"Undistinguished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Again, the Jews would say that in any case the Messiah would not be likely to be connected with a humble carpenter and his folk. The evangelist's reply is that David himself was descended from comparatively undistinguished men and from women who were despised. Thus St. Matthew meets both points ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother was of a family of the name of Hanks. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky about 1781 or 2, where, a year or two later, he was killed by Indians—not ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... though they lived long before Christ; "for all such as these, says he, who lived according to the divine word within them, and which word was in all men, were Christians." Hence also, since the introduction of Christianity, many of our own countrymen have been Quakers, though undistinguished by the exterior marks of dress or language. Among these we may reckon the great and venerable Milton. His works are full of the sentiments of[32] Quakerism. And hence, in other countries and in other ages, there have been men, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... rather affected thought and style. Aus Italien (op. 16) is an exuberant picture of impressions of his tour in Italy, of the ruins at Rome, the seashore at Sorrento, and the life of the Italian people. Macbeth (op. 23) gives us a rather undistinguished series of musical interpretations of poetical subjects. Don Juan (op. 20) is much finer, and translates Lenau's poem into music with bombastic vigour, showing us the hero who dreams of grasping all the joy of the world, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... superiority, but because it was extremely difficult to pitch on any other candidate to whom to pin ones faith. Peradventure II was the favourite, not in the sense of being a popular fancy, but by virtue of a lack of confidence in any one of his rather undistinguished rivals. The brains of clubland were much exercised in seeking out possible merit where none was very obvious to the naked intelligence, and the house-party at Lady Susan's was possessed by the same uncertainty and irresolution that ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... tailors been undistinguished. John Stow, the historian, worked at the trade during some part of his life. Jackson, the painter, made clothes until he reached manhood. The brave Sir John Hawkswood, who so greatly distinguished himself ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave 50 To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... by the Rotary Club of Seattle, would be a justifiable compromise, and satisfy nearly everybody. Its adoption would free our national map from one more of its meaningless names—the name, in this case, of an undistinguished foreign naval officer whose only connection with our history is the fact that he fought against us during the American Revolution. Incidentally, it would also free me from the need of an apology for using the hybrid "Rainier-Tacoma"! * * * Many of the illustrations ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... know him at sight? If you continue in your belief as to his character—that he is to be a king as Herod was—of course you will keep on until you meet a man clothed in purple and with a sceptre. On the other hand, he I look for will be one poor, humble, undistinguished—a man in appearance as other men; and the sign by which I will know him will be never so simple. He will offer to show me and all mankind the way to the eternal life; the beautiful ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... And it is not as if Mr. Ablett's appearance were in any way undistinguished. Quite the contrary. I'm ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... Betty. "I told you what I thought right. I love the club, and every single member of it—except my cousin, Fanny Crawford. I don't love Fanny, and she doesn't love me—I say so quite plainly; therefore, once again, I break Rule I. You see, girls, I cannot stay. I must become again an undistinguished member of this great school. Don't suppose it will hurt my vanity; but it will touch deeper things in me, and I shall never, never forget your kindness. I can by no possibility do more than I have done. Good-bye, dear Margaret; ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... a yellow beard, by name James Blount. With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel's late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... performance of the Royal Academy of Music was undistinguished; it is hard to understand why the noble directors should have begun their season with Numitor, an opera by Porta, a Venetian composer, who is described in the book of words as "Servant to His Grace ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... taught a pack of girls up there at the school, and looked as if she were born for a teacher,—the very best foil that she could have chosen; and here was this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning round to that very undistinguished young person, as if he rather preferred her conversation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... more impressive instance of the contrast, familiar to biographers, between the apparent insignificance and the real importance of their hero in undistinguished youth. To any one considering Wordsworth as he then was,—a rough and somewhat stubborn young man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed alternately to idle without grace and to study without advantage,— it might well have seemed incredible that ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... that Venice would enter into correspondence with Zurich, who would act for the other allied cities, to communicate to them what happened in Italy on the side of the Emperor, or what transpired of his dangerous schemes. He excused the sending of a solitary, youthful, undistinguished man, to such an enlightened republic by the necessity of the case, the desire to avoid notice,—to conceal the movement toward a close alliance between two free states from the watchful glance of the ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... father, Major James Brooks, late of the 4th (King's Own) Regiment, had married twice, and at the time of his retirement from active service was for the second time a widower. Blindness—contracted by exposure and long marches over the snows of Galicia—had put an end to a career by no means undistinguished. In his last fight, at Corunna, he had not only earned a mention in despatches from his brigadier-general, Lord William Bentinck, but by his alertness in handling his half-regiment at a critical moment, and refusing its right to an outflanking line of ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... career of the brilliant Themistocles he had a persistent opponent, Aristides, a man, like him, born of undistinguished parents, but who by moral strength and innate power of intellect won the esteem and admiration of his fellow-citizens. He became the leader of the aristocratic section of the people, as Themistocles did of the democratic, and for years the ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Its rubbish back once more. And lie down, undistinguished, In the rough rock as before? Does the costly diamond, blazing On that crowned and queenly one, Look back with sorrowful gazing To the coarse ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... car a mere average man, undistinguished but by a lack of especial distinction, sober of habit, economical of gesture, dressed in a simple lounge suit such as anybody might wear, beneath a rough and ready-made motorcoat. When the car stopped he had stood up in his place beside the chauffeur as if meaning to get out, but rather ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... should be misconstrued as an assignation. Ha! out, rapiers! and let us be ready for the moment when Barbara, rushing between the combatants, receives in her own bosom the blade intended for ——, etc. But of course not enough blade to endanger the happy ending. So there you are. A placid, undistinguished tale, that may be commended as nourishment or soporific according to the taste and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... excitement there has been among the non-combatant community; what handshaking; what embracing; what fervent delight! This unique life is to end; we are to become reasonably clean and quite ordinary mortals again, lost among the world's population of fifteen hundred millions—undistinguished, unknown—that is, if ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... of the will is the first step that takes a human being out of the crowd. Charmian had suffered because she was in the crowd, undistinguished, lost like a violet in a prairie abloom with thousands of violets. Something in Algeria, something perhaps in Susan Fleet, had put into her a resolve, unacknowledged even to herself. She had returned to England, meaning to marry ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... of a very old lady with an extremely wrinkled skin and a deep voice who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's inexperienced eye to be an antimacassar upon her head, a shy, blond young man with a narrow forehead and glasses, two undistinguished women in plain skirts and blouses, and a middle-aged couple, very fat and alike in black, Mr. and Mrs. Alderman Dunstable, of the Borough Council of Marylebone. These were seated in an imperfect semicircle about a very copper-adorned ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... "thou'd" by the meanest of his subjects, who never took their hats off when they came into his presence; and as singular for a Government to be without one priest in it, and for a people to be without arms, either offensive or defensive; for a body of citizens to be absolutely undistinguished but by the public employments, and for neighbours not to entertain the least jealousy one against ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... and who already had some knowledge and experience of Irish affairs? Be this as it may, we know that in 1580, Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before, in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of him as "having many ways deserved some consideration from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... the determination of their resistance begin to falter and relax. President Woodruff called on me to speak, and I felt that it was my duty to represent the needs, the hopes, and the opportunities of the hundreds of thousands of the undistinguished mass who would make no decision for themselves, but whose fate was trembling on the event. I rose to speak for them, with my hand on my brother's shoulder, knowing that my every word would be a stab at his heart, and hoping that my grasp might be a touch of sympathy to him—knowing that I must ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... turn'd to gray? I'll ne'er believe a word they say. 'Tis true, but let it not be known, My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown; For nature, always in the right, To your decays adapts my sight; And wrinkles undistinguished pass, For I'm ashamed to use a glass: And till I see them with these eyes, Whoever says you have them, lies. No length of time can make you quit Honour and virtue, sense and wit; Thus you may still be young to me, While I can better hear than see. O ne'er may Fortune ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... soul. He had prepared for the event; indeed the tedium of his confinement had been much relieved by the composition of lofty and heart-stirring addresses, in which he, the noble cavalier, laid his precious self and fortune at the feet of this undistinguished, but rich and ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... sometimes they are so; but this social drilling, unless carried to extremes, is not without its use. In America, I have always understood that, on such occasions, silent laws of etiquette exist in all good company, which are founded on propriety and tact. The young give way to the old, the undistinguished to the distinguished, and he who is at home to the stranger. These rules are certainly the most rational, and in the best taste, when they can be observed, and, on the whole, they lead perhaps to the fewest embarrassments; always so, if there happen to be none but the ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... burning, so those men, though ordained to the Holy Apostleship, would find themselves strong and fruitful in good works, only as they remained in steadfast communion with the Lord. Without Christ what were they, but unschooled Galileans, some of them fishermen, one a publican, the rest of undistinguished attainments, and all of them weak mortals? As branches of the Vine they were at that hour clean and healthful, through the instructions and authoritative ordinances with which they had been blessed, and by the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the newspaper. My dear, dear brother, how you would work hard if you only knew what a prize success in life might give you. Little as I have seen of her, I could guess that she will never bestow a thought on an undistinguished man. Come down for one day, and tell me if ever, in all your ambition, you had such a goal before ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... only with a modicum of business experience (for surely the three months with Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a knowledge of the world and a social position which she had found to be fairly marketable. That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and undistinguished applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for an instant imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... proceeded from the cruel and vindictive spirit of Philip the Fair, who, having entertained a private disgust against some eminent templars, determined to gratify at once his avidity and revenge, by involving the whole order in an undistinguished ruin. On no better information than that of two knights, condemned by their superiors to perpetual imprisonment for their vices and profligacy, he ordered on one day all the templars in France to be committed to prison, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... that had remained of the years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. This man had followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor for his sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilled forever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished, unavenged! It seemed to him like murder—murder with which his ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... presently LOKE—the first dressed like a Norwegian peasant, with a hunting-spear in his hand; the other undistinguished. ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... a pair of as yet undistinguished officers, both of whom were to be heard of again in after time, and it did not occur to the very much elated "scout," as he now considered himself, to correct General Scott's apparent idea that Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was a particular ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries. 'Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them.' The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little river goes wandering on its way." He was speaking French and she followed him easily now, her eyes beginning to fling out again their natural sunny beams of interest. "I was born there twenty-six years ago and haven't done much of anything since. You see before you, Mademoiselle, a very undistinguished young man, who has signally failed to accomplish the dream of his boyhood, which was to be a great artist like Raphael or Angelo. Instead of being famous I am but a poor Lieutenant ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... was this in the beginning.' For there the view of the absolute non-being of the effect is objected to, 'But how could it be thus?' &c., and then the decision is given that from the beginning the world was 'being.' This matter is clearly set forth in the text 'This was then undistinguished; it became distinguished by name and form' (Bri. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... the rue de Dunkerque stands the Hotel Railleux. It is a tall and narrow house, somewhat dirty and entirely undistinguished; there is nothing to recommend it save perhaps an air of privacy, a certain insignificance that wedges it between the surrounding buildings in a manner tempting to one ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... merely perished, being done in some fugitive medium; and the walls are now covered with the works of Vasari himself and his pupils and do not matter, while the ceiling is a muddle of undistinguished paint. There are many statues which also do not matter; but at the raised end is Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the first Medici Pope, and at the other a colossal modern statue of Savonarola, who was in person the dominating ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Our campaign was undistinguished by any striking event. From June to September of this year (1696), we did little but subsist and observe, after which we recrossed the Rhine at Philipsburg, where our rear guard was slightly inconvenienced by the enemy. In ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... elite, or the company at the upper table, "Sir Peter Laurie was one, and Mr. Lockhart was not one: for he sat among the undistinguished at a side table." Our Court guest also sat at a side table though he pleads guilty to "foul" means—"that of displacing an engine-turned and satine-ed card, which had been deposited therein, as the worthy locum tenens and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... cannot say, but to me it is intensely interesting, and if you can arrange for a few dozen reprints in paper wrappers I shall be glad to have them. I had, of course, some knowledge of my ancestors, but I had no idea that we were quite such an undistinguished rabble of groundlings for so long. That drunken whipper-in to Lord Dashingham in the seventeen-seventies particularly delights ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... had been laid aside on entering the saloon, as was the custom of the Romans in their own families, or among private friends, hung on the back of an armed chair; of ample size and fine material, but undistinguished by the marks of senatorial or equestrian rank. Such was the aspect, such the bearing of the youth, who might be safely deemed the girl's permitted suitor, from his whole air and manner, as he listened ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... thus entangled by a bond of enduring material, a bait for a fierce brute which eagerly pressed forward to snap at me. Believe me, boys, this was not the happiest moment of my life. I knew no reason why I should resignedly submit to so undistinguished a fate. My knife, however, was in the boat, so that my release could only be attained by extreme exertion. Accordingly I writhed and jerked with my 'best violence,' all the time denouncing the whole race of bears, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... from the neighbouring prince, who imagined that the fame of his exploits had struck the Arabians with terror, and disposed them to submission. The ambassador was introduced to the chief of the tribe, a venerable old man, undistinguished by any mark of ostentation from the rest, who received him sitting cross-legged at the door of his tent. He then began to speak, and, in a long and studied harangue, described the power of his master, the invincible courage of his armies, the vast profusion of arms, of warlike engines, and military ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... through it ere his hand could throw. And thigh and arm and chest and side With streams of rushing blood were dyed. Still unsubdued though wounded oft The shattered trunk he raised aloft, And down with well-directed aim On Jambumali's chest it came. There crushed upon the trampled grass He lay an undistinguished mass, The foeman's eye no more could see His head or chest or arm or knee. And bow and car and steeds(875) and store Of glittering shafts ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... opportunity to introduce our collections listed under so many thousand heads of a different nature, for want of which the learned world would be deprived of infinite delight as well as instruction, and we ourselves buried beyond redress in an inglorious and undistinguished oblivion? ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... fibres, or a Mind-Training System which has brought General Blank's intellect to its present pitch, should be accepted more greedily by the man-in-the-street than a remedy which has only proved its value in the case of his undistinguished neighbour, but then I can never understand quite a number of things. However, that doesn't matter. All that matters at the moment is that Mr. Sidney Mandragon has now achieved glory. Probably the papers ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... Indian turban, and even the queer head-dress of the Parsee, is far from being a stranger in our assemblies. We doubt whether the name of Akhbar Khan himself, proclaimed at the foot of a staircase, would excite the same sensation in the present day, as the announcement of the most undistinguished wearer of the turban some ten or twenty years ago; but of the "Tours" and "Narratives" which are usually the inevitable result of such an influx of pilgrims, our Oriental visitors have as yet produced hardly their due proportion. For many years, the travels of Mirza Abu-Talib Khan, a Hindustani[5] ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... consecration of St. Anne's, Alderney, when I accompanied the Bishop to the ceremony: and some memorable stanzas about the decent expediency of the Bailiff and Jurats being robed for official uniform, since ornamentally adopted; but before I wrote they wore mean and undistinguished "mufti." ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... mind of man holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, if you ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... before he fell dead of heart disease. So the old will had to stand, and the property, instead of going to Burton, was divided among the children of Mr. Baker, Burton's mother taking merely her share. But for this extraordinary good hap Richard Burton might have led the life of an undistinguished country gentleman; ingloriously breaking his dogs, training his horses and attending to the breed of stock. The planting of a quincunx or the presentation of a pump to the parish might have proved his solitary title to fame. Mr. Baker was buried at Elstree church, where may be seen a tablet ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... he held up one maimed hand and leaned over the edge of the platform, and his undistinguished face glowed with the white light of a great passion within. The ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... son of Caius Laelius, who was the life-long friend of Scipio Africanus the Elder, was born B.C. 186, a little earlier in the same year with his friend Africanus the Younger. He was not undistinguished as a military commander, as was proved by his successful campaign against Viriathus, the Lusitanian chieftain, who had long held the Roman armies at bay, and had repeatedly gained signal advantages over them. He was known in the State, ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... preserve the favour of a prince; never offending in word or gesture; in the highest degree courteous and complaisant; wherein he set an excellent example to his colleagues, which they did not think fit to follow. But this extreme civility is universal and undistinguished, and in private conversation, where he observeth it as inviolably as if he were in the greatest assembly, it is sometimes censured as formal. Two reasons are assigned for this behaviour: first, from the consciousness of his humble original,[12] he keepeth all familiarity at the utmost distance, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... the station. It rotated fast enough to give weight, but even on the outer skin that was only one-half Earth gravity. A couple of silent Martians prepared undistinguished meals and did housework in the quarters. There were no films or other organized recreation, though Lancaster was told that the forbidden sector included a ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... years after the event we cannot help wondering why the story was not earlier put in book form; for in its delineation of the character of an adventurer it is as great as VANITY FAIR, while for the local colour of history, if I may put it so, it is no undistinguished precursor of ESMOND. ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Justiniani Participazio, A.D., 827, the son and Successor of Angelo, undistinguished by events of more important character, the Venetians became possessed of the relics of that saint to whom they ever afterwards appealed as the great patron of their state and city. These remains were obtained from Alexandria by a pious stratagem, ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... case fully correspond to the early promise. Rank and station the two young ladies attained; but rank and station do not always throw people upon prominent stages of action or display. Many a family, possessing both rank and wealth, and not undistinguished possibly by natural endowments of an order fitted for brilliant popularity, never emerge from obscurity, or not into any splendor that can be called national; sometimes, perhaps, from a temper unfitted for worthy struggles in the head of the house; possibly ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... or ignorant man. So too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... he found relief in an early developed taste for reading. In 1818 the family moved to a lonely part of Maine, where in roaming the lonely woods he gained a liking for solitude as well as for nature. He returned to Salem in 1819 to prepare for Bowdoin College, which he entered in 1821. After an undistinguished course he went back to his native town, whither his mother ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... of the extraordinary scenes of romance and chivalry in which Mary Queen of Scots moved during her captivity under Lord Scrope's care at Bolton Castle in the previous year. He had met in his travels in France one of her undistinguished adherents who had managed to get a position in the castle ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... He could not apply the thematic system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... at least equal to that of any other European country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for more than a century, while (as has not yet been said) ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... companion remained unappeased, decided that the moment for speech had arrived. He took a step forward upon the soft, pulpy leads. Even then he hesitated before he finally committed himself. About his appearance little was remarkable save the general air of determination which gave character to his undistinguished features. He was something above the medium height, broad-set, and with rather more thick black hair than he knew how to arrange advantageously. He wore a shirt which was somewhat frayed, and an indifferent tie; his boots were heavy and clumsy; he wore also a suit ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in gray, wore a plain breastpin with hair in it, who taught a pack of girls up there at the school, and looked as if she were born for a teacher,—the very best foil that she could have chosen; and here was this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning round to that very undistinguished young person as if he rather preferred her conversation ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... or converted into tomb-stones, or carried off to be preserved in one or two churches of Nice. At present, the work has the appearance of a ruinous watch-tower, with Gothic battlements; and as such stands undistinguished by those who travel by sea from hence to Genoa, and other ports of Italy. I think I have now described all the antiquities in the neighbourhood of Nice, except some catacombs or caverns, dug in a rock at St. Hospice, which Busching, in his geography, has described as a strong ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... another. Friends tortured themselves in vain, to find friends, in the huge mass of slain,—fathers to recognize their sons. The mournful gratification of bending over the lifeless bodies of dear relations and gazing with intense anxiety on their pallid features, was denied them. Undistinguished, though not unmarked, all were alike consigned to the silent grave, amid sighs of sorrow and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... himself in any way that one heard from him few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. "Ah, then I must have some of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... humbler ranks, the lowly brave, who bled While cheerly following where the Mighty led—[309] Who sleep beneath the undistinguished sod Where happier comrades in their triumph trod, To us bequeath—'tis all their fate allows— The sireless offspring and the lonely spouse: She on high Albyn's dusky hills may raise The tearful eye in melancholy gaze, Or view, while shadowy ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... in the thirteenth century, and took service under Alexander Nevskii, (1252-1262,) and who is the parent root from which spring many of the most illustrious houses in Russia—those of Pushkin, of Buturlin, of Kamenskii, and of Meteloff. Nor was the paternal line of Pushkin's house undistinguished for other triumphs than those recorded in the annals of war; his grandfather, Vassilii Lvovitch Pushkin, was a poet of considerable reputation, and was honoured, no less than Alexander's father, with the intimacy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Constable of France, the most famous French warrior of his age, was born of an ancient but undistinguished family, at the castle of La Motte-Broon, near Rennes, about 1314. The date is doubtful, the authorities varying between 1311 and 1324. The name is spelt in various ways in contemporary records, e.g., Claquin, Klesquin, Guescquin, Glayaquin, etc. The ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... shame, anger, remorse, and thirst for vengeance. He imposed silence by his look and sign upon the vulgar crowd at the lower end of the apartment; but instead of instantly returning to wait on her Majesty, he wrapped his cloak around him, and mixing with the crowd, stood in some degree an undistinguished spectator of the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... said I; "meanwhile I must wish you good morning: your road now lies to the right. I return you my best thanks for your condescension, in accompanying so undistinguished an ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of my brother from oblivion a culpable one. I am willing to rely, for my justification from malicious charges, on the general tenor of my actions, and am scarcely averse to buy my brother's reputation at the cost of my own. The censure of the undistinguishing and undistinguished multitude gives me little uneasiness. Indeed, the disapprobation of those who have no particular connection with us is a very faint, dubious, and momentary feeling. We are thought of, now and then, by chance, and immediately forgotten. Their happiness ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... take these crude productions of Branwell Bronte's boyhood as implying that he had no possibilities in him of anything better, but judging from the fact that his letters, as a man of eight and twenty, are as undistinguished as his sister's are noteworthy at a like age, we might well dismiss Branwell Bronte once and for all, were not some epitome of his life indispensable in an account of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... a multitude of gentlemen, dressed as if to attend a court, but whose garb, although rich enough to have adorned a royal drawing room, could not distinguish them in such a high scene as this. Amongst these we wandered for a few minutes, undistinguished and unregarded. I saw several young persons dressed as I was, so was under no embarrassment from the singularity of my habit, and only rejoiced, as I hung on my uncle's arm, at the magical splendour of such ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... followed immediately by a general attack upon the monuments and remains of antiquity throughout all France. The sepulchres of the great of past ages, of the barons and generals of the feudal ages, of the paladins, and of the crusaders, were involved in one undistinguished ruin. It seemed as if the glories of antiquity were forgotten, or sought to be buried in oblivion. The tomb of Du Gueselin shared the same fate as that of Louis XIV. The skulls of monarchs and heroes were tossed about like foot balls by the profane multitude; ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... the cradle of an infant State. To childhood may be forgiven the elemental character of its thought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not persist in developed manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and earth together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be undistinguished. This book only begins a meditation in which, I hope, nobler imaginations and finer intellects than mine will join hereafter, and help to raise the soul of Ireland nigher to the ideal and its body nigher ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... something in the theory very pleasant and very flattering to human nature; and there are passages in the history of our race that might make its promulgation not unacceptable. When, among the innumerable "patines of bright gold" that strew the floor of heaven, we see one part from the sphere of its undistinguished fellows, and, filling its pathway with radiant light, vanish noiselessly into annihilation, we cannot but be reminded of those characters that, with no apparent reason for being segregated from the common herd, are, through some strange conjuncture, hurried from a commonplace ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... answer the second one now," Vall replied. "Vulthor Tharn is due to retire in a few years. He has a negatively good, undistinguished record. He's trying ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... and a good shot. He has been engaged and honourably mentioned in most of the Kaffir fights of his time.... Socially, he has always lived in a somewhat humble position, and it is to the credit of his nature as a man that he bears not the slightest trace of the parvenu. Plain and undistinguished in appearance, he combines the advantages of a prodigious memory with a remarkable aptitude for reading his fellow-man, and this last quality would be more valuable were it not leavened by a weakness in resisting flattery and adulation. He is very pious and self-reliant, which is ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... evenings with Craven in her imagination, keeping the conversation exactly as it had been, but giving him a thoroughly plain face, a bad complexion, mouse-coloured feeble hair, undistinguished features, ordinary eyes, and a short broad figure. Certainly it would have made a difference. But how much difference? Perhaps a good deal. But he had enjoyed the conversation as much as she had, and there was nothing in her ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... elevated situation. Growling of bears, grunting of hogs, braying of donkeys, gobbling of turkeys, hissing of geese, the catcall, and the loud shrill whistle, were heard in one mingling concatenation of excellent imitation and undistinguished variety: During which, Tom led the way to the upper Boxes, where upon arriving, he was evidently disappointed at not meeting the party who had been seen occupying a seat on the left side of the House, besides having sacrificed ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... be so put into the dark by the spreading of his light. The greater his radiance is shown to be, the more in the wrong will all her life be proved;—it is that that she will not hear of. She wants him to be obscure, undistinguished, negligible, because it's that that she has ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... canting at the gate,' is individual and Congrevean. But Heartwell, the blustering fool, Bellmour, the impersonal rake, Wittol and Bluffe, the farcical sticks, Fondlewife, the immemorial city husband, and the troop of undistinguished women—what can be said of them but that they are glaring stage properties, speaking better English than the comic stage had before attracted? Germs, possibly, of better things to come, that is all, so far as characterisation goes. The Fondlewife ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Lorette, although undistinguished by a glance from the mild blue eyes of the Premier Prince of England, was flashed upon, years ago, by the awful light that gleamed from the dark, fierce ones of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. This is how I came ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... burgesses were buried, though not one of their memorial stones remains; into the open space were flung the poor proletariat, who had gone through life marked with a yellow cross upon their arms, and found in death an undistinguished and promiscuous burial. Looking down upon them all in their last troubled sleep, were the figures carved in high relief upon each pillar, groups that are so mutilated now that only by the careful drawings and descriptions left by M. Langlois long ago can we trace faintly what was placed there ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... insurmountable points on the mountain chain of circumstance that lay between him and his heart's dearest wish. The Commodore's inherent reverence for birth and breeding, and his comparative indifference to brain, was one of them. The obstinate pride of Allan's undistinguished and ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... supreme confidence in common men that was the keynote to the wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... state. Proud as Apollo on his forked hill, Sat full-blown Bufo puffed by every quill; Fed with soft dedication all day long, Horace and he went hand in hand in song. His library (where busts of poets dead And a true Pindar stood without a head) Received of wits an undistinguished race, Who first his judgment asked, and then a place: Much they extolled his pictures, much his seat, And flattered every day, and some days eat: Till grown more frugal in his riper days, He paid some bards with port, and some with praise; To some a dry rehearsal ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... Hanson, the famed engineer, no task was impossible. But quite a few things were impossible to that engineer's obscure and unimportant nephew, the computer technician and generally undistinguished man who had been christened Dave. They'd gotten the right man for the name, all right. But the wrong man for ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... fortunate demise of the young gentleman who had brought it to this untimely end, it was put up for sale with all its contents. And Sir Morton Pippitt,—a rich colonial, whose forebears were entirely undistinguished, but who had made a large fortune by a bone-melting business, which converted the hoofs, horns and (considering that some years ago it had been a mere roofless ruin, and that the people had been compelled to walk or drive to Riversford in order to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... and less annoyed by that derision and contempt which often defeat even more generous efforts, Antonio had drawn nearer to the crowd of nameless competitors. Though undistinguished in this narrative, there were seen, in that group of gondoliers, faces well known on the canals of Venice, as belonging to watermen in whose dexterity and force the city took pride. Either favored by his ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wrote some biting verses, derisive of her brother and his purchase, but Alcaeus on the other hand, approved, and gave expression to this feeling in glowing songs on the charms of Rhodopis. And now Sappho's brother, who had till then remained undistinguished among the many strangers at Naukratis, became a noted man through Rhodopis. His house was soon the centre of attraction to all foreigners, by whom she was overwhelmed with gifts. The King Hophra, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was all the woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out anywhere. I've done my duty ... and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead, where is it? After all, what ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of speed immense, Escape his swift pursuit, and measuring eye. Ev'n light itself, which every thing displays, Shone undiscover'd, till his brighter mind Untwisted all the shining robe of day; And from the whitening undistinguished blaze, Collecting every separated ray, To the charm'd eye educ'd the gorgeous train Of parent colours. First, the flaming red, Sprung vivid forth, the tawny orange next, And next refulgent yellow; by whose ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... could not increase, nor his departure sadden. They are, in consequence, destitute of all that renders the name of Ausonia thrilling, or her champaigns beautiful, beyond the mere splendor of climate; and even that splendor is unshared by the mountain; its cold atmosphere being undistinguished by any of that rich, purple, ethereal transparency which gives the air of the plains its depth of feeling,—we can find no ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... northern part of the town, on a little hillock, stands the third fort, called el Castillo del Rosario, which is furnished with six pieces of cannon. The churches of Valparaiso are exceedingly plain and simple, undistinguished either for architecture or ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... problem," an undistinguished voice remarked two hours later; and the Poet, settling to an uneasy sleep in his chair, mentally ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... you impart, Like chop on gridiron, broil my tender heart! Which if thy kindly helping hand be n't nigh, Must like an up-turned chop, hiss, brown, and fry; And must at least, thou scorcher of my soul, Shrink, and become an undistinguished coal." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sense. So Calhoun listened politely until he found an undistinguished medical man who wanted some special information about gene-selection as practised halfway across the galaxy. He invited that man to the Med Ship, where he supplied the information not hitherto available. He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with that joyous awe ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... brightest can, at the outside, be reckoned as genuine Pleiades. The great majority were relegated, by Pickering's[1565] and Stratonoff's[1566] counts of the stellar populace in and near the cluster, to the position of outsiders from it. They are undistinguished denizens of the abysmal background upon ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... apprised that the word, in its original sense, bore no relation whatever to those passions and subjects, to the representations of which it is now applied; but meant simply a dramatic action performed at the feast of the goat, in honour of Bacchus. Thus the different provinces of the drama then undistinguished, were confounded under one term, and constituted the prime trunk from which sprung forth the two branches of tragedy and comedy separately—the first in point of time usurping the original title of the parent stock, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... which contains these verses the emotion of the poet gives words often undistinguished an almost Elizabethan rhythm. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is a poet who often achieves music of verses, though he seldom achieves ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... speech, and effective, even against the best Athenian opponents. He was modest, unambitious, patriotic, intellectual, contented with poverty, generous, and disinterested. When the Cadmea was taken, he was undistinguished, and his rare merits were only known to Pelopidas and his friends. He was among the first to join the revolutionists, and was placed by Pelopidas among the organizers of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Mr. Vandewaters." She smiled to think what an undistinguished name it was. It suggested pumpkins in the front garden. Yet here its owner was perfectly at his ease, watching the scene before him with good- natured superiority. "London is English; but it is very cosmopolitan, you know," she added; "and I fancy you can see it is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... speaks to us to be loving and helpful to one another. Her common and undistinguished love to us all was such that it could never be said which of us she loved the best, and it speaks to us, now that she is gone, to "love one another with a pure heart fervently." We know very well that our unity was the joy of her heart while living, and ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of ...
— The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America • Thomas Jefferson
... actual words, for I wrote them down at the time, as a supreme example of the art of "leg-pulling." Amongst the members of the "Grill-room Club" was an elderly bachelor, whom I will call Mr. Smith. "Mr. Smith," who has now been dead for some years, was wholly undistinguished in every way. He ate largely, and spoke little, but Tree had discovered that under his placid exterior he concealed a vein of limitless vanity. One evening "Mr. Smith" startled the club by breaking his habitual silence, and ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Van Kuyp read a volume of verse. He did not hear his wife enter. It pained her when she saw his serious face with its undistinguished features and dogged expression. No genius this, was her hasty verdict, as she quickly went to him and put a hand on his head. It was her hand now that was hot. He raised eyes, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving for one evening, but not what the rude forefathers have achieved for eternity. From the ploughman and the simple annals of the poor the poem diverges to reproach the proud and great for their disregard of undistinguished merit, and moves on to praise of the sequestered life, and to an epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray himself. The epitaph with its trembling hope transforms the poem into something like a personal yet universal requiem; and for one villager—perhaps for himself—Gray seems ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... in order that when we have once got rid of that, it may appear a business of less consequence to look after remedies for the others. For there are certain things which are usually said about poverty; and also certain statements ordinarily applied to retired and undistinguished life. There are particular treatises on banishment, on the ruin of one's country, on slavery, on weakness, on blindness, and on every incident that can come under the name of an evil. The Greeks divide these into ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... persons in September, 1841, who found great fault with my remaining in the President's Cabinet. You know, Gentlemen, that twenty years of honest, and not altogether undistinguished service in the Whig cause, did not save me from an outpouring of wrath, which seldom proceeds from Whig pens and Whig tongues against anybody. I am, Gentlemen, a little hard to coax, but as to being driven, that is out of the question. I chose to ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... excellences, of Mr. Wordsworth's published poems. The first characteristic, though only an occasional defect, is the inconstancy of style; the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity to a style not only unimpassioned, but undistinguished. He sinks too often, too abruptly, into the language of prose. The second defect is a certain matter-of-factness in some of his poems, consisting in a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representations of objects, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... host of undistinguished Colonials and others of British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit these shores on business or for pleasure or some other object, how many there must be who come with some such memory or dream or aspiration in their hearts! A greater number probably than ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... gets anything properly describable as pleasure out of this dogged accumulation of threadbare, undistinguished, uninspiring nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles and conjunctions. To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies—the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said—there is in writing the constant ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... kind in London. Sir Hans Sloane, whose name is revered in Chelsea and perpetuated in one of the principal streets, is so intimately associated with this garden that it is necessary at this point to give a short account of him. Sir Hans Sloane was born in Ireland, 1660. He began his career undistinguished by any title and without any special advantages. Very early he evinced an ardent love of natural history, and he came over while still a youth to study in London. From this time his career was one long success. When he was only twenty-seven he was selected by the Duke of Albemarle, ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... had now put an end to the employment of literary men in public life, and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted much attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one of that undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly depended on the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in a garret or even walking ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the same neighborhood, there is another equally contemptible Brook, making towards Oder, and turning the so-called Krebsmuhle, which became still more famous to the whole European Public twenty years hence. KREBS-MUHLE (Crab-Mill), as yet quite undistinguished among Mills; belonging to a dusty individual called Miller Arnold, with a dusty Son of his own for Miller's Lad: was it at work this day? Or had the terrible sound from Palzig quenched ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 1757 in America, undistinguished by any act which might compensate for the loss of territory or the sacrifice of lives. With an inferior force the French had been successful at every point, and besides having obtained complete control of Lakes George and Champlain, the destruction of Oswego gave the dominion of those lakes, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... to Mallet's Life of Bacon, I see he mentions that he was privately buried at St. Michael's church, near St. Alban's; and it adds, 'The spot that contains his remains lay obscure and undistinguished, till the gratitude of a private man, formerly his servant' (Sir Thomas Meautys), 'erected a monument to his name and memory.' This makes it probable that the likeness ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... caution, the other upon experience. It would be endless to produce instances of these kinds. The characters of Virgil are far from striking us in this open manner; they lie, in a great degree, hidden and undistinguished; and, where they are marked most evidently affect us not in proportion to those of Homer. His characters of valour are much alike; even that of Turnus seems no way peculiar, but, as it is, in a superior degree; and we see ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Unlike the ancestors of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, his family, so far as the pedigrees show, had as little of genius, musical or other, in their composition, as the families of Shakespeare and Cervantes. In the male line they were hard-working, honest tradesmen, totally undistinguished even in their sober walk in life. They came originally from Hainburg, where Haydn's great-grandfather, Kaspar, had been among the few to escape massacre when the town was stormed by the Turks in July 1683. The composer's father, Matthias Haydn, was, like most of his brothers, a wheelwright, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... flourished—was brightly lighted by large arc-lamps, but never once did Rosanne come within range of these. It was in a dingy lane giving off from the big thoroughfare that she at last stopped before a shop whose shuttered window bore the legend—"Syke Ravenal: Jeweller." Upon an undistinguished looking side door she knocked gently, distinctly, three times. It opened as if by magic, and, like a shadow, she slipped ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... restorer, balmy sleep. Meditation, avaunt! Respected (tho' unknown) Sir,—Out of the abundant store of your immutable condescension graciously deign to pardon the bold assurance and presumptuous liberty of an animated mass of undistinguished dust, whose fragile composition is most miraculously composed of congenial atoms so promiscuously concentred as to personify in an abstracted degree the beauteous form of man, to convey by proxy to your brilliant opthalmic ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... steal away from the company, which appeared no difficult matter, from the undistinguished part I acted in it. I resolved to return to the town, and pay another visit to Mr. John the following morning, and, at the same time, make some inquiries of him relative to the extraordinary man in grey, provided I could command sufficient courage. Would to ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and then forgotten." It is only since the beginning of the present century that a conviction ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Indiscrimination — N. indiscrimination^, indistinguishability; indistinctness, indistinction^; uncertainty &c (doubt) 475; incomparability &c 464.1. V. not discriminate &c 465; overlook a distinction &c (neglect) 460, confound, confuse. Adj. indiscriminate; undistinguished^, indistinguishable, undistinguishable^; unmeasured; promiscuous, undiscriminating. Phr. valeat ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mournful tale Her hapless sister told, and wonderous! sate In silence; grief her rising words repress'd: Indignant, chok'd, her throat refus'd to breathe, The angry accents to her plaining tongue. To weep she waits not, in turmoil confus'd, Justice and flagrance undistinguished lie; Her mind sole bent for ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Sylvia." They all leaned over the side of the pool. "See that little starfish? He's lost a leg already in his short career; and those pretty anemones! Why didn't I bring a pail. I shall make an aquarium for you on the piazza, and we'll have anemones, and undistinguished urchins who will never be in a cabinet or hold candles, and starfish, and barnacles. Oh, there's a baby, John. Quick, there! Oh, I can get it myself." She reached down in a flash and drew forth ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... conference. You may be a leader of quite an insignificant body of workers, like the Nutcracker-Teeth Makers' Union, but you rub shoulders at a conference with men whose names are a household word throughout the whole of Great Britain, amongst those who have houses. The distinguished and the undistinguished lay their heads together; the spat-wearing get their feet mixed with the non-spat-wearing; though there is rather a fake, mind you, about this spat-wearing business, for it may simply mean that the uppers are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... but it's interesting, and very interesting, in itself, and just now very embarrassing - this rural parish supplied Glasgow with such a quantity of Stevensons in the beginning of last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be able to go back to the eleventh century, always undistinguished, but clearly traceable. When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to mean a dozen. What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather! ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... often the result; for there is forced upon the eye a vividness and variety of colours, in dresses, accessories, and the scene, which one present at the action would never have noticed—which, as the feeling would have rejected, so would the obedient eye have left undistinguished; and we know how the eye is obedient to the feelings and withholds impressions, and in the midst of crowds, to use a common expression, will "fix itself on vacancy." It will do even more; it will adopt the colouring which the feeling suggests—will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... tobacco was not remarkable. The pipe was not picturesque. The scissors were the most ordinary of scissors. The copy paper was quite undistinguished in appearance. The lead pencils had the most ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... seemed transferred to the battlefield, and when an emperor and a king moved among them as liberators. At Milan, after the victory of Magenta had opened its gates, the most permanent enthusiasm gathered round the short, stout, undistinguished figure in plain clothes and spectacles—the one decidedly prosaic appearance in the pomp of war and the glitter of royal state. Victor Emmanuel said good-humouredly that when driving with his great subject, ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... pardoned for being a little too well satisfied with themselves and with their last new bibelot. The Fothergill dinners were like all other dinners given by the Fothergills of society. They were costly, utterly undistinguished, and invariably graced by the presence of certain guests who seemed to have been called in out of the street at the last moment. Van der Roet's Japanese menus were curious, and at times inimical to digestion, but the personality ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... or providential, this rarely allotted portion, this crowning incident of an heroic career, it is after all but an incident. It the man has not contrived; but to it he has contributed much, without which his passing hour would have faded to memory, undistinguished among those of the myriads, great and small, who have died as nobly and are forever forgotten. A sun has set; but before its setting it has run a course, be it long or short, and has gathered a radiance which fixes upon its parting beams the rapt attention of beholders. The man's self ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Antonia; in which battle the darts were on both sides useless, as well as the spears, and both sides drew their swords, and fought it out hand to hand. Now during this struggle the positions of the men were undistinguished on both sides, and they fought at random, the men being intermixed one with another, and confounded, by reason of the narrowness of the place; while the noise that was made fell on the ear after an indistinct ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a little slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight swagger and a seaman's roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets. His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and his face, if one saw it after his figure, was something of a surprise. For while the form might be called big and braggart, the face might have been called weak, and was certainly worried. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... to Mary Makebelieve that marriage was not a story but a fact, and, somehow, the romance of it did not drift away, although the very house wherein she lived was infested by these conjoints, and the streets wherein she walked were crowded with undistinguished couples.... Those gray-lived, dreary-natured people had a spark of fire smoldering somewhere in their poor economy. Six feet deep is scarcely deep enough to bury romance, and until that depth of clay has clogged our bones the fire can still smolder and be fanned, and, perhaps, blaze ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious and undistinguished mass may now and again find his way within the gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office for any of its responsible officials, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... know nothing about it, or are above such terrene trifles. Let us keep our pity for the seething mass of divines who were not elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. And let us keep a specially large portion for one whose lot was so much worse than merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate had not been at the Thrales' that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so well became him, his life would have been drab enough, in all conscience. But at any rate an unpromising career would not have been nipped in ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the remedies, that were gradually applied. The societies, which had hitherto seen their members, undistinguished either by authority or rank, admitted now of magistratical pre-eminence. They were divided into tribes; to every tribe was allotted a particular district for its support, and to every individual his particular spot. The Germans[041], who consisted of many ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... should be delighted to join you," said the girl, "if you could consent to be accompanied by such undistinguished climbers. Let me introduce ourselves. This is my cousin, Sir Ernest Scrivener. This is my brother, Lord ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... hour generally makes the man, and the necessities of the moment often call forth talents and energies, the existence of which was wholly unsuspected by their possessors. For aught we know, many a hero may be now among the ranks, and many a gallant officer now before the mast, undistinguished from lack of opportunity, unknown because circumstances have not developed his dormant powers. How then can the hour be hastened, and the opportunity of developing our musical powers be afforded? The answer is, by the establishment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... vicarage worth annually sixty pounds, in the most desert parts of Lincolnshire; where, his spirit quite sunk with those reflections that solitude and disappointments bring, he married a farmer's widow, and is still alive, utterly undistinguished and forgotten; only some of the neighbours have accidentally heard, that he had been a notable man ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... than noble, as nobility is usually graduated. She had been accustomed to see her father and John Effingham moving in the best circles of Europe, respected for their information and independence, undistinguished by their manners, admired for their personal appearance, manly, courteous, and of noble bearing and principles, if not set apart from the rest of mankind by an arbitrary rule connected with rank. Rich, and possessing all the habits that properly mark refinement, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... as affording an exception to his general sentence against rhyming plays, he does not extend the compliment to Dryden, whose defence of rhyme was expressly dedicated to that noble author. Dryden, not much pleased, perhaps, at being left undistinguished in the general censure passed upon rhyming plays by his friend and ally, retaliates in the Essay, by placing in the mouth of Crites the arguments urged by Sir Robert Howard, and replying to them in the person of Neander. To the charge, that rhyme ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Senator had been tendered to Pierce by Governor Steele, and declined. It is unquestionable that, at this period, he hoped and expected to spend a life of professional toil in a private station, undistinguished except by the exercise of his great talents in peaceful pursuits. But such was not his destiny. The contingency to which he referred in the above letter, as the sole exception to his purpose of never being separated from his family, was now about to occur. ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shades retired, And his own native Nysa less admired. Oft to the mountain's airy tops advanced, The frisking Satyrs on the summit danced. Alcides [1] here, here Venus graced the shore, Nor loved her favourite Lacedaemon more. Now piles of ashes, spreading all around, In undistinguished heaps deform the ground. The gods themselves the ruined seats bemoan, And blame the ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... and the virtual seizure of coal mines were by no means the only accomplishments of the Vanderbilt family in the years under consideration. Colorless as was the third generation, undistinguished by any marked characteristic, extremely commonplace in its conventions, it yet proved itself a worthy successor of Commodore Vanderbilt. The lessons he had taught of how to appropriate wealth were duly followed by his descendants, and all of the ancestral methods were closely adhered to by the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... to Alresford was not then made, and I had to post part of the way from London to The Grange. My chaise companion was a man very well known in 'Society'; and though not remarkably popular, was not altogether undistinguished, as the following little tale will attest. Frederick Byng, one of the Torrington branch of the Byngs, was chiefly famous for his sobriquet 'The Poodle'; this he owed to no special merit of his own, but simply to the accident of his thick curly head of hair. Some, who spoke feelingly of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke |
