"Stilted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mere defect of style, and that the verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated. The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the Songs of the Pixies, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only doing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted terms; but the young admirer of the Robbers, who informs Schiller that if he were to meet him in the evening wandering in his loftier mood "beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood," he would "gaze upon him awhile in mute awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... different voices, these cities of men—from the Maxim-gun-like rattle of New York, with its chorus of strenuous steamers calling from the water, on over the gamut of different capitals to Tokio, where the city voice is the tinkling of stilted wooden shoes; not "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," but "Tinkle, tinkle, little feet," go the small wooden shoes on the ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... sweet. 'The Faultless Father,' 'The Mysterious Mother,' 'The Lame Lover,'—such names as that she was aware would be useless now. 'Mary Jane Walker,' if she could be very simple, would do, or 'Blanche De Veau,' if she were able to maintain throughout a somewhat high-stilted style of feminine rapture. But as she considered that she could best deal with rapid action and strange coincidences, she thought that something more startling and descriptive would better suit her purpose. After an ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... very stilted, almost melodramatic, but my father was so much in earnest that I readily gave the promise he asked. With a look of relief he took a package from his pocket and handed it ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... version anew the translator has endeavored to retain the characteristics of the style of the early chap-book versions, while evading the pompous, stilted language and Johnsonian phraseology so fashionable when they ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... at Fording the next morning as he sat over a late breakfast, with a Virgil open on the table by his coffee-cup. He read the Rector's stilted periods without a smile, and made a mental note that he would at once send a specially civil acknowledgment. Then he put it carefully into his pocket, and turned back to the Di patrii indigetes et Romule Vestaque Mater of the First Georgic, which he was committing ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... was framed in stilted phrases, inconsecutive. They dared not converse naturally, each fearing to say too little or too much. For the memory of that surge of emotion, transient though it had been, in which their discussion ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... the usual elegant inclination in a continuous curve from the spring to the apex, they rise perpendicularly for some distance above the piers on either side, and then take rather an abrupt turn inwards, suggesting the imposition of a pointed heading on an original stilted form. Further signs of alteration appear on the northern side, where the capitals have been recut in the Perpendicular fashion; but the Norman pilasters and mouldings on the south remain untouched. On both sides the double serrated ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... was given in the true Grecian fashion, and was interesting and curious as a spectacle. The French literal translation of the grand old tragedy seemed at once stilted and bald, and yet I perceived and felt through it the power of the ancient solemn Greek spell; and though strange and puppet-like in its outward form, I was impressed by its stern and tragic simplicity. It is, however, merely an archaeological curiosity, chiefly interesting as a reproduction ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... this in a high, stilted voice, and as she sat primly in the straight-backed old chair, knitting away at nothing, she presented ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... seen few similar performances, or upper class girls who had seen a great many and so fully appreciated the novelty of this one, were wildly enthusiastic. Every actress, down to Helen, who made a very stiff and stilted "Buttons," and Rachel and Mary Rich who appeared in the robbers' den scene as Betty's female accomplices, and in the heroine's drawing-room as her wicked mother and her stupid maid respectively, was rapturously received; and ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... time I will try to do better." Well, she had done better the next time. She had not forgotten him again—never, never again. That had been her first letter; how absurd of Jerry, the magnificently careless, to have treasured it all that time, the miserable, stilted little thing! She touched it with curious fingers. Surely, surely he must have cared, to have cared so ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... shadowed spots fauns and hamadryads wooed, unconscious of the gaze of mortal eyes. A hand organ—Philomel by the grace of our stage carpenter, Fancy—fluted and droned in a side street. Around the enchanted boundaries of the little park street cars spat and mewed and the stilted trains roared like tigers and lions prowling for a place to enter. And above the trees shone the great, round, shining face of an illuminated clock in the tower of an antique ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... America—Frederica Bremer, whose novels portrayed the home life of the middle class, Emelie Carlen, who idealized the fishermen and sea-faring folk of the West Coast, and Sophie von Knorring, who gave rather stilted descriptions of life in aristocratic circles. All three were very productive, and their novels count by dozens. Yet they failed to sustain the reputations their first works had won ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... my tea, I am at my tea," running through it for refrain. Then a description of a lodging-house dinner: "a block of bread on a lonely plate, and potatoes that looked as if they had committed suicide in their own steam." A little ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty. I read on until I came to a young man who fell from his horse, or had been thrown from his horse, I never knew which, nor did I feel enough interest in the matter to make research; the young man was put to bed by his mother, and once in bed ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... say. The specialist is inclined to lack the broad outlook of one who is interested in many things; he acquires a jargon of his own; his mind runs in the narrow channel to which that jargon corresponds; the language he uses becomes stilted and dead. There is no tonic in the truths he tries to proclaim, no relevance to the rest of knowledge. In other words, what he has to say may be scientifically valuable, but he fails to convey it to any but ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... can steer you around some on Thursday night. That is my night off, and then I will show you some sights that are sights." The young man chuckled as he got his hat and prepared to return to the shop. Brent thanked him in a way that sounded heavy and stilted even to his own ears after the other's ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... more personage whose subsequent fortunes must be briefly glanced at here. Cassiodorus, the minister of Theodoric and Amalasuentha, remained, as we regret to find, in the service of Theodahad when sole king and composed his stilted sentences at the bidding of Amalasuentha's murderer. Witigis also employed him to write his address to his subjects on ascending the throne. He does not seem to have taken any part in the siege of Rome, and before the tide of war ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... candid, to leave him in no uncertainty as to her actual sentiments, she had concerted a response but a degree less stilted than his proposal. She would have been ashamed of it had ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... visit us quarterly. It is the first fruit of a spirited and apparently well-matured plan set on foot by students in Yale College, and heartily entered into by those of several other institutions. Its objects are clearly stilted in the well-written Prospectus and Introduction. They are briefly these:—"To record the history, promote the intellectual improvement, elevate the moral aims, liberalize the views, and unite the sympathies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... when he had begged permission as of a visiting princess to see and welcome her; yet this punctiliousness was not neglect, but Arab courtesy; and Ben Raana had talked to her of the world in general and Paris in particular, in French, which, though somewhat stilted and guttural, was curiously Parisian in wording and expression. He was one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, scarcely darker in colour than many Frenchmen of the Midi, and marvellously dignified, with his long black beard, his great, sad eyes whose overhanging ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... the giant, in correct but stilted English. "I have set the indicator to signal the alarm in every shop ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... quite unusually considerate of Ronnie to curb the glowing words he must have longed to pour forth. The very effort of that curbing, had reduced him to a somewhat stilted adjective. ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... the chasm which her coquetry had already bridged, he paid her the quick, reckless, boyish compliment she invited—a little flowery, perhaps, possibly a trifle stilted, but very Southern; and she shrugged like a spoiled court beauty, nose uptilted, and swept him with a glance ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... made me read Meredith—the novels, I mean. One of Our Conquerors, he vowed, was the finest thing ever written. He scoffed at me for liking Diana and Richard Feverel better, because they were easier. And now, nothing's bad enough for Meredith's 'stilted nonsense'—'characters without a spark of life in them'—'horrible mannerisms'—you should hear him. Except the poems—ah, except the poems! He daren't touch them. I say—do you know the 'Hymn to Colour'?" The girl's eager eyes questioned her companion. Her face in a moment was all softness ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Seculare et Annus haud Mirabilis, with this Epigraph—'Impar Congressus Achilli.' It is calculated for the reading part of the million, being all on politics, etc., etc., etc., and a review of the day in general,—in my early English Bards style, but a little more stilted, and somewhat too full of 'epithets of war' and classical and historical allusions. If notes are necessary, they can ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... endorse what an anonymous writer has said of him: "An unconscious Christianity covers all his sentiments. If the fair fame of the man is sullied, the aspiration to a higher life cannot be denied to the philosopher; if the tinkling cymbal of a stilted Stoicism sometimes sounds through the nobler music, it still leaves the truer melody vibrating ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... these men, their voyages and their battles, their faith and their valor, their heroic lives and no less heroic deaths, that I write this book; and if now and then I shall seem to warm into a style somewhat too stilted and pompous, let me be excused for my subject's sake, fit rather to have been sung than said, and to have proclaimed to all true English hearts, not as a novel but as an epic (which some man may yet gird himself to write), the same great message which the songs of Troy, and the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... which, I believe, will be the next novel done. But it is to be clearly understood that I promise nothing, and may throw in your face the very last thing you expect - or I expect. ST. IVES will (to my mind) not be wholly bad. It is written in rather a funny style; a little stilted and left-handed; the style of St. Ives; also, to some extent, the style of R. L. S. dictating. ST. IVES is unintellectual and except as an adventure novel, dull. But the adventures seem to me sound and pretty probable; and it is a ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... skeletons were taken away from the mid-gallery, and instead, three gradated series of birds put down the length of it (or half the length—or a quarter would do it—with judgment), showing the transition, in length of beak, from bunting to woodcock—in length of leg, from swift to stilted plover—and in length of wing, from auk to frigate-bird; the wings, all opened, in one specimen of each bird to their full sweep, and in another, shown at the limit of the down back stroke. For what on earth—or in air—is the use to me of seeing ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... lapse into sentiment, and he made himself fairly agreeable, in his somewhat stilted fashion. Ida accepted his attention with a charming unconsciousness; but she was perfectly conscious of Urania's vexation, and that gave a zest to the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... candles burning at her elbows, sat Alix. There were tears in her eyes, a wistful little smile on her lips. She was reading again the clumsy lines David had written in those long-ago days of adolescence. Now they meant something to her. They were stilted, commonplace expressions; she would have laughed at them had they been written by any one else, and she still would have been vastly amused, even now, were it not for the revelations contained in his letter. And the postscript,—how like him to have added that whimsical twist! He ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... wanderer, I came upon a lake, set in a land Which has no fear of wolves. A fisher folk Live there in houses stilted over the water, And the stars walk like spectres of white fire Upon the misty waters of the mere. Ay, if they have no wolves, they have the fear All as thou hast; the sedges in the night Shudder, and out ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, the more attractive, no doubt, it ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... together over the possibility that our ancestral home might be seeking us, but believing nothing of the kind. How we did joke over our united efforts at composing it! He was the scholar, but I suggested all sorts of long-stilted sentences to him, which he modified to suit himself. He used to think me bright in those days. When it was signed, addressed, and sealed, we looked into ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... very human man. Slyly he wrote poetry,—stilted, pleading things from a soul astray. He loved women in his masterful way, marrying three beautiful wives in succession and clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic, affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure,—hard, domineering, unyielding. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... several are richer in ornament, one or two have a more delicately varied outline. None are so stately and so magnificent; and there is hardly a church in Europe that appears so vast as the minster viewed from the north. Compared with it the great French cathedrals, with their stilted roofs so often unbroken, except by a small fleche and with their outlines concealed in a crowd of flying buttresses, are apt to look short and huddled ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... ravens Croak James and Croak Elizabeth, a big white wedding-favour tied round the neck of each. To see these grave birds, none would have suspected how frequently they had been in the mince-pies that morning, though Popham had expressly ruled (in somewhat stilted language) that they should "take ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... could put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make yourself at home—at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... their bellowing, countless quarry: the plain alive and trembling with their tumult, what tournament of mail-clad knights but was as a stilted play to this rude shock of man and beast—carrying in a cloud of dust that hid alike the chaser and the chased, till done their work the frightened herds swept onward and away, leaving the sward flecked with the huge forms that made the hunters' wealth! And now! on: fall prosaic from ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... their pulses in anticipation during their whole lives. But the bridegroom was not so supported. He was manifestly agitated and nervous, especially during the reception which followed the ceremony. He stood with forced amiability responding to the stilted congratulations and gazing with wondering admiration at his bride, whose manner ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... was presented last. He had expected, hoped, to be unfavorably impressed; he had known he would be ill at ease, and that any attempts he made at conversation would be stiff and stilted. ... It was some moments after his presentation when he realized he felt none of these unpleasant things. She had shaken hands with him boyishly; her eyes had twinkled into his—and he was at his ease. Afterward he studied over the thing, but could not comprehend it.... It ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... which should reveal Europe to his searching vision. But this was when he was fourteen, and had almost forgotten what the life of a mere boy was like. Shortly after he entered Mr. Cruger's store he wrote his famous letter to young Stevens. It will bear republication here, and its stilted tone, so different from the concise simplicity of his business letters, was no doubt designed to produce an effect on the mind of his more fortunate friend. He became a master of style, and before he was twenty; but there ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... if playing off the "amate sponde" of the Mediterranean; and sandpipers and curlews, the latter wild as ever, paced the smooth, pure floor. The shoreline was backed by a dark vegetable wall, here and there broken and fronted by single trees, white mangroves tightly corded down, and raised on stilted roots high above the tide. Between wood and wave lay powdered sandstone of lively yellow, mixed with bright white quartz and debris of pink shells. Upon the classic shores of Greece I should have thought of Poseidon and the Nereids; ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... foregone, the mind is prepared for it. But these men will have nothing but fifth acts; and seem to skip, as unworthy, all the circumstances leading to them. This, however, is part of the scheme—the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime, that our teachers have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and other antihumbuggists should heartily, according to the strength that is in them, endeavor to pull down. What, for instance, could Monsieur Lafond care about ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of romanticism. They ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... her fear, she walked, not sideways as always, but erect, her chest thrown out, which gave her figure a droll, stilted air of importance. Her shoes made a knocking sound on the ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... Meredyth pondered a great deal. It was a warm-hearted and affectionate response to her somewhat stilted little appeal. Yet what did the old lady mean, to what did the veiled ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... if you were a little less pathetic," said the king. "You not only assert, but you declaim. There is too little of nature and truth in your tone; you remind me a little of the stilted French tragedies, in which design and premeditation obscure all true passion; in which love is only a phrase, that no one believes in, dressed up with the tawdry ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... was persuaded to write "Oliver Twist" in a hurry, he fell far below his own standard. I have lately read the book after many years, and while I find nearly all the comic parts admirable, some of the serious portions strike me as being so curiously stilted and bad that I can hardly bring myself to believe that Dickens touched them. An affectionate student of his books can almost always account for the bad patches in Dickens by collating the novels with the letters and diary. Much ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the remains of old frescoes on the walls; the tomb of a knight who lay still and stiff, his head resting on his hand. I read an epitaph or two, with the faint cry of love and grief echoing through the stilted phraseology of the tomb, and then I went back ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Fields and the Gladmans, with their homely dwellings and hospitality, drew him to them like magnets. There was nothing too fine nor too lofty in these friends for his tastes or his affection; they did not "affront him with their light." His fancy always stooped to moralize; he hated the stilted attitudes and pretensions of ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... stilted phrases should be stripped from a letter. "Replying to your esteemed favor," "Yours of the 11th inst. to hand, contents noted," "Yours of the 24th ult. received. In reply would say," "Awaiting a favorable reply," "We beg ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... stilted and difficult hand, is a great waste of time and energy, mainly the would-be reader's. There is no excuse, in these days of the typewriter and of common knowledge of stenography, for an illegible letter or manuscript, and the carelessness ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... and as cheap as he does, and that no one can drive a horse safely but himself. My talking about his reading was not as bad as Sheila's persuading him that he can play whist. Did you ever know a man who did not believe that everybody else's reading of poetry was affected, stilted and unbearable? I know Mackenzie must have been reading poetry to Sheila long before I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... diplomacy. It appears that besides the composed and formal dignity of phrase which alone the public knows in published state papers and official correspondence, there is also an official language of wrath and retort not at all artificial or stilted, but quite homelike and human in ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... to all invitations, there came only polite, stilted little letters of regret, in the children's round script. "Mother would d'rather we shouldn't go to a sin-gul party until we are young ladies!" Ellen would say cheerfully, if cross-examined on the subject, leaving it to the more ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... stilted Oxfords or buttoned in the arching insteps of those who sat in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.," which was the other side of the double-backed bench whose obverse was the "Gents' Dept.," but also he took ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... could take lines that were stilted and shoddy and speak them in a way to make them sound natural and distinctive and real. She was a clear blonde, but her speaking voice had in it a contralto note that usually ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... is true, bettered their predecessors to the extent of exchanging a stilted greeting when they met; but this perfunctory salutation was usually hurtled across the historic borderline and was seldom concluded without some reference to it. For Ellen Webster was an aggravating ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... without extra charge; and now, half-awed, half-contemptuous, but wholly interested, he looked out upon the ordered English landscape wrapped in its Sunday peace, while I watched the wonder grow upon his face. Why were the cars so short and stilted? Why had every other freight-car a tarpaulin drawn over it? What wages would an engineer get now? Where was the swarming population of England he had read so much about? What was the rank of all those men on tricycles along the roads? When were we due at Plymouth I told him all I knew, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... ladies spent their time at court, filling idle hours with compliment, love-making, veiled jibe and swift retort; if we read our Euphues again, renewing our acquaintance with its absurdly elaborated and stilted style, its tireless winding of sentences round a topic without any advance in thought, its affectation of philosophy and classical learning; if we remember that to speak euphuistically was a coveted and studiously cultivated accomplishment, and that ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... with its more lyric note and his later work with its deeper and more prophetic tones. In point of expression the poet's powers had attained their full development; he has perfect command of rime; the versification is free and shows no trace of the stilted style of his first volumes; the language is copious and eloquent, but exhibits few signs of that verbosity and tendency to vain repetition which, as has been already remarked, marred some of his later poetry. In ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... my baptism I wore no beard whatever.) And how I hated a boy with a high-sounding, unnicknamable given name!—with his round white collar and his long glossy curls! I dare say he hated the name, the collar, and the curls even more than I did. Whenever you run across a name carded in this stilted fashion, "A. Thingumy Soandso", you may make up your mind at once that the owner is ashamed of his first name and is trying manfully to live it down and eventually ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... and eighty percent of the American people," said he in stilted, pompous tones, "is that our friend Herring unwisely voices his protest, while the others merely think—and consider it the part of ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... Farewell Address, issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In the composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the United States, and his Diary, kept from 1755-85, should also be mentioned as important sources for a ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... on the heath. Edgar, still attired as a lunatic, soliloquizes in stilted terms about the instability of fortune and the advantages of a humble lot. Then there comes to him somehow into the very place on the heath where he is, his father, the blinded Gloucester, led by an old man. In that characteristic ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... coach from Vicenza, which arrived at Padua every night of the year, brought with it in particular on the night of October 13, 1721, a tall, personable young man, an Englishman, in a dark blue cloak, who swang briskly down from the coupe and asked in stilted Italian for "La sapienza del Signer Dottor' Lanfranchi." From out of a cloud of steam—for the weather was wet and the speaker violently hot—a husky voice replied, "Eccomi—eccomi, a servirla." The young man took ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... wears a beard, but it is the beard of the bearded lady who up-to-date appears to be a useless appanage of the strenuous life; and when you try to get at his Americanism, if he has any, he flies off into stilted periods having to do with the superior virtues of the Cingalese. And Margaret Perkins that was hangs on his utterances as though he ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Hadria was glad to notice some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term "second class," though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the impression, was ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... unquestionable merits. The elegant artificiality of the American school, a tendency to pose and be self-conscious, to smirk even, if the word may be permitted, especially when advancing to the footlights to receive a full measure of applause, were fatal to such sentiment as even so stilted a play could be made to yield. It was but too evident that Parthenia was at all times more concerned with the fall of her drapery than with the effect of her speeches, and that gesture, action, intonation—everything which constitutes ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... hang a man," argued Hall, "because he doesn't live in accordance with our stilted notions. Professor Young says that the girl is a genius—that she has a beautiful voice. I promised that if he took up—a contribution for the family that I ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Christmas play do the boys and girls like, and in what sort do we like to see them take part? It should be a play, surely, in which the dialogue is simple and natural, not stilted and artificial; one that seems like a bit of real life, and yet has plenty of fancy and imagination in it; one that suggests and helps to perpetuate some of the happy and wholesome customs of Christmas; ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... As for the stilted style, that presents little difficulty, when one remembers that people of a certain rank in life never use a short word when a long one will answer ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... height of their popularity, had over-refined the sentiments; the chevaleresque heroes and picturesque heroines turned the heads of young girls, who dreamed of an ideal and perfect love; their one longing was for the romantic—for the enchantments and delights of life. In this stilted and amorous atmosphere, Mme. de Maintenon preserved her poise and fought vigorously against the fads of the day. The young girls under her care were taught to love just as they were taught to do other things—with reason. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... in consonance with the general spirit of the language. "Truthful," for example, is said to be an Americanism, and at one time gave offence on that account. It is not only a vast improvement on the stilted "veracious," but one of the prettiest and most thoroughly English ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... hear her make use of the sort of phrase she read in the penny novelettes which she devoured. Then he wondered whether what she said had any meaning for her: perhaps she knew no other way to express her genuine feelings than the stilted language of The ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... child's self-respect and good sense, and leaves him to cry himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control and development which the child does not possess. There is no doubt that our development of charity methods has reached this pseudo-scientific and stilted stage. We have learned to condemn unthinking, ill-regulated kind-heartedness, and we take great pride in mere repression much as the stern parent tells the visitor below how admirably he is rearing the child, who is hysterically crying upstairs and laying the foundation for future nervous ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... they were singularly ready to be shown what to do, and to be criticized. "Knock-about" farce—the counterpart in drama of their comic songs—pleased them best, and they did well in it. But "Box and Cox" was almost beyond them, because they missed the meanings of the rather stilted dialogue. In helping to coach them in their parts I had the best of opportunities to know this. They produced a resemblance to the sound of the sentences, and were satisfied, though they missed the sense. Instead of saying that he "divested" himself of his clothing, Mr. Box—or was it Cox?—said ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... the rest, they were conscious of a pleasant surprise. Against the simplicity and pathos of the old ballad Buononcini's stilted artificialities sounded tame and monotonous. When Lavinia finished applause filled the room. She had ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... us is no longer a plunge from heaven to hell; the entire life of these people is an Inferno. The terrible darkness and ignorance of these people, forced on them by the social misery of dull necessity, produces greater soul sensations in the spectator than the stilted tragedy of a Corneille. Those who witness a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's "Hannele" and fail to be stirred by the grandeur and depth of that masterpiece, regardless of its petty poorhouse atmosphere, deserve to see nothing else than the "Wizard of Oz." And again is not the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... stilted, banal little phrase had fallen awkwardly from Magda's lips, and Quarrington had assented ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... bow was stiff enough but his intention was obvious. He stopped before the two men, exchanged a somewhat stilted greeting with Philip Downing, and turned ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... rather absently; her heart was very full and she was thinking of other matters. But as he continued she answered at length, hesitating, using phrases as trite and quaintly stilted as the theme itself, gently defending the old names he sneered at. And in her words he savoured a certain old-time flavour of primness and pride—a vaguely delicate hint of resentment, which it amused him to excite. Pacing the dunes with her waist ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly share, was offset by her vivid ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... other every little bit of praise wrung from the world's cold, death-doomed lips. It is to me pathetically absurd to see gifted persons all struggling along, and rudely elbowing each other out of the way to win—what? A few stilted commonplace words of approbation or fault-finding in the newspapers of the day, and a little clapping and shouting from a gathering of ordinary minded persons, who only clap and shout because it is possibly the fashion to do so. It is really ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... new monarchy of July, yet being a republican he would take no oath to defend it. The only amusement that Comte permitted himself was a visit to the opera. In his youth he had been a playgoer, but he shortly came to the conclusion that tragedy is a stilted and bombastic art, and after a time comedy interested him no more than tragedy. For the opera he had a genuine passion, which he gratified as often as he could, until his means became too narrow to afford ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... by such a stilted scribble as that. Sounds as if I might be addressing the president of the Associated Charities. Oh, dear, it is such a piece of work to write to one's father! Carrie never has half the fuss; but then I don't suppose I would either if Dad was like Mr. Carson—or Tom. That's it. I will ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... has perhaps suggested the extreme of accuracy in speech. But as has already been said, any degree of overnicety, of pedantic elegance, of stilted correctness, is especially irritating to a sensitive ear. Excessive biting off of syllables, flipping of the tongue, showing of the teeth, twisting of the lips, is carrying excellence to a fault. The inactive jaw, tongue, and ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... The words were so stilted that she had the sensation of throwing metal disks on a stone floor and waiting for their tinny clatter. She could see the high red drain out of his face and then rush up again as if he ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... vendors of literature. For the Spanish newspaper is always literature, which is a good deal more than can be said for some of the English halfpenny Press. Whatever may be the politics of the particular journal, its Castellano is perfect; perhaps a little stilted or pompous, but always dignified ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... were near enough to observe the visitors closely soon began to look upon Richard and Nathan as a couple of quaint, harmless, exceedingly well-bred old gentlemen, rather provincial in appearance and a little stilted in their manners, who, before the evening was over, would, perhaps, become tired of the gayety, ask to be excused, and betake themselves to bed. All of which would be an eminently proper proceeding in view of their extreme age and general infirmities, old gentlemen of ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and intelligent constituency, who saw in this drama the marvellous possibilities of the stage for improvement as well as entertainment. They also saw real life depicted. The absence of empty lines and stilted phrases so common in conventional drama was refreshing and interesting to those who believe that the drama has a mission other than merely to amuse. "Margaret Fleming" is nothing if not artistic from the standpoint of the realist. Its fidelity to life ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... blame Methodism for these horrors simply because it is, as we know, the cult of ugliness, but there may have been another cause for the change; it was perhaps to some extent a reaction against the stilted, the pompous and silly epitaph which one finds most common in the first ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... forced and stilted to his ears, even while he pressed the little white hand that she put out blindly towards him. He was not sorry for his pledge; he felt that he could have done no less; but Sydney's proud, earnest face flashed before him, and his memory ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... sign upon the gate?" he demanded angrily, in curiously stilted English. "Did you not see that trespassers are forbidden? You must go away at once! You will be prosecuted! You ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... Kleine Rugen. He was walking slowly toward her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully upon the ground. When she accosted him, he was plainly confused, as she had said. After the first few passages in polite though stilted conversation, his keen, grey eyes resumed their thoughtful—it was even ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... spring from a detached capital which seems to have lost its shaft, but as there is no trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the corbel table of a form common in Portugal but rare elsewhere, where each ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... Amanda on the ground. He stooped down and examined her, and stood up again. Then he eyed the company of travellers with a hard cold eye, and spoke deliberately and in a low voice. His manner of speech was somewhat stilted and precise, and scarcely what might have been ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... unreadable, and many of the blemishes in Byron's poetry are inseparable from the romantic style; they are to be found in Scott's metrical tales, which have much redundancy and some weak versification; while his chiefs and warriors often talk a stilted chivalrous language which would now be discarded as theatrical. Byron's personages have the high tragic accent and costume; yet one must admit that they have also a fierce vitality; and as for the crimes and passions of his Turkish pashas and Greek patriots, he had actually ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the colourless reticence of official documents. And yet something of the thrill of the superstitious fear, and the virtuous disapproval of the lawyers who composed these writings, pierces through the stilted phrases. Like a faint fragrance of faded rose-leaves, a breath of this woman's charm seems to cling and elusively to peep out of the curt record of her crimes. Enough at least to incite the wanderer in History's byways to a further study of this potent German forerunner ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... elegance of Henry as the civilized brother I shall never forget. There was something in him to which the perfect style of the D'Orsay period appealed, and he spoke the stilted language with as much truth as he wore the cravat and the tight-waisted ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... hands of the savages was a wandering schoolmaster, named John Filson, [Footnote: Do., John Small to G. R. Clark, June 23, 1786.] the first historian of Kentucky, and the man who took down, and put into his own quaint and absurdly stilted English, Boone's so-called "autobiography." Filson, having drifted west, had travelled up and down the Ohio and Wabash by canoe and boat. He was much struck with the abundance of game of all kinds which he saw on the northwestern side of the Ohio, and especially by the herds of buffaloes which ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... resorted to in order to acquire more information about her, when suddenly the murmur of a human voice attracted his attention. He heard whispers, the complaining tones of a woman's voice mingled with entreaties, smothered laughter, sighs, and half-stilted exclamations of surprise; but above them all, the woman's voice prevailed. Saint-Aignan stopped to look about him; he perceived from the greatest surprise that the voices proceeded, not from the ground, but from the branches of the trees. As ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... who had travelled for a long time in Germany and had acquired the essentials of our language. As a matter of fact, there was no need for special knowledge in this respect, as the sole problem seemed to be to make the French verses less stiff and stilted which poor Roche had constructed under the shameful control of Lindau, who used to make out that he knew everything better than any one else. The inexhaustible patience with which Truinet proceeded from ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... combined "to give the world assurance of" a bishop rather than a clerk. It needed familiarity with his inner life to know how much simpleness of purpose and simplicity of mind and contentment and piety lay hid under a pompous exterior and a phraseology somewhat stilted. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... new and strange—the stilted wharves on the ledges, heaped with lobster-traps and festooned with buoys of all shapes and colors; the fish-pier with its open shed, sheltering the dark, discolored hogsheads rounded up with salted fish; the men in oilskin "petticoats," busy with splitting-knives ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... applied to the case of the French peasants of a century ago apply also to them?" It is not under oppression that we learn how to use freedom. The ordinary sophism by which misrule is defended is, when truly stilted, this: The people must continue in slavery, because slavery has generated in them all the vices of slaves; because they are ignorant, they must remain under a power which has made and which keeps them ignorant; because they have been made ferocious by misgovernment, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... numerous, and in the thick jungle bordering the tanks in places, and consisting mostly of nurkool and wild rose, hog-deer and wild pig were abundant. The dried-up bed of an old arm of the Koosee was quite close to my camp, and abounded in sandpiper, and golden, grey, goggle-eyed, and stilted ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... masters of literature, at one bound he leapt to a high level of thought and composition. His earliest book, "Some Gospel Truths Opened," "thrown off," writes Dr. Brown, "at a heat," displays the same ease of style and directness of speech and absence of stilted phraseology which he maintained to the end. The great charm which pervades all Bunyan's writings is their naturalness. You never feel that he is writing for effect, still less to perform an uncongenial piece of task-work. He writes because he had something to say which was worth saying, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... answered Janey, as she shot a sudden mischievous glance from the corners of her downcast eyes; "but I reckon he'll think more of me, ef he thinks I's goin' to die. I am not very happy," she resumed, in the same stilted tone as before; "an' las' night you came to me in a dream, an' tol' me you was dead. I done specks he'll cry like everything, when he reads dat," she interpolated, with a nod of triumph. "Sometimes I reckon we sha'n' never see each other no mo'; but you mus' never forget your Janey. Um-mm," she went ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... by the kindly editor, and full of wholesome advice, cut like a surgeon's knife in some desperate case when it is a question whether the patient can endure the heroic treatment necessary. Haldane's stilted and unnatural tales had been projected into being by such fiery and violent means that they might almost be termed volcanic in their origin; but the fused mass which was the result, resembled scoria or cinders rather than fine metal shaped into artistic ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... half-dozen girls had been presented, some one told Miss Fenler that Mrs. Marvin wished to see her, and what had begun in a stilted manner, became ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... indignant glance, just as Professor Enoch Crabbe, of the Riverside Academy, stepped up and greeted Joe. He was earnest in his congratulations, but his manner was so stilted that they looked at each other with an amused smile, as ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... without a tangible change in the stilted intoning of the stage-puppets, she was conscious of another time ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the protest exhausted her so that she could not utter it. And she knew that the words were stilted and artificial, and the working-cells of her brain whispered that she was recalling and adapting something she had heard at the theatre. She wanted to do the easiest thing, and it seemed absurdly ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... you gave of his appearance;—a sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white neckcloth, and stilted up on his thick-soled ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... vitia of style which we meet with even in Contarini Fleming as the sin by which the young author was most easily beset. His attempts at serious sentiment and pompous reflection are too often deplorable, because inanimate and stilted. When he warns a heroine against an error of judgment by shouting, "'Tis the madness of the fawn who gazes with adoration on the lurid glare of the anaconda's eye," or murmurs, "Farewell, my lovely bird; ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... word ends with a consonant and the second begins with a vowel, as in eats apples, not at all, an ox, etc. On the other hand, too evident an effort to secure the proper enunciation of the sound elements should be avoided, since a stilted mode ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... writing, his indolence often allowed him to compose half sleepily, at a low pressure. In some of his works, especially 'The Rambler,' where, it has been jocosely suggested, he was exercising the polysyllables that he wished to put into his 'Dictionary,' he does employ a stilted Latinized vocabulary and a stilted style, with too much use of abstract phrases for concrete ones, too many long sentences, much inverted order, and over-elaborate balance. His style is always in some respects monotonous, with little use, for instance, as critics have pointed out, of any form of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... took up her stand on the exquisitely decorated landing, ready to greet her guests. She had a smile and a pleasant word for all, as, in a constant stream, the elite of London fashionable society began to file past her, exchanging the elaborate greetings which the stilted mode of the day ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... this, the form "come here," which is the ordinary English expression, is simply bad grammar in Swedish; the use of "come hither" (kom hit, instead of kom haer) is imperative. We have the "hither" in English, but it has become stilted, and the linguistic distinction lost. Compare also the use of fa, as a common auxiliary; nor are these exceptions, but, on the contrary, characteristic examples. Also to enunciate the language rightly one must hold the back and neck erect and the ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... Lovelace describes the death-bed moments of the girl he has ruined, the scene has a great moving power. Allowing for differences of taste and time, the vogue of the Novel in Richardson's day can easily be understood, and through all the stiffness, the stilted effect of manner and speech, and the stifling conventions of the entourage, a sweet and charming young woman in very piteous distress emerges to live in affectionate memory. After all, no poor ideal of ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... establishing it. Mr. Howard Lindsay, Stage Manager for Miss Margaret Anglin, recently said to the present writer that change of pace was one of the most effective tools of the actor. While it must be admitted that the stilted mouthings of many actors indicate cloudy mirrors, still the public speaker would do well to study the actor's use ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... half-knee deep on the oozy bottom, with his long neck arched over the water, and his keen purple eye fixed eagerly upon the fish below. Though I am still twenty yards from where he poises lightly on his stilted legs, I can see distinctly his long pendent snow-white breast-feathers, his crest of waving black plumes, falling loosely backward over the ash-gray neck, and even the bright red skin of his bare legs just below ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner |
