incongruous act than to set about renovating the adjoining ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Establishment is representative of all the citizens of the United States."[3-13] The majority invoked past experience, efficiency, and patriotism to support the status quo, but its chorus of reasons for excluding Negroes sounded incongruous amid the patriotic din and call to ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... looked curiously out of place in this unwholesome, gaslit building with its atmosphere of cheese and bacon. He would have been noticeably good-looking upon the cricket field or in any gathering of people belonging to the other side of life. Here he seemed almost a curiously incongruous figure. He passed through the glass-paned door and stood respectfully before his employer. Mr. Weatherley—it was absurd, but he scarcely knew how to make his suggestion—fidgetted for a moment and coughed. The ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... there was a silence. Ten minutes later the priest and nurse came out, throwing wide the door on the remains of Henry Clairville, just passed from this world to the next. At the same instant, a strange incongruous sound came from the room, and Pauline, wide-eyed and panting, stopped sobbing, and stood up with her hands pressed over her heart. It was the penetrating chant of three lusty kittens, new-born, blind and helpless, yet quick to scent ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... want of it lies much deeper than word of mouth. The man without a sense of humor is sure to make a certain number of solemn blunders. They may be in matters of importance or in the merest trifles, but they are blunders none the less, and come from insensibility to the incongruous, the ludicrous, or the impossible. It may be said that common sense suffices to avoid these pitfalls, but this is really begging the question, inasmuch as common sense of a high order amounting almost ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Church at Setubal, built by Justa Rodrigues, Dom Manoel's nurse, has fifteen paintings in incongruous gilt frames and hung high up on the north wall of the church, which also have something of ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... of our liturgy has descended to us as a precious legacy from the time when Peter and Paul preached in Rome. It would be incongruous that our ancient hierarchy robed in ancient vestments should perform our ancient liturgy in a moderne language. As in all parts of the globe there are members of the Catholic church, she has wisely preserved in her ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... during the Epiphany Tide and the long period of the Trinity Season. Black is made use of at funerals and on Good Friday. This use of the colors applies to the stole as well as to the Altar hangings. The black stole is always out of place, incongruous, except at funerals and on Good Friday. Where they are used, the cope, chasuble, maniple, dalmatic and tunic also vary with the Season in the same manner. The use of the Church colors, besides "decking the place of His Sanctuary" is also most helpful ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... Oil.—This sounds somewhat incongruous, as mineral oil is entirely unsaponifiable. Most of the suggestions for this purpose consist of the incorporation of mineral oil, or mineral oil emulsified by aid of Quillaia bark, with a cocoa-nut oil ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... carried, in our old-fashioned neighbourhood, to a point at which what began in reverence ended in what was barely decent, and what was meant to be most melancholy became absolutely comical. But a sense of the congruous and the incongruous was not cultivated amongst us, whereas solid value (in size, quantity and expense) was perhaps over-estimated. So our furniture, our festivities, ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... induced some to adopt, or at least to regard with favor, the theory of Materialism, is—the difficulty of conceiving of the union of two substances so incongruous as Mind and Matter are supposed to be,—and still more the difficulty of explaining how they could have any mutual action on each other. Dr. Priestley largely insists on this, as well as on the former ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favour? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on the side-walk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the- ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a few school-books that jauntily swung from a strap in her gloved hand, she bore no resemblance to a pupil; in her pretty gown of dotted muslin with bows of blue ribbon on the skirt and corsage, and a cluster of roses in her belt, she was as inconsistent and incongruous to the others as a fashion-plate would have been in the dry and dog-eared pages before them. Yet she carried it off with a demure mingling of the naivete of youth and the aplomb of a woman, and as she swept down the narrow ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... THACKERAY himself, a score of great and (to the kindly chronicler) gracious personalities live again in her pages. I should add that the volume is rounded off by a short story, a late addition to the Miss Williamson series, which might be called a pot-boiler, were it not somehow incongruous to associate so gentle a flame with any such activities. Slight as it is, From Friend to Friend forms an apt and graceful finish to the work of one whose life was given ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... or another, had long fermented in Wagner's brain. At first it was—incongruous though the thing may seem—either Jesus of Nazareth or Wieland the Smith; then Parzival grew out of the Siegfried idea; and at length, stimulated by the attentions and help of poor Ludwig, he settled on Parsifal. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... she could hardly keep from smiling at the idea, so wildly incongruous with the scene she had really undergone, of looking out for admirers ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... figured also in the Greek mysteries, and are elaborated with much detail in Plato's great Phaedo Myth—in all these cases with increasing fullness of mystical meaning. In the popular mind they were incrusted with layers of incongruous notions and crude superstitions. But, as Plato, for one, so clearly saw, there is always at their core a group of intuitions which have their bearing on the deepest problems of human life, and are capable of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... prettier in her uniform Captain Middleton would have been the first to allow; but he hated it nevertheless. There seemed to him something incongruous and wrong for a girl with a smile like ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... can say, hell. Yet all these ideas have a foundation in fact, and only a foundation. The superstructure has been reared by exaggerating, diminishing, combining, separating, deforming, beautifying, improving or multiplying realities, so that the edifice or fabric is but the incongruous grouping of what man has perceived through the medium of the senses. It is as though we should give to a lion the wings of an eagle, the hoofs of a bison, the tail of a horse, the pouch of a kangaroo, and the trunk of an elephant. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... laughed out idiotically. Handcuffs! They seemed the most incongruous things in the world for the Adventurer to have, and—She felt mechanically in his pocket, and handed ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... garments stopped short of his knees; the whole attire belonging to a smaller man than the unfortunate statesman. His delicate white hands, much exposed by the shortness of the sleeves, looked very unlike those of a day-labourer, and altogether the new mason presented a somewhat incongruous and wobegone aspect. Grotius was fearful too lest some of the preachers and professors frequenting the book-shop next door would recognize him through his disguise. Madame Daatselaer smeared his face and hands with chalk and plaster however and whispered encouragement, and so with a felt ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... him before why the children's clothes, Daddy's and Mummy's as well for that matter, were such an incongruous assortment of village or peasant wear, and smart, well-cut garments that bore ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Mother Guendolen? Some faint, vague, misty memories seemed to awake within me—an odd, incongruous mixture like a dream—dark eyes like Margaret's, which told a tale, but this seemed a tale of terror; and an enamelled cross, which had somewhat to do with ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... nach Luft, wie ein Spatz unter der Luftpumpe.—In vielen der hiesigen Strassen riecht es am Ende auch lenzhaft, naemlich pestilenzhaft, und die guten Stuttgarter merken das gar nicht; 'suess duftet die Heimat.'"[87] In his fondness for bringing together the incongruous, for introducing the element of surprise, and in the fact that his humor is almost always of the impatient, disgruntled, cynical type, Lenau reminds us not a little of Heine in his "Reisebilder" and some other prose works. Hoelderlin, ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... did her step falter as she quitted the library, and returned to her own room, when, carefully closing the door, she sunk on the nearest seat, and covering her eyes with her hands, as if to shut out all outward objects, gave unchecked dominion to the incongruous thoughts occasioned by Percy's tale. She could not define or banish them; a sudden oppression appeared cast upon her brain, deadening its powers, and preventing all relief from tears. The ruin, the wretchedness from which she had been mercifully preserved stood ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... holding a candle that softened the austerity of her plain black dress. There in the half light there was a slender grace about her that made her seem vaguely unreal. In that disordered room she seemed as incongruous as some portrait from a house across the water, as coldly unresponsive to her surroundings. I imagined her on the last canvas of the gallery, bearing all the traits of the family line—the same quiet assurance, ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... fail to remark Judy's wedding present. A bride in white from top to toe—a lovely bride in the tenderest bloom of youth, to carry a bouquet of strong dark green and crimson—had anything so incongruous ever been seen before? But Hilda held the flowers tightly, and Judy's hungry heart ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... inadequately described the repellent sensuousness of this veritable potentate, who could contrive to invest a sitting room in a modern hotel with the atmosphere of a secret Eastern household. To consider Ormuz Khan in connection with matters of international finance was wildly incongruous, while the manicurist incident indicated an inherent cruelty only possible ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... There were a good many times and things in which she scarcely expected much companionship from Frank. She would not have said even to herself, that Frank was rusty; and she would do her faithful and good-natured best to rub her up; but there was an instinct with her of the congruous and the incongruous; and she would not do her Bath-brick polishing out ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm whale to add to his own memories. Very literally the story begins as an autobiography; even the elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But even before the Pequod leaves sane Nantucket an undercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. This brooding ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... truth, nothing often results from these singular unions, especially when they are very incongruous, as the individuals which result from them are usually sterile; but also, when the disparities are less great, it is known that the drawbacks (defauts) with which it has to do no longer exist. However, this means ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... on the bridge staring after him, and as he went towards the Grafton Street gate, there was something slightly incongruous about his look. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... dresses of the women. The sidewalks quivered with life—soberly dressed coolies, making green background for the gauds of their women, bespangled babies late out of bed that they might gain good luck and blessing from those rites, priests in white robes, dignitaries in long tunics, incongruous Caucasian tourists and spectators. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... find Lady Ingleby in the mood of a typical April day, sunshine and showers rapidly alternating; whimsical smiles, succeeded by ready tears; then, with lashes still wet, gay laughter at some mistake of her own, or at incongruous behaviour on the part of her devoted but erratic household; speedily followed by pathetic anxiety over her own supposed short-comings in view of Lord ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... Washington wrote President Roosevelt another letter which throws light upon the relations between the two men as well as upon the incongruous phases of racial prejudice: ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can imagine Pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction to have been able to express. Thenceforward, until the episodical lines on the Martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. There comes the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... I broke off. "Such an appellation is anachronistic, incongruous, and infinitely absurd. I can't use it. I must take the liberty of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... first sight appear somewhat incongruous that a king and court thus given up, the former to flagrant immorality, the latter to the unbridled pursuit of riches and honors, should early have exhibited a disposition to carry forward in an aggravated form the system of persecution ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... becomes part of our knowledge but as it has been shaped and coloured by its magic reflexion. Nay, more, it is not only our mirror but our archetype for every thing. So we spiritualise the material universe, and afterwards, by an incongruous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... a promise not to inform her brother of Peak's singular position, Marcella spoke with sincerity. She was prompted by incongruous feelings—a desire to compel Godwin's gratitude, and disdain of the circumstances in which she had discovered him. There seemed to be little likelihood of Christian's learning from any other person that she had met with Peak at Budleigh Salterton; he had, indeed, dined with her ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... contest in which we are engaged must be recast. Our demands on our national leaders—not those now in power who only mislead—must be greatly enlarged. Truth, however bitter, must take the place of fancy. Ideas and institutions incongruous with the new social and political conditions must be displaced. The nation's aims and policy should be stated boldly and clearly, and adequate machinery set up to achieve them. In a word, system will have to be substituted for confusion, ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... answer, Gallant," he said, "because your silence is enough. Regardless of how incongruous it seems in view of the great wrong I have done her, I love her, too. And, because I love her I can tell that you do. I can see it by the way you speak to her, the way you look at her and unless I am greatly mistaken she knows it as well ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... men lay close among the shore-side bushes, expecting their arrival; when a silly lad, in mere lightness of heart, fired a shot in the air. My native friend, Mrs. Mary Hamilton, ran out of her house and gave the culprit a good shaking: an episode in the midst of battle as incongruous as the grazing cow. But his sillier comrades followed his example; a harmless volley warned the boats what they might expect; and they drew back and passed outside the reef for the passage of the Fuisa. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... justifies his sport. It is a sign of intellectual barrenness in the writers; for what is easier than parody? what means of raising a laugh so certain and so cheap as to roll a statue from its pedestal and stick some vulgar utensil in its place? Laughter always follows the incongruous; and to make a Grecian Deity call for a pot of half-and-half, or to ask a Fairy Princess if her mother has parted with her mangle, is to secure the laugh, though contempt may follow it. To our minds there is something ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... dreams. In the heart of Venice could I have erected a better? You behold around you, it is true, a medley of architectural embellishments. The chastity of Ionia is offended by antediluvian devices, and the sphynxes of Egypt are outstretched upon carpets of gold. Yet the effect is incongruous to the timid alone. Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent. Once I was myself a decorist; but that sublimation ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... pouring into our country, our political traditions and racial characteristics still continue English—Mr. Douglas Campbell would say Dutch, but even so the stock is the same. Though thus somewhat gorged with food not wholly to its taste, our political digestion has contrived so far to master the incongruous mass of materials it has been unable to reject; and if assimilation has been at times imperfect, our political constitution and spirit remain English in essential features. Imbued with like ideals of liberty, of law, of right, certainly not less progressive than our kin ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... tribes in the Russian territory," the Queen Charlotte Islanders, Koloshes, Ugalentzes, Atnas, Kolchans, Ken['a][:i]es, Tun Ghaase, Haidahs, and Chimmesyans. His Nootka-Columbian family is scarcely less incongruous, and it is evident that the classification indicated is only to a comparatively slight ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... servant; but, although the bell cord dangled within easy reach, he made no movement toward it; it had occurred to his mind that the act might subject him to the suspicion of fear, which he certainly did not feel. He was more keenly conscious of the incongruous nature of the situation than affected by its perils; it was revolting, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... "counter-plotting and secret wishing one another's dissolution"; "a habit of wrath and perturbation"; "heavenly with hellish, fitness with unfitness," &c. "God commands not impossibilities," he bursts out, "and all the ecclesiastical glue that Liturgy or Laymen can compound is not able to sodder up two such incongruous natures into the one flesh of a true beseeming marriage." Or take this remarkable passage, repeating an opinion we have already had from him, "No wise man but would sooner pardon the act of adultery once and again committed by a person worth pity and forgiveness than to lead a wearisome ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... cannot guess, Fail to track their deep distress— Dull look on when death is nigh, Note no change, and let them die. Poor Matthias! couldst thou speak, What a tale of thy last week! Every morning did we pay Stupid salutations gay, Suited well to health, but how Mocking, how incongruous now! Cake we offer'd, sugar, seed, Never doubtful of thy need; Praised, perhaps, thy courteous eye, Praised thy golden livery. Gravely thou the while, poor dear! Sat'st upon thy perch to hear, Fixing with a mute regard Us, thy human ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... of it, the sore punishments appointed to it), we may consider, that to common sense vain swearing is a very unreasonable and ill-favoured practice, greatly misbecoming any sober, worthy, or honest person; but especially most absurd and incongruous to ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... and incongruous love ballad of old lands, and old days, for the absurd reason that the youth of the world in his own land beat in his blood, and because in the night time one of the twinkling stars of heaven had dropped down the sky and become a girl ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... guest with the kindness of his nature, and an inward smile at the incongruous assemblage he was likely to have around him by the arrival of the Jarvis's, who, at that moment, drove to his door. The introductions between the baronet and the new comers had passed, and Miss Jarvis ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the rail, and the yachtsmen stared at her as if she were Aphrodite risen from the sea instead of a mighty pretty girl emerging from a dark companion-way. She had appeared so suddenly! She was so manifestly incongruous in ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... maintained that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. But he is the advocate of a philosophical method which makes the belief in the existence of an immaterial principle superfluous and incongruous; he not only acknowledges no such distinction between the phenomena of mind and those of matter as to require the hypothesis of a free intelligence to account for it; he not only regards the ascertained ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... as incongruous a figure as was the American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur "statesmen" ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... at Overstow was certainly a strange and incongruous one, consisting as it did of persons who seemed all in league with each other, the master-criminal whose shrewd, steel-grey eyes were so uncanny, and his accomplices and underlings who all profited and grew fat upon the ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... countless images fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion in a ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of his mind, and the power he possessed of throwing himself with the utmost keenness into many absolutely dissimilar and incongruous enterprises at the same time, add further to the difficulty of understanding him. An extraordinary number of subjects had their place in his capacious brain, and the ease with which he dismissed one and took up another with equal zest the moment after, causes his doings to seem unnatural to ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... chiefly remarkable for their intricate plots, and for the hope of better things that breathed through the cheap sensation of the best of them. But it was a hope that had been deferred a good many years. His manner was better than his matter; indeed, an incongruous polish was said by the literary to prevent Langholm from being a first favorite either with the great public or the little critics. As a maker of plots, however, he still had humble points; and Rachel assured him that she had burnt ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the tibia. His nephew (oh! whip me such philosophical coxcombs!) was reading Thucydides' description of the plague, and nodding his conceited little head in time to the music, while his lips were repeating all the loathsome details of that terrible delineation. The puppy saw nothing incongruous in learning at the same time a ditty of love and a description of ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Fielding should have been born among buildings raised by Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it was surely a happy stroke ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... too polite for good manners. It was incongruous with the eccentric spectacle of the duellists which ought to have startled a sane and free man. It was also incongruous with the full and healthy, though rather loose physique of the man who spoke. At the first ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... I should lay my garden out into four squares, the combination of squares, central circles and straight main paths would look incongruous. So I shall cut the central points of the four square beds off by swinging circles. Have patience and you will see, for the general plan is in my mind just as it ought to be in the mind of any person who is to make a garden. Now swing another circle ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... and he cannot understand why he needs winter clothing, why he is always seeking the sun, why he wants a fire at night. It is a fraud, he says, all this visible display of summer, and of an almost tropical summer at that; it is really a cold country. It is incongruous that he should be looking at a date-palm in his overcoat, and he is puzzled that a thermometrical heat that should enervate him elsewhere, stimulates him here. The green, brilliant, vigorous vegetation, the perpetual sunshine, deceive him; he is careless ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... being so benumbed with cold that he found it impossible to unbutton the straps which confined his month. In this emergency he could only utter the strange and unintelligible moan which had reached our ears, and which, mingled with the bursts of laughter from Julia D'Egville, formed a most incongruous melange. ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... facts and get the personal side of the matter—and feel it. Then he must tell the story just as he sees and feels it. Absolute truthfulness in the telling is as necessary as keen perception in the seeing. Humor must be sought through the simple, truthful presentation of an incongruous or humorous idea or situation; pathos must be sought by the truthful presentation of a pathetic picture. Just as soon as the reporter tries to be funny or to be pathetic he fails, for the reader is not looking to the reporter for fun or pathos—but ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were carefully brushed, and his fat face, which wore an incongruous expression of anxiety and dejection, shone with washing. David studied him a moment in silence, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... must have straight vision, and a Grecian nose. Hers is a face that will look very arch and piquante, when she acquires more sense, and lays aside her lack-a-daisical airs; but, at present, the expression and the features are very incongruous. It is excessively mortifying! but it cannot be helped; many times a day does she cast her eyes on the glass, but the obstinate pug remains a pug, and Alice is forced to conclude that she is not intended for a heroine. Yet she always holds herself ready for ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... could not remember that there was a boat about the place. I had not seen one. As I thought all this in a wild, excitable way, I snatched up some of my clothes, slipped them on partly as I ran; and even then, incongruous as it may sound, I could not help thinking how the wet hindered me. Then running on, I came upon Gunson, with his face cut and bleeding, struggling back from among ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... sculptor did his best; but he was careful to do nothing which was out of harmony with its surroundings. He sank himself in his work. And even when he was engaged on a more serious substantive work, what he most avoided was the incongruous and unbecoming. He so worked that the attention of the spectator was concentrated not on the character of the workmanship, but on the person or the subject portrayed. The idea which he tried to incorporate in marble or bronze was not his own thought about the subject, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of the Alexander story thus well illustrates one way of the mediaeval mind with such things—the way of combining at will incongruous stories, of accepting with no, or with little, criticism any tale of wonder that it happened to find in books, of using its own language, applying its own manners, supposing its own clothing, weapons, and so forth to have prevailed at any period of history. And further, it shows how the geste theory—the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... remains however—admiration of a familiar and even slightly patronizing kind. The Maison Carree does not overwhelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great sensations of antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvelously preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming compactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the century that built it than the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... superb carriages in the avenues and parks, and teams of handsome cream-colored oxen in the suburbs: but we saw also in the highways, small, rough-coated donkeys overburdened with panniers of fruit; tall, bony horses mismatched with diminutive donkeys; incongruous teams composed of a cow and a donkey, or a large ox and a small cow; and a team even more grotesquely made up of a horse, a cow, and a donkey. We saw the elite of the city elegantly dressed in the latest fashion promenading in the shopping districts; but on the sidewalks of the tenement ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... theory it is the form proportionate to full manhood; planting and fostering institutions tending to promote the free play of all that is great and glorious in human character. It does not thus far practically realize its theory, because, without regard to this incongruous system of inhumanity, which, by its very nature, can find no harmony nor peace in connection, nations themselves wear the human form, and must, therefore, realize the various states of infancy, youthfulness, and manhood—of germ, growth, and fruitage. This is true of whatever national ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the next verse. This desirable end can only be reached through a preliminary painful ordeal, 'but I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.' If I might use such an incongruous figure, the fire that is to flash and flame through the world emerges from the dark waters of that baptism. Our Lord goes on still further to dwell upon the consequence of His mission and of His sufferings. And that, too, shadows the first triumphant ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... institutions, myself (flint-maniac)—to say nothing of men like Dufresnoy—we all contrive to fit, after a fashion, into the place; we have a raison d'etre. But this composite, unadaptive city-dweller: how incongruous a figure against that background of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... this form, or rather this degree, of aestheticism, which so often prevents our realising the higher aesthetic harmonies. In obedience to a perception of what is congruous on a small scale we often do oddly incongruous things: spend money we ought to save, give time and thought to trifles while neglecting to come to conclusions about matters of importance; endure, or even cultivate, persons with whom we have less than no sympathy; nay, sometimes, from a keen sense of incongruity, tune ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... National Gallery, and that most wonderful one of our Saviour and the Disciples at Emmaus in the Louvre: there they sit at supper as they might have sat. Rubens and the Venetian Painters did neither one thing nor the other: their Holy figures are neither ideal nor real: and it is incongruous to see one of Rubens' brawny boors dressed up in the ideal red and blue drapery with which the early Italians clothed their figures of Christ. But enough of all this. I have seen Trench's Sabbation, and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... so great, and in its collective effect so pacifically magnificent, that to make war upon it seemed incongruous beyond measure, like laying siege to the National Gallery or attacking respectable people in an hotel dining-room with battle-axe and mail. It was in its entirety so large, so complex, so delicately immense, that to bring it to the issue of warfare was like driving a crowbar into the mechanism ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... men—i. e., as they ride three in a rank, the outer legs of those personages who formed the outside, as it may be called, of the procession, were {p.151} each clothed in a boot. This and several other incongruous appearances were thrown in the teeth of those cavaliers by the Kelso populace, and, by the assistance of whiskey, parties were soon inflamed to a very tight battle, one of that kind which, for distinction sake, is called royal. It was not without great difficulty that we extricated ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... grouch," Pepper Sneed, seemed always to find some new objection to raise, or some dire calamity to predict. And as for Mr. Bunn, he made many protests at roles he considered incongruous ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... of realism is wanting; it needs a population out of one of Watteau's pictures,—clean and deft as the painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to—sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. And the stiff parterres, terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a scene. If, indeed, as at Versailles, they bounded and engrossed the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... that night with one of the men who had destroyed the mystery of Mongolia. In 1916, Coltman and his former partner, Oscar Mamen, had driven across the plains to Urga, the historic capital of Mongolia. But most unromantic and incongruous, most disheartening to a dreamer of Oriental dreams, was what I learned a few days later when the awakening had really come—that among the first cars ever to cross the desert was one purchased by the Hutukhtu, the Living Buddha, the God of all ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... oath the things come to her cognisance in this process, and has avowed naught save praises of the said foreigner, because since her coming her man had treated her better in consequence of the neighbourhood of this good lady, who filled the air with love, as the sun did light, and other incongruous nonsense, which we have not committed ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... probably once been part of the Bog itself, there stood—there stands still—a short, square tower, battlemented at top, and surmounted with a pointed roof, which seems to grow out of a cluster of farm-buildings, so surrounded is its base by roofs of thatch and slates. Incongruous, vulgar, and ugly in every way, the old keep appears to look down on them—time-worn and battered as it is—as might a reduced gentleman regard the unworthy associates with which an altered fortune had linked him. This is all that ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... fifty years ago, the Norman details were still very distinct, though the round arches of the arcades had been parodied by the Georgian windows of the east end, and by the plastered romanesque reredos; but gloom and darkness overspread the whole place, encroachments of the most incongruous kinds had invaded the most sacred portions, and to the casual observer it seemed impossible that the church could ever be rescued from the ruin with which it was threatened, or reclaimed from the squalor by which ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... seemed so incongruous with Paul's feelings, and above all with the recollection of his scene with Yerba, that he excused himself from dining with the party, alleging an engagement with his old fellow-traveler the German officer, whose acquaintance he had renewed. Yerba did not press him; he even fancied ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... four centuries later than Ethelbert and Augustine; but the origin of Canterbury is commonplace and prosaic compared with the origin of Westminster." (Yes, that's true.) "We can hardly imagine a figure more incongruous to the soberness of later times than the quaint, irresolute, wayward prince whose chief characteristics have just been described. His titles of Confessor and Saint belong not to the general instincts of Christendom but to the most transitory ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... that afterward it would be possible for the man to have offspring only by marrying a new wife. There are also several specifics to prevent conception, but none for producing fertility. The kapala gave as reasons for this practice scarcity of food and woman's fear of dying. Both seem incongruous to fact and primitive ideas, and perhaps his view would better be accepted only as an indication of his ignorance in the matter. The young people are taught to dance by the blian before they are married, and take lessons for ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... much as possible and that I must not spoil my chances of safety either by relying too recklessly on my disguise or through risking arousing suspicion in Falco by any attempt at confining myself to my apartment, which would have been altogether incongruous with the character I ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... the daughters of farm labourers nowadays ride their bicycles, instead of going out to service as their mothers and grandmothers did before them, and dress themselves ridiculously out of keeping with their position and surroundings. It seems very incongruous to see such girls living in indolence in country villages, while the daughters of their parson, as frequently happens in large families, turn out and ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... his hand. In the moonlight the grass seemed tipped with hoar frost. Most of the beeches were already bare, but the shoots, clustering round them, like children at their mother's skirts, still retained their leaves red and brown. Among the pines these leaves were as incongruous as a wedding-dress at a funeral. Gavin was standing on grass, but there were patches of heather within sight, and broom, and the leaf of the blaeberry. Where the beeches had drawn up the earth with them as they grew, their roots ran this way and that, slippery to the feet and looking like disinterred ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... shirt-sleeves, his coat being rolled up to serve as a pillow. Above the "bed" hung a Derby hat—an incongruous object. He was short, stout, and fresh coloured, with a startling black moustache elaborately curled at the ends and two grey eyes that were lined around with much laughter. He walked slowly to the party and held out ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... plan. In an earnest plea he urged Jay to convene the Legislature in extraordinary session for this purpose. "The anti-Federal party," he wrote to the Governor, "is a composition indeed of very incongruous materials, but all tending to mischief; some of them to the overthrow of the government by stripping it of its due energies; others of them by revolutionising it after the manner of Bonaparte. The government must not be confided to the custody of its enemies, and, although the measure proposed ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... square in front of the railway station. "Keep to the sidewalk" is the brusque order to those who stray. Also the park in front of the Royal Palace is closed to the public. Three bright red gasoline tank wagons among the trees give it an incongruous touch, while the walks and drives are used as an exercising ground for officers' mounts. All the windows of the Royal Palace are decorated with the sign ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... nobleness was thought to be found only by cool balancing and prudential calculation. A book like Clarissa Harlowe shows us this prudential and calculating temper underneath a varnish of sentimentalism and fine feelings, an incongruous and extremely displeasing combination, particularly characteristic of certain sets and circles in that century. One of the distinctions of Vauvenargues is that exaltation of sentiment did not with him cloak a substantial adherence to a low prudence, nor to that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... behold the sedate Atkinson (who manifested not the least surprise at our incongruous appearance) a square-shouldered, square-faced person he, whose features wore an air of resolution, notwithstanding his ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... eyes registered in memory the casual movements without, while her consciousness was occupied only with her soul's experience. But soon this period of blissful inaction was sharply terminated. Her still watching eyes brought her a message so incongruous with her immediate surroundings as to shake her out of her waking dream. She became suddenly conscious of a nineteenth-century intruder amid ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... discipline with victory may seem incongruous almost to the point of impossibility. Yet, if we look below the surface, we shall see that never is the connection more strong and the need for realising it ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... other man gazed up at us pathetically; his body had relaxed into the hollows of his disordered cot. Against the scene of regal gardens which was luminous as if the painted sky itself bathed all in the soft light of a spring evening, the man and his face were ridiculous and incongruous. His presence in that half-real setting seemed a satire upon the beauties achieved by man ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... great conception far and wide. In England also the puppet play was extremely popular. The drama had moved from the church to the market-place, and much of the Elizabethan drama appeared in this quaint form, played by wooden figures upon diminutive boards. To the modern mind nothing could be more incongruous than the idea of a solemn drama forced to assume a guise so grotesque and childish; but, according to Jusserand, much of the stage-work was extremely ghastly, and no doubt it impressed the multitude. There is even ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... in the bustle of Bishopsgate Street, still stands—the worse, to be sure, for the clutter of little shops that has been built in front of it, and for incongruous interior renovation—and I am very grateful to Purchas for having preserved the scrap of information that links Hudson's living body with that church which still is alive: into which may pass by the very doorway that he passed ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... hair was beginning to show gray about the ears, and his bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities; yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidence ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... sight, her cry of distracted alarm was irrepressible. Carried round again and again, on a wheel that to her was far more like Ixion's than that of the spheres, she never cleared her perceptions as to where he was, and only was half-maddened by the fantastic whirl of incongruous imagery, while she barely sat out Mercury's lengthy harangue; and when her wheel stood still, and she was released, she could not stand, and was indebted to Charon and one of her fellow-nymphs for supporting her to a chair in the back of the scene. Kind Charon ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have properly located and rightly earned all the faculties of mind, but have their expositions been useful in the development of truth. While endeavoring to connect each mental power with a local habitation in the brain, the system of phrenology may be chargeable with some incongruous classification of the faculties, and yet it has furnished an analysis of the mind which has been of incalculable service to writers upon mental philosophy. Phrenology, in popularizing its views, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... forward in the interval. She was undoubtedly pale and heavy-eyed; but in her little dress of dark blue silk, with her narrow lawn ruffles and locket and shining hair, she showed none of the desperate signs appropriate to her circumstances nor any embarrassment at the incongruous situation in which ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... were acute, and from the first her memory helped itself by the involuntary association of incongruous ideas. Many people's recollections are stimulated by the sense of smell, but it is a rarer thing for the sense of taste to be associated with the past in the same way, as it was in Beth's case. There were many circumstances which were recalled by the taste of the food ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... and obvious, to believe that the writer meant what he said, and to reject any interpretation which implies that when he came to speak of himself he said what he did not mean, or filled the picture with descriptions, situations or emotions, incongruous or inappropriate. And if in so reading they seem clear and connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted. We should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer that they are imitations of Petrarch, or that the genius ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... knows any more of the medical Bart. than that, when he sends for the other to attend his wife, he calls him generally "doctor," and seldom Sir James: or that the military Bart. does not much like the naval Bart.? and do not all these incongruous Barts. shudder at the bare idea of been seen on the same side of the street with a gin-spinning, Patent-British-Genuine-Foreign-Cognac Brandy-making Bart.? and do not each and every one of these Barts. from head to tail, even including the last-mentioned, look down with immeasurable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... clergy, who had degraded themselves into intriguers; and like mechanics in a trade, who are afraid of nothing so much as interlopers—they had therefore induced indifferent persons to imagine that their earnest contest was not about their faith, but about their temporal possessions. It was incongruous that a church, which does not pretend to be infallible, should constrain persons, under heavy penalties and punishments, to believe as she does: they delighted, he asserted, to hold an iron rod over dissenters ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... movement of incongruous feelings that I read the first name on the list. I had no wish to look again on my own handiwork; my flesh recoiled from the idea; and how could I be sure what reception he designed to give me? The cure was in my own hand; I could pass that first name over—the doctor would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Less visible were the glass studio on its iron columns, an excellent piece of work, considering its few possibilities, and the Arab Hall at the other end. Of course the latter looks a little incongruous. It is a professed reproduction of Arab architecture, but carried out, like the rest of the house, with ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... Obozerskaya to bury them. The American officer in command engaged the local Russian priest to perform the religious service. By some trick of fate it had happened that these first Americans who fell in action were of Slavic blood, so the strange funeral which the doughboys witnessed was not so incongruous ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... pulled a chair from the corner of the porch, and flounced down among the cushions. David could not restrain a smile. She looked so babyishly young, and so furiously cross. To David, youth and crossness were incongruous. ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... glowing sunset. Amidst the congregated many, and distinguished from the common herd by very superior bulk and four resplendent wings, were several individual ants, which Emily (as well she might) mistook for flies, and inquired accordingly what could be their business in such incongruous society. "They are no flies," said we, "but ants themselves—female ants,—though with somewhat of the air, certainly, of being in masquerade or fancy costume. But say what we will of their attire, we must needs confess that ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... porters, very early one morning, leisurely surveying one of the apartments. He was caught and searched; nothing of any consequence was found on him, but in a hall was a bundle, evidently made up by him, containing such incongruous articles as old letters, a sword, and a pot of bear's grease. He had he appearance of a sweep, being very sooty, but disclaimed the chimney-cleaning profession. He had occupied, for a while, the vacant room of one of the Equerries, leaving in the bed the impress of his sooty figure. He declared ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... the Boer burgher was none the less incongruous than the physical appearance of the majority of them, although no expensive uniform and trappings could have been of more practical value. The men of the Pretoria and Johannesburg commandos had the unique ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... know the truth about anything till I've read them both!" said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth among the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wild imagining with a very different power displayed in "moralities" like his "Last Supper." I have heard stories as incongruous, one uproarious, another of cloistral quiet and piety, from the old Irish gardener with whom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven to seventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning after morning on the cold stone floor of a Vincentian ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... speech did not harmonize. If I felt it borne in upon me that I must be a profane fellow to prove my manliness, I would choose another diet than spoon victuals to nourish my formidable zest for naughtiness. Rare beef or wild game would be less incongruous. There are times when a man may be excused for using objectionable language. Stress of righteous indignation, seasons of personal conflict with hansom cabmen, large-headed street car conductors, ubiquitous, never-dying expectorators and many ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... each held by the ornamental sheath a kris or parang of singular workmanship, with the hilt resting against the right shoulder. The rest of the rajah's people were picturesquely arranged, and in their native dress looked to a man far better than their ruler, who was the incongruous spot in the group, which was impressive enough to an English lad, with its lurid fierce-looking faces and dark oily eyes peering from the mass of yellow and scarlet, while everywhere, though with the hilt covered by the folds of the sarong, could be made out the fact that ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... from the Northern Bards; but their texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the act of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always dangerous; Gray has made weavers of slaughtered bards by a fiction outrageous and incongruous. They are then called upon to "weave the warp, and weave the woof," perhaps, with no great propriety; for it is by crossing the woof with the warp that men weave the web or piece; and the first line was dearly bought by the admission of its wretched correspondent, "give ample room ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... place of the London hansom. Even as she rapidly walked down the crowded street mademoiselle closely scrutinised each vehicle that overtook her, and once, at a busy crossing, she deliberately stopped. Edith, of course, slackened her pace, and simultaneously she became aware how incongruous was her appearance at such an ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... peers are created in Europe, and that the partners in the big, wealthy firms over there, are called "merchant princes", and so to outdo them, they arrogate to themselves a still higher title. Hence there are railroad kings, copper kings, tobacco kings, etc. It is, however, manifestly improper and incongruous that the people should possess a higher title than their President, who is the head of the nation. To make it even, I would suggest that the title "President" be changed to "Emperor", for the following reasons: First, it would not only do away ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... Galba had let fall a remark, which augured well for Rome, though it spelt danger to himself. 'I do not buy my soldiers,' he said, 'I select them.' And indeed, as things then stood, his words sounded incongruous. ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... districts, but their tyrannical and injudicious conduct stunted the growth of the infant colonies, and little progress was made till the religious dissensions of Boston swelled their population. Violent and even fatal dissensions, however, distracted this incongruous community, till the government of Massachusetts assumed the sway over it, and re-established order and prosperity. Gorges and Mason disputed for many years the rights of authority with the new rulers; nor was the question finally settled till Massachusetts was deprived of her charter, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... covered with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than iron—living wood fiber—in him, he cannot be allowed any natural growth, but gets hacked in every extremity, and bossed over with lumps of frozen clay;—grafts of incongruous blossom that will never set; while some even recognize no need of knife or clay (though both are good in a gardener's hand), but deck themselves out with incongruous glittering, like a Christmas-tree. Even were the style chosen true ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... meeting a plain clothes man from detective headquarters around the next bend of a peaceful Missouri road was so preposterous and incongruous that Billy had found it impossible to give the ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with which this old aged man adheres to the opinion that he had formed, without any intelligible reason, is characteristic of an English peasant; but however absurd his mode of judging may be, and however confused and incongruous his ideas, his species of absurdity surely bears no resemblance to an Hibernian blunder. We cannot even suspect it to be possible that a man of this slow, circumspect character could be in any danger of making an Irish bull; and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... clear-cut outline, had something awe-inspiring about it, for here one was face to face with real Nature. A faint and distant roar was also a reminder that the jungle had its inhabitants, and through it all came the quaintly incongruous strains of the orchestra playing a selection from ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set about with guillotines ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... kindred humorous faculty and told a story in much the same solemn manner, bringing out the point as if it were something entirely irrelevant and unimportant and casually remembered. The subject of this sketch, however, was the only member of the family in whom a love for the droll and incongruous was a controlling disposition. As is frequently the case, a family trait was intensified in one individual to the point where talent passes over ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the 'tolls' due on merchandise entering or leaving the port of Antwerp, and a table giving Flemish weights and moneys in terms of the corresponding English measures. Why such a poem should be printed in such incongruous surroundings, what its date or who its author was, are questions impossible to determine. Its position here is perhaps almost as incongruous as in ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... of truly barbaric taste—such as in Germany would hardly be met with in the house of a fairly well-to-do citizen. Similar incongruities there were many, and perhaps the appearance of the Prince himself was the most incongruous of them all. For this stalwart man with the soft black beard and penetrating eyes, who in the picturesque attire of his country would doubtless have been a handsome and imposing figure, made an inharmonious impression in his grey English suit and with ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... quietly into the vestibule and the company burst into an incongruous babble. Dorn listened to their voices, again firm and self-sufficient, chattering formalities. He watched Rachel adjusting her hat with over-eager gestures. Her eyes were avoiding him. She seemed breathless, her head squirming under the necessity of having to remain for another moment ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... might himself pronounce judgment. [392:1] It is possible that the chief magistrate of Syria pursued the same course; and that thus Ignatius was transmitted as a prisoner into Italy. But, upon some such substratum of facts, a mass of incongruous fictions has been erected. The "Acts of his Martyrdom," still extant, and written probably upwards of a hundred years after his demise, cannot stand the test of chronological investigation; and have evidently been ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... rather than sought it, worked as he walked, and was marked down as a 'pot-hunter.' He 'worked while he ate, he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable, definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.' With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had weakened him just when he should have been ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... do you think of the situation? I belong to the worldlings, of course, but I confess the idea of Jesus Christ at a Butterfly Social is tremendously incongruous. We have the best of it, Evadne, for we live up to our theories. Give it up, coz. You'll find it a hopeless task to make the Bible and modern ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... would surely have been in reason if the widow had taken a fancy to some nice girl and had had her to live in the house. But Mrs. Ogilvie did not take fancies to nice girls. She loved Jane Erskine, but disguised the feeling under a sort of whimsical indifference. And the friendship seemed incongruous enough if one came to think of it. Jane, with her wholesome love of outdoor life, her fresh beauty, her heedlessness of learning and ignorance of books—what had Jane in common with Mrs. Ogilvie in her Parisian gowns and with her dyed hair, sitting ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... at the box and went upstairs. For years to come and in the most incongruous surroundings John Penhallow now and then laughed as he saw again the look with which Mrs. Ann regarded the article so essential to Mr. Grey's comfort. She disliked all forms of tobacco use, and the law of the pipe had long ago been settled at Grey Pine as Mrs. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... the slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the consummate artist. He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant Popo. This defect was ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... sufferings of the plain-hunters. To have continued at the same pace would have been to insure a meeting and a crash. One must give way to the other! Since the affair of the knoll these two men had studiously cut each other. They met every Sabbath day in the same church, and felt this to be incongruous as well as wrong. The son of the one was stolen by savages. The son of the other was doing his utmost to rescue the child. Each regretted having quarrelled with the other, but pride was a powerful influence in both. What was to be done? Time for thought was ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... was unheated and was barely large enough to contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. The dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the corner at my right were all my books, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... solemnly; "Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve frightened! And of Granville Kelmscott, too! That's true wit, Elma; the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Why, what on earth has the man got to be frightened of, I should like to know? ... No, no; he's really ill; very seriously ill. Humphreys says the case is a most peculiar one, and he's telegraphed up to town for a specialist to come down this ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... meagre frame incased in new black woollens, and wearing, as an incongruous added touch, the most brilliant of neckties, a necktie of the shade of a pomegranate blossom, he presently issued from Felsburg Brothers' and entered M. Biederman's shoe store, two doors below. Here Mr. Biederman fitted him with shoes, and in addition noted down a further order, ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... uneasily in his grave at the strange story I am called upon to chronicle; a story as strange as a Munchausen tale. It is also incongruous that I, a disbeliever, should be the one to edit the story of Olaf Jansen, whose name is now for the first time given to the world, yet who must hereafter rank as one ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... enough to be a mother. And again he had cried. Some doctors may lose through oft-recurrence visualized their susceptibility to suffering; but Dr. DeLancey was not of them. And when he stumbled on stiffened legs out of the darkened parlor and into the incongruous mellow radiance of the spring sunshine, his eyes were still wet, and he didn't care ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... the incongruous mixture called the family, were there assembled, including the Professor. The latter was just then discussing the condition of his patient with Miss Payne, in blissful ignorance of the fact that the young lady was ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the moment it happened to touch her, to give her an increased interest in the affair, though afterwards she could reflect that in a man of Charles' character, so soberly practical and mature, it was perhaps a trifle incongruous, and, at the best, not precisely the tone by which women are most ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... of manner did not seem at all incongruous to him. She was comfortably ageless so far as he was concerned, a drab figure with a pleasant voice who treated him as though he were a human being instead of a sick ogre. In some mysterious way her attitude suggested something that no one had suggested ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... part, we dimly scan Through the dark medium of life's feverish dream; Yet dare arraign the whole stupendous plan, If but that little part incongruous seem. Nor is that part perhaps what mortals deem; Oft from apparent ill our blessings rise. O, then, renounce that impious self-esteem, That aims to trace the secrets of the skies: For thou art but of dust; be humble, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... plain great-grandmother in white satin at the end, two or three Vandyck school-portraits of seventeenth-century Mannerings, and the beautiful Hogarth head—their best possession—that was so like Pamela. The furniture of the room was of many different dates—incongruous, shabby, and on the whole ugly. The Mannerings of the past had not ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... our behaviour every where. Fashion with us is like the man in one of Le Sage's novels, who was constantly changing his servants, and yet had but one suit of livery, which every new comer, whether he was tall or short, fat or thin, was obliged to wear. We adopt manners, however incongruous and ill suited to our nature, and thus we always seem awkward and constrained. But Lydia White's soirees are indeed agreeable. I remember the last time I dined there we were six in number, and though we were not blessed with ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have been born among buildings raised by Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English novelist has left us brighter pictures of ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... that we are a couple of old maids, incongruous associates for a young wife in the government of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... returning to the fancy fair, found the world in all the ardour of raffles. Lady Leonora's contributions were the chief prizes, which attracted every one, and, of course, the result was delightfully incongruous. Poor Ethel, who had been persuaded to venture a shilling to please Blanche, who had spent all her own, obtained the two jars in potichomanie, and was regarding them with a face worth painting. Harvey Anderson had a doll, George Rivers a wooden monkey, that jumped over ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... several errors that are not infrequent in the use of metaphor. A metaphor should not be blended with plain language in the same sentence, nor should it be extended too far. The latter fault is called "straining the metaphor." Two incongruous metaphors should not be used in the same sentence. In the following lines from Addison his muse is first conceived of as a steed that needs to be restrained with a bridle, and then as a ship that is ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... upflung arm, his refinement of feature incongruous under the rush of ox-blood red, his teeth showing whiter as ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... of the room where she had danced and been happy: the many lights, the pagan figures merrymaking on the panels, the goddess on the ceiling with her cupids and scattered roses, and, in the centre of it all, that dead face, incongruous and calm. ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is always seeking the sun, why he wants a fire at night. It is a fraud, he says, all this visible display of summer, and of an almost tropical summer at that; it is really a cold country. It is incongruous that he should be looking at a date-palm in his overcoat, and he is puzzled that a thermometrical heat that should enervate him elsewhere, stimulates him here. The green, brilliant, vigorous vegetation, the perpetual sunshine, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... to posterity with much greater lustre. Cean Bermudez says of his works in Spain, "He left nothing that is absolutely bad, and nothing that is perfectly good." His compositions generally bear the marks of furious haste, and they are disfigured in many cases by incongruous associations of pagan mythology with sacred history, and of allegory with history, a blemish on the literature as well as the art of the age. Bermudez also accuses him of having corrupted and degraded Spanish art, by ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... the first who had wandered there that morning; for as he raised his eyes with an agreeable deliberation, they alighted on the figure of a girl, in whom he was struck to recognise the third of the incongruous fugitives. She had run there, seemingly, blindfold; the wall had checked her career: and being entirely wearied, she had sunk upon the ground beside the garden railings, soiling her dress among the summer dust. Each saw the other in the same instant of time; and she, with one wild look, sprang to ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... glass, perceived that it was the tall man with the stoop shoulders and incongruous clothing who had torn down the red flag. He was now in violent altercation with the man who had hung it out—the fellow whom he had ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... magnetism of their own. Such men are generally more or less conscious of the influence, and the result is either a vague appreciation, which will make the male wonder why he gets on so well with the invert, or else the influence will be realized to be something incongruous and unnatural, and will be resented accordingly. Sometimes, indeed, the reciprocated feeling (circumstance and opportunity permitting) will prove strong enough to induce sexual relations. Reason will then generally overpower instinct, and the feeling, aroused unaware, will probably ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... prosperity and light-hearted buoyancy of His children, especially of His young children. Ah! but I know there are young lives over which poverty or ill-health or sorrows of one kind or another have cast a gloom as incongruous to your time of life as snow in the garden in the spring, that pinches the crocuses and weighs down young green beech-leaves, would be. And if I am speaking to any young man or young woman at this time who by reason of painful outward circumstances has had but a chilling ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that belonged to Pilate's house in Jerusalem are said to have been once trodden by Jesus and may be ascended only on one's knees. At no hour of the day can one visit the Scala Santa without finding the most motley and incongruous throng thus ascending, pausing on each step for meditation and prayer. These stairs were transported from Jerusalem to Rome under the auspices of St. Helena, the Empress, about 326 A.D., and in 1589 they were placed by Pope Sixtus V in this portico built ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... when, as I wandered absorbed in an inspection of minor details, and a mellow whistle, constant but varying in volume, broke in upon my musings, it was vain to repress the thrill of excitement. A sound so foreign and incongruous also had a certain element of mystery. In a flash unsensational ponderings were displaced by a picture of a steamer in distress far away. Had I not on a similar occasion of a secret-disclosing tide heard through seven miles of insulted and sullen air ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... winter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with a delicate variety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering blue of September. There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled by tides, and unhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating on your head while your fingers are cold. You bathe when the sun has set, and the vast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the distance where you can rest; and where you float, there float also by ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... printed, in 4to., Andalusia; or Notes tending to show that the Yellow Fever was well known to the Ancients? The book seems a mass of absurdity; containing illustrations of Milton's Comus, and several other subjects equally incongruous. ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... capricious gods, was trying to make sense out of the meaningless medley in which he seemed to find himself. Through science, modern man is likewise trying to make sense out of his world. The more apparently disconnected and incongruous facts that can be brought within the compass of simple and perfectly regular law, the less threatening or capricious seems the world in which we live. Where everything that happens is part of a system, we do not need, like the savage trembling in a thunderstorm, to be frightened ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Bates whirled by on his way to the hotel. There was something glaringly incongruous between his glistening silk hat and the long-haired "plough horse" and rickety buggy he was driving. The silk hat was a sort of badge of office; lawyers wore them, as a rule, and he was the only lawyer at Cartwright. He had bought his silk hat on the day of his admission to the bar, and ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside—the great table in the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books, flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers, and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides—all this self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch—and ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... * * I have read the 'Strictures,' which are just enough, and not grossly abusive, in very fair couplets. There is a note against Massinger near the end, and one cannot quarrel with one's company, at any rate. The author detects some incongruous figures in a passage of English Bards, page 23., but which edition I do not know. In the sole copy in your possession—I mean the fifth edition—you may make these alterations, that I may profit (though a little too ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... less trouble and more fun to him to create them afresh; but none the less he heaps the murders and villainies of the borrowed story on his own essentially gentle creations without scruple, no matter how incongruous they may be. And all the time his vital need for a philosophy drives him to seek one by the quaint professional method of introducing philosophers as characters into his plays, and even of making his heroes philosophers; but when they come on the stage they have no philosophy ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... carters must wait for the keys, as she should need them to set the furniture up in the right places. But they could not stop for this. They put it down upon the piazza, on the steps, in the garden, and Elizabeth Eliza saw how incongruous it was! There was something from every room in the house! Even the large family chest, which had proved too heavy for them to travel with, had come down from the attic, and stood ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... cellar and the upper floor. There was no sign of a recent occupancy. Everything was as Bobby had found it on awakening. A vagrant wind sighed about the place. They looked at each other with startled eyes. They filed out with an incongruous stealth. ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... band of tourists in whose company I happened to enter the Yosemite Valley was a San Francisco youth with a delightful baritone voice, who entertained the guests in the hotel parlour at Wawona by a good-natured series of songs. No one in the room except myself seemed to find it in the least incongruous or funny that he sandwiched "Nearer, my God, to thee" between "The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo" and "Her golden hair was hanging down her back," or that he jumped at once from the pathetic solemnity ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are cached, and the trail strikes into the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... or more, there had been a fair promise of a successful adjustment of the two incongruous natures in the new conditions. They both tried to keep off dangerous ground and to avoid collisions of will. They made the most of their one common interest, although even here they soon found themselves out of sympathy. Hubert's instincts were scholastic and lawful, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... the fertile soil of the spiritual needs and experiences of India. It began by moulding a personal God out of ancient figures of myth and legend, and it surrounded him with a hierarchy of godly heroes. Though its doctrines were often philosophically incongruous and incoherent, its foundation was a true religious feeling; it gave scope to the mystic raptures of the ascetic and the simple righteousness of the laic; and it claimed for its heroes, Vasudeva and his kindred and his friends the Pandava brethren, a grave and dignified ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... even, would have decided that these four maidens were bound together by an unusual bond of friendship—an incongruous friendship it might have seemed, and ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... sweetness of sleep before it overpowered him. In the morning, he seemed to hear the shriek of his alarm clock for hours before he could come up from the deep places into which he had plunged. All sorts of incongruous adventures happened to him between the first buzz of the alarm and the moment when he was enough awake to put out his hand and stop it. He dreamed, for instance, that it was evening, and he had gone to see ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... the badly blotted missive, and with startled, mystified eyes, read the incongruous words penned by that ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... indecisively because a sixth figure had suddenly presented itself just inside the doorway—a figure so incongruous in the scene as to be almost comic. It was a very short man in the black uniform of the Roman secular clergy, and looking (especially in such a presence as Bruno's and Aurora's) rather like the wooden Noah out of an ark. He did not, however, seem conscious ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... dining-room, the bed-chambers, and other apartments occupied by the personnel look out on to the mournful gloom of a side street. All these vast rooms, twenty and four-and-twenty feet high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier tables mingling with modern bric-a-brac. And things become abominable when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there you no longer find an article of furniture, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... extraordinary force; to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans, digested by common councils, and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... that spoiling, Susan," he said. Once again that incongruous little note of wistfulness sounded in his voice. But, an instant later, Lady Susan wondered if her ears had deceived her, for he swung round and snapped out in his usual hectoring manner: "Then you won't help me ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... the Godless revolution was in sympathy with Pius IX. and the Church. The venerable Pontiff was still able to take to task the indiscreet writers who, from mistaken zeal, maintained that such an incongruous coalition had taken place ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... tired. He was a short man, built like a barrel on stubby legs, a great white beard covering his neck and the top of his chest. Another time Jason might have laughed at his incongruous waddle, but not now. There was a charged difference in the air since ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... Jewish subjects were the most hopeless, involved, incomprehensible and protracted puzzles ever penned, bristling with Hebrew quotations from the most varying, the most irrelevant and the most mutually incongruous sources and peppered with the dates of birth and death ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of the road may be seen a variety of incongruous edifices, called villas and cottage ornees, peeping up in all the pride of a retired linen-draper, or the consequential authority of a man in office, in as many varied styles of architecture as of dispositions in the different proprietors, and all exhibiting (in ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... left were the Louther Hills, with their smooth-green magnificence, bearing away into the distance, and placed, as it were, to shelter this happy valley from the stormy north and its wintry blasts. At present, however, all idea of storm and blast was incongruous, for they seemed to sleep in the sun's effulgence, as if cradled into repose by the hand of God. To the south, and hard at hand, were the woods and the fields of Collestown, with the echoing Linn, and the rush of many waters. O land of our nativity!—how deeply art thou impressed upon ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... of an incurable cannibal grandee with two incongruous traits. His favourite morsel was the human hand, of which he speaks to-day with an ill-favoured lustfulness. And when he said good-bye to Mrs. Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing her with tearful eyes, and chanting his farewell improvisation in the falsetto ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me that if I should lay my garden out into four squares, the combination of squares, central circles and straight main paths would look incongruous. So I shall cut the central points of the four square beds off by swinging circles. Have patience and you will see, for the general plan is in my mind just as it ought to be in the mind of any person who ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... asserted, in a way as decisive as it was calm, his absolute control over the everlasting destinies of all men. When we read the account of these superhuman claims, we have no feeling that they were incongruous or extravagant. On the contrary, they seem to us altogether legitimate and proper. And yet, as has been often remarked, were any other person to advance a tithe of these pretensions, he would be justly regarded as a madman. The ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... using her eyes and her mind—her own eyes and her own mind—in observing what was going on around her, she did not disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts. Common sense—absolute common sense—always sounds incongruous in a conventional atmosphere. In its milder forms it produces the effect of wit; in stronger doses it is a violent irritant; in large quantity, it causes those to whom it is administered to regard the person administering it as insane. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... interval elapsed ere she stood in Isabella's presence, Marie knew not. The most incongruous thoughts floated, one after another, through her bewildered brain—most vivid amongst them all, hers and her husband's fatal secret: had it transpired? Was he sentenced, and she thus summoned to share his ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... and supernatural cures were deemed indubitable facts: and when accounts of contemporary miracles, Divine or Satanic, carried with them no sense of strangeness or improbability. It is scarcely surprising that these formularies sometimes seem incongruous with an age when the scientific spirit has introduced very different conceptions of the government of the universe, and when the miraculous, if it is not absolutely discredited, is, at least in the eyes of most educated men, relegated to ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... be characteristic of the same mind to appreciate the beauty of ideas in just proportion and harmonious relation to each other, and the absurdity of the same ideas when distorted or brought into incongruous juxtaposition. The exercise of this sense of humour ... compels the mind to form a picture to itself, accompanied by pleasurable emotion; and what is this but setting the imagination to work, though in topsy-turvy ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the words of haste, makes her audience wait to hear them. Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's harry of phrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing. None act, none speak, as though there were such a thing as impulse in a play. To drop behind is the only idea of arriving. The nurse ceases to be absurd, ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... that he had gradually contracted something of that "naughty-boy" temper, as we may call it, for which the deliberate and ostentatious repetition of offences has an inexplicable charm. It seems clear, too, that, growth for growth with this spirit of bravado, there had sprung up—in somewhat incongruous companionship, perhaps—a certain sense of wrong. Along with the impulse to give an additional shock to the prejudices he had already offended, Sterne felt impelled to vindicate what he considered the genuine moral worth underlying the indiscretions of the offender. What, then, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... could have been her scholar, with such edifying resignation did she submit to the dispensation," returned the clergyman, uttering these long words in a broad northern accent which had nothing incongruous in it to Richard's ears, and taking advantage of the lady's absence on "hospitable tasks intent" to ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... country and to the beggars of the town that slept on the steps around the pedestal, as the Horse of Stone. The other Carlos, turning off to the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pavement—Don Carlos Gould, in his English clothes, looked as incongruous, but much more at home than the kingly cavalier reining in his steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos, with his marble arm raised towards the marble rim of a ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... remains the honest prophet of immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does not rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a transcendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... bell cord dangled within easy reach, he made no movement toward it; it had occurred to his mind that the act might subject him to the suspicion of fear, which he certainly did not feel. He was more keenly conscious of the incongruous nature of the situation than affected by its perils; it ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... sanction we must trace a large portion of the mythological pedantry and incongruous paganisms, which for so long a period deformed the poetry, even of the truest poets. To such an extravagance did Boccaccio himself carry this folly, that in a romance of chivalry, he has uniformly styled ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... with the large white face of the Nonconformist minister smiling from beneath it. He had a thick lance with which to support his injured leg, and this murderous crutch combined with his peaceful appearance to give him a most incongruous aspect,—as of a sheep which has suddenly developed claws. Behind him were two negroes with a basket and ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... sharply, and looked at Jim. He had spoken the words in a tone sounding almost casual, curiously incongruous with their grim significance. She knew that he meant what he had said, and ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... drab-coloured men for these shifts of labour were arranged so that no space at any time was wholly idle. I now passed by miles of sleeping dormitories, and other miles of gymnasiums, picture theatres and gaming tables, and, strikingly incongruous with the atmosphere of the place, huge assembly rooms which were labelled "Free Speech Halls." I started to enter one of these, where some kind of a meeting was in progress, but I was thrust back by a great fellow who grinned foolishly ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... burst out into a loud laugh, stopped suddenly, sat down, and took Nick on his knee. It was an incongruous scene. Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... take up his abode for a while with Aunt Tipping, and that his books and the cast of Dante, and the sketch of the young Dante done in sepia by Myrtilla Williamson's own fair hand, came to find themselves in the incongruous environment of Tichborne Street. ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... the severely peaceful Quaker preacher defending so notoriously bloody and cruel a cutthroat pirate as Capt. Jack Scarfield. The warm and innocent surroundings, the old brick house looking down upon them, the odor of apple blossoms and the hum of bees seemed to make it all the more incongruous. And still the elderly Quaker skipper talked on and on with hardly an interruption, till the warm sun slanted to the west and ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... and whose hand was white and silken in its touch—how hopelessly lost this little man would be should circumstances turn him forth to gain his livelihood at hunting and trapping. Old Larocque himself would hardly be more incongruous teaching in this college. It was this thought that made Shag smile as he rose from his knees, with the echoes of the bells of St. Boniface ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... justly be accused of impertinence, of exceeding due measure. The sculptor did his best; but he was careful to do nothing which was out of harmony with its surroundings. He sank himself in his work. And even when he was engaged on a more serious substantive work, what he most avoided was the incongruous and unbecoming. He so worked that the attention of the spectator was concentrated not on the character of the workmanship, but on the person or the subject portrayed. The idea which he tried to incorporate in marble or bronze was not his own thought ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... William of Orange was going to wed the Princess Mary, who was the daughter of the Duke of York, the King of England's brother, and likely to be herself the daughter of an English sovereign. For certain reasons it seemed an unlikely and incongruous alliance, for even in the end of 1677, when the marriage took place, anyone with prescience could foresee that there would be a wide rift between the politics of the Duke of York when he became King ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favour? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on the side-walk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the- ring; yet this only made ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... century who fought for that Charles of Navarre who was surnamed "The Bad." The classic additions to the western part of the church seem strangely out of sympathy with the gargoyles overhead and the thirteenth century arcades of the nave, but this mixing up of styles is really more incongruous in ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... he called her. He had hardly set out when in a country lane he came across a peasant girl hanging out clothes to dry, and he fell to talk with her while she went on with her charming occupation. Presently he observed, pegged on the line, strangely incongruous among the other homespun garments, a wonderful petticoat, so exquisite in material and design that it aroused his curiosity. At the same moment he noticed a pair of stockings, round the tops of which one of the daintiest artists in the land had ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... being the same, namely, uncontradicted experience. Now when we say, 'If Nature is uniform, science is true,' the hypothetical character of science appears in the form of the statement. Nevertheless, it seems undesirable to call our confidence in Nature's uniformity an 'hypothesis': it is incongruous to use the same term for our tentative conjectures and for our most indispensable beliefs. 'The Universal Postulate' is a better term for the principle which, in some form or other, every ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... be almost something incongruous in the idea of sightseeing in the Holy Land, yet it is probable that of the crowds round the foot of the Cross, on which was enacted the world's greatest blessing, a great part were idle sightseers who, twenty centuries ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... all four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom Castleton and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after the manner of youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one another's shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the quartette were gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals and the intellectual capacity of the absent fourth were discussed with ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... plumb-line be askew, and if The square deceiving swerve from lines exact, And if the level waver but the least In any part, the whole construction then Must turn out faulty—shelving and askew, Leaning to back and front, incongruous, That now some portions seem about to fall, And falls the whole ere long—betrayed indeed By first deceiving estimates: so too Thy calculations in affairs of life Must be askew and false, if sprung for thee From senses false. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... he can say, hell. Yet all these ideas have a foundation in fact, and only a foundation. The superstructure has been reared by exaggerating, diminishing, combining, separating, deforming, beautifying, improving or multiplying realities, so that the edifice or fabric is but the incongruous grouping of what man has perceived through the medium of the senses. It is as though we should give to a lion the wings of an eagle, the hoofs of a bison, the tail of a horse, the pouch of a kangaroo, and the trunk ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... topics in the Appendices are of such a controversial nature—the whereabouts of the Mascoutins, for instance—that at my request Mr. Roy made the translation absolutely literal no matter how incongruous the wording. To those who say Radisson was not on the Missouri I commend Appendix E, where the tribes ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... with the wistful faces of the very young girls—eager and wise beyond their years. What an incongruous thing this mingling of the tense eagerness of young girlhood in the straight open stare of worldly wisdom with which some of them looked at him, and, passing, turned to look again. It made him shiver. They ought to be at school, these children; why were ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... than the latter would probably have done. Everything in the room was artistic, but its effect was deeper than mere prettiness. It was cool, though the autumn sunshine streamed in, and the girl had somehow impressed her personality upon it. Soft colorings, furniture, even the rather incongruous mixture of statuettes and ivory carvings, blended into a harmonious whole, and the girl made a most satisfactory central figure, as she sat opposite him in her unusually thoughtful mood. He felt the charm of her presence, though he could ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... for what suited me—for the antipodes of the Creole: and I longed vainly. Amongst them all I found not one whom, had I been ever so free, I—warned as I was of the risks, the horrors, the loathings of incongruous unions—would have asked to marry me. Disappointment made me reckless. I tried dissipation—never debauchery: that I hated, and hate. That was my Indian Messalina's attribute: rooted disgust at it and her restrained me much, even in pleasure. Any enjoyment that bordered on riot seemed to approach ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... hushed state of tension. In the room itself there was no sound save the scratching of the pen and the laboured breathing of the old man; but in the next house we could hear someone playing a waltz. Somehow it did not seem to me incongruous, for it was 'Sweethearts,' and that had been the favourite waltz of Ben Rhydding, so that I always connected it with Derrick and his trouble, and now the words ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... narrative, which shall comprehend this period of social disorganization, must be ascribed entirely to the skill and luminous disposition of the historian. It is in this sublime Gothic architecture of his work, in which the boundless range, the infinite variety, the, at first sight, incongruous gorgeousness of the separate parts, nevertheless are all subordinate to one main and predominant idea, that Gibbon is unrivalled. We cannot but admire the manner in which he masses his materials, and arranges his facts ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... counting Mr. Simpson, who ordinarily sat elsewhere at the town's expense), they warmed themselves rapturously in the vision of the banquet lamp, which speedily became to them more desirable than food, drink, or clothing. Neither Emma Jane nor Rebecca perceived anything incongruous in the idea of the Simpsons striving for a banquet lamp. They looked at the picture daily and knew that if they themselves were free agents they would toil, suffer, ay sweat, for the happy privilege of occupying ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... have a way of couching their nonsense in language that sounds rational, and has a false air of logical connection. Their periods seem stolen from sensible books, and forcibly fitted to incongruous bosh. By this means the ear is confused, and a slow hearer might fancy ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... whereunto, I must plainly confess to you, I have seen yet nothing parallel in our language." The criticism was just. It is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is discharged from the labor of uniting two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even above himself. Then, like his own good Genius bursting from the earthly form and weeds of Thyrsis, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... this that in the newly built Prussian capital society, utterly artificial as it was, an improvised amalgam of incongruous elements, was predisposed, so to speak, to dissoluteness. Berlin swarmed with army men who had no family life and whose whole day was not occupied with military duties. Men of letters, adventurers of the pen and of the sword, attracted by Frederick's reputation ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... with his habitual insolence, and, opening the drawer of the chest in which he kept the most incongruous treasures, he drew from it the precious volume, which he held toward them, without giving it up. Then he began a speech, which reproduced the details given by Montfanon himself. "Ah, it is very authentic. There is an indistinct but undeniable ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... consider the Bible revelation and story with the same fearless honesty and clear common sense with which he would consider the Bibles of the Mohammedan, or Buddhist, or Hindoo, and then ask himself the question: "Is the Bible a holy and inspired book, and the word of God to man, or is it an incongruous and contradictory collection of tribal traditions and ancient fables, written by men of genius ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... roses and all the pleasant border plants that go with box and lavender. Never before did the flowers answer the spring roll-call with such a rush! Upstairs, in the Empire bedroom which the General has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruous to see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps, trench-plans, aeroplane photographs and all the documentation of modern war. Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, and one felt, close by, behind the walls ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the empress. "There is no sympathy between Austria and Prussia, and peace will never come to Europe until one succumbs to the other. No dependence is to be placed upon alliances between incongruous nations. In spite of our allies, the English, the Dutch, and the Russians, the King of Prussia has robbed me of my province; and all the help I have ever got from them was empty condolence. For this reason I have sought for alliance with another power—a power ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... you don't go to the mountains," Beppi interrupted. "Oh, I saw you walking smack into the guns. What were you doing?" He dropped his threatening tone, so incongruous with his tiny body, and coaxed softly, "please tell me, ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent
... his real name to such a rhapsody)—it is not, we say, that the author has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of genius. He has all these: but he is unhappily a disciple of the new school of what has been somewhere called "Cockney Poetry," which may be defined to consist of the most incongruous ideas in the most ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... was the matter with him. In the night my worry found expression in the dream which I have reported, the content of which was not only senseless, but failed to show any wish-fulfillment. But I began to investigate for the source of this incongruous expression of the solicitude felt during the day, and analysis revealed the connection. I identified my friend Otto with a certain Baron L. and myself with a Professor R. There was only one explanation for my being impelled to select just this substitution ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... get into some sort of touch with the people I had met. I knew how they lived and loved and thought. But him! He had dressed his mind up in the showy rags and remnants of our speech as a savage will dress his body in incongruous clothing, and of what he was, inside, I could form no conjecture. Between us was an impassable barrier. I was trying to realize what made me so silent before his volubility, when the bell on the forecastle of the Corydon struck eight times. It was midnight and my watch was over. I said good-bye. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... whaler's life, and to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm whale to add to his own memories. Very literally the story begins as an autobiography; even the elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But even before the Pequod leaves sane Nantucket an undercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. This brooding captain, Ahab (for Melville also broods, though with characteristic difference), and ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... is truly a tenement dweller, and his home is occupied not only by his own kind, but by owls and rattlesnakes. Most naturalists believe that these incongruous families live in perfect harmony; but it is a well-known fact that the snake occasionally devours the young prairie-dogs, and he must be considered by them as an intruder who procured board and lodging without their consent. The owls, on the other hand, are supposed ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... will like to come and be one of us because we are not different." The answer is, "I can get the things of this world better in the world, where they belong, than with you." Thus we have naturalized our very offices of devotion! Hence the attempts to revive worship are incongruous and inconsistent. Hence they have that sentimental and accidental character which is the sign of the amateur. They do not bring us very near to the heavenly country. It might be well to remember that the servant of Jahweh doth not cry nor lift up his voice nor ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
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