"Hackneyed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and book, eagerly—for both were enthusiastic—sketching one of the most enchanting scenes that can well be imagined. We will not attempt the impossible. Description could not convey it. We can only refer the reader's imagination to the one old, hackneyed but expressive, word—fairyland! ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... painter, had gone back to London. Perhaps it was the spring, perhaps it was merely the law which decrees that the past can never be recaptured—whatever the cause, Stefan's flight had not wholly assuaged his restlessness. Of adventures in the hackneyed sense he had not thought. He was too fastidious for the vulgar sort, and had hitherto met no women who stirred his imagination. Moreover, he harbored the delusion that the failure of his great romance had killed his capacity ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... help thinking about it night and day. I wouldn't wonder if that meddling missionary had been praying about it all the while; and the result is, the old money-lender is going to give you a lift, my boy. We, hackneyed, hopeless old reprobates, need just such preachers as the missionary's famous seminary is going to make out of you; and I invited you here to say that you can depend on me for two hundred dollars in gold to start with, and ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... suddenly the pangs of life. His movement shot Cuckoo like a bullet into her real world. Through her tears she saw a man regarding her. In a flash, old habit brought to her a smile, a turned head of coquetry, an entreating hand, a hackneyed phrase that reiteration rendered parrot-like in intonation. The youth shrank back and fled away in the darkness. Long afterwards that incident haunted him as an epitome of all ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... gladder to see Pard and Lite again than she was to meet the six-hundred-a-week star whose popularity she seemed in a fair way to outrival. Men and women who were "in stock," and therefore within the social pale, were introduced to her and said nice, hackneyed things about how they admired her work and were glad to welcome her. She felt the warm air of good-fellowship that followed her everywhere. All of these people seemed to accept her at once as one of themselves. When she noticed it, she was amused at the ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... have prefixed the hackneyed line of Il Penseroso to our paper, because it is a definition of the essence of the beautiful. What is most musical, will always be found most melancholy; and no real beauty can be obtained without ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... at any name that I could think of; nor, indeed, could I recommend any one with full confidence. It would be a very desirable task for a young literary man, or, for that matter, for an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... overwhelming, had changed from its old vehemence. This change had been wrought in Zillah—the old, unreasoning passion had left her. A real affliction had brought out, by its gradual renovating and creative force, all the good that was in her. That the uses of adversity are sweet, is a hackneyed Shakspeareanism, but it is forever true, and nowhere was its truth more fully displayed than here. Formerly it happened that an ordinary check in the way of her desires was sufficient to send her almost into convulsions; but now, in the presence of her great ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... your goodness, I do not approach you, my Lords and Gentlemen, in the usual style of dedication, to thank you for past favours: that path is so hackneyed by prostituted learning that honest rusticity is ashamed of it. Nor do I present this address with the venal soul of a servile author, looking for a continuation of those favours: I was bred to the plough, and am independent. I come to claim the common ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... The hackneyed poem beginning with this stanza that delighted our nursery days, has left in our minds a fairly correct impression of the bird. He still proves to be one of the perennially joyous singers, like a true cousin of the wrens, and when we study him afield, he appears to give his ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... alive and dead, have sung of Spring, and doubtless have fancied that they understood it. They had no more idea of what they were singing about than—than the man in the moon, if we may venture to use a rather hackneyed comparison. Listen, reader, humbly, as ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... revealed from the top of the island was a veritable apocalypse. There was something unique about the desolate grandeur of the novel surroundings that would cause a man of the Sir Charles Coldstream type to say there "is something in it," and the most hackneyed man of the world would acknowledge a new sensation. It was midnight, and the sun shone with gleaming splendor over all this waste of ice and sea and granite; on one hand Wrangel Island appeared in well-defined outline, on the other an open sea ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... the editor expresses the customary regrets that the poet should have chosen so defective a stanza, "so romantick a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, which appears so monstrous when "examined by the rules of epick poetry"; makes the hackneyed comparison between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture, and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at the time when he wrote, "the remains of the old Gothick chivalry were not quite abolished." "He did not ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... blue, her head had been dressed with real flowers by a coiffeur of the old-fashioned school, whose awkward hands had unconsciously given the charm of ineptitude to her fair hair. Still unaccustomed to any finery, she showed the timidity—to use a hackneyed phrase—inseparable from a first appearance. She had come from Valognes to find in Paris some use for her distracting youthfulness, her innocence that might have stirred the senses of a dying man, and her beauty, worthy to hold its own with any that Normandy has ever supplied ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... furnished with excellent roads, and in part with railways, contain large and civilized towns, and are inhabited by a peaceable and industrious population. The difficulties, such as they are, can be overcome by the two necessaries for all except the most hackneyed excursions—time and money. In Java the former is, if anything, more important ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... pictures—signed simply A. Delasalle—were the work of a man. Attracted by the dramatic aspects of human nature, she finds congenial subjects in the great efforts of humanity in the struggle for life. Her power of observation enables her to give freshness to hackneyed subjects, as in "La Forge." The attitudes of the workmen, so sure and decided, turning the half-fused metal are perfect in the precision of their combined efforts; the fatigue of the men who are resting, overwhelmed ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... not been so hackneyed, I would have advised Mr. Bull to mend his way; but he seemed so thoroughly astonished ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and says it gracefully and without stiltedness or intimacy. Their aim seems to be the ability to write a business letter which may be easily read, easily understood, and with the important facts in the attention-compelling places. But for the sake of those who still cling to these hackneyed improprieties (which most of them are), let us line them up for inspection. Many of them are inaccurate, and a moment's thought will give a better method ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... other lovers of routine. New needs of the mind, of the heart, and of the sense of hearing, make necessary new endeavours and, in some cases, the breaking of ancient laws. Many forms have become too hackneyed to be still adopted. The same thing may be entirely good or entirely bad, according to the use one makes of it, or the reasons one has for making use of it. Sound and sonority are secondary to thought, and thought is secondary to feeling ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... opinions they were all, with a few exceptions, literally tongue-tied. Two or three of the more thoughtful ones made an attempt to define Deity, but their definitions, for the most part, were the hackneyed ones of ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... beautiful women; old footmen, relics of serfdom, on the brink of the grave; young ladies longing for the most conventional love. In addition to all these things, not far from me there is even such a hackneyed cliche as a water-mill (with sixteen wheels), with a miller, and his daughter who always sits at the window, apparently waiting for someone. All that I see and hear now seems familiar to me from old novels and ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... frenzy, downward from her Grace, Whose flambeaux flash against the morning skies, And gild our chamber ceilings as they pass, To her who, frugal only that her thrift May feed excesses she can ill afford, Is hackneyed home unlackeyed; who, in haste Alighting, turns the key in her own door, And, at the watchman's lantern borrowing light, Finds a cold bed her only comfort left. Wives beggar husbands, husbands starve their wives, On Fortune's ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... such a universe be really the fabrication of such a Being. It is impossible to express my astonishment at the ease with which Mr. Newman disposes of the difficulties connected with the origin and perpetuation of physical and moral evil. His arguments are just two of the most hackneyed commonplaces with which metaphysicians have attempted to evade these stupendous difficulties; and it is not too much to say, that there never was a man who was not resolved that his theory must stand, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... historical explanation, no reference to hackneyed categories in the card-index of Time. Whether his plan was dedicated to this world or to the glory of some invisible God, you may debate as you will, but Bismarck will be neither greater nor less because ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... form her one freehold for all artists, and he had but the instrument of his guild—his pen; the series of his collected contributions to journals and magazines bear a no more distinctive title than the hackneyed one of 'Notes Contemporaines,' but the sub-titles betray at once the trend of originality: 'Great Souls and Little Lives,' 'The Obscure Ones,' 'Companions of the New Life'; and in the treatment of these subjects, and especially in his sketches of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... compound sentence. We have examples in the phrases, "[Greek: pleion touton]" and "plus his," above. Of such a construction our language admits no real example; that is, no exact parallel. But we have an imitation of it in the phrase than whom, as in this hackneyed example from Milton: ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... goods smuggled so regularly across the Mexican and Canadian borders. Why were we content to allow the smuggling to continue without interference, simply because we felt it couldn't be stamped out anyhow? The Japanese did not resort to the hackneyed piano-cases and farming machinery; they knew better than to employ such clumsy methods. The goods they sent over the line consisted of neat little boxes full of guns and other weapons which had been taken apart. And when a Japanese farmer ordered a hay-cart from Canada, ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... often give it away the next week. For he really liked money only for freedom and ease. The general look of the house was, consequently, distinguished, sincere and extremely comfortable. It was neither hackneyed nor bizarre, and, while it contained some interesting things, had ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... truthful man in the restaurant; that too truthful man in Burmah, is Mr. Bernard Shaw. He appears eccentric and grotesque because he will not accept the general belief that white is yellow. He has based all his brilliancy and solidity upon the hackneyed, but yet forgotten, fact that truth is stranger than fiction. Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... one answer was expected,—was customary in all cases,—there was a pause of dead silence, an interval of solemnity even in this hackneyed part of the proceeding; while the prisoner at the bar stood with compressed lips, looking at the judge with his outward eyes, but with far other and different scenes presented to his mental vision; a sort of rapid recapitulation of his life,—remembrances of ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and a broken car, and a rainy night when they—she and Sullivan, tramped eternally and did not get home. And of Mrs. Curtis, when they got home at dawn, suddenly grown conventional and deeply shocked. Of her own proud, half-disdainful consent to make possible the hackneyed compromising situation by marrying the rascal, and then—of his disappearance from the train. It was so terrible to her, such a Heaven-sent relief to me, in spite of my rage against Sullivan, that I laughed aloud. At which she looked at me over ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... composition, and, as a rule, a stiff, formal picture, with each individual posed as for a photograph, was the result. Rembrandt, apparently, was in nowise restricted when he undertook the work for Banning Cock, and so, instead of the stupid, hackneyed arrangement, he made of the portrait of the company a picture of armed men marching forth to beating of drums and waving of banners, "The Night Watch," as it must ever be known—more accurately, "The Sortie ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... care he has shown in quoting one of those hackneyed phrases which almost all the world misquotes, "Que mon nom soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre." Of a hundred times that you may see those words of Danton's written down, you will perhaps not see them once written down exactly as they ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... first youth, wearing the crown and wielding the sceptre, had become un fait accompli and the news spread over the length and breadth of the land. We have seen how it touched the oldest statesmen, to whom State ceremonials had become hackneyed—who were perhaps a little sceptical of virtue in high places. It may be imagined, then, how the knowledge, with each striking and picturesque detail, thrilled and engrossed all the sensitive, romantic young hearts in the Queen's dominions. It seemed as if womanhood and girlhood ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... creed is false, quite false. I shall not advance to the attack with hackneyed tales of the rich man astray in a desert, who cannot get even a drop of water for his gold; or the decrepit millionaire who would give half he has to buy from a stalwart fellow without a cent, his twenty ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... written in the "snatched leisure" of an active political life, bear marks of haste, and are very unequal. In the midst of passages of pastoral description worthy of Milton himself, feeble lines and hackneyed phrases occur. His Nymph lamenting the Death of her Fawn is a finished and elaborate piece, full of grace and tenderness. Thoughts in a Garden will be remembered by the quotations of that exquisite critic, Charles Lamb. How ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... ENGLISH EXPRESSIONS for all the slang, fine writing, and hackneyed phrases that you meet, and then use the good expressions instead ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... made mistakes, at least I have not been mistaken in choosing you before all others as the persons to whom I dedicate these Discourses; both because I seem to myself, in doing so, to have shown a little gratitude for kindness received, and at the same time to have departed from the hackneyed custom which leads many authors to inscribe their works to some Prince, and blinded by hopes of favour or reward, to praise him as possessed of every virtue; whereas with more reason they might reproach him as contaminated ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... to vice to tremble at the enquiries of justice; and Mrs. Brown, whose conscience was not entirely clear upon my account, as knowing as she was of the town as hackneyed as she was in bluffing through all the dangers of her vocation, could not help being alarmed at the questions, especially when he went on to talk of a Justice of peace, Newgate, the Old Bailey, indictments for keeping a disorderly house, pillory, carting, ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... The subject is too hackneyed, and, indeed, possesses too little interest, to induce us to give more than an outline of what passed. The captain and the chaplain belonged to that class of friends, which may be termed argumentative. Their constant discussions were a strong link in the chain of esteem; ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... remains yet another cause to be noticed, which seems to have induced a considerable alteration into the popular creed of England, respecting Fairies. Many poets of the sixteenth century, and, above all, our immortal Shakespeare, deserting the hackneyed fictions of Greece and Rome, sought for machinery in the superstitions of their native country. "The fays, which nightly dance upon the wold," were an interesting subject; and the creative imagination of the bard, improving upon the vulgar ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... in the face of the Lady Duty, and, putting a hand in hers, go onward, thinking nothing hard because of her beauty. But it is admitted by all that there is often a stage between these two, when all the romance of life is summed up in the hackneyed word "love." The pretty girls who were nicknamed Blue and Red had outgrown childhood, and they saw no particular charm in work; they were very dull, and scarce knew why, except that they half envied Eliza, who had gone to the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... hackneyed, battered, old conventional newspaper gibberish had in it the breath of life. I believed it. At that moment, on the threshold of new experiences, I took the words on trust. Perhaps, for once, the things I had read in books had not eluded me! Perhaps the old gentleman in the flannel nightgown really ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... accepted this general view of their function, and many in one way or another have explicitly stated it. "As light to the eye, even such is beauty to the mind," said Coleridge, whose meaning was philosophically definite, but in no way at variance with Shakespeare's too hackneyed ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... strained, plangent pathos in the tune; but beneath those masterly old hands it cried softly and bitterly the solitude and desperate estrangement of the world. Arthur and his lady-love vanished from my thoughts. No one could put into a rather hackneyed old hymn-tune such an appeal who had never known the meaning of the words. Their meaning, anyhow, isn't commonplace. I turned very cautiously and glanced at the musician. She was leaning forward a little over the keys, so that at the approach of my cautious glance she had ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... 'TWAS self-denial — and I lectured him on booze, Using all the hackneyed arguments that preachers mostly use; Things I'd heard in temperance lectures (I was young and rather green), And I ended by referring to the man ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, the dead manners, it will always be on. All is just near enough to us for it to be enjoyed, as we ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... chorus reminds us that one of the noteworthy points in the oratorio is the character of its cadences. The cadence prepared by the 6/4 chord, now become so hackneyed from its perpetual and wearisome repetition in popular church music, seems to be especially disliked by Mr. Paine, as it occurs but once or twice in the course of the work. In the great choruses the cadence is usually reached either by a pedal on the tonic, as ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... unfinished picture, and, as usual, Malcolm had been holding forth in his role of art critic, when one of those sudden pauses which seem to drop softly between intimate friends followed his concluding speech. Verity held up her finger with the hackneyed allusion to a passing angel, at ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... is nothing comparable in human annals. We have developed wholly new powers; and, coincidentally and correspondingly, a wholly new attitude to life. Of the powers I do not intend to speak; the wonders of steam and electricity are the hackneyed theme of every halfpenny paper. But the attitude to life, which is even more important, is something that has hardly yet been formulated. And I shall endeavour to give some first ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the fulness and frankness of avowal, and the delicate and fervent earnestness of self-consecration, which make these ancient oracles of a human heart fragrant with the odor of true piety. He uses no hackneyed terms, no second-hand or imitated phrases. His language, as well as his thoughts, his method, and ideal standard, are purely his own. Indeed, we might set up and sustain for him a claim of absolute individuality, if not even of originality, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Boyd also told us, Cumming the Quaker first began to distinguish himself, by writing against Dr Leechman on prayer, to prove it unnecessary, as God knows best what should be, and will order it without our asking—the old hackneyed objection. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... Paris. There is no need to dwell upon the incidents of a commonplace tour like this, though one can never forget the delightful sense of exhilaration produced by a first experience of the living grandeur of the Alps. Switzerland was not so completely hackneyed in those days as it is now, and to me, of course, as a newcomer, it did not seem to be hackneyed at all. I was too young, I think, fully to realise the indescribable charm of Italy, a charm which is felt more strongly by most of us with each successive visit to that land of dreams and beauty. ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Puck-hairy, her son the rude swineherd Lorel, and her daughter Douce the proud. In every case Jonson appropriated and adapted an already familiar element, but he did so in a manner to fashion out of the thumbed conventions of a hackneyed tradition something fresh and ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... little lamb you are, to be sure! How lucky for you that I am always at hand to keep you from being led to the slaughter—not altar!" Eleanor laughed again at her clever play on the hackneyed phrase. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... must look ourselves and the German character in the face—this unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our own soul and is not founded in our ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... English to relapse into their Northern barbarity by multiplying monosyllables and eliding vowels between the rough and frequent consonants of their language. His ignorance of the historical origins of the language and his rather hackneyed remarks on its character do not invalidate the general scheme of his Proposal or his particular criticisms of current linguistic habits, but they did lay him open to the very penetrating and decisive attack of ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... amusement as the foolishness of these persons, who deem themselves so wise, especially those practical, rational, matter-of-fact and epicurean persons, who go to such a vast amount of trouble and suffer themselves to be put off with such hackneyed, transitory, unreal, ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... it perfectly. He did this in Ulysses, which comes nearer a noble perfection, perhaps, than anything else he ever wrote. One can imagine the enthusiasm of some literary discoverer many centuries hence, when Tennyson is as little known as Donne was fifty years ago, coming upon lines hackneyed ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... men—men with books and time to read them, with brains and the wealth and leisure to develop them—who to this very day abuse their talents in encouraging among the ignorant multitude the belief that the Irish leaders of that day were, to use the old hackneyed phrase, "traitors to the Empire." If we look at the whole of these events in just perspective, if we search coolly and patiently for abiding principles beneath the sordid din and confusion of racial strife, we shall agree that in some respects Irishmen were better friends to the ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... Pen," said the Vicar; and in the sententious pause that followed, I felt that I would offer any gifts of gold to avert or postpone the solemn, inevitable, hackneyed, and yet, as it seemed to me, perfectly appalling statement that "the Pen is ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... hundred louis d'or—a slight consolation for my heart, which was almost broken by our cruel separation! During the last twenty-four hours we could boast of no other eloquence but that which finds expression in tears, in sobs, and in those hackneyed but energetic exclamations, which two happy lovers are sure to address to reason, when in its sternness it compels them to part from one another in the very height of their felicity. Henriette did not endeavour to lure me with any hope ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... three whole days, not to hear that one everlasting sound; then I returned and to my great relief the birds were all at their old game of composing, and not one uttered—perhaps he didn't dare—the too hackneyed phrase. I was sharply reminded one day by an incident in the village of this old Patagonian experience, and of the strange human-like weakness or passion for something new and arresting in music or ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... he cared for her. He told her once that he loved her; there was a half-betrothal; but that was long ago. She sat, her work fallen on her lap, going over, as women will, for the thousandth time, the simple story, what he said, and how he looked, finding in every hackneyed phrase some new, divine meaning. The same story; yet Betsey finds it new by your kitchen-fire to-night, as Gretchen read it in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... her especial charm seems to have been that voluptuous grace which is characteristic of Andalusian women. She was simple and pious, with a nature of great sweetness, and she never abused her power; her influence, as runs the hackneyed phrase, was always for good, and untiringly she did her utmost to incline her despot lover to mercy. She alone sheds a ray of light on Pedro's memory, only her love can save him from the execration of posterity. When she died rich and poor alike mourned ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... ignorance of the very first principles: simple ignorance of the mechanical part of his art chilled all inspiration and formed an impassable barrier to his imagination. His brush returned involuntarily to hackneyed forms: hands folded themselves in a set attitude; heads dared not make any unusual turn; the very garments turned out commonplace, and would not drape themselves to any unaccustomed posture of the body. And he felt ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... hackneyed of all the answers to the case for the classics is the one that has been most rarely replied to. I mean the fact that the Greeks were not acquainted with any language but their own. I have never known an attempt to parry ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... suffered the same fate as many other words in our language. It has become hackneyed and corrupted; it has taken a professional taint; it has almost become a byword. We are apt to think of the philanthropist as an excitable, contentious creature, at the mercy of every fad, an ultra-radical in politics, craving for notoriety, filled with self-confidence, and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... said with a certain ill-concealed triumph in his voice. I saw now why he had taken the case, and saw, too, the drift of his defence—everything thus far pointed to the old hackneyed plea of an alibi. He had evidently determined on this course of action when he sat listening to the stories Bud's father and the girl had told him as he sat beside them on the bench near the door. Their testimony, taken in connection with the uncertain ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... one. That is very fine, but so hackneyed. Do play this one. [Tnya plays what she can of it, ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... "Dr. Hookwell," and "Dr. Johnson, his Religious Life and his Death." In this last work, the Quarterly Review observes, "Johnson's name is made the peg on which to hang up—or rather the line on which to hang out—much hackneyed sentimentality, and some borrowed learning, with an awful and overpowering quantity of twaddle and rigmarole." The writer concludes his reviewal: "We are sorry to have had to make such an exposure of a man, who, apart from the morbid excess of vanity which has evidently ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... subsequent and still current speculation which, in so far as it is merely a development of those germs, cannot but be infected by whatever unsoundness may be inherent in them; and, secondly, because the subject, hackneyed as it may seem, is so far from being exhausted, that there is scarcely one among the doctrines embodied in it to which, as I proceed at once to show, fresh objection, more or less grave, may not be taken by a ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... is one of intense gloom. Of all the dark books in fiction, no works sound such depths of suffering and despair as are fathomed by the Russians. Many English readers used to say that the novels of George Eliot were "profoundly sad,"—it became almost a hackneyed phrase. Her stories are rollicking comedies compared with the awful shadow cast by the literature of the Slavs. Suffering is the heritage of the Russian race; their history is steeped in blood and tears, their present condition seems intolerably painful, and the future ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... I opened it,—listening for any promise of being interrupted—and—to adapt a hackneyed phrase—directed by the power which shaped my end, I went across the hall and up the stairs. I passed up the first landing, and, on the second, moved to a door upon the right. I turned the handle, it yielded, the door opened, I entered, closing it behind me. I ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... and smiled with an air of compassionate superiority. "Depopulation an evil!" exclaimed Seguin; "can you, my dear sir, intelligent as you are, still believe in that hackneyed old story? Come, reflect and ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... which, constructed by the New South Wales Government for the Admiralty, were built to "patrol the various recruiting grounds of the Fijian and Queensland planters and place the labour-traffic under the most rigid supervision." The remark quoted above was then, as it is now, quite a hackneyed one, much used by the gallant officers who commanded the one-gun-one-rocket-tube craft aforementioned. Likewise, the "highly irregular proceedings" were a naval synonym for some of the bloodiest slaving outrages ever perpetrated, but which, however, never came to light beyond ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... you say to Matchlock?" inquired I. "You might as well have Blunderbuss while you are about it," was the reply. "No, both words are dreadfully hackneyed; let us try and find ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... 'violently in love' is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as often applied to feelings which arise from a half-hour's acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment. Pray, how violent ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... place of exile and condemnation. Their eyes are forever turned back to the object they have lost, and its recollection poisons the residue of their lives. Their first and most delicate passions are hackneyed on unworthy objects here, and they carry home the dregs, insufficient to make themselves or anybody else happy. Add to this, that a habit of idleness, an inability to apply themselves to business is acquired, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... to himself, "feature for feature, down to the very 'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got up, apres coup, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed words, under his breath.... ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... knowledge comes direct from the throne, and they have nothing to do with man-made theories, as they call education. Their preaching is a sort of canting reiteration of the text and what few Scripture verses they chance to know and some hackneyed expressions. They are great on arguing, and it would be laughable if it was not so pitiful to hear the profound questions they discuss. Last season one of these preachers nearly broke up one of our mission ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... question; there never has been any question. All the sensible people of all ages are agreed upon it. And it is not literature, nor is it any other art, nor is it history, nor is it any science. It is the study of one's self. Man, know thyself. These words are so hackneyed that verily I blush to write them. Yet they must be written, for they need to be written. (I take back my blush, being ashamed of it.) Man, know thyself. I say it out loud. The phrase is one of those phrases with which everyone is familiar, of which everyone acknowledges the value, and which only ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... up the valses of Chopin beginning with Op. 64, No. 1, like the concerto, dedicated to Delphine. This is the most familiar of all the Chopin waltzes, so familiar that it frequently is referred to in a derogatory way as hackneyed. Yet, when properly played, it is one of the most effective of his compositions in this genre. Of the Chopin waltzes in general, it should first be said that they are not dance-tunes but expressions, alternately brilliant, charming and sad, ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... there came to Frances Waldeaux, for the first time in her life, a perception that there was help for her in the world, outside of her own strength. Her poor tortured wits discerned One, more real than her crime, or George, or the woman that she had killed. It was an old, hackneyed story, that He knew every man and woman in the world, that He could help them. ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... any other trousered beings extant. Later on you found this a decided error. Item, she had a quite incredible amount of yellow hair, that was not in the least like gold or copper or bronze—I scorn the hackneyed similes of metallurgical poets—but a straightforward yellow, darkening at the roots; and she wore it low down on her neck in great coils that were held in place by a multitude of little golden hair-pins ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... hackneyed to say that "the clown that grins before the audience, who laugh with and at the merryandrew and his antics, is frequently weeping behind his mask;" yet, it ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... get up one or two rousing speeches for the Parliament, which should take the shine out of every one else and carry the school by storm? It was not a bad idea. But the chance would not come. No one could get up a fine speech on such a hackneyed subject as "That Rowing is a finer Sport than Cricket," or that "The Study of Science in Public Schools should be Abolished!" And when he did attempt to prepare an oration on the subject of Compulsory Football, the first friend he showed it to ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... forbear. That comparison is, I believe, somewhat hackneyed. The reader will therefore be good enough to appropriate the point of it, and understand that the shock of this intelligence was so overpowering, that I was ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... song, "I never have been false to thee," is, of itself, sufficient to establish General Morris's fame as a great poet—as a "potens magister affectuum"—and as a literary creator of a high order. It is a thoroughly fresh and effective poem on a subject as hackneyed as the highway; it is as deep as truth itself, yet light as the movement of a dance. We had almost forgotten, what the world will never forget, the matchless softness and transparent delicacy of "Near the Lake." ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... Dromore, after strictly examining Taverner anent the whole matter, expressed his belief in the realness of the apparition. No doubt the medium of communication suffered much mental torture, and great excitement prevailed in the north of Ireland; but, however, to use a hackneyed phrase, "All's well that ends well." The apparition's mission to earth was fulfilled; for the young man's wrongs were redressed, and he remained for many years in secure possession ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... I can tell you of something rather extraordinary that my mother used to say happened to a friend of hers at Glamis. I have no doubt you are well acquainted with the hackneyed stories in connection with the hauntings at the castle; for example, Earl Beardie playing cards with the Devil, and The Weeping Woman without Hands or Tongue. You can read about them in scores of books and ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... public use of the art in the declamation of prepared passages; and the elocution-master's science has been brought into some discredit by wide discrepancies between the performances of his pupils in their well-drilled and often hackneyed selections and their ability to read unfamiliar pieces at sight. It is quite true that voice culture is greatly aided by the close study and frequent rendering of selections suitably chosen for ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... his own, which even the piano-organ had never succeeded in making hackneyed, 'Adieu, Hiver,' and melodious as only Italian music can be. Blue beams flashed from his eyes; he seemed in a dream. Suddenly in the most impassioned part, which he was singing in a composer's voice, ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... Take any—the most hackneyed passage of 'Comus,' the 'Allegro,' the 'Penseroso,' the 'Paradise Lost,' and see the freshness, the sweetness, the simplicity which is strangely combined with the pomp, the self-restraint, the earnestness ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... that speaks of "Old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago," has grown now to be hackneyed. Yet, are not they those "old, unhappy, far-off things" that lure us back from a very commonplace and utilitarian present, and cause us to cling to the romance of stories that ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... of constant ridicule; but, somehow, we suspect that it has more to do with the affairs of this world than the world is willing to own. Eyes meet which have never met before, and glances thrill with expression which is strange. We contrast these pleasant sights and new emotions with hackneyed objects and worn sensations. Another glance and another thrill, and we spring into each other's arms. ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... admire her, and human nature is a thing very much to be consulted. Moreover, no one ever yet saw an amiable personage, who was not so far pleasing, or, in other parlance, so far pretty. I cannot help the common course of things; and however hackneyed be the thought, however common-place the phrase, it is true, nevertheless, that beauty, singular beauty, would be the first idea of any rational creature, who caught but a glimpse of Emily Warren; and I should account it little wonder if, upon a calmer gaze, that beauty were found to have ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... drugs and food. The satisfactory advance made by sick people, suffering from different diseases, when they were left without food or drugs, occurred so often, and with such unvarying regularity that it ceased to be a coincident—it was absurd for me to continue to explain the results by the hackneyed word "coincident," a word that is usually loaded with a lot of ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... of home until close upon midnight, when the baby, who was lying asleep at her side, awoke and began to cry. Upon this she broke off her conversation and began to sing the little fellow to sleep. 'Home, Sweet Home' was the song, and at the end of the first verse—so sweetly touching, however hackneyed, to all situated as we—the doctor left his books, came over, and was standing behind her, running his hands, after a trick of his, affectionately through her hair, when the native nurse, who slept in the next cabin and had heard the baby ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... her standing before the home of a man who had taken her with him out of pity and then had turned her away in scorn, and she stood for hours weeping outside his window. Frederick had by no means fully sloughed the skin of the conventional German youth. The old hackneyed ideal of virginity was in his eyes still surrounded by a sacred aureole; but no matter how often he discovered Mara in evil things, no matter how often he rejected her in his imagination, or tried ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... that they were not to blame for the murder of Anthemokritus, and lay it upon Perikles and Aspasia, quoting the hackneyed rhymes from ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... meet together, there is no perceptible difference between the conversational powers of the sexes. Let the facilities for the education of men and women once be made equal throughout the civilized world, and the hackneyed cry of her mental inferiority will be heard of no more, excepting when mentioned among the other exploded theories of the Dark Ages and of barbaric times. The cramping of the mental powers of women, or the attempting to cramp them, lest they might claim ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... history as little inadequate as possible. They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy of the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literary platitudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literary production have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They were not afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the pure vernacular to draw on. These things may be classed together. On ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... summer, as the saying is, and for once they could say it even on the bleak northern spurs of the Delverton Hills. There were days upon days when that minor chain looked blue and noble as the mountains of Alsace and hackneyed song, seen with an envious eye from the grimy outskirts of Northborough, and when from the hills themselves the only blot upon the fair English landscape was the pall of smoke that always overhung the town. On such days Normanthorpe House justified its existence in the north of England instead ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... must be something more than coincidence when they work out like this. You know your Shakespeare, John, and he says most truly: 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.' I will not repeat the hackneyed phrase about 'more things ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... was the deepest interest as to what the two visitors would do in this way. Brother Soulsby spoke first, very briefly and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional, phrases. His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some equally hackneyed remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention, felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving ejaculations. The Soulsbys had captured Octavius with ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... reader's brain has few or no Remainders to continge. Enough, however, of M.B. and his luggage. To come back to your claims upon me. Your return journey, with notes, I read again and again, nor have I done with them yet. You always make something fresh out of a hackneyed theme. Our milestones, you say, bristle with blunders, but I must shortly explain why I cannot comply with ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... remarkable passages of the work have been already hackneyed through the medium of the newspapers, that we feel somewhat at a loss to present any which may have a chance of being new to our readers. So early as his twentieth year, we find Mr Jeffrey thus sensibly expressing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... accumulated some materials, and upon these he set to work. Efforts were made at home to procure for him the position of Secretary of Legation in London, which drew from him the remark, when they came to his knowledge, that he did not like to have his name hackneyed about among the office-seekers in Washington. Subsequently his brother William wrote him that Commodore Decatur was keeping open for him the office of Chief Clerk in the Navy Department. To the mortification and chagrin of his brothers, Washington declined the position. He was resolved to enter ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... not to injure any springing herb. "Mr. Ridgeley," said he, "I would like to know more of you. You young men are fresher, see, and what is better, feel quicker and clearer than the older and more hackneyed. Are you already shelled over with accepted dogmas, and without the ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... founders of the Novel, that their tendency was towards what has come to be called "realism" in modern fiction literature. One uses this sadly overworked term with a certain sinking of the heart, yet it seems unavoidable. The very fact that the words "realism" and "romance" have become so hackneyed in critical parlance, makes it sure that they indicate a genuine distinction. As the Novel has developed, ramified and taken on a hundred guises of manifestation, and as criticism has striven to keep pace with such a growth, it is not strange ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... resting with benign composure upon our knowledge that the fire would have to burn its way through four inside passengers before it could reach ourselves. I remarked to the coachman, with a quotation from Virgil's "neid" really too hackneyed— ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... cruel stabs of the thoughtless people who condemned him, comforting with the assurance that he would return to his home some day. Old Aaron loved the girl and found her always ready to listen to his hackneyed story ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... The hackneyed defence of the insurance companies to this accusation is that great corporations, such as they are, must keep on hand, ready for emergencies, enormous amounts of cash. This is a futile argument, for in the nature of things the daily receipts of each of the Big ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... very glad to go," said Edmund. "Certainly even the being hackneyed cannot spoil the beauty or the force ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... sounds too romantic—too incredible—for belief. Even the hackneyed truism, 'Truth is stranger than fiction,' will hardly suffice to conquer one's astonishment—yet true it is. Do you recollect the Reverend Mr. Rashleigh's story at the dinner-party, the other day—that incredible tale of his abduction and ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... secret desire to widen the narrow circle of the life to which all women are condemned, and to put love and passion into marriage. Ah! it is a lovely dream! it is not impossible; it is difficult, but if realized, may it not be to the despair of souls—forgive me the hackneyed word—"incompris"? ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... one subjected to superstitions, and aiming at unworthy predominance. The second is obviously her sister, but how different! An educated woman, this; one who has learnt a good deal about herself and the world. She is 'emancipated,' in the true sense of the hackneyed word; that is to say, she is not only freed from those bonds that numb the faculties of mind and heart, but is able to control the native passions that would make a slave of her. Now, ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... whole is sought to be completed by the inference that, whatever our wanderings, our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and amidst the objects more immediately within our reach, but that we are seldom sensible of this truth (hackneyed though it be in the Schools of all Philosophies) till our researches have spread over a wider area. To insure the blessing of repose, we require a brisker excitement than a few turns up and down our room. Content is like that humor in the crystal, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the long balmy night, by a sunrise which repeats the colours of the sunset, but this time gaudy, dazzling, triumphant, as befits the season of faith and hope. Such imagery, it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence. It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... and noteworthy feature of these sermons is, we certainly think, their freshness—freshness of thought, treatment, and style; nowhere do we meet pulpit commonplace or hackneyed phrase—everywhere, on the contrary, it is the heart of the preacher pouring out to his flock his own deep convictions, enforcing them from the 'Treasures, old and new,' ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... cottage was in the least surprised when there dropped into the flow of their daily life these sparkling bits of ore, which their friend had dug in his explorations of a future Canaan,—in fact, they served to raise the hackneyed present out of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... written upon by one who knows all there is to be known about his music, and who is particularly sensitive to its beauty and its strength. Hackneyed as the subject is, the whole point of view is quite fresh, and there is an astonishing amount of matter compressed into a very small space. Altogether, the book has a critical value much beyond what is usually expected in publications of this ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... Nothing is more hackneyed than an American's description of his feelings in the midst of the scenes and objects he has read of all his days, and is looking upon for the first time. To each of us it appears in some respects in the same way, but with a difference for every individual. We may smile at Irving's ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... wrote an answer to his son-in-law, as cold and formal as if it had been a note added to an invoice; colder indeed, for it had no equivalent to the poor, hackneyed phrase in all such, of "esteemed favours." In it he stated that he would "bring up" one of the children, provided that Squire Morris would undertake the charge of the other. The unhappy father clasped his hands together on perusing ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... matter better in France then," observed the Colonel, mechanically making use of the hackneyed opening sentence of "The Sentimental Journey." "And they manage them better, Sir;—Another thing, Colonel," quickly added the General, "t's must be crossed and i's carefully dotted. There are several omissions of this kind that might have sent the Record back. By ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... flattering ir-restraint; he seemed to be leaving his heart bare to the Frenchman. Count Victor was by these last words transported to his native city, and his own far-off days of galliard. Why, in the name of Heaven! was he here listening to hackneyed tales of domestic tragedy and a stranger's reminiscences? Why did his mind continually linger round the rock of Doom, so noisy on its promontory, so sad, so stern, so like an ancient saga in its spirit? Cecile—he was amazed at it, but Cecile, and the Jacobite cause he ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... of their stories, added something of religious solemnity to these spectacles, which were opened by ceremonial sacrifice. Dramatic exhibitions, at least for a considerable period, were not, as with us, made hackneyed by constant repetition. They were as rare in their recurrence as they were imposing in their effect; nor was a drama, whether tragic or comic, that had gained the prize, permitted a second time to be exhibited. A special exemption was made in favour of Aeschylus, afterward extended to Sophocles ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hit the happy medium, not wisely but too well, I grieve to say, reign supreme, much in request, justify its existence, lend itself amiably to, choice galore, call for remark, hail with delight; and forty thousand others. The work of some writers is chiefly made up of these hackneyed locutions. Says Schopenhauer, in an illuminative passage which I cull from his clever but uneven essay "On Authorship and Style":—"Everyday authors are only half conscious when they write, a fact which accounts for their want of intellect and the tediousness of their writings: they do not really ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... (to prove our generosity, we will let it be a baker's dozen) illustrative of this same principle of metaphor that governs the mechanism of language, and sheds a glory and a beauty around even our every-day fireside words; so that even those that seem hackneyed, worn out, and apparently tottering with the imbecility of old age—would we but get into the core of them—will shine forth with all the expressive meaning of their spring time—with the blush and bloom ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... when I said it, and she turned and laid her hand gently on mine. 'There was no other way,' she said; and at the moment it seemed to me like some hackneyed phrase in a novel that she had used without any sense ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... man of wealth, it bears to this day the impress of the large ideas and quiet elegance of colonial times; but the shadow which speedily fell across it made it a marked place even in those early days. While it has always escaped the hackneyed epithet of "haunted," families that have moved in have as quickly moved out, giving as their excuse that no happiness was to be found there and that sleep was impossible under its roof. That there was some reason for this lack of rest within walls which were not without their tragic reminiscences, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green |
