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More "Prosaic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blind man may be picturesque; but it requires two eyes to see the picture. And similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane. To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite true. A man who thinks himself a chicken is to himself as ordinary as a chicken. A man who thinks he is a bit of glass is to himself as dull as a bit of glass. It is the homogeneity of his mind which makes him dull, and which makes him mad. It is ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... to all readers, I will repeat here that it is the habit of navigators to drop a day from their calendar in crossing westerly the 180th degree of longitude of Greenwich, adding a day in coming east; and that the idea of the lost galleon had an origin as prosaic as the log of the first China Mail Steamer from San Francisco. The explanation of the custom and its astronomical relations belongs rather to the usual text-books than to poetical narration. If any reader thinks I have overdrawn the credulous superstitions of the ancient navigators, I refer ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... are welcome. He is no respecter of persons. He gives without reserve his fancies, his wit, his wisdom; he makes you a present of all that the painful or the happy years have brought him. The writer makes his reader heir in full. Men of letters are a peculiar class. They are never commonplace or prosaic—at least those of them that mankind care for. They are airy, wise, gloomy, melodious spirits. They give us the language we speak, they furnish the subjects of our best talk. They are full of generous impulses and sentiments, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the clan system were finally swept away, though the sentiment lingers, even in the Transatlantic abodes of the clansmen, and is prized, like the dress, as a remnant of social picturesqueness in a prosaic and levelling age. The hills and lakes—at the thought of which even Gibbon shuddered—are the favourite retreats of the luxury which seeks in wildness refreshment from civilization. After Culloden, Presbyterianism effectually made its way into the Highlands, of which a great part had ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... for literature at least as far back as the papyrus tales of the Egyptians, more precise means of delivery from the intolerable weight of real life appear and disappear in popular books. In the early eighteen hundreds, men and women longed to be blighted in love, to be in lonely revolt against the prosaic well-being of a world of little men. Byron was popular. In the Augustan age of England, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dreaming spirit; in Shakespeare's day, Italy; in the fifteenth century, Arthurian romance. Just at present, and in America, the popularity ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... name of Berlin wool work, popular in the early XIXth century, we have before us a degenerate offshoot of this fine and poetic kind of work in which all its possibilities are missed, with a result that is prosaic in the extreme. Some of the canvas-work seat covers decorated with geometrical designs, seen on Chippendale chairs, were a pleasant and satisfactory variation in their way, but in most of the work after that period, the attempt ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie
... the country that, growing weary of playing, thy money may there bring thee to dignity and reputation.' Whether or no Ratsey's biographer consciously identified the highwayman's auditor with Shakespeare, it was the prosaic course of conduct marked out by Ratsey that Shakespeare literally followed. As soon as his position in his profession was assured, he devoted his energies to re-establishing the fallen fortunes of his family in his native place, and to acquiring for ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... subject of engagements, perhaps the following letter from Charles Lamb to Fanny Kelly, and her reply, will be of interest—though the unarduous and somewhat prosaic tone of Elia's proposal of marriage—beautifully expressed as it is—is hardly to be recommended as a model calculated to ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... dangling behind to represent the tail, and sees them stamping, snorting, prancing, and champing the imaginary bit, witnesses the alchymy of the imagination, an alchymy out-stripping all the wonders and out-weighing all the treasures of the prosaic positive chemistry, so longed for by the present generation. The child 'supposes' the handkerchief a tail, and it becomes a tail. He has but to say to his companion: 'This shall be a whip and this shall be the harness,' and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... swept away by a bursting shell, lying on the battlefield pleading for water; show the children with tear-stained faces pressed against the window pane praying for their dead father to return. Avoid general and prosaic terms. Paint pictures. Evolve images for the imagination of your audience to construct into ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... my roupit Muse is hearse! Your Honours' hearts wi' grief 'twad pierce, To see her sittin on her arse Low i' the dust, And scriechinhout prosaic verse, An like ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... to-morrow, he would give him food and warm clothing and money,—and perhaps a recommendation to the Archbishop in order that he might get a chance of free education and employment in Rouen, while proper enquiries were being made about him. That was the soberly prosaic and commonplace view to take of the matter. The personality of the little fellow was intensely winning,—but after all, that had nothing to do with the facts of the case. He was a waif and stray, as he himself had said; his name, so far as he seemed ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... desultory ambition of a young and inexperienced student. And at that time I sought his advice upon a work of imagination, intended to depict the effects of enthusiasm upon different modifications of character. He listened to my conception, which was sufficiently trite and prosaic, with his usual patience; and then, thoughtfully turning to his bookshelves, took down an old volume, and read to me, first, in Greek, and secondly, in English, some ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... lovers had not struck the prosaic bottom yet, though they reached it sooner than either had expected. There were a good many kisses and verses the first months, passion and temperament. John discovered, of course, that Mrs. Bragdon was quite a different woman from Milly ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... classical days? He concluded, lamely, that there was an element of the child in every Southerner; that men, refusing to believe what is improbable, reserve their credulity for what is utterly impossible; in brief, that the prosaic sea-folk of Nepenthe were like everybody else in possessing a grain of stupidity in their composition—"which does not bring us much further," he would add. . ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... bade farewell to the line grounds, and commenced another stretch to the south, another milestone, as it were, on the long road home. Prosaic and uneventful to the last degree was our passage, the only incident worth recording being our "gamming" of the PASSAMAQUODDY, of Martha's Vineyard, South Sea whaler; eighteen months out, with one thousand barrels of sperm oil ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... this prayer: make my cattle fat for the use of their master, and every thing else, except my genius: and, as you are wont, be present as my chief guardian. Wherefore, when I have removed myself from the city to the mountains and my castle, (what can I polish, preferably to my satires and prosaic muse?) neither evil ambition destroys me, nor the heavy south wind, nor the sickly autumn, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... just the quality which is least common in our present satirical literature. He had read the old writers,—Browne, Donne, Fuller, and Cowley,—and was tinged with that richer and quainter vein which so emphatically distinguishes them from the prosaic wits of our day. His weapons reminded you of Damascus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... in this burlesque of the descent of Euphuism to the prosaic detail of the human conditions, not then accommodated with a style in literature, a defect in learning which this Academy proposed to remedy. A new department in literature which began with a series of papers issued from this establishment, has since undertaken to cover the ground ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... I perceive your objection then: you think me fairer without than within. I dare not contend you are altogether wrong in such conjecture. Faith, why not, senor? It would be strange otherwise. All lives do not flow gently amid prosaic routine, and my ship has been often enough upon the rocks. I have learned reasons of deceit and cruelty in the hard school of experience. If, in years of trial, I have grown hard of judgment, reckless of action, it is because others have ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... of a poet, who with all the courage of uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a cause, which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little objected by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's Prolusions; ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... cried Mrs. Octagon, becoming more prosaic than ever, "there is nothing to understand. But Selina lives in quite a lonely house, and has a lot of money. I never open the papers but what I expect to read ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... same means as before. He then went on to state that he remained in the Palace the whole of Tuesday night, all Wednesday, and up to one o'clock on Thursday morning, when the inquisitive youth was captured. He was not satisfied with this dull and prosaic account of his entry; but, on the following day, he tried to invent something marvellous, and alleged that he ascended the roof of the Palace, and got down the chimney; but there were no marks of soot ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... you depict them? Never, never! The Jesuits are merely a Romish army making ready for their future temporal kingdom, with a mitred emperor—a Roman high priest at their head. That is their ideal and object, without any mystery or elevated suffering. The most prosaic thirsting for power, for the sake of the mean and earthly pleasures of life, a desire to enslave their fellow-men, something like our late system of serfs, with themselves at the head as landed proprietors—that is all that they can be accused ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... that I shall be reproached (for it is the fashion of the day) for placing interest, vile and prosaic interest, at the foundation of the fraternity of nations. It would be preferred that this should be based upon charity, upon love; that there should be in it some self-denial, and that clashing a little with the material welfare of men, it should bear the ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... "next year I will do as much again, though it will be a little unnecessary, because you have my good wishes all the time. Still, you are too prosaic to fancy they can have ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... years. The secret that I learned that day has acted like a talisman, and has turned every spot that I have visited into an enchanted ground. Even my study table is not immune from its magic spell. A more prosaic spectacle never met the eye. The desk, the pigeon-holes, the drawers, and the piles of papers might have to do with a foundry or a fish-market, so very unromantic do they appear. And yet, what times I have whenever ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... the series of regulations as to the functions of the Levites in the Tabernacle worship. The words 'to perform the service' are, as the margin tells us, literally, to 'war the warfare.' Although it may be difficult to say why such very prosaic and homely work as carrying the materials of the Tabernacle and the sacrificial vessels was designated by such a term, the underlying suggestion is what I desire to fix upon now—viz., that work for God, of whatever kind it be, which Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... uses. Go and Catch a Falling Star is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in disparagement of women. In several of the Elegies, however, he throws away his lute and comes to the satirist's more prosaic business. He writes frankly as a man ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... a high opinion of the sisters, as you see— Another fellow's sister is so very dear to me! I love to work anear her when she's making over frocks, When she patches little trousers or darns prosaic socks; But I draw the line at one thing—yes, I don my hat and take A three hours' walk when she is moved to try her ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... what he ought to do. A deliberate sound of wheels arose in the distance, and then a cart was seen approaching, well filled with parcels, driven by a good-natured looking man on a double bench, and displaying on a board the legend, "I. Chandler, carrier." In the infamously prosaic mind of Mr. Finsbury, certain streaks of poetry survived and were still efficient; they had carried him to Asia Minor as a giddy youth of forty, and now, in the first hours of his recovered freedom, they suggested to him the idea of continuing his flight in Mr. Chandler's cart. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... This last prosaic fact, established by actual excavation, destroys the basis of all the current local legends and ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... is the world that it often leaves no time for mourning—that in the midst of our sorrow it causes us to hear the prosaic voices of reality and necessity, compelling us to dry our eyes and turning our thoughts from painfully-sweet remembrances of a lost happiness to ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... which followed the ceremony of initiation had all been disposed of, the business of the lodge proceeded. McMurdo, accustomed only to the prosaic performances of Chicago, listened with open ears and more surprise than he ventured to show ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... ever going back there?" inquired Bob, in a tone which said plainly that it was beyond his understanding how a man could give up life on a ranch and settle down to the very ordinary, prosaic life of the East. ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... blunt-witted, shallow-pated^, clod-pated^, addle- pated^, addle-brained^; dim-sighted, short-sighted; thick-skulled; weak in the upper story. shallow, borne, weak, wanting, soft, sappy, spoony; dull, dull as a beetle; stupid, heavy, insulse^, obtuse, blunt, stolid, doltish; asinine; inapt &c 699; prosaic &c 843; hebetudinous^. childish, child-like; infantine^, infantile, babyish, babish^; puerile, anile; simple &c (credulous) 486; old-womanish. fatuous, idiotic, imbecile, driveling; blatant, babbling; vacant; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... proposition, representing by the first passable physical phenomenon which came to hand, that ideal reality underlying all change, which is at once the beginning, the middle, and the end of all. That he did not mean Water, in the ordinary prosaic sense, to be identical with this, is suggested by some [10] other sayings of his. "Thales," says Aristotle elsewhere, "thought the whole universe was full of gods." "All things," he is recorded as saying, "have a soul in them, in ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... his dramas that Alfieri is chiefly indebted for the high reputation he has attained. Before his time the Italian language, so harmonious in the Sonnets of Petrarch and so energetic in the Commedia of Dante, had been invariably languid and prosaic in dramatic dialogue. The pedantic and inanimate tragedies of the 16th century were followed, during the iron age of Italian literature, by dramas of which extravagance in the sentiments and improbability in the action were the chief characteristics. The prodigious success of the Merope of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... becomes more scientific in its methods and in its detection also. The revolver places a more hasty, less decorous weapon than the old-fashioned pistol in the hands of the determined burglar. The literature of crime, such as it is, becomes vulgar and prosaic. Peace has no charm about him, no gaiety, but he has the virtues of his defects. He, unlike Sheppard, shuns company; he works alone, never depending on accomplices; a "tight cock," as Sheppard would have phrased it, and ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... The very names of favourite spots are poems in themselves. One is "the pavilion of the phoenixes"; another "the fountain of the white cranes." A rock is called "the tower of the quickening spirit"; the gate on the summit is "the portal of the clouds." More prosaic, but not less charming, is an inscription on a rock in the plain, "the place of the three smiles," because there some mandarins, meeting to drink and converse, told three peculiarly funny stories. Is not that delightful? It seems so to me. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... out of things, in a general way, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article my impression that it rather does, I know not whether primitive Lorette has not become sadly vulcanized into prosaic progress by the grand system of water-works established there for the benefit of Quebec. Connected as it is, now, with the latter place, by seven miles of iron pipes, I would not undertake to say that it retains aught of the rustic simplicity of its greener days. Had the pipes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... girl in the factory, who hesitates between the hard work at the machine for the smallest pay, without pleasures, and the easy money of the street, with an abundance of fun, may in the regrettable life of prosaic reality balance the consequences very differently from the moralist. She has discovered that the ideal of virtue is not so highly valued in her circles as in the middle classes. The loss of her virtue is not such a severe hindrance in her life, and even if she yields for a while to earn her extra ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... be noted en passant that many of the revived medieval words which sound so picturesque in Scott are of very prosaic ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... with an oracular air, "it was a capital error to make Olla a married woman; what business I should like to know, can a married woman have in a story?—She belongs properly to the dull prosaic region of common life—not to the fairy land of romance. Now the charm of sentiment is as necessary to a perfect tale, as the interest of adventure, or the excitement of conflict, and had Olla been ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... sense. He has not taken very high ground—he has abstained, far too much, in my opinion, from laying down those principles, from uttering those words which create sympathies, and make the conscience of the human race vibrate in unison. Say that he is a little prosaic, a little of the earth, earthy; do not say that he blusters, and that the best thing that England can do is to attack him without waiting to ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... kindness and disinterested humanity. His biography will be read with satisfaction, by those who feel themselves indebted to his writings. It is simple, honest, unpretending, like its subject. With the singularly prosaic mind of Mr. George Combe, no one can expect to find it animated with any living glow. It records the life of a public benefactor, but with as little freshness or enthusiasm, as if the author were giving a Phrenological lecture on a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... rhythm. Any one who cares to do so might test the validity of those rules in the nearest possible way, by applying them to the varied examples in this wide [6] survey of what has been actually well done in English prose, here exhibited on the side of their strictly prosaic merit—their conformity, before all other aims, to laws of a structure primarily reasonable. Not that that reasonable prose structure, or architecture, as Mr. Saintsbury conceives it, has been always, or even generally, the ideal, even of those chosen writers ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... after all, is much more rational than the more recent contention of sundry modern Orators of the Human Race that 'the mines belong to the miners'! But after it had talked itself hoarse, the Assembly had to descend to the prosaic business of legislation, and in dealing with the mines, as in dealing with other matters, it made a muddle of the laws which existed before it met, and left this muddle to be resolved into a new order of things legal, under the presiding genius ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... battle began in sober earnest. There were a great many witnesses to be called on both sides, their evidence being of more or less importance—chiefly less. But the interest centred round the prosaic figure of John O'Neill, the butler at Fitzwilliam Place, who had been in Mr. Brooks' ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... their young as partridges show for theirs. The cry is harsher and noisier than that of the latter. There is one sort which has a cry of so curious a description that a good deal of speculation has arisen as to its significance. It sounds like "Tre-tre-tre," and is meant, according to a prosaic Sicilian proverb, to be a declaration by the bird of its market value, which it assesses at three coins. Others have likened its cry to the harsh, grating blast of a cracked trumpet. Such being the case, it is just as well that we have no ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... them regarding "th' latest from th' Hills." Waffles made a rush for Hopalong, but fell over Big-foot's feet and all three were piled up in a heap. All were beaming with good nature, for they were as so many school boys playing truant. Prosaic cow-punching was relegated to the rear and they looked eagerly forward to their several missions. Frenchy told of the barb-wire fence war and of the new regulations of "Smith of Buffalo" regarding cow-punchers' guns, and from the caustic remarks explosively given it was plain to be seen what a wire ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... clearness. It is possible to express in the drab tones of morality the profound insights which have made religion the great guide to happiness; and even the man who deems himself irreligious may, if he takes to heart these more prosaic counsels, find something of the peace that has been the boon ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... to see the prosaic figure of Floss Eden, in brief tennis skirts and shady hat, hurrying across the lawn, with her boyish stride; racquet swinging, her round ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... art. Forty years after his death, Gerard de Lairesse, a popular painter, now forgotten, wrote of Rembrandt—"In his efforts to attain a yellow manner, Rembrandt merely achieved an effect of rottenness.... The vulgar and prosaic aspects of a subject were the only ones he was capable of noting." Poor Gerard ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... are fine touches of nature with regard to Cassandra. Hecuba shows that mixture of shame and reverence that prosaic kindred always do toward the inspired child, the poet, the elected sufferer for ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic and commonplace, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... really was at stake, the springs of motive were hidden behind the smiling countenance of the Machiavellian WOLMER. The only thing to do, and it is quite foreign to the habits of OLD MORALITY, was to meet guile with guile. WOLMER's question, plain enough as it appeared in print on the prosaic Orders, was, "Will Her Majesty's Ministers consider the advisability of appointing a Royal Commission to examine and report how far the evil of Fog is one that may be mitigated ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... thing from attributing to him such genius as must necessarily shine forth in every word he utters. Dr. Brandes, indeed, declines to believe even in his ability as a sociologist, on the ground that it is idle to write about the social development of the future. "To our prosaic minds," he says, "it may seem as if the most sensible utterance on the subject is that of the fool of the play: 'The future! Good heavens, we know nothing of the future.'" The best retort to this criticism is that which Eilert himself makes: "There's a thing or two ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... remember that the ancient Romans had lamps constructed somewhat like that in the picture, it seems strange that so rude a contrivance should be in use in the nineteenth century. But this is only the practical and prosaic side of the question. For artistic purposes the lamp is just what is ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... on general theories, the broad vistas which it may be made to encompass, and lastly the opportunity for eloquent self-expression offered by parliamentary debates, all taken together exert a powerful attraction for the intellectualized mind. Contrast with this the prosaic humdrum work of a trade union leader, the incessant wrangling over "small" details and "petty" grievances, and the case becomes exceedingly clear. The mind of the typical intellectual is too generalized to be lured by any such alternative. He is out of patience ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... true Putnam feeling about Jaggers; but that passion of devotion for the mare, which had inspired the English-speaking race for the past year, had not left him untouched. Jim Silver felt the little prosaic man thrilling at his side, and thrilled in his turn. He felt as he had felt when as a Lower Boy at Eton the Captain of the Boats had spoken to him—a swimming in the eyes, a brimming of the heart, a gulping at ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... mountaineer's is such a beautiful life, so simple, healthful, hardy, and fine; always face to face with nature. I try to teach them what an inestimable joy that alone is. I do not altogether believe in the prosaic views of rural life. It is true that the peasant digging his trench sees the clod, not the sky; but then when he does lift his head the sky is there, not the roof, not the ceiling. That is so much in itself. And here the sky is an everlasting grandeur; clouds and domes of snow ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... grateful to Herr Wickhoff for his new interpretations, not less sound and thoroughly worked out than they are on a first acquaintance startling. And yet we need not for all that shatter our old ideals, or force ourselves too persistently to look at Venetian art from another and a more prosaic, because a more precise ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... ironical smile, "How can you imagine, my dear friends, that I can take these fleeting shadowy images for true living and breathing forms?" For this reason many found fault with her as being cold, prosaic, and devoid of feeling; others, however, who had reached a clearer and deeper conception of life, were extremely fond of the intelligent, childlike, large-hearted girl But none had such an affection for her as Nathanael, who was a zealous and cheerful cultivator of the ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the physical characteristics of the continent is not surpassed in literature: nor is there any subdivision of the work in which the severest philosophy is not invested with the grace of poetry, and the driest statistics with the charm of romance. Western emigration seemed commonplace and prosaic till M. de Tocqueville said, "This gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event; it is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven onward ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... He was wont to sing for her also, albeit tunelessly, and as he sat blond and roseate and gay, warbling after his fashion on the hearth, her clouded old eyes were relumed with a radiance that came from within and was independent of the prosaic light of day. His favorite ditty was an old nursery rhyme in which the name "Pretty Polly Hopkins" occurs with flattering iteration, and he began to apply it to her, for he had come to think her very ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... were out of the jog-trot of my prosaic life. And being of a stolid and incurious nature, I left Seaton and his marriage, and even his aunt, to themselves in my memory, and scarcely gave a thought to them until one day I was walking up the Strand again, and passed the flashing ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... prosaic Gregson, laying his hand upon the lady's sleeve with as little sentiment as if she were a Notting Hill hooligan, "I am not very clear yet who you are or what you are; but you've said enough to make it very clear that we shall ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sent in pictures for the Academy or other exhibitions. His larger and more highly finished landscapes were unequal in technical perfection,—sometimes harsh or cold in color, or stiff in composition; sometimes full of imagination, at others literal and prosaic,—but always impressive reproductions of interesting or peculiar scenery. In later years he used in conversation to qualify himself as a "topographical artist;" and the definition was true, though not exhaustive. He had an intuitive and a perfectly trained eye ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... unconsciously gives a hint of another purpose for which the complexity of muscles in the larynx may exist. After speaking of the "innumerable little fingers of the muscles which move the vocal cords," he continues: "These fingers (which prosaic anatomists call fibres), besides being almost countless in number, are arranged in so intricate a manner that every one who dissects them finds out something new, which, it is needless to say, ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... the Ouse. The suggestion that they were originally beacon towers is not very convincing, though the Ouse at the time they were built was a wider and deeper stream, forming in fact an estuary haven. The more prosaic explanation is that lack of stone for the quoins, which every square flint tower must have, led the builders to adopt this form. In any case, a beacon fire from a square tower is as effectual as from a round one. Piddinghoe has many associations with the smuggling days which ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... descend to a prosaic life! how few to meet one as rich and full beside them! The tone grew ever lower; he looked up slowly, fastening ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... failed to do so; though the tendency of 'Easter Day' is as different from that of its precursor as their common Christianity admits. The balance of argument in 'Christmas Eve' is in favour of direct revelation of religious truth and prosaic certainty regarding it; while the 'Easter Day' vision makes a tentative and unresting attitude the first condition of the religious life; and if Mr. Browning has meant to say—as he so often did say—that religious certainties are required for the undeveloped mind, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... a boarding-house in the world where the seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background, where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out passions? You look ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank verse will therefore, I fear, be too often found in description exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome. His diction is certainly poetical, as it is not prosaic; and elegant, as it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. He rarely either recalls old phrases, or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The sense, however, of his words is strained when "he views the Ganges from ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... contact with Katenka (who during those two years had been wearing long dresses, and was growing prettier every day), the possibility of his falling in love with her never seemed to enter his head. Whether this proceeded from the fact that the prosaic recollections of childhood were still too fresh in his memory, or whether from the aversion which very young people feel for everything domestic, or whether from the common human weakness which, at a first encounter with anything fair and pretty, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... world! Think of country vicarages, of Australian or Himalayan outposts, where men have nourished out lives of duty upon the fire of three transient, priceless years. Think of the generations of children to whom their fathers' lives, prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if someone let fall the word 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge,' so that they themselves came to surmise an aura about the name as of a land very far off; and then say if the ineffable spell of those two words do not lie somewhere in the conflux ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... love that!" exclaimed Barrie suddenly, in the manner of her old self. Nevertheless, she descended and advertised her return to the prosaic world by closing the door loudly in less than ten minutes after Mrs. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... she seldom takes a chance if it is possible to avoid it. It is common for men to marry women who bring nothing to the joint capital of marriage save good looks and an appearance of vivacity; it is almost unheard of for women to neglect more prosaic inquiries. Many a rich man, at least in America, marries his typist or the governess of his sister's children and is happy thereafter, but when a rare woman enters upon a comparable marriage she is commonly set down as ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... die, great truths are born. To such a boy at such a moment there comes the firm conviction which increasing years can only emphasize: Home is but a poor prosaic place, but Home—Ah, my brother, think on this—Home ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... heretofore shown, he found sweet moments of dalliance to steal away from his prosaic toils, and court the muse among the green lanes and hedgerows in the rural environs of London, and on the 26th of May, 1770, he was enabled to bring his Deserted Village before ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... have still good friends there. That is the prosaic fact, but there is ever so much behind it. We can't see the trail just now, dear, but we are riding out into the future that has all kinds of brightness ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... art, in the plastic repose of sculpture, and the second in the mysterious cadences of music, the poetry of the twentieth century finds its ideal in life, in the creative evolution of being, even in the mere things, the 'prosaic' pariahs of previous poetry, on which our shaping wills are wreaked. We know it in poets unlike one another but yet more unlike their predecessors, from D'Annunzio and Dehmel and Claudel to our Georgian experimenters in the poetry of ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... he said, "how silently you came upon me! I was dreaming. Come and stand here. Is not that scene one to make a poet of the most prosaic man?" ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... and, in the year 1760, published, by the house of B. Mecom in Boston, a 72 page brochure entitled "The Rudiments of Latin Prosody with a Dissertation on Letters and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic and Prosaic Composition, collected from some of ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... that, though I knew no more than I had at first, I derived some satisfaction from the mere fact that for the second time Virginia had confirmed the extraordinary belief or fancy which had possessed prosaic MacMechem, the unimaginative Miss Peters, and, finally, myself. It seemed to justify positive steps in an investigation; after a further examination of the little body on the bed which offered still better evidence of an improvement in the course of the malady, I left the Marburys' ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... and harmless; fickle and passionate, if rebelliously natural; exhausting his youth and manhood in fruitless action, and devoting the moments of reflection to the playful current of the muse's fancy, forsooth, to the delectation of the more prosaic humanity in this his locality. A life of pleasure was ever his treasure, and he agrees, after experience of life's fitful ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... Coins and some ornaments of this Temple of Isis. David listened to Michael Angelo's account with strange interest, for it seemed to him as though the fabled characters of Bulwer's story were endowed with actual reality by Michael Angelo's prosaic statements. ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... "abide" in Christ, to "make Christ our most constant companion," is to them the purest mysticism. They want something absolutely tangible and absolutely direct. These are not the poetical souls who seek a sign, a mysticism in excess, but the prosaic natures whose want is mathematical definition in details. Yet it is perhaps not possible to reduce this problem to much more rigid elements. The beauty of Friendship is its infinity. One can never evacuate life of mysticism. Home is full of it, love is full of ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... to romp with the children, whilst the rest dispersed in different directions. At luncheon all met again, and there was much merry-making over the tansy cakes—very foolish, no doubt, but to me at least very delightful, and perhaps a wise practice, at times, even for the most prosaic. In the afternoon the Colonel took me for a drive to a charmingly picturesque village in the Chilterns, whence we did not set out on our way ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... about the house was many a prosaic bit of furniture which was musical with memories for the parents,—memories of their first little homes and their early struggles together. This side-board, now relegated to the children's play-room, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... hunt for that prosaic instrument in a desultory way, and then forget it in some dispute with Colin, who generally welcomed any distraction whilst preparing his school-work—a result which Fraeulein Mozer probably took into account, particularly ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... missed the many romantic associations with which the name of our floating vehicle was generally connected; yet, suggestive fancy could readily supply their place with kindred ideas culled from our more prosaic surroundings. We had, it is true, no crimson-sashed, ragged, ballet-costumed gondolier to "ply the measured oar;" because, in the first instance, we did not row up at all. We were a trifle too wise in our generation to pull up the river in a lumbering barge under a broiling ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Chretien in his later romances will avoid compiling such a prosaic blue-book as is found in this passage, though similar lists of knights occur in the old English romances as late as Malory, though of some of them but little is known. Unfortunately, we have for the old French romances no such complete work as that furnished ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... authority; they never became a moving power in the life of the Jewish masses. It was the poets who nourished these lurid ideas, and poetry which has done so much for the good of religion has also done it many a disservice. Judaism, in its prosaic form, accepted the ideas of Immortality, Retribution, and so forth, but the real interest was in life here, not ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... be outside with you!" She wanted to feel "at sea" with him, to bathe herself, under the shelter of his protection, in the magnificent, tempestuous, inspiring night. To her, cooped up all her life in streets and prosaic circumstances, there was something in the present situation too poetical for words. No bride who had married money, and was setting out by P. & O. upon her luxurious European tour, could have been more keenly sensible of the romance of foreign ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... she exulted, not to have to live in Other People's Houses, but to make her own shrine. She held his hand tightly and stared ahead as the car swung round a corner and stopped in the street before a prosaic frame house in a small ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Alfonso. He is particularly anxious about the charge of heresy. Nothing indicates that any guilt of greater moment weighed upon his conscience.[31] After scrutinizing all accessible sources of information, we are thus driven to accept the prosaic hypothesis that Tasso was deranged, and that his Court-rivals had availed themselves of a favorable opportunity for making the duke sensible of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Haddon Hall! The most prosaic summer tourist could hardly fail to be moved by admiration of its delights. It is still a real home, and seems alive with memories of the fair Dorothy Vernon and her family. The old castle has scarcely changed at all since ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... corsage is so becoming, my darling. It alone would be enough to charm the most prosaic suitor, and that bracelet shows off so prettily on your white arm. I am so glad ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... what I have already said concerning the way in which novelists present us with the extreme passions of ill-balanced people and describe them as types, the normal man being too prosaic to attract their readers. Rotten as it is with neurotic degenerates, our modern society is certainly not wanting in pathological models for the novelists, but it is nevertheless false to always put these into prominence. The cultured man of well-balanced mind, adapts himself to marriage on the whole ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... respects these poems," says Mr. Barham's biographer, "remarkable as they have been pronounced for the wit and humor which they display, their distinguishing attractions lies in the almost unparalleled flow and felicity of the versification. Popular phrases, sentences the most prosaic, even the cramped technicalities of legal diction, and snatches from well-nigh every language, are wrought in with an apparent absence of all art and effort that surprises, pleases, and convulses the reader at every turn. The author triumphs with a master hand over every variety of stanza, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Revolutionary bullets, no families of unbroken aristocratic descent from over the ocean, no traditions of Colonial times, no stories of danger, no interesting relics: a few tales of pioneer life, a few encounters with the Indians, composed the annals of the town; and the prosaic reality of its life was as new and glaring as the white ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... bestial shapes, the noise and riot, may well have seemed demoniacal to simple people slightly "elevated," perhaps, by Christmas feasting, while the human nature of the maskers was not altogether forgotten.{71} Another theory of an even more prosaic character has been propounded—"that the Kallikantzaroi are nothing more than established nightmares, limited like indigestion to the twelve days of feasting. This view is |246| taken by Allatius, who says that a Kallikantzaros has all the characteristics ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... stole a look at the prosaic figure of the latter gentleman which was full of scornful curiosity. With some diffidence she invited the admiral to stay to supper, and was obviously delighted ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... Journal office, smoking a morning cigarette and looking over files. Like all ingrainedly idle men, he was very fond of lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work. But one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his day, he might have found a more ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... more closely maintained throughout his career the national, or, at any rate, the racial standpoint. The other is that while Tolstoy and Ibsen presently became, the one indifferent to artistic expression, and the other baldly prosaic where he was once deeply poetical, Bjoernson preserved the poetic impulse of his youth, and continued to give it play even in his envisagement of the most practical modern problems. Let us enlarge a little upon these two themes. Ernest Renan, speaking ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... the feast there is no fixed order of procedure; balls, concerts, garden-parties, and so on are arranged as may be most convenient, while the intervals are spent in visits, dinners, and drives. Not until the end of the week does any student lay aside his gay costume and resume the more prosaic garments of his own times. All through the week the influence of the corps, which is the life of the University from the student's point of view, is manifest in the collective character of all the festivities, everything being done either by the corps itself ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... lyric, the history, or the philosophical discussion. Equal to the highest creations, they refused to tolerate anything lower; and they knew not the novel, because their poetical notions were never left in a nebulous, prosaic state, but were ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... phrase and the cadence of the voice which pronounced it. For several days I had been almost painfully alive to the beauty of an especially lovely spring, always so lovely after the long winter in the mountains. One evening, going on a very prosaic errand to a farm-house of our region, I walked along a narrow path through dark pines, beside a brook swollen with melting snow, and found the old man I came to see, sitting silent and alone before his blackened small old house. I did my errand, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... the flea-bitten countenances of our companions, who fled from their Spanish venta to take refuge at the club the morning after our arrival, they may surely be thankful for being directed to the best house of accommodation in one of the most unromantic, uncomfortable, and prosaic of towns. ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... popular story is that this orchard formed the subject of a bequest to "St. John's College," and that the testator, being an Oxford man, was held by the Courts to have intended to benefit the College in his own University. As a matter of prosaic fact, the orchard originally belonged to Merton College, Oxford, being part of the original gift of their founder, Walter de Merton, and it was acquired by St. John's College by exchange in the early years of the ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... ways. The Mayor desired a pig-sty, with the most charming litter of little black and white pigs, as nice as guinea-pigs, and their considerably coarser grunting mamma, done to hand. He was a jolly, prosaic man, Master Mayor, very proud of his prosaicness, as you rarely see a real man of his poetry: he maintained, though Mrs. Mayor nearly swooned at the idea, that he would sooner have a pig-sty than a ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... curiosity is the best part of my Roxana. The prologue you speak of was mine, so named, but not worth much. You ask me for 2 or 3 pages of verse. I have not written so much since you knew me. I am altogether prosaic. May be I may touch off a sonnet in time. I do not prefer Col. Jack to either Rob. Cr. or Roxana. I only spoke of the beginning of it, his childish history. The rest is poor. I do not know anywhere any good character of De Foe besides what you mention. I do ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... namesake's coming. For the other years I pleased myself prodigiously by remembering that she must speak my name openly to her first-born. And I lusted for battle, then. I was an early Norseman, and I would escape the prosaic bed-death, since, for those dying thus, Held waited in her chill prison-house below, with hunger her dish, starvation her knife, care her bed, and anguish her curtains. To survive for easy death, long deferred, perhaps, I should have my empty ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... he had a voyage to the Far East in prospect. Certainly, a fortnight earlier the thing furthest from his thoughts would have been the engaging of himself as amanuensis and general literary assistant to an ex-judge upon so prosaic a task as the history of the Supreme Court of the State. To say that a rose-hued scarf, a laugh, and an alluring speaking voice explain it seems absurd, even when you add to these that which the young man saw during that moment of time when he looked ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... French, . . . showed the French that their whole classical literature was worthless, that Moliere was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine likewise was of no account . . . that the French are the most prosaic people of the world, and that there is no poetry in France." It is well known that Coleridge detested the French, as "a light but cruel race", that he undervalued their literature and even affected an ignorance of the language. The narrowness of Schlegelian ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... "poetry" is here taken in a liberal sense and includes more than the translations of German verse alone. Some translations were found whose originals, though prosaic in form, are poetic in content. This was readily recognized by the translators, who have accordingly given metrical renderings. For example, we have Letter LXI of the Sorrows of Werter Versified; four of Gessner's ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... the dock, whither Shag had already made his way, coming in a more prosaic trolley car from The Haven, and soon they were ready to row down the ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... his Yorkshire possessions. I can imagine his eye glancing down on a far more thrilling scene than the green three-sided courtyard enclosed by a crumbling grey wall, though to him the buildings, the men, and every detail that filled the great space, were no doubt quite prosaic. It did not thrill him to see a man-at-arms cleaning weapons, when the man and his clothes, and even the sword, were as modern and everyday as the soldier's wife and child that we can see ourselves, but how much would we not ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... purchase and "fake" a story of his capture had proved fruitless for the sufficient reason that no captive Grizzly of the true California type could be found, and the enterprising journal was constrained to resort to the prosaic expedient of laying a foundation of fact and veritable achievement ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... peculiar to an altogether uncultivated and sunburnt wilderness." The comparison appears so much the more suitable, when we remark that wilderness and desert are here personified, and appear as hungry and thirsty. This, however, was too poetical for several prosaic interpreters. Hence they would in both instances supply a [Hebrew: b] after the [Hebrew: k], "as in the wilderness" "I place her in the condition in which she was formerly, in the [Pg 236] wilderness." But it is self-evident that such a supplying of the [Hebrew: ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... replied the young lady, "if you only would some pretty story tell; but you are very prosaic, Mr. Morris. Do you ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... English fallacy that the Irish are weak and emotional. This again springs from the very fact that the Irish are lucid and logical. For being logical they strictly separate poetry from prose; and as in prose they are strictly prosaic, so in poetry they are purely poetical. In this, as in one or two other things, they resemble the French, who make their gardens beautiful because they are gardens, but their fields ugly because they are ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... lived Dorothy Vaneman, who had promised to be his wife. He had seen her but once since "the impossible" had happened, since his prosaic copper steam-bath had taken flight under his hand and pointed the way to a great adventure. In a car his friend was to build, moved by this stupendous power which he must learn to control, they would traverse interstellar space—visit strange ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... in the absence of a miracle, what could we do with two and a half francs, if we had them? A miserable sum!—convertible, perhaps, into as much bouilli, bread and cheese, and thin country wine as might have satisfied our own hunger in a prosaic and commonplace way; but for four persons, two of ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... men of my acquaintance, I was probably the most prosaic, the least adventurous, the one man in a hundred who would be likely to go without a deviation from the normal through the orderly procession of the seasons, summer suits to winter flannels, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... later we left the Grange and came to our new home, a furnished house four miles away. It is a big, square, prosaic-looking building, but comfortable, with a nice big garden, so we are fortunate to have found such a place in the neighbourhood. We told each other gushingly how fortunate we had been, every time that we discovered anything that we hated ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... great conquest to have made? Is it not almost an act of chivalry for these prosaic days to go forth into the world as a private inquirer, and win a hundred thousand pounds for the lady of one's love? And yet I wish any one rather than my Charlotte were the lineal descendant ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... and was prepared to meet them in a suitable manner. But, to his amazement, all that he had presupposed and had feared proved a timorous, fantastic fiction. The business was far more simple, more wearisome and more prosaic, and at the same time ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... you silly child," said Patty, who was of a prosaic and literal turn of mind. "You wouldn't believe, Miss Campbell," she went on, turning to her elder sister, "would you, that Maggie last Christmas went and told Flop that Santa Claus was a real old man, and that he really ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
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