"Unpicturesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an unpicturesque object. Given a plumed hat, a doublet and hose, and he would look the part, and his manner would fit in with it. Given good English, his voice would never betray him for what he is. For another thing that these people have preserved is a softness of voice and an inflection ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... the reforming political school that has trained the man now openly discussed as the next Premier of Canada. And for the benefit of any Canadian Norris who dreams of writing a problem novel about Crerar, it may be said that he is the most drab and unpicturesque personality that ever stood in line for any such office in this country. In the triangle of leaders at Ottawa he is the angle of lowest personal, though by no means lowest human, interest. Meighen is impressive; King brilliant. Crerar—is ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... presupposed to be the most tarry and pitchy spot on earth, swarming with old salts, and full of warm, bustling, coarse, homely, and cheerful life. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a cold and torpid neighborhood, mean, shabby, and unpicturesque, both as to its buildings and inhabitants: the latter comprising (so far as was visible to me) not a single unmistakable sailor, though plenty of land-sharks, who get a half-dishonest livelihood by business connected with the sea. Ale and spirit vaults (as petty drinking-establishments ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for a stroll pondering over the duties of this evening, which even then were looming in the distance, but not quite so far off as I could wish—I found it very curious to consider that though the newsman must be allowed to be a very unpicturesque rendering of Mercury, or Fame, or what-not conventional messenger from the clouds, and although we must allow that he is of this earth, and has a good deal of it on his boots, still that he has two very remarkable characteristics, to which none of his celestial predecessors can lay the slightest ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... west of the island; and Yarmouth, with its long street and sturdy little castle at one end, a church tower rising in its midst; and Freshwater, with its attractive-looking residences, perched on the hillside; and to the west of it, its formidable but unpicturesque-looking forts, scientifically placed on heights commanding the entrance to the Solent. On the right, at the end of a long spit of sand, were the red light-houses, and the castle, and newly erected batteries of Hurst, such as no hostile fleet would dare to encounter; outside of which ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... more I had reached the heart of Switzerland; but what a contrast had I experienced in passing from one country to the other! The whole of France, with the exception of my ever happy Loire, must surely be the most monotonous and unpicturesque tract of the whole continent; while Switzerland presents, at every turn, a combination of the paradisaical and of terrific sterility. Smiling patriarchal pastures, walled in by granite mountains, frowning in eternal silence and solitude, save when thundering with the awful avalanche. ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... New York, or London, or Paris. She found Berlin, with its Adlon, its appalling cleanliness, its overfed populace, and its omnipresent Kaiser forever scudding up and down Unter den Linden in his chocolate-colored car, incredibly dull, and unpicturesque. Something she had temporarily lost there in the busy atmosphere of the Haynes-Cooper plant, seemed ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... witch's, Missy?" Virgie said, as Vesta took in its not unpicturesque outlines and crude plank carpentry, the weather-rotted roof, the decrepit chimney at the far end, the one garret window in the sharp gable, the scant little windows above stairs, and the doors low to ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... cloth cap and conventional and unpicturesque, though shapeless and weather-stained, garment of the late nineteenth century. Neither horns nor goat's feet were visible; nor was the pipe of reed on which he played. Yet he played, in Paul's ear, the comforting melody of Pan, and the glory ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... into deeds that make men freer in the enjoyment of health and earning power. In protecting health, as in reforming government, an ounce of efficient achievement is worth infinitely more than a moral explosion. One month of routine—unpicturesque, unexciting efficiency—will accomplish more than a scandal or catastrophe. Such routine is possible only when special machinery is constantly at work, comparing work done with work expected, health practice with health ideals. Where such machinery ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... Captain Fidanza, unpicturesque, but always a little mysterious, was recognized quite sufficiently under the lofty glass and iron roof of the Sulaco railway station. He took a local train, and got out in Rincon, where he visited the widow of the Cargador who had ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... remarkable thing about Worth is the tombstone of Benjamin Jesty, who is claimed thereon to be the first person to inoculate for smallpox (1774). Langton Matravers need not keep the stranger; its church was rebuilt nearly fifty years ago and the village is unpicturesque. ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... were spread out, like a rich tapestry, above and behind the long unpicturesque line of hills, the lower acclivities of Blackstonedge, opposite to the stately mansion of Clegg Hall. The square squat tower of Rochdale Church peered out from the dark trees, high on its dim eyrie, in the distance, towards the south-west, below which a wan hazy ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... cathedral, Arras is, nevertheless, an interesting city,—modernized, to be sure, by boulevards laid out along the old fortifications. The Citadel of Vauban (1670), called ironically "la belle inutile," may be classed as a worthless, if not wholly unpicturesque, ruin, though ranking, when built, as among the most wonderful fortifications of the times. The wave of Renaissance which swept northward has left its ineradicable marks here. The Hotel de Ville is a remarkable specimen of that art of overloading ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... not unpicturesque of form and hue. Gray, home-knit stockings, and coat and knee-breeches of corduroy, which takes tints from Time and Weather as harmoniously as wooden palings do; so that field laborers (like some insects) seem to absorb or mimic ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... that a company of regular cavalry, taking the field against hostile Indians, had discarded pretty much every item of dress or equipment prescribed or furnished by the authorities of the United States, and had supplied themselves with an outfit utterly ununiform, unpicturesque, undeniably slouchy, but not less undeniably appropriate and serviceable. Not a forage-cap was to be seen, not a "campaign-hat" of the style then prescribed by a board of officers that might have known something of hats, but never could have ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... nothing. They talked of their escape, their hopes, and of the supposed fate of the rest of the party; the discourse leaving a feeling of sadness on all, that harmonized with the melancholy, but not unpicturesque, scene in which they were placed. At length the night set in; and as it threatened to be dark and damp, the ladies early made their arrangements to retire. The gentlemen remained on the sands much later; and it was ten o clock before Paul Powis and Mr. Sharp, who had assumed ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... was Sir Henry James, and then came Mr. Courtney, in a snuff-coloured coat and drab waistcoat; for all the world like an old-fashioned squire who has not yet learned to accommodate himself to the sombre garments of an unpicturesque age. The dutiful Austen left himself without a seat, and was content to kneel in the gangway, and there take sweet counsel ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... face" with military precision doubtless thus impelled by the magic influence of his headgear - and beckons me to follow. Not knowing what better course to pursue I obey, and after threading the mazes of a dozen streets, composed of buildings ranging in architecture from the much gabled and not unpicturesque structures of mediaeval times to the modern brown-stone front, he pilots me outside the fortifications again, points up the Appenweir road, and after the never neglected formality of touching his cap and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... traveller left the rail at Reno, he left, as it were, civilization with it; and, until he reached the Nebraska frontier, the rest of his road was only the old emigrant trail traversed by the coaches of the Overland Company. Excepting a part of "Devil's Canyon," the way was unpicturesque and flat; and the passage of the Rocky Mountains, far from suggesting the alleged poetry of that region, was only a reminder of those sterile distances of a level New ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... slightly-built but well-knitted young fellow, in the not unpicturesque garb of our marine service. His woollen cap, pitched forward at an acute angle with his nose, showed the back part of a head thatched with short yellow hair, which had broken into innumerable curls of painful ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... memory, a mist brooding over and around it, as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me; for—though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... of the city is composed principally of houses of wooden frames, with the interstices filled in with cement. Work of this kind is very common in all the northern provincial towns of France. It gives a place a singular, and not altogether an unpicturesque air; the short dark studs that time has imbrowned, forming a sort of visible ribs to ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... garden was a peaked-roof pigsty; it was cleanly kept, and its inhabitant had his meals served with the regularity which characterized all that Grandfather Warren did. Beautiful pigeons lived in the roof, and were on friendly terms with the occupant on the lower floor. The house was not unpicturesque. It was built on a corner, facing two streets. One front was a story high, with a slanting roof; the other, which was two-storied, sloped like a giraffe's back, down to a wood-shed. Clean cobwebs ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... county bearing this name: (1) a small hamlet partly in Ardeley and partly in Cottered parish; (2) a large village on the Cambridge Road, 2 miles E. from Buntingford. The village has several quaint old cottages, and is by no means unpicturesque; but it contains little of historic importance. It affords, however, a good centre from which to visit several old and interesting churches (described elsewhere in these pages); Layston, Wyddial, Anstey, and Great and Little ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... of Greek Testaments here are the first, second, fourth and fifth editions of Erasmus; the first, containing both parts, is in one volume, in original boards, or binding; a sound and clean copy: written upon, but not in a very unpicturesque manner. The second edition is but an ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... own plain clothes are not at all unpicturesque, and are very becoming to Miss Allen," said Mr. Fairfield. "But haven't your trunks come?" he added, as they all went ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... morning at nine o'clock showed little of its usual activity. Most of the boys were gathered near Sam Brierly's Gothic portico, now in unpicturesque ruins and hanging limply to the school front like an excrescence. Here Richard Haddon and Edward McKnight were standing in attitudes of extreme unconcern, heroes and objects of respectful admiration, but nevertheless ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... are very short, and—I regret to report it—generally quite crooked in the legs, and their own flowing costumes render them dignified and graceful. Indeed, after a residence in the East for a while one agrees with the opinion he hears often expressed there that our costume is the most unpicturesque dress in ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... "If the house had not been insured my father has wealth enough in those abominably unpicturesque stores in Tooley Street to rebuild the whole of Beverly Square if it were burnt down. The fire costs me not a thought, although, by the way, it nearly cost me my life, in a vain attempt I made to rescue my ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... and the artillery, leaving the emplacements where they had been anchored a whole year, came across and took position in the open, a magnificent spectacle. Squadrons of cavalry came up. Suddenly the long, unpicturesque 'guerre de tranchees' was at an end, and the field really presented the aspect of the familiar battle pictures, — the battalions in manoeuvre, the officers, superbly indifferent to danger, galloping about on their chargers. But now the German guns, moved back, ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... virtues to itself. On the contrary there is positive rejoicing in the middle classes over a workman who deigns to keep a contract, and an aristocrat who perceives the duty of paying a debt. In fine we of the middle classes need no more be ashamed of our highly unpicturesque virtues than we are ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... through the gate across the lawn, and up to the verandah where the king stood, in one continuous procession, till 2400 Hawaiians had enjoyed one moment of infinite and ever to be remembered satisfaction in the royal presence. Every now and then the white, pale-eyed, unpicturesque face of a foreigner passed by, but these were few, and the foreign school children were received by themselves after Mr. Lyman's boys. The Americans have introduced the villanous custom of shaking hands at these receptions, borrowing it, I suppose, from a presidential reception at Washington; ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... ahead, the spider following. The bullet-pierced, grey felt smasher hat, a manly and not unpicturesque headgear, sat on the man's close-cropped head with a soldierly air becoming to the square, opaque-skinned face that had power and strength and virility in every line of it. The blue eyes, under their black bar of meeting eyebrows, were clear now, and the short aquiline ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... methods of modern justice are unpicturesque, unimpressive! Compare this trial of the cause of the People against the mighty Atlantic and Pacific railroad corporation et al. with the trial of the robber baron dragged from his bleak castle perched above the highroad where he had laid in wait to despoil his fellow-men, weaker ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... described as a handsome young man (for he was scarcely more than thirty) and a handsome young woman, the description would be correct. He was rather tall, she was rather tall; but he was formal, severe, respectable, and absolutely unpicturesque—she was picturesque in every motion. His well-made clothes sat stiffly on him, and the first idea he conveyed was that he was carefully dressed. Even a woman would not have thought, at the first glance at least, of how she was dressed. ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... We have—no, I will not say we have, because there would be a protest on the left—but different governments have added allotments to the attractions of rural neighborhoods. I venture to think that an allotment is not an unpicturesque thing. Certainly, small holdings are more picturesque than large holdings, but I do not say that from the point of view in which Sydney Smith said that the difference between the picturesque and the beautiful was that the rector's horse was beautiful, and that the curate's ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... figures, and the comparative meanness and commonplaceness of even the folds of the drapery. It seems as if Tintoret had determined to make the shepherds as uninteresting as possible; but one does not see why their very clothes should be ill painted, and their disposition unpicturesque. I believe, however, though it never struck me until I had examined this picture, that this is one of the painter's fixed principles: he does not, with German sentimentality, make shepherds and peasants graceful ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... gregarious; Fourier's fables are founded on fact; we are nothing without our opposites, our fellows, our lights and shadows, colors, relations, combinations, our point d'appui, and our angle of sight. An isolated man is immensurable; he is also unpicturesque, unnatural, untrue. He is no longer the lord of Nature, animal and vegetable,—but Nature is the lord of him; the trees, skies, flowers, predominate, and he is in as bad taste as green and blue, or as an oyster in a vase of roses. The race swings naturally to clusters. It being admitted, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... are so abundant all over the back country, and which rise, one behind another, to the number, it may be, of twenty or thirty, with the most unpicturesque regularity (on my run there are fully twenty), are supposed to be elevated sea-beaches. They are to be seen even as high as four or five thousand feet above the level of the sea, and I doubt not that a geologist might find traces of them ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... the isolated "Ford Mansion," better known as the "headquarters," that the wind wreaked its grotesque rage. It howled under its scant eaves, it sang under its bleak porch, it tweaked the peak of its front gable, it whistled through every chink and cranny of its square, solid, unpicturesque structure. Situated on a hillside that descended rapidly to the Whippany River, every summer zephyr that whispered through the porches of the Morristown farm-houses charged as a stiff breeze upon the swinging half doors and windows of the "Ford Mansion"; every wintry ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte
... again. The Stufa di Nerone, a little further on the high-road, is another volcanic calidarium in full activity, where you may boil eggs or scald yourself in a dark cavern. There you may deposit your mattrass and yourself in any one of a store of berths wrought into that most unpicturesque tufa, of which the exterior face constitutes the whole of the sea view of Baiae. If ever there were decorations in these caverns, they are gone; but there probably never were. Diana, Mercury, Venus, and Apollo all claim brick tenements, called temples, in this little bay, all close ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... before a small glass at her window. The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow level—the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape. The foreground was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, whose irregular attempts at regularity were set forth with all the cruel, uncompromising clearness of the Californian atmosphere. There was the straight Main Street with its new brick block of "stores," ending abruptly ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... of soft, poetic beauty, and the mother with her saint-like face and gentle, composed manner—her expressive hands busy with her needle work. Was it possible that such a home—such a household—was always there, keeping the even tenor of its way among the unpicturesque ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... unpicturesque elderly man got up and began to walk to and fro in the room which he had turned into with Lanfear, and to say, more to himself than to Lanfear, as if balancing one thing against another: "The merciful thing is that ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... the city hall project by an entirely new and highly exhilarating thought of how little was done for these unpicturesque poor. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Prayer-rooms, and the solemn stillness of the garden below, where the relatives of the departed come to talk peacefully over their memories. However admirable the arrangement may be from a sanitary point of view, I never could get reconciled to the presence of the vultures, though they were not at all unpicturesque, for their unwieldy copper-coloured bodies contrasted well with the massive and ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... it would not have been a cheerful place. The unpicturesque site, the rude and unlovely outlines, the unsavory details, which distinguish the nest-building of the California miner, were all here with the dreariness of decay superadded. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough inclosure, which, in the brief days of Tennessee's Partner's ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... commented on the monotonous level expanse of country as being unbearable from any point of view except as good farm land. Used to hills and mountains, inviting brooks and winding roads, he turned away from this unpicturesque land, saying if it was a good place to make money, it was also a place to lose one's own soul—he was already homesick for the beauty and diversity of our more ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Kennett" which were denied him in "Hannah Thurston" and "John Godfrey's Fortunes." He here deals with the persons, scenes, and actions of a hundred years ago, and thus gains that distance so valuable to the novelist; and he neither burdens himself with an element utterly and hopelessly unpicturesque, like modern reformerism, nor assumes the difficult office of interesting us in the scarcely more attractive details of literary adventure. But we think, after all, that we owe the superiority of "The Story of Kennett" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... I ought to have known. I suppose that was, really, why I liked him so much—so infinitely much. Come to think of it, I can remember a thousand little acts of kindliness, of thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the Continent. Look here, I know of two families of dirty, unpicturesque, Hessian paupers that that fellow, with an infinite patience, rooted up, got their police reports, set on their feet, or exported to my patient land. And he would do it quite inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a child crying in the street. He would wrestle with dictionaries, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... down toward evening at Sebastian, where an unpicturesque collection of wooden houses stand upon a branch line on the Canadian prairie. The place is not attractive during the earlier portion of the short northern summer, when for the greater part of every week it lies sweltering in heat, in spite of the strong west winds ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... the long drab waistcoat. His corduroy trousers, of a light green colour, were hitched up at the knees with a couple of straps as though he wore his garters outside. His neckerchief was a bright red, tied round his neck in a careless but not unpicturesque manner. Take him for all in all he was as fine a specimen of a country lad as one could wish to meet,—tall, well built, healthy ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... varying in size, and varying also in their lines athwart the house. Those of the ground floor are all uniform in size and position. But those above are irregular both in size and place, and this irregularity gives a bizarre and not unpicturesque appearance to the building. Along the top, on every side, runs a low parapet, which nearly hides the roof, and at the corners are more figures of ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the exception of the schooner itself. In the six hours he had been below, his vessel had moved her position out to sea nearly forty miles. No land was now to be seen, the American coast being very tame and unpicturesque to the eye, as the purest patriot, if he happen to know anything of other parts of the world, must be constrained to admit. A low, monotonous coast, that is scarcely visible at a distance of five leagues, is certainly not to be named in the same ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... English miles from Doneraile, and is seated in as unpicturesque a spot as at present could have been selected. Many of the delightful and visionary anticipations I had indulged, from the pleasure of visiting the place where the Fairy Queen had been composed, were at an end on beholding the monotonous reality of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... horizon was formed by the azure wall of Tayyib Ism,[EN32] the "Mountain of the Good Name," backed by the far grander peaks of Jebel Mazhafah: the latter rises abruptly from the bluer Gulf of El-Akabah, and both trend to their culminating points inland or eastward. On our right followed the unpicturesque metalliferous heap of Jebel Zahd or 'Aynnah Mountain, whose Brche de Roland seems to show from every angle; its chocolate-coloured heights contain, they say, furnaces and "Mashghal," or ateliers, where the Mar ("quartz") was worked for ore. In ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... sensitively as to let it detract from the serene pleasure he found in it all. From the happy glow of his mind every outward object took a rosy light; even a rustic funeral, which he came upon at a cross-road that fore-noon, softened itself into something not unpicturesque. ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... It is good to know that he shared the average human history in these harmless peccadilloes; for they never hurt his integrity, and they are reminders of that old but welcome truth, that the greatest men do not need a constant diet of great circumstances. He had many difficulties to deal with, as unpicturesque and harassing as any we have to encounter in our daily courses,—a thing which people are curiously prone to forget in the case of eminent authors. The way in which he dealt with these throws back light on himself. We discover how well the high qualities ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... found him attractive in himself; they had cared for his strength of will and mind, and because he was good to look at. But he determined that this one must sympathize with his work in the world, no matter how unpicturesque it might seem to her. His work was the best of him, he assured himself, and he would stand or ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... profound stillness lasted for a few seconds, and then the door was brusquely opened by a short, black-eyed woman in a red blouse, with a great lot of nearly white hair, done up negligently in an untidy and unpicturesque manner. Her thin, jetty eyebrows were drawn together. I learned afterwards with interest that she was the famous—or the notorious—Sophia Antonovna, but I was struck then by the quaint Mephistophelian character of her inquiring glance, because it was so curiously evil-less, so—I ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... I may be allowed the expression, and although its height, the vivid colour of its base, and the masses of snow that cover its slopes, give it a peculiar attraction, it nevertheless struck me as being intensely unpicturesque, at least from the point from which I saw it, and from which the whole of it was visible. When clouds were round it, toning down and modifying its shape, Tize appeared at its best from the painter's point of view. Under these conditions, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the great window, were many of the artist's miniature wax models and studies. Else, the ordinary not unpicturesque lumber of an artist's studio was conspicuously absent. The secret of Leighton's despatch and careful ordering of his days, was to be read, indeed, in every detail of his work-a-day surroundings. Even in a dim antechamber, with a trellised niche most mysteriously ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... light—the only light of the tent—fell down upon the group below: the old chief with his great silver cross, and medal, and snow-white hair; the young and beautiful squaw with her pappoose at the breast, like a Madonna by Murillo; Malcolm's battered tarpaulin and Guernsey shirt; and the two unpicturesque objects of the party—Picton and myself. Around the central fire a broad, green border of fragrant hemlock twigs, extending to the skirts of the tent, was raised a few inches from the ground. Upon this couch we sat, and opened our business with the ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... in a region upon which unpicturesque prosperity has not yet descended is equivalent to leaving the house, and that is exactly what the young man did. Of course there was a loft above that was reached by a perilously steep pair of stairs; but he was not a cur to creep away into a kennel. He went out and battled with the pitiless ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... everything straight, it was so formal and UNPICTURESQUE. Uniformity and conformity, she observed, had their day; but now, thank the stars of the present day, irregularity and difformity bear the bell, ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... garden was tolerably large, and in decent order, and beyond the garden was a fine old orchard, divided from lawn and flower-beds only by a low hedge, full of bush-roses and sweet brier. It was a very pretty place in summer, not unpicturesque even at this bleak season; but Clarissa was thinking of lost Arden, and she looked at Mill Cottage with mournful unadmiring eyes. There had been a mill attached to the place once. The old building was there still, indeed, converted into a primitive kind of stable; hence its name of Mill Cottage. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... bank, covered with trees—oak, birch, beech, chestnut, and maple—runs the sandy road, bordered by corn-fields, by orchards, and occasionally by little patches of woodland, looking for all the world like Old England, excepting that that unpicturesque snake ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... and continue the mediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of modern civilisation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attract him; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him.[28] The ugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, its unpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as it was to Ruskin—his teacher. He loved to imagine the face of England as it was in the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... how shall I write a love-ditty To my Alice on Valentine's day? How win the affection or pity Of a being so lively and gay? For I'm an unpicturesque creature, Fond of pipes and port wine and a doze Without a respectable feature, With a squint and a ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... Asher himself was unpicturesque. Indeed, he was the very picture of the bluff and burly Briton, white-bearded like Father Christmas. But he did not seem to lead to yonder vision of poetry and purity. Lady Aaronsberg, who might have supplied the missing link, was dead—before even ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... scoffer buys, Long rods and wading stockings; Unpicturesque he walks in Esk With unbelief ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... their miner's costume, which, consisting of a flannel shirt (almost always of a dark-blue color), pantaloons with the boots drawn up over them, and a low-crowned broad-brimmed black felt hat (though the fashion of the latter is not invariable), is not, simple as it seems, so unpicturesque as you might perhaps imagine. A strange horror of that lonely mountain graveyard came over me as I watched the little company wending wearily up to the solitary spot. The "sweet habitude of being"—not that I fear death, but that I love life as, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... figures were clad in buskins, and many-coloured garments, that were not long enough to conceal their greaves and clod-hopping boots. Altogether, these young women, when engaged at their ordinary avocations by the side of a spring, formed no unpicturesque subject for the sketcher's pencil, and might have been advantageously transferred to canvas by many an artist who travels to greater distances in ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... limited breadth had caused inconvenience and bred pestilence were made wide; warehouses and dwellings of solid brick and carved stone, with doors, window-frames, and breastsummers of stout oak, replaced irregular though not unpicturesque habitations; whilst the halls of companies, eminent taverns, and abodes of great merchants, were now built "with fair courtyards before them, and pleasant gardens behind them, and fair spacious rooms and galleries in them, little inferior to some princes' palaces." Moreover, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... the coast railway of Maine. Notwithstanding the high temperature, the country seemed cheerless, the sunlight to fall less genially than in more fertile regions to the south, upon a landscape stripped of its forests, naked, and unpicturesque. Why should the little white houses of the prosperous little villages on the line of the rail seem cold and suggest winter, and the land seem scrimped and without an atmosphere? It chanced so, for everybody knows that it is a lovely coast. The artist said it was the Maine Law. But that ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with Loch Katrine or Windermere in his fond memory's eye, it is not surprising that the great lakes of America seem howling wildernesses of water, for the shores are mostly low and unpicturesque. There is no changing tide to give variety, no strong smell of seaweed nor salt breeze to brace the wearied nerves, but the wearied nerves are braced nevertheless. The sand is soft and clean to extend one's length upon, and the waves forever rolling ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... humiliatingly true of pine forest. Nearly all other kinds of wood may be reduced, over large spaces, to undetailed masses; but there is nothing but patience for pines; and this has been one of the principal reasons why artists call Switzerland "unpicturesque." There may perhaps be, in the space of a Swiss valley which comes into a picture, from five to ten millions of well grown pines.[94] Every one of these pines must be drawn before the scene can be. And a pine cannot be represented by a round ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... miles through a flat, unpicturesque country, when they reached a branch road leading ...
— The Cash Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... view, at the distance of little more than half a league. We soon took a turn to the left, towards a bridge of many arches across the Guadiana, which, though so famed in song and ballad, is a very unpicturesque stream, shallow and sluggish, though tolerably wide; its banks were white with linen which the washer-women had spread out to dry in the sun, which was shining brightly; I heard their singing at a great ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... be dismissed in a very few words. It is situated in the ugliest part of Lancashire, in a flat district, among coal mines, on the banks of a very unpicturesque river, surrounded by a population in character much resembling that described in the "Black Country" of Staffordshire, and Worcestershire, and Shropshire. It was one of the earliest seats of manufacture ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... On this point the words of Mr. Hastings Rashdall, a leading authority on mediaeval universities, are instructive: "... If we would completely understand the meaning of offices, titles, ceremonies, organizations preserved in the most modern, most practical, most unpicturesque of the institutions which now bear the name of 'University,' we must go back to the earliest days of the earliest Universities that ever existed, and trace the history of their chief successors through the seven centuries that intervene ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... The approach to the city, through the dirty brown mud of the treacherous Mekong, which is swept down vigorously to the China sea between stretches of monotonous mangrove, with no habitation of man anywhere visible, is distinctly unpicturesque; but Saigon itself, apart from the exorbitance of the charges (especially so to the spendthrift Englishman), is worth the dreary journey of numberless twists and quick turns up-river, annoying to ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... romanticist of 'Gunnar'—steeped in the legends of old Norway, creating a fairy-land atmosphere about him and delighting to live in the ideal,—into a so-called realist, setting himself to the task of brushing away all illusions and painting life as sterile and unpicturesque as it is in its meanest, most commonplace conditions. To do this, he claimed, was the stern function of the author. To help his readers to self-knowledge, although it might lessen their happiness, was the greatest service ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Berkeley answered calmly, 'is an unpicturesque but otherwise estimable member of a very distinguished ecclesiastical order, who ought not lightly to be brought into ridicule by lewd or lay persons. On that ground, I have always been in favour myself of gradually reforming ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... classical bladder at the end of his stick. They drew up before the house and danced their morris-dance for us. The scraps of old poetry which came into my head, the contrast between this pretty picture of a bygone time and the modern but by no means unpicturesque group assembled under the portico, filled my mind with the pleasantest ideas, and I was quite sorry when the rural pageant wound up the woody heights again, and the last shout and peal of music came back across the sunny lawn. I am ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... as they passed through the hall-way. The sun was well down in the west, and heavy banks of rain-clouds obscured the heavens. Miss Forrest turned the knob and threw open the door leading into the unpicturesque yard at the rear of the quarters. "A little light here will be an improvement," she said. "Why! who ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... clouds, lit up for a moment the turbid waves, and gleamed on rock and beach and fishermen's huts,—and with the other holding on to the sharp edge of a projecting rock, that still towered above her. Nor as she thus stood, was she, by any means, an unpicturesque object; the sunshine glancing on her neatly arranged brown hair, her tall figure, slight for that of a hardy fisherman's child, clad in a black skirt and crimson jacket, and every feature of her speaking countenance wearing a commingled expression ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... field peculiar to himself. Still again, H. G. Wells, who began his career as a clerk and continued as a teacher of science, has found in both these phases of his experience a mine of literary wealth; and Arnold Bennett, born and educated in the dreariest, most unpicturesque, apparently least inspiring, part of England, has seen in the very prosiness of the Five Towns untouched material, and has given this an enduring place in literature. In your imagination there may lie the basis ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... out-of-the-way minor station of the high desert, meditated a character study of "the hero of the wreck," but could not quite contrive any peg whereon to hang the wreath of heroism. By his own modest account, Banneker had been competent but wholly unpicturesque, though the characters in his sketch, rude and unformed though it was, stood out clearly. As to his own personal history, the agent was unresponsive. At length the guest, apologizing for untimely weariness, it being then 3.15 A.M., yawned his ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... B—— to the Dingle, a pleasant domain on the banks of the Mersey almost opposite to Rock Ferry. Walking home, we looked into Mr. Thorn's Unitarian Chapel, Mr. B——'s family's place of worship. There is a little graveyard connected with the chapel, a most uninviting and unpicturesque square of ground, perhaps thirty or forty yards across, in the midst of back fronts of city buildings. About half the space was occupied by flat tombstones, level with the ground, the remainder being yet vacant. Nevertheless, there ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... order to observe the Choir and Transepts with the staircase which leads to the raised Ambulatory. Observe that the transepts are simple. The ugly stained glass in the windows of their clerestory contains illustrations of the reign of Louis Philippe, with extremely unpicturesque costumes of the period. The architecture of the Nave and Choir, with its light and airy arches and pillars, is of the later ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... as to cover a wide veranda, that the bark and moss were left clinging to the logs, which by another season would be covered with honeysuckles and the Virginia creeper, we shall see that they must have presented no unpicturesque appearance. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... spot, and not unpicturesque. North and south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness, with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the mountains; ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... with her passion for picturesque philanthropies, knew right well that she had neglected somewhat the plain, unpicturesque philanthropy which lay close to her hand. She had neither the heart nor the conscience to deny Eleanor this sacrifice. In that hour, there grew up between the childless aunt and the motherless niece an understanding which those ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... the vast heath, which spread around them, in a wild but not unpicturesque expanse, for many miles on either side, Leonard perceived a band of horsemen, amounting perhaps to a dozen, galloping towards them, and, not doubting they were the robbers in question, communicated his suspicions to his companions. Neither ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... return —of friends, truer, perhaps, though rude and humble, than all of prouder seeming. Farewell to thee, fair lake! Long may it be before thy rugged hills be stripped of their green garniture, or thy bright waters marred by the unpicturesque improvements of man's avarice!—for truly thou, in this utilitarian age, and at brief distance from America's metropolis, art young, and innocent, and unpolluted, as when the red man drank of thy pure waters, long centuries ere he dreamed ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... neighbourhood of Loftus, and from thence to the sea at Skinningrove the valley is green and open to the heavens. Loftus is on the borders of the Cleveland mining district, and it is for this reason that the town has grown to a considerable size. But although the miners' new cottages are unpicturesque, and the church only dates from 1811, the situation is pretty, owing to the profusion of trees among the houses. Skinningrove has railway-sidings and branch-lines running down to it, and on the hill above ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... said. "It is only the unpicturesque result of an unfeminine knowledge of the law. And I was thinking how one is limited—and yet how things are simplified ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... me to ye church, and was charmed with a curious antique font, and the tower, an octagon gothic lantern with extinguisher atop, like this: as far as memory serves me. Onward again, through St. Blazey, and a mining district, not ill-wooded, nor unpicturesque, to the fair town of St. Austle, which the piety of Cornish ancestors has furnished with another splendid specimen of ecclesiastical architecture, the upper half of the chief tower, a square one, being ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... upon which they found themselves was a very ordinary, unpicturesque-looking stretch of brown sand running practically straight, and also practically north and south, as far as the eye could see in both directions. It averaged about one hundred and twenty yards in width, was very flat, and on its landward side was bounded by a ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... words. It was a novel, oddly entitled The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Grant Richards), and fell into the hands of Miss Jessie Pope, who recognised the genius in it (none too strong a word), made some excisions, and now stands sponsor for it to the world. It is a grim story of the unpicturesque and horribly anxious lives of working-folk, specifically of the house-painter and his mates working on a job, elated and satisfied at the beginning, depressed and despondent as the work nears completion with the uncertainty as to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... such scenes with truth and grace. Thus we find these pictures of his, which, for the most part, are painted on small sheets, his sports, banterings, quarrellings, sledge-parties of children, with their half-frozen but still merry faces, in their puffy yet not unpicturesque costume; his beggar-boys, with their rag-ware on their backs, are almost always genial and pleasing. In the course of his narrow, in-doors life, he had worked himself into a friendly, nay, as it were, almost ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... the United States of America a few notes about that country. Though as a rule physically unpicturesque, it has some great wonder-places and beauty spots, such as the Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canon of the Colorado, the Yellowstone Park, the Falls of Niagara, and the big trees of California, which trees ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... The shops were now all closed, but lights gleamed from many windows. The beautiful latticed panes we had found in Morlaix were here very few and far between. Here and there we came upon gabled outlines, but much that we saw seemed modern and unpicturesque; very tame and commonplace after our late experience in the cathedral. The streets were silent and deserted; all doors were closed; the people of Quimper, like those of Morlaix, evidently carried out the good old rule of retiring early. Occasionally we came upon a group of buildings, or ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... breakers and billows upon broken bits of boat, while their fathers throw the cast-net nearer shore. The brown-black pigs and piglets root up the wet sand for shell-fish; and, higher up, the small piebald cattle loiter in the sun or shade. From afar the negro-groups are not unpicturesque in their bright red and brimstone yellow sheets, worn like Roman togas. A nearer view displays bridgeless, patulous noses, suggesting a figure of [Symbol: Figure-8 on its side.]; cheek-bones like molehills, and lips splayed ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... postilion blew his little horn incessantly as we galloped through the village and up the long, steep hill which leads to the chateau. The walls on both sides of the badly paved, narrow road were high and unpicturesque—not a tree to be seen; vineyards, ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... its ancient splendour, of its coronet of towers, was built by William the Conqueror on the summit of a precipitous height rising above the river Leen. It was dismantled by Cromwell, and what remained was pulled down by the Duke of Newcastle, who erected on its site the uninteresting and unpicturesque mansion that ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... of their dress are faced with white silk galloon, full an inch in width. To complete the whole, instead of hats, they have on their heads caps of velvet or colored cloth, forming a tout-ensemble of attire, which is evidently ancient, but far from unpicturesque or displeasing. Thus clad, the Poltese, though in the midst of the kingdom, have the appearance of a distinct and foreign colony; whilst, occupied incessantly in fishing, they have remained equally strangers ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... they measure fifty or sixty feet in height and are beautifully clothed with broad, level, fronded plumes down to the base, preserving a strict arrowy outline, though a few of the larger branches shoot out in free exuberance, relieving the spire from any unpicturesque stiffness of aspect, while the conical summit is crowded with thousands of rich brown cones to complete ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... was killed in the mill a month ago? Of course not,—what are such people to you? There was a girl who loved him,-you know what that is? She's dead now, here. She drank herself to death,—a most unpicturesque suicide. I want you to look at her. You need not blush for her life of shame, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the scene, the fire, the caldron, the intent figure and withered countenance of the old woman, the grouping of the other forms, the rude but not unpicturesque tent, the dark still woods on either side, with the deep and cloudless skies above, as the stars broke forth one by one upon the silent air, which (to use the orthodox phrase of the novelist) would not have been wholly unworthy the bold ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... canvas, and drawn by six mules, in the management of which rather intractable animals my father was an adept. In the wagon were stored our few household goods and scanty supply of provisions, and in it rode my wife and mother. My brother and myself figured as a mounted guard, and presented a not unpicturesque appearance in our tunics of dressed deerskin, and leggings of the same material; our revolvers in our belts, and rifles slung over our shoulder, or resting on the pommels of our Mexican saddles. ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... by the happy-go-lucky practicalness of the eighteenth century and the Revolution, reduced them thoroughly to rags; and with these rags of Renaissance civilization, Italy may still be seen to drape herself. Not perhaps in the great centres, where the garments of modern civilization, economical, unpicturesque, intended to be worn but a short time, have been imported from other countries; but yet in many places. Yes, you may still see those rags of the Renaissance as plainly as you see the tattered linen fluttering ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Pemberton. Its metal will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which so defaced its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick foundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. It overlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is not unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds. The battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed to the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... naturally under the Crown-Prince's government at present: the little Town or Village of Reinsberg stands about, ten miles north of the Town Ruppin;—not quite a third-part as big as Ruppin is in our time, and much more pleasantly situated. The country about is of comfortable, not unpicturesque character; to be distinguished almost as beautiful, in that region of sand and moor. Lakes abound in it; tilled fields; heights called "hills;" and wood of fair growth,—one reads of "beech-avenues" of "high linden-avenues:"—a country rather of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... invite the beautiful bird, which now advanced, now withdrew its rich blue neck, as in condescension, then raised its crested head in sudden alarm, its train sweeping the ground in royal splendour. Arthur, no unpicturesque figure in his loose brown coat, stood by, leaning against the stand of one of the vases of plants, whose rich wreaths of brightly coloured blossoms hung down, making a setting for the group; and while Violet by her blandishments invited the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said to afford one of the finest specimens of the skill of Vauban. They may do so; but they are very flat, tame, and unpicturesque. We now neared the barriers: delivered our passports; and darted under the first large brick arched way. A devious paved route brought us to the second gate;—and thus we entered the town; desiring the post-boy to drive to the Hotel de l'Esprit. "You judge wisely, Sir, (replied he) for ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of "drops of brandy," while, with every stretch of canvass set, we joyfully proceeded in our course, saluting the Pasha, according to custom, as we came abreast of the village of the Dardanelles, which occupies a low situation, and its mean-looking houses are huddled together in a very unpicturesque manner. The celebrated castles look formidable enough, with their enormous guns lying upon the ground without carriages, and sweeping the surface of the waves from shore to shore. The entire population was assembled upon ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... part of this and the neighbouring streets has been very recently rebuilt. Huge modern red-brick mansions with all the latest conveniences of electric light and lifts replace the old mansion which once stood here. These are carefully built and not unpicturesque; they are let in flats, and house a multitude of offices, clubs, etc. They are called by the names of the noble families who once lived here—Arundel House, Mowbray House, and Howard House. In Norfolk Street there are hotels and a small ladies' club, the Writers', the ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... covered, with a scanty soil, but capable of cultivation in corn, olives, and figs. This region is most productive towards the north, barer and more arid as we proceed southwards towards the desert. The lowest portion, Judaea, is unpicturesque, ill-watered, and almost treeless; the central, Samaria, has numerous springs, some rich plains, many wooded heights, and in places quite a sylvan appearance; the highest, Galilee, is a land of water-brooks, abounding in timber, fertile and beautiful. The average height ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... the grey dawn struggled through the clouds, which still doggedly hugged the earth, and drove away the gloomy shadows which enveloped the high unpicturesque walls of the penitentiary. The rain had ceased falling; even the wind had grown weary, and its faint whispering could ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... a fine dry dock and navy yard, as I was informed.... The appearance of the place in general was mean and unpicturesque. Here I encountered the first slaves I ever saw, and the sight of them in no way tended to alter my previous opinions upon this subject. They were poorly clothed; looked horribly dirty, and had a lazy recklessness in their air and manner ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... eyes of the reverend old gentleman, her father's friend? The three-cornered hat which he doffs with ceremonious courtesy to the fair vision before him, the powdered queue, the high boots with jingling spurs, the sword at his side, are not unpicturesque items in our nineteenth-century eyes. Were they likely to be so in the eyes of this nineteen-year-old ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... wrangling in the house of the guide, we were transferred to horses and donkeys; and off we went, first up a hot lane between stone walls, and then along a fine paved road. The party was merry, and not unpicturesque, but out of character with the scene. Not one of us was subdued by the tranquil beauty of the little landscapes, the bright green nooks that opened here and there. Our temperaments were still too northern. We were not yet soothed down by the sunny sky and balmy air of Italy; and got stared ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... paper commenced appearing and disappearing under the door. She mounted a chair and peeped through that odd little jalousie which formerly was in almost all New Orleans street-doors; but the missive had meantime found its way across the sill, and she saw only the unpicturesque back of a departing errand-boy. But that was well. She had a pride, to maintain which—and a poverty, to conceal which—she felt to be necessary to her self-respect; and this made her of necessity a trifle unsocial in her own castle. Do you suppose ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... whole, the look of the thing was not unpicturesque, except for the hopeless whiteness and shabbiness of the principal architectural features, and especially the "Konak" (palace), which was, beyond all disguise of light or circumstance, an eyesore and a nuisance, the more so that its foundations were fine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... a tall, bronzed young man with yellow hair and quick blue eyes, in what an observant British tourist noted in his journal as "the not unpicturesque garb of a border-ruffian," helped a dazed but very pretty young woman on to the rear platform of the Pullman car attached to the east-bound overland ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... orderly is not (I think I may assert on his behalf) puffed up with foolish illusions as to his place in the scheme of things. It is a humble place, and he knows it. His work is almost comically unromantic, painfully unpicturesque. Moreover—let us be frank—much of it is uninteresting, after the first novelty has worn off. Work in the wards has its compensations: here there is the human element. But only a portion of a unit such as ours can be detailed for ward work: ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... rapturous praises of her charms. "Helpstone," wrote an old friend of the poet, lately deceased, "lies between six and seven miles NNW of Peterborough, on the Syston and Peterborough branch of the Midland Railway, the station being about half a mile from the town. A not unpicturesque country lies about it, though its beauty is somewhat of the Dutch character; far-stretching distances, level meadows, intersected with grey willows and sedgy dikes, frequent spires, substantial watermills, and farm ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... class of maidens; namely, a shawl, which at midday or in fine weather was allowed to be merely a shawl, but towards evening, if the day was chilly, became a sort of Spanish mantilla or Scotch plaid, and was brought over the head and hung loosely down, or was pinned under the chin in no unpicturesque fashion. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... first visit here in September. Highly beneficial to the community, no doubt; but destructive of the repose and seclusion of this charming scene. The sweetest spots, and such as one would most desire to conserve, seem to be always the places peculiarly selected for these useful but most unpicturesque invasions. ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... is gradual at first and not unpicturesque: after passing a small chokey about half a mile from Buxa, sandstone of a coarse nature commences. The descent is very steep, and continues so until within a short distance of a place called Minagoung, at which the bullocks are unladen at least of heavy baggage. The remaining ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... had just shrieked out its usual indignant protest at stopping at Genoa at all, as Mr. Jack Prince entered the outskirts of the town, and drove towards his hotel. He was wearied and cynical. A drive of a dozen miles through unpicturesque outlying villages, past small economic farmhouses, and hideous villas that violated his fastidious taste, had, I fear, left that gentleman in a captious state of mind. He would have even avoided his taciturn landlord as he drove up to the door; but that functionary ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... half a dozen families, living in squalid tents. The braves worked in the fields for Denton and the squaws kept to the shade with their numerous children. They appeared to be poor. Certainly they were a ragged unpicturesque group. Nielsen and I visited them, taking an armload of canned fruit, and boxes of sweet crackers, which they received with evident joy. Through this overture I got a peep into one of the tents. The simplicity and frugality of the desert Piute or Navajo ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... changes in "The Wayside" and surrounding grounds. He enlarged the house and added the striking but quite unpicturesque tower which rises from the centre of the main part; here he had his study and point of observation; he could see the unwelcome visitor while yet a far way off, or contemplate the lazy ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... as he stepped into the cage he turned to look at the unpicturesque little town, brightened by the winter's sun; and that as he went down he glanced up at the sky, and marked how intense appeared the bit of blue which was framed in by the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... what you mean. Man makes ugly marks on the wilderness unless he goes to farm. A mine, for example, is remarkably unpicturesque." ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... death of Henri III, Henri de Navarre, who played a not unpicturesque part in the funeral ceremonies, installed himself in a neighbouring property known as the Maison du Tillet. Thus it is seen that the royal stamp of the little bourg of Saint Cloud was never wanting—not until the later palace and most of the town were drenched ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... or rather predominance, of the ideal in his loves, his hates, and his sorrows, the state of his existence at that period, animated as it was, and kept buoyant, by such a flow of success, must be acknowledged, even with every deduction for the unpicturesque associations of a London life, to have been, in a high degree, poetical, and to have worn round it altogether a sort of halo of romance, which the events that followed were but too much calculated to dissipate. By ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... in their breathing—the way little children do, you know, after they have been crying a good deal; and I sat quite still, staring out at the gloomy-looking country that we were whizzing through, the bare trees and dull fields, so different from the brightness and prettiness of even a flat unpicturesque landscape on a summer day, when the sun lights up everything, and makes the fresh green look still fresher and more tempting. And it seemed to me that the sky and the sun and all the outside things were looking dull ...
— The Boys and I • Mrs. Molesworth
... stockings, which, like the rest of his apparel, were particularly rusty. His looks were starched, but his white neckerchief was not, and its long limp ends straggled over his closely-buttoned waistcoat in a very uncouth and unpicturesque fashion. A pair of old, worn, beaver gloves, a broad-brimmed hat, and a faded green umbrella, with plenty of whalebone sticking through the bottom, as if to counterbalance the want of a handle at the top, lay on a chair beside him; and, being disposed in a very ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the statues were most unpicturesque, and the varied and flashing electric advertisements to be seen hung up on high around the Square were not only hideous ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... to have seen any instances of this in the streets. They are slovenly, and the lower classes extremely dirty; the market-women, in their white flannel peaked hoods of a hideous form, or their handkerchiefs loosely tied, without grace and merely for warmth, have in the cold season a very unpicturesque appearance, and the shrill shrieking voices of those who scream hot chesnuts to sell about the streets, uttering their piercing cry of "tou cai, tou cai!"[26] is anything but pleasing to ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... although it had been worn by every member of the family in succession, and was frayed, and torn, and forlorn enough in broad daylight, by the uncertain Rembrandt glare of the chamber-candle, its gorgeous palm-leaf pattern and soft folds made a by no means unpicturesque or unbecoming drapery, in conjunction with the girl's grand, soft, un-English eyes, ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the wide estuary of the Canche showed clear, lake-like sheets of water amid the brilliant greenery; later are passed sandy downs with few trees or breaks in the landscape. This part of France should be seen during the budding season; of itself unpicturesque, it is yet beautified by the early foliage. Hesdin is an ancient, quiet little town on the Canche, with tanneries making pictures—and smells—by the river, unpaved streets, and a very curious bit of civic architecture, the triple-storeyed portico of the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the highest rank, he could not have been received with more ceremony. The guard turned out, and the rattle of the muskets was heard as the massive gates rolled ponderously upon their axes. The one light in the entrance gave an awful but not unpicturesque appearance to the scene, for it was reflected on the glittering steel. It cast its wild gleams on the bronzed cheeks of the guards, while the length and height of the hall were lost in ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... on the outside, New England history is dry and unpicturesque. There is no rustle of silks, no waving of plumes, no clink of golden spurs. Our sympathies are not awakened by the changeful destinies, the rise and fall, of great families, whose doom was in their blood. Instead of all this, we have the homespun ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... true that American life presents less salient characteristics than that of Europe; that class distinctions are less marked; and that the energies of the nation are still so much confined to strictly utilitarian objects, that life moves along with unpicturesque sameness and evenness. But mankind remains equally complicated and equally interesting under whatever circumstances it may be placed. The vast extent of American territory and the infinite variety of its inhabitants ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman |
