"Unromantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Islam." Yet these later works of Crabbe met with the fullest recognition both from readers and from critics of the most opposite tendencies. Scott, the most generous, and Wordsworth,[2] the most grudging, of all the poets of the day towards their fellows, united in praising Crabbe; and unromantic as the poet of "The Village" seems to us he was perhaps Sir Walter's favourite English bard. Scott read him constantly, he quotes him incessantly; and no one who has read it can ever forget how Crabbe ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and hundreds of singing birds were let free, thus giving the appearance of a forest glade in summer-time. There is no evidence that this crypt was appropriated to any special use in former times, but to-day it serves the useful, if unromantic, purpose of a kitchen for preparing the mayoralty banquet on the historic ninth ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... it seemed almost impossible that he, Freddie Kirby, native of Kansas, unromantic aviator, should have been the one to discover this relic of an unknown, lost race. Yet the cylinder of gold ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... special branch of education, in which experts are only gradually becoming developed. The phenomena are as massive and wide-spread as is anything in Nature, and the study of them is as tedious, repellent and undignified. To reject it for its unromantic character is like rejecting bacteriology because penicillium glaucum grows on horse-dung and bacterium termo lives in putrefaction. Scientific men have long ago ceased to think of the dignity of the materials they work in. When imposture has been checked ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... glow, a speck at first, and on, and on, until he arrived where she waited and flung himself from his panting horse, neckerchief awry, spurs tinkling, and swept off his broad hat in salute. Beyond that point she had not dared to go since marrying the miller, who had dust enough on his shoulders—unromantic dust, unromantic shoulders, goodness knows! But that was her picture, all framed in the gold of her heart. She wanted to see the mountain with the sun behind it, and the cowboy, and all, and then she could sigh, and go back to the miller ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... air, or something, makes a fellow mighty unromantic, too. Perhaps it was the thin blue wood-smoke from the field-stoves, and the smell of the hot coffee and the victuals the waiters are carrying about, some to the tent where the bare tables are for the canvasmen, some to the table covered with a red and white table-cloth as befits ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... and a motherly embrace, the old lady bustled away to stir up her maid and wakt John from his first nap with the smell of coffee. a most unromantic but satisfying perfume to all the weary watchers in ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... inspiring to summon the vision of Honora, in rustling garments, poised as the figurehead of this craft, beckoning him on to battle and victory. Alas! the launching happened at that grimmest and most unromantic of hours-ten minutes of eight in the morning. There was a period, indeterminate, when she poured out his coffee with wifely zeal; a second period when she appeared at the foot of the stairs to kiss him as he was going out of the door; a third ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... seeing those two in the new light of this letter. So they were really lovers, the drab, unromantic, plain, dull, middle-aged souls! What had they seen in one another? What had they felt, to drive them to deeds so desperate, yes, and so absurd? Was there then a world right outside his ken, a world from which he had been since his ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... fuss to make over nothing," said Mary Vance disdainfully as Jem dashed off. She was sitting out with Miller Douglas on a lobster trap which was not only an unromantic but an uncomfortable seat. But Mary and Miller were both supremely happy on it. Miller Douglas was a big, strapping, uncouth lad, who thought Mary Vance's tongue uncommonly gifted and Mary Vance's white ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... idyllic descriptions of George Eliot, no more resemble actualities than the poetic spinning-wheel of olden times the loom of latest invention. Utility is the object aimed at, incontestably with great results, but in effect unromantic as Chicago. It is high farming made to pay. All was bustle and activity as we made the round of the premises, beginning with the vast machinery and workshops. These walled-in buildings, divided into two portions, each covering three-quarters of an acre, reminded me of nothing so ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of Francesca and Paolo, or Tristram and Yseult. Indeed, it is difficult to guess whether this self-satisfied, self-glorifying quality, which distinguishes mediaeval passion from the passion (always regarded as an interlude, harmless or hurtful, in civic concerns) of unromantic Antiquity—whether, I say, this peculiarity of mediaeval love is due to its having served for religious as well as for secular use, or whether the possibility of its being brought into connection with the highest mysteries ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... took another look at the oasis. Sure enough, horns and a hoof protruded from one end of the mudhole. I sank back weakly and wondered why I had ever thought I wanted to visit the Navajos. I hoped my loved ones back in the Virginias would not know how I died. It sounded too unromantic to say one passed out from drinking dead cow! I might as well say here that evidently I was held firmly by the Deity, for I felt no ill effects whatever. I couldn't eat any supper, but I knew Smolley would soon blow in and it ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... brought Jay back to Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown Borough. Chloris gave an unromantic snort and sat with unnecessary clumsiness upon Jay's toe. So Jay returned, falling suddenly out of the music of the sea into the band-of-hopeful music of distant Boy ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... have made the melancholy picture of Katrina's condition most satisfyingly complete. But when we sought eagerly for such details, Katrina, with shameless indifference to dramatic possibilities, painted for us an unromantic, matter-of-fact old German, kind to her when he remembered her existence, but submerged in his library and in scientific research. We further learned that they ate five meals a day at Katrina's home, with "coffee" and numerous accompaniments in between. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... in an appalled tone. "Morrison!" Her head drooped. Unable to see her features, Heyst could tell from her voice that for some reason or other she was profoundly moved by the syllables of that unromantic name. A thought flashed through his head—could she have known Morrison? But the mere difference of their origins ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Bedelle and Miss Vivi Balou separated themselves from the unromantic middle-aged crowd around the tennis courts and made their way up the beach to the sheltering swirls of convenient sand dunes. They walked in silence, oppressed by the greatness of their grief, from time to time their shoulders touched ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... on, Guy, for you must allow that it was much worse in such a grave, grand, unromantic person, who makes a point of thinking before he speaks, than if it had been a hasty, hand-over-head man like Maurice de Courcy, who might have got into ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... much of the nuns. It has ever been the custom of the priesthood to endeavor to throw a veil of romance over the very unromantic way of life followed by females who have shut themselves up for life in a place hardly equal to a second-class state-prison. Woman has an important place which God has assigned her in the world; but when ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... is assumed, not proved. My own conviction that most wealth is quite blameless, whether under the general or specific accusation, is based on no comprehensive axiom, but simply on the knowledge of a number of particular fortunes and of their owners. Such a road towards truth is highly unromantic. The student of particular phenomena is unable to pose as the champion of the race. But the method has the modest advantage of resting not on a priori definitions, but on inductions from actual experience; hence of being ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... forests and Cathay deserts are buffoons such as Florentine shopmen may have trapped out for their amusement in rusty armour and garlands of sausages. The only lifelike heroes and heroines are those of Ariosto. And they are most untragic, unromantic. The men are occasionally small scoundrels, but unintentionally on the part of the author. They show no deep moral cancers or plague-spots; they display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small lusts which the Renaissance regarded as mere flesh and blood characteristics. ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... of human joy and the extinction of natural desires, and that prohibits the free exercise of beneficent faculties, as conditions of its realization, can never establish its right to permanent and universal dominion. The faithful discharge of unromantic, secular duties, the keeping of one's heart pure in the midst of temptation, and the unheralded altruism of private life, must ever be as welcome in the sight of God as the prayers of the recluse, who scorns ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... a just criticism of mine. One part of the subject you have certainly omitted. You do not tell us how much there often is of physical disorder in despair. I dare say you will think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but I must confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that one can walk down distress of ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... you think safest from our cruisers, hauling it down when fair, to begin hostilities. . . . Choose your terms," he concludes, "but let us meet." Having sent in this amazing letter, this middle-aged, unromantic, but hard-fighting captain climbs at daybreak to his own maintop, and sits there till half-past eleven, watching the challenged ship, to see if her foretopsail is unloosed and she is ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... the scene of her unromantic martyrdom, and I made a feeble effort to shake the dew-drops from my mane, and, so to speak, look myself in the face. I must give this life over, I thought; and I will give it over; an I do not, I am a villain. After all, there are not two sides to this question; there is only one; and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... person, nor have I given my own impressions, but have as accurately as possible written a detailed account of what I witnessed myself or heard from others. The discovery of these facts was laborious owing to conflicting statements and confused memories and party favour. Perhaps the unromantic nature of my record will make it uninteresting; but if any person will judge it useful because he desires to consider a clear account of actual facts and of what is likely to recur at some future time, I shall be content. As a compilation it is rather an eternal possession ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... as he ended; then choked, and broke into a fit of coughing which unromantic chance brought on just now, ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... the voice of emotion, it will of necessity vary with the emotion; and every one who has ears must have heard once in a while bird music of quite unusual fervor. For example, I have often seen the least flycatcher (a very unromantic-looking body, surely) when he was almost beside himself; flying in a circle, and repeating breathlessly his emphatic chebec. And once I found a wood pewee in a somewhat similar mood. He was more ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... scholar whose name has hardly yet crossed the Atlantic,—Professor Ashley Horace Thorndike,—has lately made some studies in dramatic chronology which go far to confirm the unromantic conjecture that to the end Shakspere remained imitative and little else. Professor Thorndike, for example, has shown with convincing probability that certain old plays concerning Robin Hood proved popular; a little later, Shakspere produced the woods and outlaws of 'As You Like It.' The ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... withheld from introducing such an episode by a strong conviction that it does not usually occur at such times. And I trust that my fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always some uninteresting stranger or unromantic policeman, and not Adolphus, who rescues, will ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... and that the convenience of its site enabled one on quitting it, to escape at once, and privately, either to the solitary beach, or to the glades and groves of the wide park which stretched behind,—I could not help indulging the belief that the unceremonious and not unromantic noble had himself selected his place of retirement, and that, in so doing, the gallant of a stately court was not perhaps undesirous of securing at well-chosen moments a brief relaxation from the heavy honours of country homage; or that the patron and poetic admirer of the dreaming Spenser might ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "You are intensely unromantic. But Mrs. Higgins is awfully good. She will give us eggs and cakes and milk and coffee and—everything. ...
— The Day of the Dog • George Barr McCutcheon
... breakfast; and then—the young damsels having eaten with the most unromantic heartiness—the whole school scattered: some to walk toward "town;" others to stroll by the brook, at the foot of the hill; others again ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... that nothing was to be done about it was so egregious that words failed to do justice to it. It was only eleven o'clock and he told Archie that he might spend an hour at the woodpile, even guiding him to that unromantic spot and initiating him into the uses of saw ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... particularly require their flattering attentions.... Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions of other girls.... All of which is so clearly a pretty ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... head came through slowly with a surprised expression upon his face. He remembered. He remembered the thing as a bald discovery, and without a touch of emotion. With all the achromatic clearness, the unromantic ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... course not." But the interior Tiffles was disappointed at this sudden and unromantic termination of his case. A few more nights in the station house, or in the Tombs, would have given him capital material for a book, of which he had already projected the first chapter. He sat down, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... her, however, so much as the pleasant country, the common people, the quiet villages. With observant eyes she saw the world about her as it was and she entered into the heart of its life, and has painted it for us in a most sympathetic, appreciative spirit. The simple, homely, unromantic life of middle England she has made immortal with her wit, her satire, her fine description, and her keen love of all that is human. She herself recognized the importance of her early surroundings. In one of her letters she used ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... bottom of the launch. The cutter was by this time close to us, on the larboard side, commanded by Mr Julius Caesar Tip, the senior midshipman, vulgarly called in the ship Bathos, from his rather unromantic name. Here also a low moaning evinced the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... event the boy's introduction to war was going to be as unromantic as anyone could want, short of being thrown cold and untrained into a major battle. They must be prepared for a bad time until they made it out of the Union lines and ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... way and that, as if yet undecided, and at length a positive heel over to that; the whole of my little world within being canted to half a right angle, and a ridiculous distortion of every single thing in my bedroom was the result. The humiliating sensation of being aground on hard unromantic mud is tempered by the ludicrous crooked appearance of the contents of your cabin and by the absurd sensation of sleeping in a corner with everything askance except the lamp flame, which, because it burns upright, looks most awry of all, and incongruously flares ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... Florrie at all, but some very different, unromantic, and unimaginative creature, had she failed of comprehension. Jim Galloway was actually making love ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... his home in 1900 was, in the unromantic procedure of our self-conscious days, of the nature of a triumph. He was formally welcomed by the Lotus Club, and, of course, as delicately as might be, he was praised for his honesty. His reply to compliment was a generous recognition of social virtue, which renders easier ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... it is that people often are so modest; they think that their own experience is so dull, so unromantic, so uninteresting. It is an entire mistake. If the dullest person in the world would only put down sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work, love, religion and emotion, it ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... unromantic ending to this experience that, forgetful of the consequences of what he did, he finally became sensible of the irksomeness of his standing position, and sat down, with his back to the rock, that he might enjoy it all without fatigue ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... everything so that he could place his hands readily upon it, found that he had half an hour to spare. He said to himself: "Miss Ludolph is wrong. I shall leave the house for a short time. I am a most unromantic individual; for, no matter what or how I feel, I do get hungry. But I am sure Miss Brown's coffee and sandwiches would choke me. I have already swallowed too much from her to care for any more, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... not mean to compliment you, for I spoke but the truth, I shall not accept the penalty. Now," he went on, "unromantic as it may sound, I own that I am hungry, and I am sure that my four followers are also, for we have ridden far and fast, and have not stopped, save to bait our horses and snatch a mouthful while they ate, since daybreak. In truth the news we received made me sorely anxious, though ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... modification of the little one's diet were useless. Indigestion was unromantic (in the mother's judgment), and "nerves" were highly aristocratic ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... or fill our pages with the rest of the pedigree. Senefelder invented Lithography. His invention has not made so much noise and larum in the world as some others, which have an origin quite as humble and unromantic; but it is one to which we owe no small profit, and a great deal of pleasure; and, as such, we are bound to speak of it with all gratitude and respect. The schoolmaster, who is now abroad, has taught us, in our youth, how the cultivation of art "emollit mores nec ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fellow is no father of mine," cried Jim, who had been sadly disappointed at the unromantic character of the revelation; "but I'll find out the secret of this matter yet. Meantime, I suppose, sir, the watch is mine. Elsie may ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... last offer is easily discovered, and the new bidder "sees that" (if I may be permitted to amuse myself with the phraseology of the Mississippi bluff-player) and "goes" a few ticals "better." There are always several enterprising Stars of the Harem ready to vary the monotony by engaging in this unromantic business; and the agitation among the "sealed" sisterhood, though by no means boisterous, is lively, though all have tact to appear indifferent in the presence of their awful lord. The meagreness ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... ring as of something hollow. He opened some letters, and looked up from one with a twitching face and a curious droop of the eyelids. "Miss Wishart is all right," he said. "My aunt says that she is none the worse, but that Stocks has caught a tremendous cold. An unromantic ending!" ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... his practical, unromantic temperament to play the Gargantuan role. He had not the mentality. Van Horne left the road when the road threatened to become bigger than its creator. Shaughnessy began to work on it when he knew that the bigger he made ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... not prone to wax enthusiastic over the delights of architecture or natural scenery. He called himself unexpansive and unromantic; he confessed to small understanding, small veneration, for artistic effects. The beauty of a man's character moved him more strongly than the beauty of any picture or any landscape. Yet, on arriving next afternoon at the upper plateau of Nepenthe he could not help being struck by the strange ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... common as pets in the Navy, but the goat of all the goats was a white creature rejoicing in the unromantic name of William who lived on board a cruiser. His staple articles of food seemed to consist of tobacco, cigarettes, stray rope-yarns, bristles of brooms, and odds and ends of old canvas, while he was not averse to licking the galvanised ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... pointed muzzles. They could even perceive the little black spots behind their cheeks, which emit that disagreeable odour—as with the common goat—and on account of which the hunting-trappers, in their unromantic phraseology, have given the name of "goats" to these most ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... mummy case. A brilliant inspiration! Here, at all events, was a temporary hiding-place for the corpse of the blackmailer. If it was putting new wine into old bottles, circumstances surely justified a violation of the proverb. Till now a severe unromantic Hellenist, he held Egyptology in some contempt; and for Egypt, except in so far as it illustrated the art of Greece or remained a treasure-house for Greek manuscripts, his distaste was only surpassed by that of the Prophet ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... in a New York "finishing school" for young ladies had served greatly to modify Miss Calhoun's colloquial charms. Many of her delightful "way down south" phrases and mannerisms were blighted by the cold, unromantic atmosphere of a seminary conducted by two ladies from Boston who were too old to marry, too penurious to love and too prim to think that other women might care to do both. There were times, however,—if ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... but the guns that were once on its parapets are gone, the garrison is gone, gone far out on the trench lines beyond the hills. The Vauban citadel is now a place where bread is baked, where wounded men are occasionally brought, where live the soldiers and officers whose important but unromantic mission it is to keep the roads through the town open, to police the ashes of the city, to do what remains of the work that once fell to the lot ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... mouth is at its narrowest, it is natural that it was chosen as the site of one of the forts built to defend the capital. Here, then, on a sandbank washed once by every high tide, but now joined to the mainland by so unromantic a feature as the gasworks, a tower begun by Dom Joao II., and designed, it is said, by Garcia de Resende, was finished by Dom Manoel about 1520 and dedicated to Sao Vicente, the patron ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... of fairy wands, and of the soothing, self-ingratiating role of transforming other people's grey into gold, while the said people sat agape, transfixed with gratitude and admiration, but—how extraordinarily prosaic and unromantic the process became when worked out in sober black and white. To mend stockings, to stifle shrieks, to be snubbed by a cross housekeeper; probably, in addition, to be sent to Coventry by the handsome and haggard ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... girl, With an unromantic style, With borrowed colour and curl, With fixed mechanical smile, With many a hackneyed wile, With ungrammatical lips, And corns ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... for one reason among so many, I love this mystic morning light. It has a strange power of revealing the beauty that is hidden from us by the coarser beams of the full day. These worn men and women, grown so foolish looking, so unromantic; these artisans and petty clerks plodding to their monotonous day's work; these dull-eyed women of the people on their way to market to haggle over sous, to argue and contend over paltry handfuls of food. In this magic morning light the disguising body becomes transparent. They ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... in wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly agitated even in bowing to ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... interested he was—his manner was so deceptive. Aileen imagined that she was the superior woman of the two, the better-looking, the better-dressed, hence the more ensnaring. She could not guess what a lure this woman's temperament had for Cowperwood, who was so brisk, dynamic, seemingly unromantic, but who, just the same, in his nature concealed (under a very forceful exterior) a deep underlying element ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of the two speakers were hushed, or were replaced by the gentle but unromantic music of the nose; and save when the church bells tolled the hour and the watchman called it, all was silent at the house of John Sedley, Esquire, of Russell Square, and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sure,—tattered, and sickly, and starved. She was not quite up to the mark as to prettiness, though she had soft, sorrowful eyes and a delicate mouth. Hunger, cold, and ill-treatment are not very favorable to beauty. Then the name she gave was decidedly unromantic,—Molly Magee. But the poor child told a piteous story, which soon brought tears to Bessie's gentle eyes,—how her father was dead of fever, and her mother a suffering invalid; how she was obliged to beg in ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... I have done nothing. I am only an unromantic gentleman, hiding from a romantic lady who is in love ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... in this town," said Beechy, when Mr. Barrymore slowed down before an imposing glass-fronted hotel with gorgeous ornamentations of iron and a wonderful gateway. "After what we've come from, Lecco does look unromantic and prosaic, though I daresay this hotel is nice and will give us a ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... out of my depth, Blanche, methinks," said Lysken, re-threading her needle in a practical unromantic way. "Love is love, for me. It differeth, of course, in degree; we love not all alike. But, methinks, even a man's love for God, though it be needs deeper and higher far, must yet be the same manner of love that he hath for his father, or his childre, or his friends. ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... if such it might be termed, ran an uneventful course. I had almost said unromantic. But who shall tell where is fancy bred or wherein romance consists? Whenever Plooie saw the drabbled little worker busy on a doorstep, he would cross over and open the conversation according to an ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... destroy your belief in the connection of your friend with the road agents," said Demorest grimly, "but if he belongs to their band it is in an inferior capacity. Most of them are known to the authorities, and I have heard it even said that their leader or organizer is a very unromantic speculator in ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... appearance; while the gay tinkle of the leader's bell, mingling with those shrill and peculiar exclamations with which Spanish muleteers are in the habit of urging on their animals, made a not unpleasing medley of sounds. But the creamiest part of the whole affair was—I must confess it, unromantic as it may seem—when the twenty-five or thirty pretty creatures were collected into the small space between our cabin and the Humboldt. Such a gathering together of ham-and-mackerel-fed bipeds, such a lavish display of gold-dust, such troops of happy-looking men bending beneath the delicious ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... bristling and gleaming with silver and glass, was a round table, at which fourteen could have dined comfortably; and at opposite sides of this table sat two gentlemen, who looked as neat, grave, precise, and unromantic, as the place: Merchant ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... first time, I explored my small future domain, which is bounded, on the right, by the high-road; on the left, by a not unromantic little mill-stream, with bits of rock, and cedar-bushes, and dams, and, I am sorry to say, a very picturesque, half-tumbled-down factory; on the north, by fields and orchards of our neighbors, and another road; and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... gleaming white Mission, as when we beached our boats for the first time, riding over the breakers with shouting Kanakas, the three small hide-traders lying at anchor in the offing. But now we are the only vessel, and that an unromantic, sail-less, spar-less, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... river than the surface, while his leg was held in chancery by a network of clinging water-weeds. Lubin had some slight difficulty in extricating him, and for the moment, at least, his poetic fantasies came to an abrupt and unromantic finish. ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... commonplace and (to his mind) unromantic irritated him; but an instinct of good manners, that was not the least of his charm, compelled him to humour her. Once she sat for a whole hour in a dark cellar that smelt of tallow where a couple of men were engaged in making ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... infinite pains over his work, Derrick did not break down, but pleasantly cheated my expectations. I was not called on to nurse him through a fever, and consumption did not mark him for her own. In fact, in the matter of illness, he was always a most prosaic, unromantic fellow, and never indulged in any of the euphonious and interesting ailments. In all his life, I believe, he never went in for anything but the mumps—of all complaints the least interesting—and, may be, an ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... dwarf creatures from the underworld on a visit to the haunts of men. I almost looked to see them vanish before my eyes. All of a sudden the cow in its Lilliputian cart utters a throaty roar—and even that unromantic sound was like a voice ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... know him and I don't, but that's how it strikes a stranger." He turned on his heel and paced the veranda thoughtfully. "And, after all, the burden of the actual, daily unromantic toil falls on the shoulders of the men out here, and not on his own. He enjoys all the privileges of recommendation without responsibility, and we—well, perhaps, when you've seen a little more of India you'll understand. To begin with, our ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... to doubt that slowly stirring effort of memory. He was a man of unromantic temperament, unimaginative, and by no means of an adventurous turn of mind. He sought naturally for the most reasonable explanation of this strange picture, which no effort of his will could dismiss from his memory. It was a dream, of course. But the dream did not fade. Slowly it spread ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... field and wash of the sea beyond the lesser island of the Spotted Horses. And he knew, too, the issue of the disappearance of the moon, the desperate plight into which the sluggish bank of black cloud might plunge a man. As a matter of unromantic fact he desired greatly to decline a passage of ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... Malvine had sixty thousand thalers in cash as her dowry, and would inherit double that sum. Her modest, quiet, amiable disposition made him drift into a strong attachment; her appearance was sufficiently womanly and charming, and her steady, practical views on things, utterly unromantic an unenthusiastic, harmonized entirely with his own. It was refreshing for him to hear her chatter about people and things with the calm good sense of a Philistine, especially in a society where the bombastic and exaggerated ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the teeth of an explicit presbyterial anathema, and again in the same year—in the month of August—the boys of the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy, which Smith was at the time attending, enacted the piece their master had written. It bore the rather unromantic and uninviting title of "A Royal Council for Advice, or the Regular Education of Boys the Foundation of all other Improvements." The dramatis personae were first the master and twelve ordinary members of the council, who sat ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... sometimes assailed as the advocate of a grovelling philosophy complaining that the chivalrous spirit has almost disappeared from books of education, that the youth of both sexes of the educated classes are growing up unromantic. "Catechisms," he says, "will be found a poor substitute for the old romances, whether of chivalry or faery, which, if they did not give a true picture of actual life, did not give a false one, since they did not profess to give any, but (what was much better) filled the youthful imagination ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... which was for sale, being one day offered to him, he was not a little surprised on discovering them to be the same jewels which he had, not long before, presented to his fair favourite, and which had, by some unromantic means, found their way back into the market. Without enquiring, however, any further into the circumstances, he generously repurchased the casket and presented it to the lady once more, good-humouredly taxing her ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the last scene in the tragic part of my unromantic experience. One of the artful dodgers, having transformed himself into an angel of light (in my hearing, not in my sight), informed me, at about eight o'clock in the evening, that, though my destruction appeared imminent, there was one way of escape left. My own prayers ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... people are knocked down successfully and artistically," admitted the other. "In everyday life they resent it. Yes—if you do anything hysterical there will be some sort of a disgraceful noise, I suppose. It's shoot or suit in these unromantic days, Dysart, otherwise the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Abbey. The day was in harmony with the poetical associations of our excursion: a gentle mist hung like a veil over hills and groves, giving a dreamy aspect to Nature, and rendering the places we intended to visit creations of fancy rather than actual facts. Very unromantic personages, however, answered our inquiries for Annesley, which reassured us of its reality. Byron's "Dream" had rendered the scenery familiar ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... geographical names I have adopted the course advised by the Royal Geographical Society—viz., to give the names their true sound as they are locally pronounced, and I have made no exception even for the grand and poetic "Himahlya" which is in English usually distorted into the unmusical and unromantic word "Himalayas." ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the Vosges will not compare with the hills of the Schwarzwald. The advantage about them from the tourist's point of view is their superior poverty. The Vosges peasant has not the unromantic air of contented prosperity that spoils his vis-a-vis across the Rhine. The villages and farms possess more the charm of decay. Another point wherein the Vosges district excels is its ruins. Many of its numerous castles are perched where you might think only eagles would care ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... Reynardson, of Holywell Park—a visit full of romance, as narrated by Mr. Martin, a beautiful young lady, governess to the General's children, having to all appearances fallen desperately in love with the poet at first sight. The only unromantic incident of the day was the customary dinner at the servants' table. Clare's biographer, with excusable warmth, says that his local patrons, however much they might differ on other subjects, held that the true place of a poet ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... of Kossovo where old Serbian culture was prostrated before the onrush of the Turk, and whence Serbia has drawn all its legends and heroes; possibly the most unromantic looking spot in all Europe, save only Waterloo. Here, far to the left, was Mahmud's tomb:—Mahmud the great victor, stabbed the day before the battle, and dying as he saw his armies victorious. History contains no keener romance. Serge the hero, ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... Henry Selz was the unromantic name of the commonplace man over whose fifteen-year-old letters Rose had glowed and dreamed an hour before. It was a name that had become mythical in that household—to all but one. Rose heard it spoken now with a sense of unreality. She smiled a little uncertainly, ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... refuse to surrender the portcullis and the moat, the bastion and the well-manned towers, which were the features of every castle with which hitherto I have played, in order to take the field with allies so unromantic as a brace of rooks. You may tell me that "rook" is a corruption of this or that word, meaning something which has never laid an egg in its life. It may be so, but in that case you cannot blame me for continuing to call it the castle which its ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... to a wife, which if he doesn't possess now, he may some day. Once I stopped with Mame while she and Irene phoned a "fella" of Irene's from a drug-store telephone booth. Such gigglings and goings on, especially since the "fella" was unknown to Mame at the time. Outside in the store a pompous, unromantic man grew more and more impatient for a turn at that booth. When Mame stepped out he remarked casually that he hoped she felt she'd gotten five cents' worth. The dressing down Mame then and there heaped upon that startled gentleman! Who was he to ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... in life with this name, too, but, passing into the possession of an unromantic Yankee at Albany, had been re-christened Eli—a name which he loathed yet perforce retained when Mr. Stewart bought him. He was a drunken, larcenous old rascal, but as sweet-tempered as the day is long, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... Leader, with a winning smile, "I suppose Lady Kicklebury is not a judge of beer—and what an unromantic subject of conversation here, under the castled crag ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and how he had come so opportunely to her relief. Their dramatic meeting invested him in her eyes with more interest than she would have found in any man whose acquaintance she had made in a more unromantic and conventional manner. And so she bestowed more attention on him and studied his appearance more closely than she would otherwise have done. He struck her at once as being exceedingly good looking ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... vessels in, was so much reduced that the ventures hardly paid. And when at last Fort Fisher was taken, and thus all blockade-running entirely put an end to, the enterprise had lost much of its charm; for, unromantic as it may seem, much of that charm ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... Barbican," cried the Frenchman, "as we should like to appear before the Selenites in full skins, please land us in the snug though unromantic North. We shall have time enough to break our ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... down over his eyes the brim of a rusty plug hat, he thrust fat hands into the pockets of his shabby trousers and lounged against the polished pillar even more energetically than before: if that were possible. An unromantic, apathetic figure, fitting so naturally into his surroundings as to demand no second look even from the most observant; yet one seeming to possess a magnetic attraction for the eyes of the hall-boy of the apartment hotel ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... Brussels. You are welcome to any illusions you may have left on these subjects: I have none. If we three are to remain friends, I must be treated as a woman of business, permanently single [to Frank] and permanently unromantic ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Nathan told the story of the duel, a new song of thanksgiving arose for Henry's safety. The joy she felt in his preservation would not be entirely confined to her heart, and Uncle Nathan—unromantic bachelor as he was—could not but discern the deep interest ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... money-loving nature, unromantic to a degree; but I believe he would gladly have waked to find himself a houseless, landless beggar, if he could thus have regained what Charley, with his soft voice, and eyes, and manner, had stolen from ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... and of the family may seem unromantic, prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it the Romans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections of the human heart. The letters of Cicero himself show how ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... wish you wouldn't say this time, Delia. It sounds so unromantic. If you'd only put it into French—cette fois—it sounds so much better. Cette fois. (Parentally.) When one's daughter has just returned from an expensive schooling in Paris, one ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... she is a liar and a bully in grain; she has no truth or magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we know that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old impotence of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine the main motives of human life from the inside. We are convinced successfully that Anne wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a more romantic ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... have said, "Lord, I'd like to. I wish I could. I've always wanted to do something magnificent. It has occurred to me again and again as I have read the record of thy dealings with thy saints that the Christian life is not to be a dull and drab and unromantic thing. I have felt a thousand times that the faith of the saints ought to have far more of buoyancy and enthusiasm and daring and romantic adventure in it than it has. So since you have bid me come, Lord, I'd like to come. I'll think ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... rolls, an omelette, and a savory little bird, with excellent and unromantic appetite. Then the service was cleared away, and the real business of the day began. She was under the hands of her maid, deep in the ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... plank and presents us as souvenirs. "Pieces of a coffin of one of the Acadians, exhumed at Grand Pr fourteen months ago, near the site of the old church," we are told; and when he continues: "A woman's bone was found in it", one unromantic and matter-of-fact member of the Octave asserts, "Evangeline's grandmother, of course"; while another skeptically remarks, "That's more than I can swallow; it would give me such a spell o' coughin' as I couldn't get over"; but the conductor and others staunchly avouch the ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... glimpsing at him over the hedge; no black-eyed houri peeping over the balustrades of the caravanserai, (called by vulgar men the Bricklayers' Arms)—no Saices to help John Hostler to change horses; but dulness, uniformity, and most tiresome and unromantic safety. England, we are sorry to confess it, is not the land of stirring adventures or hair-breadth 'scapes—a railway coach occasionally blows up; a blind leader occasionally bolts into a ditch; a wheel comes occasionally into dangerous collision with one of Pickford's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... he stows away an appallingly large one. And then he stretches himself in his bunk and is happy. Only, when morning comes again, he awakes stiff and sore. But, no matter for that, inexorable duty claims him for the same toil. And so wags our daily life—hard, unremitting, unromantic labour, day after day, year after year. Still we say it is a glorious life, and we believe what we say. Anyhow, it is better than being chained to a desk, or growing purblind "poring over ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... air of the hills, when she happened to cast her eyes to the far-off meadows beneath. Her head grew suddenly giddy, and she could not divest herself of the idea, that one false step would send her to the plains below. Here was a most ridiculous and unromantic position: she neither dared to advance nor retreat; and she stood grasping a ledge of the rocky wall in an agony of cowardice and irresolution. At this critical moment, the mother of the run-away child returned panting from the higher ledge of the mountain, and, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... of our still too adolescent world, Mr. Britling and Mrs. Harrowdean proceeded to negotiate these extremely unromantic matters in the phrases of that simple, honest and youthful passionateness which is still the only language available, and at times Mr. Britling came very near persuading himself that he had something of the passionate love for her that he had once had for his ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the act of applying still more powder to the tip of her nose and regarding the Little Captain with a horrified expression, "why drag the mention of such unromantic ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... said he, looking gravely in my face. "This will never do. When I bring the wild-cat back, I mean to carry you off. It will do you good to stay a while with my good, methodical, unromantic wife. I can take you round to visit my patients with me. I have a new buggy, larger than the one in which we had such ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... came a more heroic hour. It was hard, so hard to do, but the pressure rendered concealment quite impossible, for the note I had endorsed was handed in for suit. So I told her one twilight hour that our already limited income must be shared with an unromantic creditor. There was a little tightening of the lips, then of the arms, then of those mutual heart cords ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... misfortunes, as we do with the "White Devil." She is neither quite a virtuous woman (for in that case she would not have resorted to so much concealment) nor a frank professor of "All for Love." Antonio, her so-called husband, is an unromantic and even questionable figure. Many of the minor characters, as already hinted, would be much better away. Of the two brothers the Cardinal is a cold-blooded and uninteresting debauchee and murderer, who sacrifices sisters and mistresses without any reasonable excuse. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... the grand point. Your character is now in my hands, and I shall take care of it; I shall see you a general officer yet, if you have not the greater luck to retire and live an honest farmer, sitting under your own fig-tree and your own vine, with an unromantic spouse, and some half-dozen of red-cheeked children. Farewell, we shall soon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Out of the unromantic night, out of the somber blurring January fog, came a voice lifted in song, a soprano, rich, full and round, young, yet matured, sweet and mysterious as a night-bird's, haunting and elusive as the murmur of the sea in a ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... his character, the passionate ABANDON of his language; his face, his hair, his glances, the charm of his smile; how was it that so many of his indications had escaped him? And this want of penetration which resulted from the rather unromantic character of his mind, he attributed to bluntness of sensibility and charged himself with it as a crime. He was profoundly absorbed in his reverie when the cry of a raven aroused him. He opened his eyes, and when he had lost sight of the croaking bird, which crossed the glade in ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... mass of houses swarming over the city's hills and valleys, with sudden palms in high gardens and a tree here and there, produced the impression that all were white with red roofs, and looked not unlike Genoa. But it seemed quite unromantic and uninspiring to a girl who had just paid her first brief visit to the old world, an interval, moreover, that had been without a responsibility, cut her off so completely from her general life that when variously addressed "Mademoiselle," "Signorina," "Senorita," ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... Unromantic enough, but beyond all conception wonderful. I stood at the east end of Bourke Street, not a year ago, looking at the black swarming masses, which thronged the broad thoroughfare below. All the town lay at my feet, and the sun was going down beyond the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... matter was so entirely unromantic, that I scarcely wondered at Mistress Stickles for having run away from him to an adventurous moss-trooper. For nine women out of ten must have some kind of romance or other, to make their lives endurable; and when their love has lost this attractive ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... were Spain and England. The ambition of Spain was measureless; she desired not only the mastery of America and its riches, but the empire of the world, the leadership in commerce, and the ownership of the very gates of Heaven. England sought land and trade; she was practical and unromantic, but strong and daring; and in her people, unlike the Spanish, were implanted the seeds of human freedom. She had not as yet the prestige of Spain; but men like Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh went far to win it; moreover, the star of Spain had already begun to wane, while that of England ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... quite rid herself of the notion that she was in a dream that outraged the proprieties. The entire affair, for an unromantic spot like Bursley, was too ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... with a beautiful lady imprisoned in the upper rooms of the castle. In the rare old days I could go up and knock the jailers' heads together, break in the door, and bear the captive damsel away on my charger. But in this unromantic age I can't even send in ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... lawyer of some distinction and a Protestant—but he was not a man to set the Thames on fire; he was not the man to control the fierce and fiery young politicians that had begun to flock to the standard of the National cause. With unromantic dutifulness to his place and his party, he annually brought his motion for Home Rule before the notice of the House, and was supported by some fifty or sixty members and a few sympathetic Radicals, but the Conservative government and its solid majority ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto. It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... point was brought up recently in conversation with an artist, who in referring to one of the most successful costume balls ever given in New York—the crinoline ball at the old Astor House—spoke of how our unromantic Wall Street men fell to the spell of stocks, ruffled shirts and knickerbockers, and as the evening advanced, were quite themselves in the minuette and polka, bowing low in solemn rigidity, leading their lady with high arched arm, grasping her pinched-in waist, and swinging her ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... communicate telepathically with the object of his desires. But she seemed unattuned, and coyly refrained from showing her face. He undertook to loiter gracefully, knowing himself to be the target of many eyes, but found it extremely hard to refrain from sitting on the curb, a manifestly unromantic attitude for a love-lorn swain. He swore grimly that, if usage required a suitor to make an exhibition of himself before the entire neighborhood, he would do the job thoroughly. It did not cheer him to reflect ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... the Grand' Rue, where the lattice had been lighted up and the mysterious vision had received a revelation in gazing upon H.C. To-day behind the lattice there was comparative darkness, and the vision had descended to a lower region, and the unromantic occupation of opening a roll of calico and displaying its advantages to a market woman who was evidently bent upon driving a bargain. The vision caught sight of H.C., and for the moment calico and everything else was forgotten; the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... came the consideration of a basketful of things Mr. Linden had brought her. Very simple things they were, and unromantic enough to be useful; yet with sentiment enough about them,—if that name might be given to the tokens of a care that busied itself about all the ins and outs of her daily life, and sought out and remembered the various little things that she wanted ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... will not testify to anything so unromantic; besides, it might be inconvenient for Mrs. Bondy's cook." She put on her hat, and stepped along the stones towards the entrance ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... and rice and beans!" protested Helen in simulated disgust. "They are so unromantic! It will sound so poor if ever I tell the ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... though Litton was too much of a gentle heart to hate anybody, if he could have hated anybody it would have been Teed. A girl was concerned in one of their earliest encounters, though Litton's share in it was as unromantic ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have chosen to employ it, the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers |
