"Wordy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... let Deed Measure your words, indeed your flowers of speech Ill with your iron equipage atone; Irony indeed, and wordy compliment. ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... I remember, some wordy debating, Whether my love should be brought to behold me. Sick was I at heart, little ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... soul waiting to be gathered with the harvest," said the lad, pointing to the outcast. "If Christian prayers could lift from his shaking hands the pagan doom, it would not do more to make converts here than wordy argument." ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... broke out into wordy recrimination and abuse, each declaring that he wouldn't stay a day longer in the house if the other remained; but as they had often said so before, and still gave no symptoms of going, their assertion produced little effect upon anybody. Sir Harry would ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... feyther, and we mun respect him. But it's dree work havin' a man i' th' house, nursing th' fire, an' such weather too, and not a soul coming near us, not even to fall out wi' him; for thee and me must na' do that, for th' Bible's sake, dear; and a good stand-up wordy quarrel would do him a power of good; stir his blood like. I wish Philip ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... follow the instinctive love of battle down through the custom of "trial by combat"—only recently outgrown, to our present method, where each contending party hires a champion to represent him, and these fight it out in a wordy war, with tricks and devices of complex ingenuity, enjoying this kind of struggle as they ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... letter supplies these items:—wrangling; wordy disputes; passionate outbursts of anger; wire-pulling or electioneering, that is, using the world's methods to attain one's ends by those in ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... equally incapable of grasping the whole. He does not take words in their simple meaning or sentences in their natural connexion. He is thinking, not of the context in Plato, but of the contemporary Pythagorean philosophers and their wordy strife. He finds nothing in the text which he does not bring to it. He is full of Porphyry, Iamblichus and Plotinus, of misapplied logic, of misunderstood grammar, ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... unwilling in what thou doest, neither selfish nor unadvised nor obstinate; let not over-refinement deck out thy thought; be not wordy nor a busybody. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... multiply citations. What is found even in The Rambler, which he himself in later years found "too wordy," is found much more abundantly in the Dictionary and the Shakespeare; and as he grows old, and, with age and authority, increasingly indifferent to criticism and increasingly confident in his own judgment, there gradually ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... a time for religion it was? All its saints have something formal and restricted, wordy and cold, which turns me away from them. Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Chantal ... No, I prefer Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Bernard, Saint Angela ... The Mysticism of the seventeenth ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... afternoons thinking how lonely it would be in Heaven with nobody there but God and the angels and the Starr family. Even the family, it seemed, was not to be admitted as an entity, but separately, according to individual merit. Grandmother and Aunt Matilda had many a wordy battle as to who would be there and who wouldn't, but both were sadly agreed that Frank ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... the street, a talk of mere wordy nothings, but of deep and tender looks. In point of words, a make-talk affair; in point of feeling, a vague shadowy suggestion of twenty delicious possibilities; in point of fact a walk without any serious results. Calburt Young, a ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... on the street, or in the Hole-in-the-Wall, he would meet his enemy—in a few minutes, perhaps. There would be no wordy argument. They understood each other, and had understood each other, since that morning, long ago when they had passed each other on the road—Panhandle riding in to Laramie and Cheyenne and Little Jim riding ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... that he was not expert with the tool and the foreman's most pointed remarks were generally addressed to him, but he had a humorous manner which gained him friends. Once or twice, to his comrades' admiration, he engaged his persecutor in a wordy contest and badly routed him, which did not improve matters. Indeed, his last victory proved a costly one, because afterward when there was anything particularly unpleasant or dangerous to be done, Kermode was selected. ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... surely could not keep such a misfortune in store for me. If nothing else prevented, an earthquake or the crack of doom would certainly interfere before I need rise to speak. Yet here was the Mayor getting on inexorably,—and, indeed, I heartily wished that he might get on and on forever, and of his wordy wanderings find ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Hafr was the name of him who urged most that peace should be given to the man. This Hafr was the son of Thorarin, the son of Hafr, the son of Thord Knob, who had settled land up from the Weir in the Fleets to Tongue-river, and who dwelt at Knobstead; and a wordy ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... rare occasions when they went out to lunch together, there was a "strictly business" attitude that was deceiving. Brennan's loyalty to P. Q. was only rivaled by the city editor's covert admiration for him as a reporter. Several times John overheard wordy altercations between P. Q. and Brennan in which the city editor would threaten to discharge him and Brennan would reply with a threat to resign, but nothing ever came of these quarrels and they were forgotten within an hour after ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... all. The really great poet challenges it, like Homer, with some tremendous, irresistible opening; and in this respect the magnificent prelude to Beowulf may almost be put beside Homer. But lesser poets have another way. That prolixity at the beginning of many primitive epics, their wordy deliberation in getting under way, is probably intentional. The Song of Roland, for instance, begins with a long series of exceedingly dull stanzas; to a reader, the preliminaries of the story seem insufferably drawn out. But by the time ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... patiently, content that he should be clumsy, glad that in the distance, under the arcade of the tabernae, she had spied Hortensius Martius watching with wrathful eyes every movement of the praefect. She wondered if the young exquisite had heard the wordy warfare between herself and the proud man who now knelt quite awkwardly at her feet, and she guessed that what Hortensius had seen and heard, that he would retail at full length to his friends in the course of the banquet given by Caius ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... good enough for me.... I tell you it's rotten, the whole damn cheese.... You've got to stand in with the police or you can't get...." and so on and on unendingly, without coherence. I went to sleep only when the sound of the wordy warfare died away. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... resulting from "the confusion." He makes man the inventor of speech, and resorts to raillery: speaking against his opponent Eunomius, he says that, "passing in silence his base and abject garrulity," he will "note a few things which are thrown into the midst of his useless or wordy discourse, where he represents God teaching words and names to our first parents, sitting before them like some pedagogue or grammar master." But, naturally, the great authority of Origen, Jerome, and Augustine prevailed; the view ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reference to personal preference, or individual enterprise, but to the great question of national claims to come before the Convention."[1] Douglass pronounced the call "uncalled for, unwise, unfortunate and premature," and his position led him into a wordy discussion in the press with James M. Whitfield, of Buffalo, prominent at the time as a writer. Delany explained the call as follows: "It was a mere policy on the part of the authors of these documents, ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... the following, it must be explained that the first draft of the first part of the Amateur Emigrant, when it reached me about Christmas, had seemed to me, compared to his previous travel papers, a somewhat wordy and spiritless record of squalid experiences, little likely to advance his still only half-established reputation; and I had written to him to that effect, inopportunely enough, with a fuller measure even than usual of the frankness which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ordinary blundering attempts at comfort, which only charm ache with sound and patch grief with proverbs. The sorrow of our hearts is not appreciably lessened by argument. Any kind of philosophy—any wordy explanation of the problem—is at the best poor comfort. It is not the problem which brings the pain in the first instance: it is the pain which brings the problem. The heart's bitterness is not allayed by an exposition of the doctrine of providence. Rachel who weeps ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... to twenty shillings the next day, and it was not due to any wordy flow of his gratitude that the name of Martha Tilden was not mentioned between them. "Better leave it," thought Joanna to herself, "after all, I'm not sure—and she's a slut. I'd sooner he married a cleaner, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... is far too long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of much higher and riper gifts than Bailey's. It is turgid, untechnical in verse, wordy, and involved. Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style. But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated to the library of things not ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... display of wordy pyrotechnics, the dazed and bewildered stranger asked, "What will be the ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... than men, and under the besotting influence of beer and even stronger drinks, a fearful amount of gossiping, news-carrying and tattling went on, which often resulted in quarrels and contentions, which, while it never resulted in blood, sadly lowered the tone of social life. It was the arena of wordy strife in which angry tongues were the only weapons of warfare, and poor little Annette was fast learning their modes of battle. But there was one thing against which grandmother Harcourt set her face like flint, and that was sending children to saloons for beer, ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... genitive has saved for us another of these sorrow-laden sentences which Mr. Swinburne has amplified in some beautiful but too wordy lines. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... several ponderous things. On different lines of action, and the pulling of different strings; Upon some equivocal doings, and some unequivocal duns; On how few of his numerous patrons were quietly prompt-paying ones; On friends who subscribed "just to help him," and wordy encouragement lent, And had given him plenty of counsel, but never had paid him a cent; On vinegar, kind-hearted people were feeding him every hour, Who saw not the work they were doing, but wondered that "printers are sour:" On several intelligent townsmen, whose kindness was so without stint ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... punishment. He fled away to Grey Beaver, behind whose protecting legs he crouched when the bitten boy and the boy's family came, demanding vengeance. But they went away with vengeance unsatisfied. Grey Beaver defended White Fang. So did Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch. White Fang, listening to the wordy war and watching the angry gestures, knew that his act was justified. And so it came that he learned there were gods and gods. There were his gods, and there were other gods, and between them there was a difference. Justice or injustice, ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... advantages of the short sentence are mainly those of clearness, directness, emphasis. Its dangers are monotony, bareness, over-compactness. The advantages of the long—that is, quite long—sentence, are rather difficult to comprehend. A wordy sentence is likely to defeat its own purpose. Instead of guiding it will lose its hearer. Somewhat long sentences—as already said—will serve in general discussions, in rapidly moving descriptive and narrative passages, in rather simple explanation ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... found her mother awake, very angry over Una's staying out till after midnight, and very wordy about the fact that "that nice, clean young man," Mr. J. J. Todd, of Chatham and of the commercial college, had come to call that evening. Una made little answer to her. Through her still and sacred agony she could scarce hear ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... involved. After the fashion of debating societies, the entire universe was promptly subjected to a complete overhaul. If the truth must be told, I am afraid that I must confess to having forgotten the eloquent contentions of the different speakers; but out of the hurly-burly of that wordy conflict one utterance comes back to me. It appealed to me at the time as being very curious, very pathetic, and very striking. It made upon my mind an indelible impression. A tall young fellow rose, and, in the shortest speech of the debate, imparted to the discussion the only ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... unstringing the nerves of his competitors, and diminishing their chance of gain. It was difficult to unstring the nerves of Parson Whymper, who ran him very close in skill, and sometimes divided the spoil with him; but on the present occasion he had a wordy weapon to baffle even that foe. This consisted in constant allusion to the latter's supposed reversionary interest in the living at Crompton, the incumbent whereof was ancient and infirm, and which was in the Squire's gift. This piece of preferment ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... and are refused. People are already sleeping three or four in a room, sleeping in outhouses and bath-rooms, refugee Bulgars from the lost Bulgar territories, refugee Turks, refugee Russians. You return to the station and it is closed for the night, and you have a wordy discussion with the eternal cabman as to whether you shall pay a hundred or two hundred francs—Bulgarian francs or levas which are, however, worth a bare three-farthings each to-day. You find shelter in a wayside cafe ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... from faults of gaudiness and meretricious ornament. They are chastened by good taste and regulated by gentlemanly cultivation. They are written by a scholar, and not by a scribbler; and while reading their magnificent pages we need have no misgiving that we are admiring the flashy ornaments of wordy or half-educated mediocrity. Far the best of them is also the first, 'Guy Livingstone.' The poorest is 'Sword and Gown;' this has the feeblest plot, in fact a mere apology for a story, and contains more passages which seem ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... on indefinitely illustrating the boundaries of interests of various kinds. Some of them centered in the State House; others in the national Capitol; and many a wordy political battle was fought in the little country section over the question as to whether the protective tariff or the Democratic party was responsible for the hard times the farmers and others were suffering. There were even world ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... These wordy contests, though violent, were brief; "and within fifteen minutes," says the captain, "they would be ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... sights, sounds, etc. As regards such things it is uncertain whether they are sins, or temptations by which merit is increased. And yet it is marvelous how a patent is vexed and worried in these matters by the present wordy manner of confessing. A purpose ought to be certain, and directed toward things which are certain and which can be shunned in common living, like ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... had not been as well attended to as the methods of attack and defence in the chase and on the war path. By some, not strange, personal argument, he concluded to appropriate the six valuable horses above mentioned, in the law wordy vocabulary of civilization, "to his own, use, benefit and behoof, without asking the consent, good-will, approbation, permission and personal, directions of the said ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... threw down his tools; but possibly this was by request, for he had acquired a habit of engaging in much wordy argument and letting the work slide. He went out upon the streets to talk, and in the guise of a learner he got in close touch with all the wise men of Athens by stopping them and asking questions. In physique he was immensely strong—hard work had developed his muscles, plain ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... were carrying on a wordy war, matters had assumed a more serious aspect in America. Committees had been appointed in nearly all the principal sea-ports of the colonies, to examine cargoes arriving from Great Britain, and to report to their constituents how far the act of association was carried into effect, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... black—the dark shadow of the government of progress—so glibly states, he might as well be talking Turkish or Japanese. Every one looks at Monsieur le Cure, they scan his face, and ask him what they are to do; and let him only feel angry or disgusted with the wordy nonsense, and just make one sign, or raise one finger, and 1200—aye, 2000 men would in a trice surround him, and send the orator and all his staff to preach their pestilential doctrines under the turf, and ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... carnal boast of being Christians while destitute of love. He cites several facts as evidence that where love is lacking, necessarily faith and deliverance from death are absent, likewise. Thus no opportunity is given for self-deception or a frivolous excuse based upon wordy boasting of one's faith. The reality of the inner life is known by the presence of love, which in turn attests the presence of faith ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... however, that the consequences of this great discussion were such as are necessarily produced by every exhibition of the kind. For a considerable time afterwards nothing was heard between Catholic and Protestant but fierce polemics, and all the trite and wordy arguments that are to be found in the mouths of ignorant and prejudiced men on both sides. The social harmony of the district was disturbed, and that friendly intercourse which should subsist between neighbors, was either suspended ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... coals, capering over her success, and standing on her head in the midst of all her scattered embers, afterwards, with pure delight. The next day she came in at noon from the woods, a mile down the river-bank, with her own dark lips cased and coated in golden sweets, and, after a wordy skirmish with the cook, presented to Miss Emma a great cake of brown and fragrant honey from a nest she had discovered and neglected in better seasons, and said nothing about her half-dozen swollen and smarting stings. Mas'r Rob having shouldered his gun and taken himself off, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... to Mrs. Tarbell's discredit," said the Honorable Pope. "Not a bit of it. Not a bit of it. Her feelings do her infinite honor. In her appearance on our wordy and contentious stage I see the commencement of a new era of things. Let her be guided by her feelings. Let her still preserve that beautiful sympathy which is one of the chiefest ornaments of the female sex. It will bring to her a thousand cases of injustice and oppression which we hardened lawyers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... no time in procrastinating delays. Committees were prompt in making reports. Parliamentary wranglings were infrequent. There was no filibustering. The discussions were, as a rule, neither long, wordy, nor tiresome. Indeed, the proceedings were throughout conducted in a business-like manner. The Democrats were determined to frame a Constitution in accordance with what they were pleased to call "the true principles of Jeffersonian Democracy and Economy." ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... I need somethin' to help me do dat? Hah! 'Tis not so!" But the weakness of the wordy denial ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... account was corroborated, in the very minutest points, by the men who had accompanied him, even though cross-questioned with unusual particularity by Father Francis. Old Pedro's statement, though less circumstantial, was, to the soldiers and citizens especially, quite as convincing. He gave a wordy narrative of Senor Stanley's unnatural state of excitement from the very evening he had become his lodger—that he had frequently heard him muttering to himself such words as "blood" and "vengeance." He constantly appeared longing for something; never eat half the meals provided ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... We open take the bolo in our hands, With bellies yearning for the blood of those Who long have winked a proud disdainful eye Beware! I say, beware! for mercy then is dead. Francos: But Quezox, hold! Water thy burning thoughts. 'Twere well to bridle firm such wordy steed, For mayhap there be one with list'ning ear, Who wide would publish what were worthy thoughts; But which should covered be by mantle wise, Until time furnisheth the proper hour, To tongue them into words with cautious garb So they ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... need we shun, But skilfully to each should yield its due. The narrower total seems to suit the few, The wider total suits the common run; Each obvious in its sphere like moon or sun; Both provable by me, and both by you. Befogged and witless, in a wordy maze A groping stroll perhaps may do us good; If cloyed we are with much we have understood, If tired of half our dusty world and ways, If sick of fasting, and if sick of food;— And how ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... surrounding the shaft in place of them. I strongly demurred to this, but without avail, until a party of men who were our camp neighbours came over and took my part. Through them I recovered my claim without more than wordy warfare. After doing well out of the claim I found I could not continue it without a mate. Having to throw the wash-dirt eleven feet, a lot of the pebbles in it would come back on and bruise my ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... heard the name; earth trembled, as the smoke Of his revenge ascended up to Heaven, Blotting the constellations: and the cries Of millions, butchered in sweet confidence, And unsuspecting peace, even when the bonds Of safety were confirmed by wordy oaths, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... chapels," as it is often said, but as many different conceptions regarding the scope, the bearing, and the goal of the revolution. Possibilists, Collectivists, Radicals, Jacobins, Blanquists, will be thrust together, and waste time in wordy warfare. Honest men will be huddled together with the ambitious ones, whose only dream is power and who spurn the crowd whence they are sprung. All coming together with diametrically opposed views, all—forced to enter into ephemeral alliances, in order ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... exhibited so strong a desire to have us extinguished, even while it has repeatedly refused to take steps preparatory to war; and the two countries should be persuaded to understand that neither can perish without the life of the other being placed in great danger. The best answer to be made to the wordy attacks of Englishmen is to be found in success. That answer would be complete; and if it cannot be made, what will it signify to us what shall be said of us by foreigners? The bitterest attacks can never disturb ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... ceremonial business. The Inquisition Court, with the bishop presiding, sat for about three hours. There was reading of papers, citing of ecclesiastical and royal decrees, and a good deal of argument between the bishop, the Chief Inquisitor, and Brother Basil. Through all this wordy process the two sailors stood, or lounged, or chatted quietly together. At first they had listened, hoping to glean a little information; but as Latin predominated over Spanish, and they understood no word of the former and only the New World barbaric mixture ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... Prelacy and Popery, and entertaining no very orthodox notions with respect to the divine right of Kings. From them the Quakers drew their most zealous champions; men who, in renouncing the "carnal weapons" of their old service, found employment for habitual combativeness in hot and wordy sectarian warfare. To this day the vocabulary of Quakerism abounds in the military phrases and figures which were in use in the Commonwealth's time. Their old force and significance are now in a great ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... monarch, provoking Arjuna still further who was like a snake of virulent poison, by means of those wordy strokes of his, Uluka once more repeated the words he had once spoken. The Pandavas had before such repetition, been sufficiently provoked, but hearing these words (a second time) and receiving those censures through the gambler's son, they were provoked beyond endurance. They all stood ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sir?" said Leah faintly, oblivious of the wordy Michael's harangue, and thinking only of the prison-the dim, dark prison, where her husband was languishing. "I have no money but gold," she continued; "how much do I owe you for ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... the square as we rattled through. From behind their battlemented wares the country mice waged wordy war with the town mice over the price of merchandise. But on this occasion we were too engrossed to notice a scene whose picturesque humour usually fascinated us, for as the carriage jogged over the rough roads the poor little arbre de Noel ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... It was quite a wordy sarmon that Parson Grant gave us to-night, said Remarkable. The church ministers be commonly smart sarmonizers, but they write down their idees, which is a great privilege. I dont think that, by nater, they are as tonguey speakers, for ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... in the narration more intimate and particular than is general with Hugo; but it must be owned, on the other hand, that the book is wordy, and even, now and then, a little wearisome. Ursus and his wolf are pleasant enough companions; but the former is nearly as much an abstract type as the latter. There is a beginning, also, of an abuse of conventional ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Boers used to be less than 100 yards apart, and when the wily snipers of both sides saw nothing to snipe at, they used to exchange pleasantries at the expense of one another, from the safety of their entrenchments. Sometimes these wordy compliments made the opponents decidedly "chummy", to borrow a trench phrase. In that mood, they would now and again wax derisive or become amusing, bespeaking the fates of one another or the eventual outcome ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... not out of print, An honest tongue may drop a harmless hint. Stop not, unthinking, every friend you meet, To spin your wordy fabric in the street; While you are emptying your colloquial pack, The fiend Lumbago jumps upon his back. Nor cloud his features with the unwelcome tale Of how he looks, if haply thin and pale; Health is a subject for his child, his wife, And the rude office that insures his life. ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty, wordy, and wrathful, she had a drawn quarrel with most of her neighbours, and with the others not much more than armed neutrality. The grieve's wife had been "sneisty"; the sister of the gardener who kept house for him had shown ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the age of the writer rendered natural, yet with touches here and there which I thought were borrowed from a more experienced source. Some of them struck me as singularly odd compounds of ardour and flatness; commencing in strong feeling, and concluding in the affected, wordy style that a schoolboy might use to a fancied, incorporeal sweetheart. Whether they satisfied Cathy I don't know; but they appeared very worthless trash to me. After turning over as many as I thought proper, I tied them in a handkerchief and set them ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... to like bold argument (continued) And wordy wars with Parliament; He made things lively we infer ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... and put it right. Then he returned to his seat, not apparently puffed up, yet perhaps satisfied with himself; while Mr. Dishart, glaring after him to see if he was carrying his head high, resumed his wordy way. ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... toil and traffic, working with their hands, or shipping freights of figs or valonea; as for the Schnorrers, the beggars who lived by other people's wits, they were even more hard-headed than the workers. Hence constant excitements and wordy wars, till at last the authorities banished the already outlawed Sabbatai from Smyrna. When he heard the decree he said, "Is Israel not in exile?" He took farewell of his brothers and of his father, now grown decrepit in his body and full of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... external accident. And yet when Richard's inward weakness appears to seek refuge in his despair, and his exhaustion counterfeits repose, the old habit of kingliness, the effect of flatterers from his infancy, is ever and anon producing in him a sort of wordy courage which only serves to betray more clearly his internal impotence. The second and third scenes of the third act combine and illustrate ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... taken no part in this wordy warfare between her mother and her future husband. It seemed almost as if she had not heard a word of it. No doubt her ears were trained by now no longer to heed these squabbles. She had drawn a low stool close to the invalid's chair, and sitting near him with ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the West they journeyed then, And in a quarrel got; One said 't was his, he knew it was, The other said 't was not. One drew a knife, a pistol t' other, And dreadfully they swore; From Northern lake to Southern gulf Wild rang the wordy roar. ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... here and there by irrefutable facts, believed and doubted all. Lost in thought, a prey to an awful and involuntary incredulity, which was combated by the instincts of his own pure love and his faith in Natalie, he read and re-read that wordy letter, unable to decide the question which it raised either for or against his wife. Love is sometimes as great and true when smothered in words as it is in brief, ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... of violent wordy warfare carried on around me. I was lying on the ground, and the first things I saw were three or four pairs of feet standing close together. Gradually out of the confused hubbub a few ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... more in one sentence of his than in a a page of the other's wordy utterances." Her lips moved in the earnestness of her inward-spoken thoughts. "How annoyed I was to be dragged from his side by Mr. Dexter just as I had begun to feel a little at my ease, and just as my voice had gained something of its true expression. ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... sucree. It was an awe-inspiring assembly; "for the men who talked, held a city of two millions of inhabitants in their hands, and were free to put into practice any or all of the amazing theories that might come into their heads. Their speeches, however, were brief; they were not wordy, as they might have been if reporters had been present. Most of them wore uniforms profusely decorated with gold lace," and, says an Englishman who saw them in their seats, "one had only to look in their faces to judge the whole ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... my wounds. Every time I entered the ward a delegation of one-eyed would greet me as a comrade and present me with a petition. In this petition I was asked and urged to betake myself to the hospital library, to probe the depths of the encyclopaedias and from their wordy innards tear out one name for the organisation of the one-eyed. This was to be our life long club, they said, and the insistence was that the name above all should be a "classy" name. So it came to pass that after much research and ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... is taken from the Definition of the council, a rather wordy document, but ending with a passage indicating the action of the council. From this concluding passage this condemnation is taken. See Hefele, 274, also PNF, ser. II, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... A wordy war followed, lasting the best part of a half an hour. Through this it was learned that the hotel man had prepared for the spread, and so had the professor of music. Just after noon telephone messages had ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... a sudden and terrific kick; the wordy quarrel ceased; hurried steps retreated along the corridor; a pass key rattled in the lock, and the door ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... from his lips no wordy protestation such as formal lovers use. No eloquence was his, nor did he suffer from the lack of it. He simply enfolded her in his ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... will not drown in wordy praise The kindly thoughts that rise; If friendship owns one tender phrase, He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... buckled on again, Charlie had only a wordy wrath for the vanished officer, and grim worship of Anna, while Constance and Miranda, behind a veil of mirthful recapitulations, tenderly rejoiced in the relief of mind and heart which the moment ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... and explained in wordy Italian that the poor, dear, sweet little signorina had fallen asleep in bed and was breathing ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... prevails in the wretched straw-spread hole where our tribe—some upright and hesitant, others kneeling and hammering like colliers—is mending, stacking, and subduing its provisions, clothes, and tools. There is a wordy growling, a riot of gesture. From the smoky glimmers, rubicund faces start forth in relief, and dark hands move about in the shadows like marionettes. In the barn next to ours, and separated from ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... on the other. Bloody collisions, it is said, occurred between them. The latter held meetings in the calkers' hall in the lower part of the city, at which resolutions were adopted and speeches made denouncing the soldiers, who, on their part deriding the wordy war offered, sneeringly snubbed their opponents "The Calkers," which by an easy corruption became "the caucus," and finally a term to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... would have fared badly with Pompey Hollidew, he thought grimly; it was unconvincing, wordy; he was conscious that his assumed emotion rang thinly. But its calculated effect was instantaneous, beyond ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... up, but he was civil and polite enough in his unkempt way. They thought he would be a good butt for play, as educated folk were uncommon out there in 1847, and considered the untaught as their legitimate prey. So they bombarded the poor bumpkin with "wordy pyrotechnics," at which the stranger bewilderingly added his laugh and finally was emboldened to ask what would be the upshot of "this here ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy barren speculation. For these men were men who would not fish up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. And they were men of a different turn of mind ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... a lustre, as the Dedication reminds us, since David Balfour, at the end of the last chapter of Kidnapped, was left to kick his heels in the British Linen Company's office. Five years have a knack of making people five years older; and the wordy, politic intrigue of Catriona is at least five years older than the rough-and-tumble intrigue of Kidnapped; of the fashion of the Vicomte de Bragelonne rather than of the Three Musketeers. But this is as it should be; ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... over-burdened tax-payer who derived neither enlightenment nor comfort from the wordy war about a "Graduated Income-Tax" between Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... been dazed by the cosmic torrent, but here was something specific;—and it was astounding. They regarded the speaker with awe. They wanted to be told how one could perform the feat, but dreaded to incur a too-wordy exposition. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... the God of the Law imperfect, he concludes this is not the supreme God. After a wordy harangue of Peter, Simon is said to have been worsted by Peter's threatening to go to Simon's bed-chamber and question the soul of the murdered boy. Simon flies to Tyre (H.) or Tripolis (R.), and Peter determines to ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... the pompous tone she had first adopted, and a volley of queries and replies was exchanged so rapidly, and with such appalling shrillness, that we onlookers ran a great risk of being either deafened, or driven out of our senses. At the first slackening of the wordy warfare, Dunmore put his questions, ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... ecstasy, with the exception of one incident which, though somewhat painful, it is necessary to retail in order to illustrate what havoc habit can work on even the brightest psychologies. Earl Bowles (a descendant of Senator Didcot Bowles—beloved by all) in his rather wordy dissertation on "Intellects of the Hour" presents to us perhaps the most vivid picture of ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... declining so to decide, and intimating that they were willing to hear an argument on the point, of any reasonable length, he spread himself for the wordy onset. The sheriff—who, in the mean time, had started for the door to make an opening in the crowd for the expected entrance,—seeing that a long speech was in prospect, now went out, conducted the proffered witness, in waiting near by, to ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... wordy controversy on "compelling" and "acquiring." Seeing no prospect of a conclusion we withdrew. The good auntie who had invited us followed us out in deep humiliation. I said, we are sorry to go without contributing something to the interest ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 06, June, 1884 • Various
... he had imagined Jacqueline capable of leaving him for a creature like Channing, flabby, wordy, feebly vicious! Somewhere at home she was waiting for him; lonely, perhaps, wondering why her husband did not come to her, but safe and unashamed. Possibly her mother and Jemima had ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... question the piety which hesitates to flatter the Divine ear by "vain repetitions" and formal enumeration of sacred attributes, dignities, and offices. Every instinct of his tenderly sensitive nature shrank from the wordy irreverence of noisy profession. His very silence is significant: the husks of emptiness rustle in every wind; the full corn in the ear holds up its golden fruit noiselessly to the Lord of the harvest. John Woolman's faith, like the Apostle's, is manifested by his labors, standing not ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... now consign me to a comfortable couch made up of several quilts, one of the transients thoughtfully cautioning me to put my moccasins under my pillow, as these articles were the object of almost universal covetousness during the evening. No sooner am I comfortably settled down, than a wordy warfare breaks out in my immediate vicinity, and an ancient female makes a determined dash at my coverlet, with the object of taking forcible possession; but she is seized and unceremoniously hustled away by the men who assigned me my quarters. It appears that, with an eye singly and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticised, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal?" Mark Twain never, I firmly believe, held up to ridicule the Southern "ideal." But in a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality—all imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of the Southern literary journal of the thirties and forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his 'Joan of Arc', voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke the "Southern ideal" of his Virginia forbears; ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... listened to the jargon which I had just heard proclaimed as Platonism, consisting of common-place thoughts, laboriously tortured and involved, till their true semblance was lost, and instead of them a wordy mist—glowing indeed oftentimes with rainbow colors—was presented to the mind of the hearer for him to feed upon, he would at the moment have as heartily despised, as he had formerly gloried in, the name and office ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... travelled up to eight, and the children being engaged in a wordy warfare over the possession of a certain stray dog that had come to Misrule in the afternoon, she slipped out of the room unobserved. No one was in the hall, and she picked up the becoming, fleecy cloud she had hidden there, twisted ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... Sir Henry Delme was disposed to consider Dr. Pormont, with his pomposity, and wordy arguments, as a mere superficial thinker; and he half laughed at himself, for having ever thought it necessary to consult him. This class of men influence less than they ought. Sensible persons are apt to set ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... not wordy, and he tarried but a moment, yet he explained his paralysis. In the dreary monotone of a chronic sour temper he related that some Confederates, about a year before, had come here impressing horses, and their officer, on being called by ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... affirmations ridiculous. It was the wordy dispute of two wretches who lied for the sake of lying, without succeeding in concealing from themselves that they did so. Each took the part of accuser in turn, and although the prosecution they instituted against one another proved barren of result, they began it ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... was taking a desperate chance in working through the cordon of Indians which surrounded them, and that the house was safe when compared to running such a gantlet, offered to go through the danger line with him. For several minutes a wordy war raged and finally Red accepted a compromise; he was to help, but not to work ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... father and mother. It was a sad picture to witness their grief. But Kit Carson could not do so unmoved. The heart of such grief has ever awakened his earnest sympathy. His sympathy, too, has never been of a wordy nature. He volunteered to go with Fuentes and make an attempt to deliver the captives, if such they should prove, or to avenge their death, if that became ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... shovelling away on the house-tops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball—better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest—laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack such cases as the Commons it is always on the points (perhaps the few points) where the Commons are right. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop, and complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one respect in which the Commons are actually like the Common People. If they love leisure and long debate, it is because all men love it; that they really represent England. There the Parliament does approach to the ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... delays; some from the jealousy and distrust of the English, who feared that the Indians were going to ally themselves to the Dutch; some from the difficulty of getting pastors to join in the tedious task of listening to the wordy confessions; and some from the distressing scandal of drunkenness breaking out among the Indians, in spite of the strict discipline that always punished it. It was not till 1660 that Mr. Eliot baptized any ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Cornewall, a valiant sea-captain, put up by Parliament, the other to Craggs, a young statesman, whose posthumous fame was sullied by his share in the South Sea Bubble. The elder Craggs committed suicide {29} when the Bubble burst, but the son died first, and Pope wrote a wordy epitaph and superintended the erection of the monument. From this side we turn to the other tower, but make no exhaustive survey of the "Whig Corner," for statesmen galore are to be found in the north transept, and we mention the chief of these in connection with their contemporaries there. The latest ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... clearly exactly your view. I find I had noted the explanation as insufficient, and I hear that in Darwin's copy there is "No! No!" against it. It seems, however, to me to summarise all that is of the slightest value in Romanes' wordy paper. I have asked Newton (to whom I had lent it) to forward to you at Birmingham a proof of my paper in the Fortnightly, and I shall be much obliged if you will read it carefully, and, if you can, "hold a brief" for me at the British ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... "In the wordy war that followed," said Terry, "we all three went the limit in throwing things up to each other. I told Katie that if it had not been for me and Marie she would not have had anybody to steal for; that I was eating on her stealings and mine, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... most brilliant writer, though a little inclined, perhaps, to be wordy. I have discovered in some of his later books one hundred and eighteen thousand words no two of which are alike. This shows great fluency and versatility, it is true, but we need something else. The ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... rate to start with, to state the differences as irreconcilable. For the first and most unfamiliar fact the English have to learn in this strange land is that differences can be irreconcilable. And again the chief danger is that they may be persuaded that the wordy compromises of Western politics can reconcile them; that such abysses can be filled up with rubbish, or such chasms bridged with cobwebs. For we have created in England a sort of compromise which may up to a certain point be workable in England; though there are signs that even in England that ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... say these persons, the justice of what has been said as to the duty and importance of improving these people. We have sometimes tried; but the want of real gratitude which, in them, is associated with such warm and wordy expressions of regard, with their incorrigible habits of falsehood and evasion, have baffled and discouraged us. You say their children ought to be educated; but how can this be effected when the all but omnipotent sway of the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... but the public was cold and inattentive. Some passages of a particularly lofty moral tone provoked laughter. The Revolution in Sweden, in fact, was shown to suffer from the ineradicable faults which Congreve had gently but justly suggested. It was very long, and very dull, and very wordy, and we could scarcely find a more deadly specimen of virtuous and didactic tragedy. Catharine was dreadfully disappointed, nor was she completely consoled by being styled—by no less a person than ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... a lugubrious silence made eloquent by his rolling eyes, passed around among us the remnants of the food. No one can be said to have eaten with appetite except Mr. Tubbs, who received his portion with wordy gratitude and devoured it with seeming gusto. The pirates, full-fed, with pipes in mouths, were inclined to be affable and jocular. "Feeding the animals," as Slinker called it, seemed to afford them much agreeable diversion. Even Magnus had lost in a degree his usual sullenness, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... at the polls; his party had won an easy victory; and, though not on the ticket, he was now awaiting a telegraphic summons to the state capital. His fortunes were growing. Yet that was not a thing to be wordy about, and now, when the murmur of his voice continued so long and steadily that it found even the dulled ear of the aged father in the upper room, that father knew what the topic must be. On all other matters the son and brother had become more silent than ever,—was being nicknamed far and ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... family collectively, but it was upon John Watson, the man of few words, that she lavished the whole wealth of her South of Ireland hatred, for John Watson had on more than one occasion got the better of her in a wordy encounter. ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... afraid of his violent disposition, of the tone of the old regime that his outbreaks of wrath had retained, of the facility with which he would raise his cane at an insolent remark from the canaille. On almost every occasion there were scenes with the manager, wordy disputes with people in the pit, and threats of personal violence to which she put an end by lowering the curtain of the box. The same thing was kept up in the street, even in the cab, with the driver, who would refuse to carry them at Monsieur de Varandeuil's ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... facts. It is an easy, but not a satisfactory method of criticism to declare what is not to one's liking to be invention and romance, and it has until late years been difficult to combat such an argument. The battle has raged round wordy disputes, the merits of which are governed by the abilities of the respective disputants; that this is no longer possible is due to the fact that there have entered into the fray the methods and results of folklore which prevent the terms invention and romance ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... foeman's wall and mound's beleaguerment No health in war? Fool, sing such song to that Dardanian head, 399 And thine own day! cease not to fright all things with mighty dread. Cease not to puff up with thy pride the poor twice-conquered folk, And lay upon the Latin arms the weight of wordy yoke. Yea, sure the chiefs of Myrmidons quake at the Phrygian sword, Tydides and Achilles great, the Larissaean lord; And Aufidus the flood flees back unto the Hadriac sea. But now whereas this guile-smith fains to dread mine enmity, ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... afternoon in particular, on a hot, airless day in June, when Joan reached the last point of her endurance. Everything had combined to make the office unendurable. One of Mr. Strangman's most agitated moods held him. Early in the morning he had indulged in a wordy argument with Chester, the Literary Page editor, on the question of whether or not the telephone was to be used by the office boys to 'phone telegrams through to the post office. It was a custom just founded by Strangman and it saved ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... at Darco's lodging next morning wrapped in a perfume of gin and cloves. He laid upon the table a wordy document in foolscap with a receipt stamp in one corner, and read it aloud in his own breathless chuckle. It set forth that whereas he, the undersigned William Treherne Macfarvel Warr, of the one part, late of, et cetera, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... Johnson. Opposite him was Miriam and another of the Johnson circle, and also he had brawn to carve and there was hardly room for the helpful Betsy to pass behind his chair, so that altogether his mind would have been amply distracted from any mortuary broodings, even if a wordy warfare about the education of the modern young woman had not sprung up between Uncle Pentstemon and Mrs. Larkins and threatened for a time, in spite of a word or so in season from Johnson, to wreck all the harmony ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... English. Hence Villemain remarks, that "every translation must virtually be a new creation." But, such as they are, I have endeavoured to translate the poems as literally as possible. Jasmin's poetry is rather wordy, and requires condensation, though it is admirably suited for recitation. When other persons recited his poems, they were not successful; but when Jasmin recited, or rather acted them, they were ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... Troops, troops, my lord, not wordy men of law, Are his sole need. Should God send angels there He'd choose but those who bear the flaming sword. ... Here, here, my lords! Look here! His guaranties, In his own hand set down! Here he vows faith To Maximilian—and ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... hall! The delegates greeting one another, shaking one another by the hand, making their alliances and friendships for the session, arranging meals together, kindly, good-humoured, and polite, the best of friends in private for all their bitter and wordy squabbles in public. The chief Russian delegate, M. Kratzky, a small, trim little ex-Bolshevik, turned Monarchist by the recent coup d'tat, was engaged in a genial conversation with the second French delegate. France had loudly and firmly voted last year against the admission of Russia ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... of the sort. Dialectically the great Doctor was a great brute. The fact is, he had so accustomed himself to wordy warfare that he lost all sense of moral responsibility, and cared as little for men's feelings as a Napoleon did for their lives. When the battle was over, the Doctor frequently did what no soldier ever did that I have heard ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... though love draws in one way, duty draws in the other, we may admire his prudence, but we are glad when so delicate a business comes to an end. In The Natural Son the latter scene, though very long, is the less disagreeable of the two. And just as in Diderot's most wordy and tiresome pages we generally find some one phrase, some epithet, some turn of a sentence whose freshness or strength or daring reveals a genius, so in this scene we find a few lines whose energy reminds us that we are not ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... how splendid his talents, they will, by that species of logic for which slanderers are famous, prove him to be a fool. These dissentions do not expire when the candidates are elected. They are carried to the capitol of our common country and blown out in more than wordy war. There, we have reason to fear, the volcano is gathering, and that the day is not distant when it will disembogue in more than the thunders of Etna, wrap our political heavens in a blaze, and melt its elements with ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... pretty safe to be a peace-day also; and none of the wordy collisions went too far, although it was plain that the new-comers had not yet attained any high degree ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... fence and a wordy discussion followed. Both were angry when they parted, and the breach was not healed for some time. It was poor policy to quarrel, since some time before he had proposed to Miss Owens, and she had asked for time in which to consider it before ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... slaughter house that Dick and Casper had made after a particularly bloody revolt against the capitalistic system, Henry Fenn walked for a time beside his friend looking silently at the earth while Van Dorn mooned and star-gazed with wordy delight. Henry lifted his face, looked at Tom with great, bright, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... "Your wit misleads you, darling. I know what I am about. I decline a wordy contest. To approach to a quarrel, or, say dispute, with one's parent apropos of such a person, is something worse than evil policy, don't ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... me patience! By the help of Juno the protectress it was this brain and this arm that—But I will not justify myself by imitating the Athenian fashion of wordy boasting. Pass on ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Marco Polo's travels was Marco's, and how much was the worthy Rusticiano's, we are unable to decide. The facts in that famous book were duly vouched for by Marco. The opening chapter, or prologue, inflated and wordy, after the fashion of the times, was undoubtedly Rusticiano's. He began thus: "Great Princes, Emperors, and Kings, Dukes and Marquises, Counts, Knights, and Burgesses! and People of all degree who desire to get knowledge ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... walls has nothing to do with the action, and Polynices enters the town under the safe-conduct of a truce, without any effect being thereby produced. After all the rest the banished Oedipus and a wordy ode are tacked on, being equally to no purpose." This is a severe criticism, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... new element in the minds of the clergy, a stronger realization, not of our responsibilities—we have that—but of the education, the personal search for truth, the knowledge of human nature, which are necessary to enable us to meet them.' He went on a long time about that. I think he grows very wordy. But I did not argue with him. I let him say what he liked. I knew that I must be obedient to my Bishop, just as I should expect my clergy to be to me, if I ever am a Bishop myself. Not that I expect I ever shall be"—Mr. Gresley was overtired—"but it seemed to me as he talked about ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... quite wordy about the lady to me when he come over on an errand one day. He told me all about these delightful talks of theirs, and what an attractive person she was, sound as a nut, and companionable and good-looking without being ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... in Great Britain has been singularly unfortunate in the literature of aphorism. One too famous volume of proverbial philosophy had immense vogue, but it is so vapid, so wordy, so futile, as to have a place among the books that dispense with parody. Then, rather earlier in the century, a clergyman, who ruined himself by gambling, ran away from his debts to America, and at last blew his brains ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... but Nature can bestow. And this is the power which alone can make drama convincing and immortal. Compare with the living and breathing reality of the characters in even the poorest of the Shakespearean plays, the wordy automata of Swinburne's Faliero or the frigid figures who talk through Tennyson's Cup. There are those who compare Scott with Shakespeare in the gift of visualising and vitalising the past. We Englishmen ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Job's comforter. Her defence, creditable as it was to a novice, seemed wordy and weak to him, a lawyer; and he was horrified at the admissions she had made. In her place he would have admitted nothing he could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... whether of offense or of defence, in foreign affairs. The people who afterwards became known as Jeffersonian Republicans numbered in their ranks the extremists who had been active as the founders of Democratic societies in the French interest, and they were ferocious in their wordy hostility to Great Britain; but they were not dangerous foes to any foreign government which did not fear words. Had they possessed the foresight and intelligence to strengthen the Federal Government the Jay treaty would ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... place, really contained a large element of truth, Cleon overreached himself, and was caught in his own snare. It was he, and not his opponents, who was diverting attention from facts, and involving a plain issue in a cloud of wordy rhetoric. He has no arguments, worthy of the name, but tries to carry his case by playing on the passions of the people, and blowing up the flames of their anger, which was beginning to cool. But though the more discerning among his audience must have seen through his sophistries, ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... I have to make on this wordy jumble is, that it seems highly presumptuous on the part of weak men to defend the character of "Almighty God." Surely they might leave him to protect himself. Omnipotence is able to punish those ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... poised above her book, ready to note which side Mr. —— took. Mr. —— fidgeted, pulled himself together with a violent jerk, and finally spoke his mind. Someone else did likewise, also someone else, then the women interposed, and jumped on the men, the men retaliated, a wordy war ensued, and the whole matter ended by nothing being decided, pro or con—generally the case in wordy discussions. Moi? Well, I sawed wood and said nothing, but all the while there was forming in my mind, ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... refusal to do what he might have preferred personally. He and his stood to lose all that they owned—their honor—and the honor of their wives and families, should they fight on the wrong side. Even as a soldier who had passed his word, he might have been excused for a lot of wordy questioning of orders, for he had enough at stake to make ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy |
