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More "Homely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... solid lady with a fine white bosom and strong white arms. Her face was homely and kind; I saw at once that she adored her husband; her placid smile carried beneath its placidity a tremulous anxiety that he should be pleased, and her mild eyes swam in the light of his encouragement. I was sure, however, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... decree? Some linger in the drear poor-house—some are beyond the sea; One died behind the cold ditch—back beneath the open sky, And every star in heaven was a witness from on high. None dared to ope a friendly door, or lift a neighbor's latch, Or shelter by a warm hearthstone beneath the homely thatch. ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... Johnson," every one called him— had made many friends while a member of the House, and was one of the most popular Senators. He was a man of generous feeling, honorable impulses, and a cheerful humor, which had endeared him to the homely backwoodsmen of his State. He was a fine speaker, pouring forth fact and argument with an earnestness that riveted attention, and lighting up the dull path of logic with the glow of his captivating fancy, while he spiced his remarks with the idiosyncrasies ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... are both very much grown and very much improved," replied Edward, "but I must confess to you that I think it is high time that they were, if possible, removed from their present homely occupations, and instructed as young ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... red-hot now, and Rouletta Kirby's tent was warm. She seated herself before a homely little dresser fashioned from two candle-boxes, and began to arrange her hair. Curiously she examined the comb and brush. They were, or had been, 'Poleon's; so was the pocket-mirror hanging by a safety-pin to the canvas wall above. Rouletta ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... in the sitting-room, and he betook himself thither, picturing the homely scene of Sylvia knitting socks for her husband or ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... has to be something very like a western exposure in him too, a touch of the homely seer, a habit of having reflections and afterglows, a sense of principles, and of the philosophy of men ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and for the hard mockery in his puffy eyes. The company seemed fairly homogeneous in its raffishness, though here and there appeared a thin, aristocratic face, with grey moustache and pointed beard, and the homely anxious visage of a small tradesman. But in bulk it looked an ugly, seedy crowd, with unwashed bodies and unclean souls. I noticed an Italian or two, and a villainous Englishman with a face like that of a dilapidated horse. A glance at the ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... various degrees to oppression. Cunning, intrigue, the oily tongue, have, through extended and powerful conspiracies, brought the resources of society under the control of the few, who stood aloof from his homely toil. Hence his dependence upon them. Hence the multiplied injuries which have fallen so heavily upon him. Hence the reduction of his wages from one degree to another, till at length, in the case of millions, fraud and violence strip him of his ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... general and in detail would come after that. He could not afford by imprudent forwardness of speech or premature declaration of measures to increase the embarrassment which already surrounded him. "Let us do one thing at a time and the big things first" was his homely but expressive way of indicating the wisdom ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of a simple but dignified and devotional expression, that might have befitted an angel of charity. A priest and a lady were dispensing loaves and warm garments to the throng around; but each gift was accompanied by a gentle word from the lady, framed with difficulty to their homely English tongue, but listened to even by uncomprehending ears like a strain ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ligno non fit Mercurius.' This Roman proverb, Courteous Reader! is adequately rendered by a homely one of our own—"You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Certainly it is difficult to do so; and none can speak to that more feelingly than myself; but not impossible, as I would hope ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... such a day as only a Scots April can show. The cobbled streets of Kirkmichael still shone with the night's rain, but the storm clouds had fled before a mild south wind, and the whole circumference of the sky was a delicate translucent blue. Homely breakfast smells came from the houses and delighted Mr. McCunn's nostrils; a squalling child was a pleasant reminder of an awakening world, the urban counterpart to the morning song of birds; even the sanitary cart seemed a picturesque ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... remarkable for a fullness, a perfection of outline, combined with a fairness and delicacy which suggested that she was not made of ordinary clay. Miss Wildmere prided herself upon giving the impression that she was remote from all that was common or homely in life. She cultivated the characteristic of daintiness. In her dress, gloves, jewelry, and complexion she would be immaculate at any cost. Graydon's fastidious taste could never find a flaw in her, as regarded externals, and she knew the immense advantage ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... to have been made and carry her off for a day up the river, where a quiet little lunch, in the tranquil shade of overhanging trees, and the cosy, intimate talk that was its invariable concomitant, seemed like an oasis of familiar, homely pleasantness in the midst of the gay ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... agriculture, textile industry, seem, all of them, to have had their origin in one or other of these two countries. The beginnings may have been often humble enough. We may laugh at the rude picture-writing, the uncouth brick pyramid, the coarse fabric, the homely and ill-shapen instruments, as they present themselves to our notice in the remains of these ancient nations; but they are really worthier of our admiration than of our ridicule. The first inventors of any art are among the greatest benefactors ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... the stiff foliage that sometimes covers it from the extremities of the branches down almost to the roots, it cannot fail to attract observation. Trees of this species, for the most part too rough and homely to please the eye, are not generally valued as objects in the landscape; but there is a variety in their shape that makes amends for their want of comeliness, and gives them a marked importance. We do not in general sufficiently appreciate the value of homely objects among ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... owned, had rather a mean opinion of her husband's friend, Captain Dobbin. He was very plain and homely-looking, and exceedingly awkward and ungainly. Not knowing him intimately as yet, she made light of honest William; and he knew her opinions of him quite well, and acquiesced in them very humbly. A time came when she knew him ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... fine place, they say; but, doctor, I am not worthy on't. I am contented with this homely world; 'tis good enough for such a poor, rascally Mussulman, as I am; besides, I have learnt so much good manners, doctor, as to let my ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... might be in their reserve and half-confessions, here was one who had never deceived him or knowingly misled him to believe her better, or otherwise, than she was. Honesty and truth were stamped upon her face by a life-long practice of these homely virtues—not by meretricious arts. It was tardy justice, but he rendered it without ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... along happily enough. The factory had a homely feel. No one was rushed or driven. Paul always enjoyed it when the work got faster, towards post-time, and all the men united in labour. He liked to watch his fellow-clerks at work. The man was ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... a homely person, with no desire either to speak, or to be spoken to. She went out but seldom, and on those rare occasions did not in any way interfere with her daughter. Mr. Boncassen filled a prouder situation. Everybody knew that Miss Boncassen was in England ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... had gathered. It lighted, too, the beautiful old face of the grandmother as she sat in her white cap and kerchief, with folded hands, making, to the minister's pleased eye, a fair picture of the homely scene. ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... no further propitiatory efforts, but sat and stared in simple blankness at the country, which seemed to increase in loveliness at each new point of view. Sometimes she saw sweet wooded, rolling lands made lovelier by the homely farmhouses and cottages enclosed and sheltered by thick hedges and trees; once or twice they drove past a park enfolding a great house guarded by its huge sentinel oaks and beeches; once the carriage ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... an ugly wooden bed covered with a bright patchwork quilt, a pine bureau and two cheap chairs. The walls were utterly bare and the floor, but for a woven rug near the bed, of the sort so common in New England. And yet there was an air of homely occupation in the plain chamber, a bright, patched cushion in one chair, a basket full of household mending and such matters, on a small table, a pair of spectacles and a worn Bible beside it. The room had that unmistakable air of recent occupation, that subtle ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... type the poet-soul sublime That leads the vanward of his timid time, And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme— Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow By double increment, above, below; Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee, Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry, That moves in gentle curves of courtesy; Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense, By every godlike sense Transmuted from the four wild elements. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... a reception in her room on the morning when I was introduced there, and the sight of the house brought vividly to my mind how the four (five) deceased young people lay, side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers; reminding me by a homely association, which I suspect their complexion to have assisted, of pigs' feet as they are usually displayed at a neat tripe-shop. Hot candle was handed round on the occasion, and I further remembered as I stood contemplating the greengrocer's, that a subscription was entered into among the company, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... with walls of rubble let into oak frames, and duly whitewashed every summer, a thatched roof, small panes of glass, an old doorway raised from the ground by two steps. There was about this little dwelling all the homely rustic elegance which peasant life admits of; a honeysuckle was trained over the door; a few flower-pots were placed on the window-sills; the small plot of ground in front of the house was kept with great neatness, and even taste; ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it "homely"; the Corps Commander remarked that its style was "not cramped, anyhow—what?" and the Army ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... in hand, wholesomely honest in his homely ruggedness, a flush of embarrassment tinging his face. The sun in his short hair seemed laughing, picking out little flecks of gold as mica flakes in the sea waves ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... of "the industrious classes," but added, with a seeming loftiness of condescension, that the Address should be replied to with as much attention as if it had proceeded from either of the branches of the Legislature—"although," said his Excellency, "I shall express myself in plainer and more homely language." This was bad enough, but its effect was intensified by the demeanour of the Lieutenant-Governor and several military officers who were in attendance upon him. It seemed to the deputation that those gentlemen regarded them with supercilious ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... willingly have stayed longer, but Perez, who had slipped away, came back with his satchel on his back and said it was time to start. * So the King said goodbye very politely, and Mrs. Mouse gave him a kiss on each cheek in her homely way. * Adelaide put out a paw in a lackadaisical fashion, and Elvira shook hands like a pump handle, while Miss Stilton made him a beautiful cheese of a curtsey, and then stared at him through her eyeglass until he was out of sight. ...
— Perez the Mouse • Luis Coloma
... "I judge you are ready for late supper or early breakfast, whichever you may prefer to call it. The provisions are homely, and I am an indifferent cook, but I can at least give you enough to eat. Those brigands of yours have stored sufficient food ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... which constitutes the essence of all poetry "; "a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order," as he has elsewhere defined it. And, in one of his spoken counsels, he says: "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose— words in their best order; poetry—the best words in ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... shy," is a homely saying, but singularly true. A man who has been swindled will be very cautious the second time, and the third. The fourth time he may be swindled again more ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... bankruptcy came upon him, a homely human angel intruded upon him with an offer of $1,500 for the Tennessee Land. Mrs. Hawkins said take it. It was a grievous temptation, but the judge withstood it. He said the land was for the children—he could ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... sunlight struck the carpet. In the middle of the room sat Mrs. Quincy, and before her on a kitchen chair stood a little tub of foamy soap-suds. A maid was stationed at hand with a bar of soap and a bottle of ammonia, and the steam of homely cleanliness filled ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... reduces the sad relicks to owe their very existence to the ostentatious bounty of their oppressors. If it is true in common life, it is still more true in governments, that we should be just before we are generous; but our legislators seem to have forgotten or despised this homely maxim. They have unjustly left unprotected that most important part of property, not less real because it has no material existence, that which ought to enable the labourer to provide food for himself and his family. I appeal to innumerable statutes, whose constant and professed object ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... permeates the business world and stiffens the economic backbone of the nation. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole German people, barring the inevitable though small percentage of weaklings, is trying with terrific earnestness to live up to the homely Hindenburgian motto, "Durchhalten!" ("Hold out,") or, in more idiomatic American, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Yet homely as were her attire and surroundings, it seemed as inappropriate for any one to call the stately Susannah Grandiere "Sukey," as it is for some writers to refer to England's ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... world he has recorded with a fresh, unfailing touch. His horses are not as rhythmic as those of Degas, his landscapes are not as sun-flooded as those of Monet, nor are his Holland bits so charged with homely sentiment as those of Josef Israels. But Liebermann is Liebermann, with a supple, flowing, pregnant line, his condensed style a versatile conception, a cynical, at times, outlook upon the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... in all their lives would moments so full of sweetness and splendor come to them. They were all the sweeter because blended with the homely duties that fell to Antonia's hands. As she went about ordering the breakfast, and giving to the table a festal air, Dare thought of the old Homeric heroes, and the daughters of the kings who ministered to their wants. The bravest of them had done no greater ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... women alone worked. Nowhere was there evidence of a man tilling the fields or performing any of the homely duties ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the White House that draws most strongly at the interest and curiosity of the homely, common throng ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... Renaissance style, which is most familiar to us in the architecture of Bath; it has an outlandish look, with its classical lines seen against the background of the smooth river and green Devonshire country, and has not the homely charm of Elizabethan or ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... that Uncle Solomon's homely story of the goat would be a splendid illustration of some of our modern politicians. It is difficult to tell which side of the question ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... on the pageantry of the marriage day itself, but I do not find that they have authority for the splendor of their descriptions. I cannot find a word in the older Chronicles about the jewels or dress of the brides, and I believe the ceremony to have been more quiet and homely than is usually supposed. The only sentence which gives color to the usual accounts of it is one of Sansovino's, in which he says that the magnificent dress of the brides in his day was founded "on ancient custom."[32] However this may have been, the circumstances of the rite were otherwise very ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... have separate bedrooms. Ordinary people accept the homely phases of coexistence as inevitable and therefore unimportant. They grow to enjoy the intimacy: they give and take informality as one of the comforts of a home. They see frowsy hair and unshaven cheeks and yawns as a homely, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... good many English parents, who call themselves Christians, are too apt to say, 'Ask your Sunday-school teacher,' when such questions are put to them. The decay of parental religious teaching is working enormous mischief in Christian households; and the happiest results would follow if Joshua's homely advice were attended to, 'Ye shall let ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... it to cover, and has the full emotional power and suggestion that it has for himself. Two quite simple illustrations may serve. The English-born clergyman in Canada who spoke of a meeting of his congregation as a "homely gathering" did not produce quite the effect he intended; "home-like" is one thing in Canada, "homely" quite another, and the people laughed at the slip—they knew, what he did not, that "homely" meant hard-featured and ugly. My other illustration will take us towards the second canon. I ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... furnishes also the following reminiscences: As George Muller was engaged in free, homely conversation with his friends on a Sunday afternoon within about three weeks of his departure to be with the Lord, he referred to two visits he had made during the previous week to two old and beloved friends. He had fully appreciated that, though they were about ten years younger than himself, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... considerable concession—by placing herself before him in a more favourable light. In her dress, her manner, her bearing there was a certain half-alien delicacy, finesse, aloofness. She would not lay this altogether aside, even at home, even in the informal country; but she would provide a homely medium, suited to Abner's rustic vision, through which her exotic airs and graces ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... parts of the house. In the diplomatic corps there was great splendor of costume, but no man carried himself more stately than did Mr. Lawrence, whose fine, manly figure admirably becomes a court dress. I do not think that I ever saw a collection of ladies so plain and homely as the court ladies of Queen Victoria, who walked behind her in procession. The Duchess of Sutherland has been renowned for her majestic beauty; but she is passe, and her friends are, I think, matchless for entire destitution of personal charms. But there was enough present to atone for the ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... forget the dead, otherwise life would be too horrible; and it was possibly only the Larchers' nature to laugh and to talk more loudly than most people. James saw that it was a united, affectionate household, homely and kind, cursed with no particular depth of feeling; and if they had not resigned themselves to the boy's death, they were doing their best to forget that he had ever lived. It was obviously the best thing, and it would be ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... Impossible to see in him any resemblance to his father! Oh! He was a far more brilliant, more advanced, more complicated, more seductive being than his homely father! She wondered where he had come from. And yet ...! If his father had lived, what would have occurred between them? Would the boy have been openly smoking cigars ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... long for sleep; Men that wake and revel;— If an old song leap To your senses' level At such moments, may it be Sometimes, though a moment only, Some forgotten, quaint and homely Vehicle of me! ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... sculptured shields upon the columns of it and Umbrian frescoes in the roof, she spread their board and brought them their onion-soup and their dish of pasta, and while they ate it looked on and muttered her talk and twirled her distaff, day after day, year after year, the same. Life is homely and frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of life in these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... with a cold, reserved look, by a lady into whose hands I had passed, that struck me as singular, as shown to the owner of such an article. It was not long, however, before I discovered, to use a homely phrase, that something had happened; and I was not altogether without curiosity to know what that something was. It was apparent enough, that Eudosia was the subject of general observation, and of general conversation, ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... thus:—Sir James taking only with him two of his servants, went to Thomas Dickson, of whom he was received with tears, after he had revealed himself to him, for the good old man knew him not at first, being in mean and homely apparel. There he kept him secretly in a quiet chamber, and brought unto him such as had been trusty servants to his father, not all at, once, but apart by one and one, for fear of discoverie. Their advice ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... estranged from you Southerners. We are becoming a world power and should have a thoroughly united country. Why don't you Southern people begin a campaign of education and let the North know your real mind, so that we won't tread on your corns so often, to use a homely phrase." ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... for October, and the veranda of the hotel was crowded with loungers, homely men in jeans, slouched hats, and coarse brogans. Some of them sat on the benches, supported by the square columns, at the end of the veranda; a few had tilted their chairs against the wall, and others stood in groups ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... Gellius, Noctes Atticae, ii. 2.) The Lessons of the philosopher Taurus were justified by the old and memorable example of Fabius; and we may contemplate the same story in the style of Livy (xxiv. 44) and the homely idiom of Claudius Quadri garius ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... is very accomplished, and has made this house a happy home to us all, ever since we can remember. She is not elegant, but genuinely good, and so beloved and respected that there will be universal mourning for her when her place is empty. No one can fill it, for the solid, homely virtues of the dear soul have gone out of fashion, as I say, and nothing new can be half so ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... at the same time for drill in language and for recitation, whereby on the one hand the memory was developed and the imagination strengthened, and on the other the heroic forms of antiquity and healthy primitive utterances regarding morality, and full of homely common sense, were deeply engraved on the young mind. Homer was regarded not merely as a poet, but as an inspired moral teacher, and great portions of his poems were learned by heart. The Iliad and the Odyssey were in truth the Bible of the Greeks." (Laurie, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... the rooms in the college is singularly furnished. "Girard had directed that a suitable room was to be set apart for the preservation of his books and papers; but from excess of pious care, or dread of the next-of kin, all the plain homely man's effects were shovelled into this room. Here are his boxes and his bookcase, his gig and his gaiters, his pictures and his pottery; and in a bookcase, hanging with careless grace, are his braces—old homely knitted braces, telling their tale of ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... huge tea-kettle on the fire, and tea-pot to correspond on the table, and I, as I read my story, and the rest of the company, as they listen, might help ourselves, I think it would be very jolly, and very homely." ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... young patriot and his warmly sympathizing Martha, who now kindly supplied their wants, and then conducted them to their attic chamber, where, it being now nearly dark, they immediately betook themselves to their homely but grateful couch. And, overcome by the fatigues and harrowing anxieties of the day, they soon fell asleep, expecting to be roused in the morning by the din of the battle, which they felt confident was ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... That homely adage, "What is one man's meat is another man's poison," comes to mind when we consider with what different eyes different naturalists look upon the hypothesis of the derivative origin of actual specific forms, since ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... silver is a mighty poor radiator. Homely example: Try waiting for your coffee to cool if it's in a polished silver pot. Then try it in a tungsten-beryllium pot. No matter how you polish that tungsten-beryllium, the stuff WILL radiate heat. ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... stars, veined marble, stained glass, and flying stair-rails he saw his legs trail helplessly after, close in above, fling violently across him feet foremost, and dash out of view. In other words, having reached the bottom of the grand staircase he had turned a complete and homely somersault. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... scorn! Where friendship and esteem that ought to be The tenants of men's hearts, lodge in their looks And tongues alone. Where little virtue, with A costly keeper, passes for a heap; A heap for none that has a homely one! Where fashion makes the law—your umpire which You bow to, whether it has brains or not! Where Folly taketh off his cap and bells, To clap on Wisdom, which must bear the jest! Where to pass current you must seem the thing, The passive thing, that others think; and not ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... the contrary, do we seem to wish for no song from the tropical bird of magnificent plumage, and express no surprise that none comes from it. I may put this more plainly as I proceed, and in more homely words. What I want to lay before you now, and must insist upon, is, that you seek for tone, tone before all. Tone you must get at all cost; and to get it, you must have as choice wood as ever can be procured, ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... his homely features, and humble garb, the intrepidity of soul came out in all its lustre! Heroism, in its native majesty, commanded ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... impression that he was on the verge of prostration, although, making an effort, Blakely had appeared at breakfast after an early morning walk, had been most courteous, gentle, and attentive to her and to her wholesome, if not actually homely, Kate. How the mother's heart yearned over that sweet-natured, sallow-faced child! But after breakfast Blakely had wandered off again and was out on the mesa, peering through a pair of borrowed glasses over the dreary eastward ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... as queer as you!" she retorted with homely force. "And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... of no service to the common people: but to tell them that they may die in a fit of drunkenness, and shew them how dreadful that would be, cannot fail to make a deep impression. Sir, when your Scotch clergy give up their homely manner, religion will soon decay in that country.' Let this observation, as Johnson meant it, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... the introduction of man), as that one form should be transmuted into another upon fitting occasion, as, for instance, in the succession of species which differ from each other only in some details. To compare small things with great in a homely illustration: man alters from time to time his instruments or machines, as new circumstances or conditions may require and his wit suggest. Minor alterations and improvements he adds to the machine ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... bad as all that, we just got to keep still about it. I wouldn't allow you to throw mud at her if she's been carryin' on with only one man, but if there's fifty or—But, gosh a' mighty, Harry, it ain't possible. A woman as homely as Minnie—why, dog-gone it, a woman as homely as she is simply couldn't be bad no matter how much she wanted to. It ain't human ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... to perswade, my louing Protheus; Home-keeping youth, haue euer homely wits, Wer't not affection chaines thy tender dayes To the sweet glaunces of thy honour'd Loue, I rather would entreat thy company, To see the wonders of the world abroad, Then (liuing dully sluggardiz'd ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... single volume in 1879, and on the 7th of October 1886 Barnes died at Winterborne Came. His poetry is essentially English in character; no other writer has given quite so simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour of rural England. His work is full of humour and the clean, manly joy of life; and its rusticity is singularly allied to a literary sense and to high technical finish. He is indeed the Victorian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... of severe mental strain Mr. Excell sat beside Lawyer Brown, motionless as a statue, save when now and again he leaned forward to whisper a suggestion. He did not look at his son, and Harold seldom looked at him. Jack Burns sat as near the prisoner as the sheriff would permit, and his homely, good face, and the face of the judge were to Harold the only spots of light in the otherwise dark room. Outside the voices of children could be heard and the sound of the rising wind in the rustling trees. Once a breeze sent ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... times themselves are giving, at once cheerfully and sadly, in strange destructions and strange births, a better answer than I can give. I have set forth, as far as in me lay, the data of my problem: and surely, if the premises be given, wise men will not have to look far for the conclusion. In homely English I have given my readers Yeast; if they be what I take them for, they will be able to bake with ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... and the riot of Zaton's seemed far away. The triumphs of the fencing-room—even they grew cheap and tawdry. I thought of existence as one outside it, I balanced this against that, and wondered whether, after all, the red soutane were so much better than the homely jerkin, or the fame of a ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... these hard, cold things and take hold of and seize them, we know that we have, to use a homely simile, eaten our cake. The supply of pearls is continuous, and under the control of the cruel ingenuity of man they grow to an ordinary size in less ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the 30th of May, 1783: "Our son is at the Hague, pursuing his studies with great ardor. They give him a good character wherever he has been, and I hope he will make a good man." On the 9th of June he wrote in these homely, but manly words: "I am weary, worn, and disgusted to death. I had rather chop wood, dig ditches, and make fence upon my poor little farm. Alas, poor farm! and poorer family! what have you lost that your country might be free! and that others might catch fish ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... saint—a cross or so— A hammock swinging to and fro— A gittern by the window laid Whereon the morning breezes play'd, And its low tones and broken parts Seem'd like some thoughtless minstrel's arts— A rugged table in the floor— Ran thro' this homely comedor. Here, weary as you well may think, An hour or so we made abode, To give our mules both food and drink, Before we took again the road; And honestly, our own repast Was that of monks from lenten fast. ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... is a breach of etiquette, when offering a gift, to represent it as valueless, or useless to yourself. "If you do not have it, the pigs will," is a homely old proverb in such cases, not ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... Bartholomaeus Anglicus, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth century, was a mutationist in his way, as Aristotle, "the Philosopher" of the Christian Schoolmen, had been in his. So late as the seventeenth century, as we learn not only from early proceedings of the Royal Society, but from a writer so homely and so regularly pious as Walton, the variation of species and "spontaneous" generations had no theological bearing, except as instances of that various wonder of the world which in devout minds is ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Maclaurin, with a face of flippant assurance, 'Are these words your own?' BOSWELL. Sir Walter Scott shows where the humour of this motto chiefly lay. 'The counsel opposite,' he writes, 'was the celebrated Wight, an excellent lawyer, but of very homely appearance, with heavy features, a blind eye which projected from its socket, a swag belly, and a limp. To him Maclaurin applied the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... tut, tut, tut!" And as the young subaltern gave utterance to these homely sounds, he was recalling certain sarcastic remarks of the stern master of drill respecting officers and gentlemen demeaning themselves by associating ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... from the most scientific test of the uniformity of these fibers, I shall next refer to one more homely. It is simply this: The common garden spider, except when very young, cannot climb up one of the same size as the web on which she displays such activity. She is perfectly helpless, and slips down with a run. After vainly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... maid brought in a tray shining with silver and porcelain, set it down on the table in front of Mrs. Draper, and then wheeled in a little circular table with shelves, a glorified edition in gleaming mahogany of the homely, white-painted wheeled-tray of Sylvia's home. On the shelves was a large assortment of delicate, small cakes and paper-thin sandwiches. While she poured out the amber-colored tea into the translucent cups, Mrs. Draper kept up with the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... listened. There was something doing. It was a Welsh rhapsodie that he was playing. It was all there—the mountains and the rivers, and the towering cliffs with glimpses of the sea where waves foam on the rocks, and sea-fowl wheel and scream in the wind, and then a bit of homely melody as the country folk drive home in the moonlight, singing as only the Welsh can sing, the songs of the heart; songs of love and home, songs of death and sorrowing, that stab with sudden sweetness. A child cries somewhere in the dark, cries for his mother who ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... offer so pleasant and worthy a work, devised by the author, it being now barbarously and simply framed in our English tongue. And after long deliberation had, your honourable lordship came to my remembrance, a man much more worthy, than to whom so homely and rude a translation should be presented. But when I again remembred the jesting and sportfull matter of the booke, unfit to be offered to any man of gravity and wisdome, I was wholly determined to make no Epistle Dedicatory at all; till as now of ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... window-panes for darkened homes before she even tapped on the window of a darkened mind; but when she did, no plants ever turned more eagerly toward the light than did the youthful souls of those Kentucky hills. She started with five pupils in a log cabin. She built a homely frame house with five rooms, only to find more candidates clamoring at her door. She taught the girls to cook, sew, wash and iron, clean house, and make baskets, and the boys to use tools, to farm, make garden, and take care of animals; and she ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... determined to superintend the education of Coningsby. It was a relation which identified him with the noble house of his pupil, or, properly speaking, his charge: for Mr. Rigby affected rather the graceful dignity of the governor than the duties of a tutor. The boy was recalled from his homely, rural school, where he had been well grounded by a hard-working curate, and affectionately tended by the curate's unsophisticated wife. He was sent to a fashionable school preparatory to Eton, where he found about two hundred youths of noble families and connections, lodged in a magnificent villa, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... not to be pricked out of his form even by so shrewd a pricker; and like unto one who heareth not, he continued to look most graciously on the homely vessel that stood ready to ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... ceremony, to their respective seats in a spacious hall. The royal table and couch, covered with carpets and fine linen, was raised by several steps in the midst of the hall; and a son, an uncle, or perhaps a favorite king, were admitted to share the simple and homely repast of Attila. Two lines of small tables, each of which contained three or four guests, were ranged in order on either hand; the right was esteemed the most honorable, but the Romans ingenuously confess, that they were placed on ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... fragrant matting; a table neither too low to be pretty nor too high to be useful; a couple of armchairs, hospitably embracing; a pair of silver candlesticks, quaint and homely; a goodly company of pleasant books; a piano, just escaping from its travelling-cage, with all its pent-up music in its bosom; a cosey little cot clinging to its ampler mother; a stream of generous sunlight ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... that it's worth explaining. We have rather luxurious quarters at the hotel, but this room is somehow different. It's restful—I think it's homely—in fact, as I said, ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... dooce——" demanded Bones indignantly, and looked over the side.... He saw the pitiful thing that rolled slowly in the swift current, and the homely face of ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... glance travelled along the ridge to his right, he saw it gradually rising from the marsh in slopes, and scars, and wooded fells, a medley of lovely lines, of pastures and copses, of villages clinging to the hills, each with its church tower and its white spreading farms—a laud of homely charm and comfort, gently bounding the marsh below it, and cut off by the seething clouds in the north-west from the mountains towards which it climbed. And as he turned homewards with the moss country behind him, the hills ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mistress of Od, the patroness of Othere the homely, the sister of Frey-Frode, and daughter of Niord-Fridlaf, appears as Gunwara Eric's love and Syritha Ottar's love and the hair-clogged maiden, as ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... denied the intimacy of his kind because he performed them acceptably. If his aloof and solitary state ever distressed him, at least he gave no outward sign of it, but went his uncomplaining way, bearing himself with a homely, silent dignity, and enveloped in those invisible garments of superstition which local prejudice and local ignorance had ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... and shade, of colour and composition, is to transform them. Schopenhauer lays great stress on the transforming power of art. He instances many typical paintings of the Dutch school, simple interiors, homely scenes, fruit, vegetables, the commonest tools and utensils, even dead flesh—all are taken up into material for pictures, and, in their special ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... you've been so steeped in the fog of the crowd that you are blind to the homely and necessary things of living. I mean I have here meat of both sheep and hog that I raised myself. That is to say, mutton and ham. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... young women blowing trumpets. They were not symbolical, or allegorical; they were homely, pathetic, humorous, human. They were aimed straight ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... hours and lapses and changes of time itself. An almost burdensome fulness of expression haunted the gestures, the very dress, the personal ornaments, of the people on the highway. Even Jacques Bonhomme at his labour, or idling for an hour, borrowed from his love, homely as it was, a touch of dignity or grace, and some secret of utterance, which made [57] one think of Italy or Greece. The voice of the shepherd calling, the chatter of the shepherdess turning her spindle, seemed to answer, or wait for answer,—to ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... say the truth, was in a bad way when he first knew Rose: he was restless, reckless, bitter. Turned loose into society with an ample fortune and nothing to do, he was in danger, according to the homely couplet of Dr. Watts, of being provided with employment by that undescribable personage who makes it his business ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,—the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods 'brewing ale' to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Joetun; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... whose light was what he had discerned at the extremity of the passage. He could distinctly observe the furniture and inmates of the room. Of the former, the only articles were a table—on which were placed the remains of a homely meal—an iron bedstead, and a barrel, turned upside down, which served as a substitute for a chair. The bedstead had no curtains, but in lieu of them, there were hangings around it, which struck Delme as resembling mourning habiliments. Whilst the light operated thus favourably, in enabling Sir ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... spiritual life was no longer a unity to Erasmus. It was, on the one hand, a strong desire for an upright, simple, pure and homely belief, the earnest wish to be a good Christian. But it was also the irresistible intellectual and aesthetic need of the good taste, the harmony, the clear and exact expression of the Ancients, the dislike of what was ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... to cross the borders of English into Spain. In his Noble Numbers Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such men as Valdivielso, Ocana, Lope de Ubeda; and there are versicles of his that in their homely mixture of the sacred and the profane, in their reverent familiarity with things divine, their pious and simple gallantry, may well be likened to the graceful and charming romances and villancicos of these strangers. Their spirit is less Protestant than Catholic, and is hardly ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... together always carried me back to a dead and gone generation. There was a rag carpet on the floor, of the "hit-or-miss" pattern; the chairs were ancient Shaker rockers, some with homely "shuck" bottoms, and each had a tidy of snowy thread or crochet cotton fastened primly over the back. The high bed and bureau and a shining mahogany table suggested an era of "plain living" far, far remote from the day of Turkish rugs and Japanese bric-a-brac, and Aunt Jane was in perfect ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... distinguished from his companions, fell to talking about a leading townsman, and praised him for his ingenio simpatico, his bella intelligenza, with exclamations of approval from those who listened. No, it is not merely the difference between homely Anglo-Saxon and a language of classic origin; there is a radical distinction of thought. These people have an innate respect for things of the mind, which is wholly lacking to a typical Englishman. One need not dwell upon the point that their animation was supported ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... man she loved, whose happiness it would be her joy to make, and who was already one with her in heart and soul. So her fortune went to swell the purse of a wiser sister, who had married a rich nabob; and she, to the wonder and compassionate regret of all who knew her, went to bury herself in the homely village parsonage among the hills of -. And yet, in spite of all this, and in spite of my mother's high spirit and my father's whims, I believe you might search all England through, and fail to ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... awful homely," said Emma Jane. "I'm going to have a white satin with a pink sash, pink stockings, bronze slippers, ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... hundred sermons every year. In London he spoke to the limit of his voice—ten thousand people. Yet when chance sent him but fifty auditors he spoke with just as much feeling. His sermons were full of wit, often homely but never coarse. He knew how to interest tired men; how to keep the children awake. He interspersed anecdote with injunction, and precept with homely happenings. He yearned to better this life, and to evolve souls ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... woman, whose dress was somewhat above her mien and air, which, though not without a certain respectability, were very homely, entered the room; and seeing the young man standing thus thoughtful by the window, paused. She was used to his habits; and since his success in life, had learned to respect them. So she did not disturb his revery, but began softly to arrange the room, dusting, with ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... English in our courts of law. The poems of Chaucer are the literary result— "the bright consummate flower" of the union of two great powers— the brilliance of the French language on the one hand and the homely truth and steadfastness of English on the other. Chaucer was born in 1340, and died in 1400; so that we may say that he and his poems— though not the causes— are the signs and symbols of the great influence that French obtained and held over our mother tongue. But although ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... lighting upon the one unanswerable demand of American political life at the time. In the earlier pages of his "Sketches" he lays down his Theory of Government, which is, in brief, that of the contrat social, but presented in a homely form, which brings it nearer to the actual life of men; he concludes his observation with a definition of the most perfect practicable system of government as "a government where the right of making laws is vested in the greatest number of individuals, and the power of executing them in the ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... Caesarea. His memory of Mathias was as partial; but he knew the president's full face, and while pondering on it he remembered that he had never seen him in profile. Nor was this all that set the two men apart in Joseph's consciousness. The prior's simple and homely language came from the heart, entered the heart and was remembered, whereas Mathias spoke from his brain. The heart is simple and always the same, but the brain is complex and various; and therefore it was natural that Mathias should hold, as if in ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... grinned his understanding and handed over the lead-rope with a bit of homely advice. "You no lak' you git find, dat better you don' talk mooch. You ain' got to sing no mor', neider, or ba Goss! A'm tak' you down an' stick you mout' full of rags, lak' I done down to Chinook dat tam'. Dat hooch she mak' noise 'nough ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... of perhaps 40 minutes, the D.C.L.I. or 479 have observed our arrival and tools are counted out and issued, the homely pick and shovel. The task is pleasantly situated about 150 yards in front of several batteries of our field guns (which open fire directly we are in position) and consists in relaxing duckboards, excavating the submerged sleepers ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... was, as Slim had said, a hammer-headed brute of imposing proportions. But for his eyes no turfman would have looked at him twice. They were large, clear, and unusually intelligent; they redeemed his homely face. Without them he would have been ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... come and dine with us; it is a month since we have seen your homely old phiz." And Sir Joseph replies that he will be on hand the next Sunday evening and offers this mild suggestion, "Scientific gents as has countenances as curdles milk should not cast aspersions on men made ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Ward affords not only a singular instance of the mutability of human affairs, but of the tendency of the Anglo-Saxon race, when transplanted to foreign countries, to emerge to eminence, and surpass others by the homely but rare qualities of common-sense and unfaltering energy. Ward was a Yorkshire groom. The Duke of Lucca, when on a visit to this country, perceiving the lad's merit, took him into his service, and promoted him, through the several degrees ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... love,' sings Coleridge, 'doth work like madness in the brain;' and to edit in numerous volumes the works of a man you cordially dislike and always mistrust has something of the same effect, whilst it is certainly hard measure on the poor fellow edited. His lot—if I may venture upon a homely comparison founded upon a lively reminiscence of childhood—resembles that of an unfortunate infant being dressed by an angry nurse, in whose malicious hands the simplest operations of the toilet, to say nothing of the severer processes of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... spent her time in spinning and weaving, and in thinking of her royal husband. Often she was very sad and lonely, and it happened that one day while she was seated at the window, letting salt tears drop on her work, an old woman, a kind, homely-looking old body, stepped up to the window, and, leaning upon her crutch, addressed the Queen ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... very remarkable, that he retained in his memory very slight and trivial, as well as important things[49]. As an instance of this, it seems that an inferiour domestick of the Duke of Leeds had attempted to celebrate his Grace's marriage in such homely rhimes as he could make; and this curious composition having been sung to Dr. Johnson he got it by heart, and used to repeat it in a very pleasant manner. Two of the stanzas ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... throve. The noble blood in his veins was warm, and he became strong on his homely fare. He grew apace in the humble house, and the Danish dialect spoken by the West Jutes became his language. The pomegranate seed from Spanish soil became a hardy plant on the coast of West Jutland. Such may be a man's fate! To this home he clung with the ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... very hearts and souls, with our wills, with our absolute being. But all external things should be in harmony with the spirit of his revelation. And if God chose that his Son should visit the earth in homely fashion, in homely fashion likewise should be everything that enforces and commemorates that revelation. All church-forms should be on the other side from show and expense. Let the money go to build decent houses for God's poor, not to give them his holy bread and wine out of silver and gold and ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... chintz-covered couch and cowered there with a hidden face. Rand arose and, walking to the window, stared at the veil of rain and the stabbing lightning. The clock ticked, a log upon the hearth parted with a soft sound, from the back of the house came faintly the homely cheer of the servants' voices. How deadly, how solemnly still, how wet and cold, was now a rocky strand upon the river road! He left the window and, coming to the couch, looked down upon the crouching figure of his wife. His brain was not numbed; it was pitilessly awake, and he suffered. ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... parade of glorious colour and the scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden, have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would have given them my vote just then before the sweetest ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... governing a kingdom has not considered her too insignificant to advise him; and I am sensible of it. I am, I assure you, dearest, on my guard against it. That would not attach me to him, as his homely friendliness does. He is the most amiable, cheerful, benignant of men; he has no feeling of an enemy, though naturally his enemies are numerous and venomous. He is full of observation and humour. How he would amuse you! In many respects ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Epaminondas is reported to have said afterwards, of his table, "Treason lurks not under such a dinner," so Lycurgus perceived before him, that such a house admits of no luxury and needless splendour. Indeed, no man could be so absurd as to bring into a dwelling so homely and simple, bedsteads with silver feet, purple coverlets, golden cups, and a train of expense that follows these: but all would necessarily have the bed suitable to the room, the coverlet of the bed and the rest of their utensils and furniture to that. From this plain sort of dwellings, proceeded ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... you, Mr. Caffyn, here in the Doctor's presence, that this has been a great experience for me. I've had a good time, as I believe, sir, they say in your country. But I look around me'—here Farrell looked again and almost theatrically around the feast of Comus—'and I say that, be it never so homely, give me Wimbledon to wind up. You and me, Doctor—or, as I might say, you and I, are for home, after all—and the old cooking. Our ways henceforth may lie separate; but we've a bond in common and any time you care to look me up at Wimbledon I shall be most ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... always a little hyperborean, leaning towards the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit. I think you must come from the north, you are so frank and honest, so sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky and homely like the northern races. Your quality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not akin to you. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the coolness is akin ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... fish for dinner, spattering the bacon fat upon the floor. She smiled alternately at her father and Professor Young; she caroled like a spring bird with bursts of happy song. Then they three sat down to the table to eat the homely ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... their hands. He will own to you that in the struggle for life which goes on day and night in our thoughts as in the outside world of nature, much that he learned under the name of science has died out, and that simple homely experience has largely taken the place of that scholastic knowledge to which he and perhaps some of his instructors ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it to make madmen Merry, and wisemen Sick. There is a Decency, or shall I rather say a Chastity in Writing or Thinking on such exalted Subjects, that great Minds are apt to Cherish, which keeps them Cautious and Diffident, where weak Men are as bold and as rash (to use an homely Phrase) as a blind Mare in a Mire. I have known many silly Preachers, and paperscull'd Writers in my Time, that were troubled with the Divinity Squirt, and were forc'd to print, or to be tormented with the Cholick, or foul ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... fire a group of girls was gathered; for the most part they were just homely, pleasant creatures, but two stood out distinctly from the rest; one, by reason of her beauty, the other, because of her original and perhaps, forbidding, personality. The beautiful one, Blaisette Simon, of Colomberie Farm, was small and plump ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... theoretical niceties of wifely submission, but with his creature comforts. His instructions as to how to make a husband comfortable positively palpitate with life; and at the same time there is something indescribably homely and touching about them; they tell more about the real life of a burgess's wife than a hundred tales of Patient Griselda or of Jehanne la Quentine. Consider this picture (how typical a product of the masculine imagination!) of the stout bread-winner, ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... beams of evening on the winking lids of the ocean; nor can you gather out of his writings such anecdotes as, like garnet in some Highland mountain, sparkle in every page of Brooks and Flavel. Nor was it the simplicity of homely language. It was not the terse and self-commending Saxon, of which Latimer in one age, and Swift in another, and Cobbett in our own, have been the mighty masters, and through it the masters of their English fellows. But it was the simplicity ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... lumber is costly in the Bush. Looking through the open door into the general living-room, which was also lighted, he could see a red twinkle beneath the register of the stove, beside which a woman was sitting sewing. She was a hard-featured, homely person in coarsely fashioned garments, which did not seem to fit her well, and Nasmyth felt slightly disconcerted when he glanced at her, for she was not the woman whom he had expected to see. Then his glance rested on a man, who had also figured in his uncertain memories, and now sat not ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... stands no chance with erratic and rather loose-mannered brilliancy. And yet some kinds of yam in flower diffuse a fragrance more exquisite, I am persuaded, than comes from any vineyard. So that, after all, their homely prose has some flavor of poetry, which, when African poets arise, will doubtless be duly canonized ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... trees, his homely audience stood silent and spellbound. Many of his hearers had seen with their own eyes horrors that compared with the infamous butchery at Schenectady almost a hundred years ago. Doubtless that was what fascinated ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... on earth would you do with Nancy if you didn't marry her off? If she were homely she'd have to fill in chinks in other people's lives, but with her nice little basket of eggs, good looks, money, not too much wit, and a desire to please, she just naturally is put up for sale ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... seen as much of the world as I have, my dear, you would take little stock in the innocence of beautiful women; very homely ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... small talk. Her love of gossip amounted almost to a passion, and nothing came amiss to her; she liked to know everything about everybody, and in the main I think her interest was a kindly one, though she found that a little bit of scandal, every now and then, added a piquant flavour to the homely fare provided by the commonplace life ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... in temperament and experience, it would be impossible to decide which felt the greater uneasiness at the prospect immediately before them. The girl openly rebellious, the man extremely doubtful, with reluctant steps they approached that tall, homely yellow house—outwardly the most pretentious in Glencaid—which stood well up in the valley, where the main road diverged into numerous winding trails leading toward the various mines among ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... I mean is this. Vernacular (from verna, a slave born in his master's house). 1. The homely idiomatic language in opposition to any mixed jargon, or lingua franca, spoken by an imported slave:—2. Hence, generally, the pure mother-tongue as opposed to the same tongue corrupted by false refinement. By vernacular English, therefore, in the primary sense, and I mean, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... making no considerable concession—by placing herself before him in a more favourable light. In her dress, her manner, her bearing there was a certain half-alien delicacy, finesse, aloofness. She would not lay this altogether aside, even at home, even in the informal country; but she would provide a homely medium, suited to Abner's rustic vision, through which her exotic airs and graces might be ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... in the least like the old one. Susy was always bewailing the contrast. She did not like the wallpaper; the carpets were homely; the rooms were, some of them, too large, and the door-yard, ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... obliged to avoid the glare of the sun: no easy thing for him to do, since his road homeward lay over a green high hill, upon which the sun beat scorchingly: wherefore, also, the people have given it the name of the Sun's hill. It was made, in consequence, Maud's duty to take daily her father's homely dinner to the stone quarry—a road which, although toilsome, was by no means disagreeable to her; inasmuch as Albert often found means to get leave of absence, and then always escorted her a part of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Who is acquanted with this man He is very homely and lytle good he can To come in here so boldly, then ...
— The Interlude of Wealth and Health • Anonymous
... stories of the people she knew so well and so lovingly understood. There was no art in the telling, only a sweet naturalness and an apparent honesty—the honesty of purpose that comes to people in lonely places. Her stories were all of the class that magazine editors call "homely, heart-interest stuff," not deep or clever or problematical— the commonplace doings of common people—but it found an entrance into the ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... was so well pleased with my prudent conduct that I can truly say I was a favourite for some days. Madame de Carignan was telling her one day that I was very homely, to which the Queen replied, "He has a very fine set of teeth, and a man cannot be called homely who has this ornament." Madame de Chevreuse remembered that she had often heard the Queen say that the beauty ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... horsewoman drew nearer he fell to wondering what she was like. Could she talk, for instance, of anything but the homely details of her own rough life? He shrugged his shoulders as he fancied her crude attempts at conversation, her uncouth language and raw expressions. The girl turned her horse toward the hotel entrance. As she drew still nearer he saw that ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... Of all the homely virtues there is none more to be commended and desired than patience. This priceless quality of mind puts its possessor into friendly relations with whatever the surrounding conditions may chance to be. There is no irritation, no clash of interests, no lack of organization for performing ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... A certain homely parallel between the tree and himself began to shape itself before his thought: how he, too, had been dug up far away—had, in a sense, voluntarily dug himself up—and been transplanted in the college campus; how, ever since being placed there, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... intelligence found much to admire in the works of the people who had passed on. From the river had been taken out great canals of good gradient, and it was clear that they had been dug by a people of homely thrift and of skill in the tilling of the soil. There still were to be seen piles of earth that marked where at least seven great communal houses had formed nuclei for a numerous people. These were served by 123 ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... airy chimes floated over Warwick, beating out a homely tune to mingle with homely dreams. He sat ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the souls of the dying ever yearn To some favored spot for the dust's return, For the homely ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... good Flemish lady, who endeared herself to the hearts of her English subjects by her wise and kindly rule during Edward's frequent absences abroad and in Scotland. The face, a portrait this time, shows us a homely countenance with full cheeks and rather prominent eyes, {80} but pleasant withal and full of character. The design of the whole was by a Flemish artist, but English stone-masons worked on the details, and a certain John Orchard, the artist of the copper-gilt angels, which formerly adorned the canopy, ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... thought it never swerved." Another policy and other aims than those which her monarchs pursued—tolerance instead of fanaticism, prudence instead of heroism, national patriotism instead of imperial, homely common sense instead of glorious wisdom—all or any of these might have warded off the doom of Portugal and of the house of Avis. Bur these things were not in the blood of Lusitania, nor would this have been the nation of Vasco da Gama and Camoens, of Alboquerque and Cabral. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... understanding, nor remarkably pleasing in manners. But, thank God! even in those years I needed not the embellishments of novel accessories to conciliate my affections: plain human nature, in its humblest and most homely apparel, was enough for me, and I loved the child because she was my partner in wretchedness. If she is now living she is probably a mother, with children of her own; but, as I have said, I ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... church which Margaret devised, "I myself carried out the work," he says. These must have been busy days in Malcolm's primitive palace while the workmen were busy with the great cathedral close by, the mason with his mallet, the homely sculptor with his chisel, carving those interlaced and embossed arches which still stand, worn and gray, but little injured, in the wonderful permanency of stone, in the nave of the old Abbey of Dunfermline: while the Queen's rooms opened into the hall where her ladies sat over ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... our useful toil, Our homely joys and destiny obscure, Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... may to a European reader seem a homely one. But Spenser likens an infuriate woman to a cow "That is berobbed of her youngling dere." Shakspeare also makes King Henry VI compare himself to the calf's mother that "Runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her harmless young one went." "Cows," says De Quincey, "are amongst the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... activity. Here opportunity lies close at hand. It may be swinging a golf club or going fishing. It may be such unorganized methods of stretching muscles and increasing breathing as pushing a lawn mower, raking leaves or weeding the delphinium border. All these sports and homely out-of-door duties and pleasures are nearby, many of them just the other side of the front door. Those classed as sports may require a country club membership but even this is on a more ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... The homely women were all witches, dreadful witches, and they drowned them, on public holidays, ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... wants. The dame, however, drew a bundle of clean straw from a huge heap, and threw it beside the hearth. A coarse and heavy rug, over which was thrown a sheep-skin with the wool innermost, constituted a warm but homely couch. A horn cup filled with cider and a burnt barley-cake were next exhibited, of which the palmer made a healthful, if not a sumptuous repast. Giles growled off to the loft above; and the dame, caring ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... back her heavy hair, and with her face still averted submitted to be helped to her feet by the kindly stewardess. Perhaps something homely sympathetic and nurse-like in the touch of the mulatto gave her assurance and confidence, for her head lapsed quite naturally against the woman's shoulder, and her face was partly hidden as she moved slowly along the deck. Jack accompanied ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Those homely ones seem to make straight for a home the first thing. Ellaphine carried off Eddie Pouch—the very Eddie of whom his mother used to say, "He's little, but oh, my!" The rest of the people said, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... entrusted the lives and properties of the citizens in any Hellenic state. Hence it might be reasonably expected that every man should be the watchman of every other, and in turn be watched by him. The ancients do not seem to have remembered the homely adage that, 'What is every man's business is no man's business,' or always to have thought of applying the principle of a division of labour to the administration of law and to government. Every Athenian was at some time ...
— Laws • Plato
... did our homely adage recur to me, "All work and no play would make Jack a dull boy;" Jonathan is a very dull boy. We are by no means so gay as our lively neighbours on the other side the Channel, but, compared with Americans, we are whirligigs and tetotums; every day is a holyday, and ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... ancient song enditers Soared many a pitch above our modern writers. . . Our numbers may be more refined than those, But what we've gained in verse, we've lost in prose. Their words no shuffling double meaning knew: Their speech was homely, but their hearts were true. . . With rough, majestic force they moved the heart, And strength and nature made ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of the Habitants," says an observer of a much later date than Saint-Simon or Montcalm,[26] "is simple and homely; it consists of a long-skirted cloth or frock, of a dark grey colour, with a hood attached to it, which in winter time or wet weather he puts over his head. His coat is tied round the waist by a worsted sash of various ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... gathered in the sitting-room; they had had their supper—the eight elderly women and the three elderly men, all that were left of the community. The room had the austere and shining cleanness which Athalia had called a perfume, but it was full of homely comfort. A blue-and-white rag carpet in the centre left a border of bare floor, painted pumpkin-yellow; there was a glittering airtight stove with isinglass windows that shone like square, red eyes; a gay patchwork cushion ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... richness consisted not in the greatness of my possessions, but in the smallness of my wants." He rose from the humblest station, that of a factory boy, to an eminent position of usefulness, by the simple exercise of homely honesty, industry, punctuality, and self- denial. Down to the close of his life, when not attending Parliament, he did duty as minister in a small chapel in Manchester to which he was attached; and ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the priceless jewel which George I., spurred on by an overmastering passion, ordered to be transferred from its rough and homely setting to the ornate luxury of life at Court, where he immediately bestowed upon her the title ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... notwithstanding all my resolution to follow business close this afternoon, did stay talking and playing the foole almost all the afternoon, and there saw two or three foolish sorry pictures of her doing, but very ridiculous compared to what my wife do. She grows mighty homely and looks old. Thence ashamed at myself for this losse of time, yet not able to leave it, I to the office, where my Lord Bruncker come; and he and I had a little fray, he being, I find, a very peevish man, if he be denied what he expects, and very simple in his argument in this ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... boy or the homely girl usually grows up free from the flattery and undue attention which are sure to be heaped upon the good-looking boy and the popular girl. Way back in the early days of five or six, and all the way up to the ages of twelve to twenty, children should be taught that ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... stole into the parlour, Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man, was at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago. He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, with friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor. I did not know all the men who were sitting about, but I recognized a furniture salesman from Kansas City, a drug man, and Willy O'Reilly, ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... through which "Cobbler" Horn had now to pass was very unlike the homely family prayer of the old life. He performed his task, however, with a simplicity and fervour with which the domestics were duly impressed; and when it was over he made them a genial yet dignified little speech, and wished them all a ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... and with an obstreperous bound, Fly flew to the new-comer, a young man in the robust strength of eight-and-twenty, of stalwart frame, very broad in the chest and shoulders, careless, homely, though perfectly gentleman-like bearing, and hale, hearty, sunburnt face. It was such a look and such an arm as would win the most timid to his side in certainty of tenderness and protection, and the fond voice gave the same sense of power and of kindness, as he called out, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hat, lying there all battered and crushed on the white snow, must be the hat of Sir Runan! Who else but the tigerish aristocrat that disdained the homely four-wheeler and preferred to walk five miles to his victim on this night of dread—who else would wear the gay gossamer of July in ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... excellent illustration of this soon after tying up at the landing. A tall, lank, ungainly officer, with a face so distinctively homely as to instantly attract my attention, led his company of men up the river bank, and ordered them to transport the pile of commissary stores from where they had been promiscuously thrown to a drier spot farther back. The officer ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... purified and refined. Charles heard, strove to believe and be consoled, and brought out his letters, trying, with voice breaking down, to show Mr. Ross how truly he had judged of Amy, then listened with a kind of pleasure to the reports of the homely but touching laments of ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... packed my books, etc., to go by cart to Edinburgh to-morrow. I idled away the rest of the day, happy to find myself at home, which is home, though never so homely. And mine is not so homely neither; on the contrary, I have seen in my travels none I liked so well—fantastic in architecture and decoration if you please—but no real comfort sacrificed to fantasy. "Ever gramercy my own purse," saith ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... hope I have not actually grown homely," conceded Dorothy, "for Aunt Winnie is so fond ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... There was something doing. It was a Welsh rhapsodie that he was playing. It was all there—the mountains and the rivers, and the towering cliffs with glimpses of the sea where waves foam on the rocks, and sea-fowl wheel and scream in the wind, and then a bit of homely melody as the country folk drive home in the moonlight, singing as only the Welsh can sing, the songs of the heart; songs of love and home, songs of death and sorrowing, that stab with sudden sweetness. ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... to the inn. It was just far enough, at that hour, to put us in heart for a housing. Indeed, twilight is the time of times to arrive anywhere. Any spot, be it ever so homely, seems homelike then. The dusk has snatched from you the silent companionship of nature, to leave you poignantly alone. It is the hour when a man draws closer to the one he loves, and the hour when most he shrinks from himself, though he want another ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... because of their remarkable parallelism, which is evidently intended to set us thinking of the connection of the various characteristics which they set forth. The first of them is a description, given by the Apostles, of the sort of man whom they conceived to be fit to look after the very homely matter of stifling the discontent of some members of the Church, who thought that their poor people did not get their fair share of the daily ministration. The second and third of them are parts of the description of the foremost of these seven men, the martyr Stephen. In regard to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the constitutional interdict already glanced at, and availing myself of the implied license to utilise that homely talent of which I am the bailee, I purpose taking certain entries from my diary, and amplifying these to the minutest detail of occurrence or conversation. This will afford to the observant reader a fair picture ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... shining gifts were wasted in a small country college, where not one in fifty of his pupils could follow him into the enchanted lands of the imagination where he was fancy-free. But it was not so. One may meet man after man, old pupils of his, who have gone on into the homely drudging rounds of business, the law, journalism—men whose faces will light up with affection and remembrance when Doctor Gummere's name is mentioned. We may have forgotten much of our Chaucer, our Milton, our Ballads—though ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... enthusiasm is, somehow, contagious; and when Phil meets Adele with a shake of the hand and a hearty greeting, she returns it with an outspoken, homely warmth, at thought of which she finds herself blushing a moment after. To tell truth, Phil is rather a fine-looking fellow at this time,—strong, manly, with a comfortable assurance of manner,—a face beaming with bonhomie, cheeks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... quarters of Van Blarcom and his uniformed friends opened from the gallery above the street passage, facing the main portion of the inn which sheltered the kitchen and salle a manger. Such was the simple, homely stage-setting. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... reminiscently, "my little girl had blue eyes and golden hair,—they said she looked like me. She was very pretty. Her father was a plain-looking man. Good as gold, Henry was, but plain looking. Not to say homely,—but just plain." ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... saw her must do her justice, and that serene conviction preserved her from all the throes of uneasy pride which afflict inferior minds in similar circumstances. She had no wish to exhibit her grandfather and grandmother in their lowliness, nor to be ostentatious of her homely origin, as some people are in the very soreness of wounded pride; but if hazard produced the butterman in the midst of the finest of her acquaintances, Phoebe would still have been perfectly at her ease. She would ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... associated, nor through the fame of some feat he may have performed, but by awakening an inexpressible animal sympathy, by the contagion of emotions felt before the same objects. Estimation has been partly arrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homely accent to universal discourse. Friendship might thus be called ideal sympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuous ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... assumes no ungraceful costume,—replied to their summons. She was the solitary cicerone of the place. She had lived there, a lone and childless widow, for thirty years; and, of all the persons I have ever seen, would furnish forth the best heroine to one of those pictures of homely life which Wordsworth has dignified with the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with the homely, good, little Felicite tranquillised and steadied her maddened nerves and ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... upon his pillow Being so troublesome a bedfellow? O polished perturbation! golden care! That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide To many a watchful night!—Sleep with it now, Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet As he whose brow with homely biggin bound Snores ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... known,” says he, “how to modulate it to every theme, and to elicit a music appropriate to each; attuning it in turn to a tender and homely grace, as in ‘The Gardener’s Daughter ‘; to the severe and ideal majesty of the antique, as in ‘Tithonus’; to meditative thought, as in ‘The Ancient Sage,’ or ‘Akbar’s Dream’; to pathetic or tragic tales of contemporary life, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... and vigorous member of our board of governors, the Rev. William Plomer, and we are all, I am sure, very sorry that illness at the last moment should have prevented him from being here today. But, if I may borrow a familiar metaphor from the—if I may employ a homely metaphor familiar to you all—what we lose on the swings we gain on ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... The lady owned theatres at Canterbury, Rochester, Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells, Faversham, Deal, and other places, but was understood to have commenced her professional career in connection with a puppet-show, or even the homely entertainment of Punch and Judy. But her industry, energy, and enterprise were of an indomitable kind. She generally lived in her theatres, and rising early to accomplish her marketing and other household duties, she proceeded to take up her position in the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... those for whom the books were primarily intended must be constantly borne in mind. He attained a splendid fulfilment of his own theories, employing the moujik's expressive vernacular in portraying his homely wisdom, religious faith, and goodness of nature. Sometimes the prevailing simplicity of style and motive is tinged with a vague colouring of oriental legend, but the personal accent is marked throughout. No similar achievement in the beginning Mr. Chertkov ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... has taught him this. What learn our youth abroad, but to refine The homely vices of their native land? Give me an honest home-spun country clown Of our own growth; his dulness is but plain, But theirs embroidered; they are sent out ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... errors as faithfully as its perfections. But, such as it is, it is a fine specimen of fourteenth-century English. He translated not for scholars or for nobles, but for the plain people, and his style was such as suited those for whom he wrote—plain, vigorous, homely, and yet with all its homeliness full of a solemn grace and dignity, which made men feel that they were reading no ordinary book. He uses many striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... birds soaring about overhead had a terrifying effect on them for several days. They did not appear to pick up much food amongst the grass, but scratched away industriously all the same. I must say that they were very friendly and gave the place quite a homely aspect. One of them was christened "Ma" on account of her ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... came down to the evening meal, he found himself wondering foolishly upon what food the child lost in the sea had fed while she grew so rapidly to a woman's stature. The present meal was such as fell to the daily lot of that household. In homely blue delft cups a dozen or more eggs were ranged beside high stacks of buttered toast, rich and yellow. The butter, the jugs of yellow cream, the huge platter heaped with wild raspberries—as each of these met his ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... our first meeting again, spoke of Margarita, that marvellously beautiful child, asking if I had not thought it strange so fair a flower as that should have sprung from the homely stalk of a sweet potato? I answered that I had been surprised at first, but had ceased to believe that she was a child of Batata's, or of any of his kin. He then offered to tell me Margarita's history; and I was not surprised to hear that ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... account of a notice, which was scarcely authorised, shows the homely manners of former days. It was at Sapiston Church, a small village on the Duke of Grafton's estate. The grandfather of the present Duke was returning from a shooting expedition, and was passing the church on Sunday afternoon while service was going on. The Duke quietly ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... green hills, beyond the nearest valleys, Nelly dwells at home beneath her mother's eyes: Her home is neat and homely, not a cot and not a palace, Just the home where love sets up ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... she's our age. Her eyes are gray with dark lashes and when she looks at you they are like surprised stars. And she has the most beautiful complexion in the world, just pink and white. She is lovely to look at and I feel like a tanned, homely gipsy beside her. She's sweet too, but very easily shocked and I'm afraid she's not only good but pious. She can never take your place so don't worry, only, as I have to be here, I might as well have ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... taught anything—I very much doubt whether the dunces of this world are not the very happiest people in it—Yes, Clara; leave to others the vain and empty distinctions of literary renown, which is but a bubble, and be happy in the homely path of obscure ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... glowing as he nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. As he looked, St. George warmed to them all in new fellowship and, too, in swift self-reproach; for in what had seemed to him but "broad lines and comic masks" he suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts. The better and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his grasp were more important than Yaque itself. He remembered, with a thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of the ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... kissed her cheek, and smiled kindly on her, but said little. It was easy to see that she was a less conversable and more homely person than Caroline. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... justly indignant. "I? Never a man loved peace as I do. My life has been hell since you have forced me into daily conflict, when, God knows, I perish with desire for the peace of my homely life in Virginia. Power! I scorn it, sir. I leave that ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... led Diana out of that room and along a short passage to another door. The passage was very narrow, the ceiling was low, the walls whitewashed, the wainscotting blue; and yet the room which they entered, though sharing in all the items of this description, was homely and comfortable. It was furnished in a way that made it seem elegant to Diana. A warm-coloured dark carpet on the floor, two or three easy-chairs, a wide lounge covered with chintz, and chintz curtains at the windows. On the walls here and there single shelves of dark wood ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... Ingenuas didicit fideliter artes, asked Mr. Maclaurin, with a face of flippant assurance, 'Are these words your own?' BOSWELL. Sir Walter Scott shows where the humour of this motto chiefly lay. 'The counsel opposite,' he writes, 'was the celebrated Wight, an excellent lawyer, but of very homely appearance, with heavy features, a blind eye which projected from its socket, a swag belly, and a limp. To him Maclaurin applied the lines ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Vladimir Vasilievitch consisted of his characterless wife, her sister, whose fortune he managed to get into his own hands by selling her property and depositing the money in his own name, and his gentle, scared, homely daughter, who was leading a solitary, hard life, and whose only diversion consisted in visiting the religious meetings at Aline's and ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... subject would certainly have wanted that tinge of chivalrous feeling which the manners of the age and the character of the king alike demanded. But with Burns's ardent admiration of Bruce, and that power of combining the most homely and humorous incidents with the pathetic and the sublime, which he displayed in Tam o' Shanter, we cannot but regret that he never had the leisure and freedom from care, which would have allowed him to try his hand on a subject ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... to make which ill accords with my luxurious surroundings of the moment. It is that I am accustomed to press my trousers myself by the homely and ignoble expedient of sleeping on them. My only excuse is that I am a heavy sleeper. So automatic is the process, that I was wrapped in sheets and darkness before it occurred to me that I had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... in her method of doing this simple duty, an indication of suppressed vitality that conveyed the idea that here was a girl accustomed to action. And she fitted well into the homely scene: short and somewhat "squatty" of form, red-haired, freckle-faced and pug-nosed. Wholesome rather than beautiful was Patsy Doyle, but if you caught a glimpse of her dancing blue eyes you ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... of the craggy hills that guard it. A veritable heaven on earth for the nerve-racked and brain-wearied, for the heart-sick and soul-burdened; for it was the pleasure of the lady of Ruthven Hall, a kindly, homely mansion house that stood at the valley's head, to bring hither such of her friends or her friends' friends as needed the healing that soft airs and sunny days, with long quiet hours filled with love ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... we must no longer, if we can help it, term by the familiar name of Jeanie, brought into the married state the same firm mind and affectionate disposition—the same natural and homely good sense, and spirit of useful exertion—in a word, all the domestic good qualities of which she had given proof during her maiden life. She did not indeed rival Butler in learning; but then no woman more devoutly venerated the extent of her husband's erudition. She did not pretend ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... with his subjects, it is quite certain that the King won the hearts of his people by the great interest he took in their welfare. This good king—whose intimacy with his people we delight to associate with the homely incident of the burning of a cottager's cakes—kept the Christmas festival quite as heartily as any of the early English kings, but not so boisterously as some of them. Of the many beautiful stories told about him, one might very well belong to Christmastide. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... long rank grass, Or paused to gaze upon him as he rode; The cottages, deserted all in haste, Stood open-door'd and rifted by the winds, With cold grey ashes scatter'd o'er the hearth. Here he beheld the homely meal spread forth, Which no man ate; and there, upon the floor, An o'erturn'd cradle, whence a mother late Had snatch'd her babe up with a cry, ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Abbott home. This was a roomy stone house occupying a sightly corner in the West End,—that sharply defined residential area of Vancouver which real estate agents unctuously speak of as "select." There was half a block of ground in green lawn bordered with rosebushes. The house itself was solid, homely, built for use, and built to endure, all stone and heavy beams, wide windows and deep porches, and a red tile roof lifting above the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... And yet with gentle hands I place You with my priceless Delft and Dresden china, For sake of one who loved your homely ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... with their church to the population of a pastoral village. I admit, in its fullest extent, the moral value of the scene, which is almost always one of perfect purity and peace; and of the sense of supernatural love and protection, which fills and surrounds the low aisles and homely porch. But the question I desire earnestly to leave with you is, whether all the earth ought not to be peaceful and pure, and the acknowledgment of the Divine protection, as universal as its reality? That in a mysterious way the presence of Deity is vouchsafed where it is sought, and withdrawn ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... was a strong vein of superstition in his nature, which caused a vague fear of the men that had escaped him with such wonderful cleverness. Individuals who could do that sort of thing, were capable of doing things still more marvellous, and to use homely language, King Haffgo was ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch, the Western Empedocles, 'Some things can be done as well as others.' A homely utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and hierarchies. These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that some things can NOT be done as well ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... trivial affairs passed away the short time between the coming of Natura, and dinner being brought in; on which, the yeoman intreated him to sit down, and partake of such homely food as he found there.—'That I shall gladly do,' answered Natura, 'but I waited for your fair daughter; I hope we shall have her company. I do not know,' said the yeoman, 'I think they told me she was not very well, ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... treatise, entitled, 'The Art of English Poetry, alledges, that Sir Thomas Wyat the Elder, and Henry Earl of Surry were the two chieftains, who having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and stile of the Italian poetry, greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poetry, from what it had been before, and therefore may be justly called, The Reformers of our English Poetry and Stile.' Our noble author added to learning, wisdom, fortitude, munificence, and affability. Yet all these excellencies of character, could not prevent his falling ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... through which one was obliged to pass. I took my daughter with me and gave up the largest room for her and the maid who was to take care of her. I was lodged in a little hole on straw, to which I went up by ladder. As we had no other furniture but our beds, quite plain and homely, I brought some straw chairs and some Dutch earthen and wooden ware. Never did I enjoy a greater content than in this little hole, which appeared so very conformable to the state of Jesus Christ. I fancied everything better on wood than on plate. I laid in all my ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... ranch supper. The table was simply loaded with cold meats, and sweets, and cakes of varied description. The fare was homely but plentiful, and, to these simple-living people, it was all that was required. Bud helped himself liberally, while Nan ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... thereby the welfare of the individual parts, among whom he himself is one; individual happiness cannot be separated from general happiness. All duties are implied in the supreme one: Give to others, and preserve thyself. This principle of benevolence, advanced by Cumberland with homely simplicity, received in the later development of English ethics, for which it pointed out the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... credulous persons in the world." If set forth only as a novel and pleasing fancy, it may be classed with other ingenious fictions, that are published without a thought of deception. But if seriously proposed, it can be fitly characterized only by borrowing the homely but ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... profound psychologist, yet he tells what he sees and what he imagines with delightful spirit and delightful wit, and tinges the fabric of his fancy with the ever-changing colors of his own versatile personality, fanciful suggestions, homely realism, and bright antithesis. Above all, he has the great ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... like shaking hands and fondling their little ones, while the venerable aboriginal sequoia, ancient of other days, keeps you at a distance, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among its neighbor trees as would the mastodon among the homely bears and deers. Only the Sierra juniper is at all like it, standing rigid and unconquerable on glacier pavements for thousands of years, grim and silent, with an air of antiquity about as pronounced ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... the facts, the evidence resolves itself into practically nothing. That, in his self-absorption, he allowed her to Sending Completed Page, Please Wait... overflowed toward a man who must have been a manly, loving lover. She calls him by the name by which he called her—a homely ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Billroth's case of cancer of the breast, which was so excessively foul smelling that all his deodorizers failed, but which, on applying a poultice made of dried figs cooked in milk, the previously unbearable odor was entirely done away with, gives an importance to this homely remedy not to be denied.—Medical ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... a wife was less fortunate than his first. Wanting a woman to take care of his children and preside over his rather numerous establishment, he made an offer to a widow, named Alice Middleton. Plain and homely in appearance and taste, Mistress Alice would have been invaluable to Sir Thomas as a superior domestic servant, but his good judgment and taste deserted him when he decided to make her a closer companion. Bustling, keen, loquacious, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... of love to read." The artist poet who coloured the virginal form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved by his well-known canzone that he was free from monastic Quixotism, and took a practical view of the value of worldly wealth.[127] His homely humour saved him from the exaltation and the childishness that formed the weakness of the Franciscan revival. By the same firm grasp upon reality he created more than mere abstractions in his chiaroscuro figures of the virtues and vices at Padua. Fortitude and Justice, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... never a laugh. Herein they are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her "Dutch painter's" portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately skilful reproduction of its homely wit and harmless absurdity. Happily neither these writers, nor the purveyors of mere sensation who cannot get on without crime and mystery, exhaust the list of our romancers, many of whom are altogether healthful, cheerful, and ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... little, of what happened to grandmother when she went on a journey, and so on, but it also extends to stories which are not in themselves personal: which take their personal savour merely from the fact that they flow from the lips in spontaneous, homely phrases, with an appreciative gusto which ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... active, a life of semi-indolence soon became to him unendurable; and presently his offer was accepted of service with the troops, but instead of being sent as he desired into the thickest of the fray, he found himself detailed for hospital and other homely duties, at De-Aar Nauwpoort and Norval's Pont. Here for over twelve months he rendered admirable, though to him monotonous, service; when, lo, suddenly the Boers doubled back upon their pursuers, and attempted not unsuccessfully though unfruitfully, a second invasion of ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... is one; individual happiness cannot be separated from general happiness. All duties are implied in the supreme one: Give to others, and preserve thyself. This principle of benevolence, advanced by Cumberland with homely simplicity, received in the later development of English ethics, for which it pointed out the way, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... by the distant Alps, looked down into the building, it seemed to lie before me like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw, with an enormously broad brim and a shallow crown; the plaits being represented by the four-and-forty rows of seats. The comparison is a homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was irresistibly ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... whatsoever I shall tell you, according to my wonted manner, I will speak as plainly unto you as though you were my son, and therefore pardon me, if I shall seem eyther too familiar, or too homely with you. ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... England and of the cities of Europe and Asia. He had been for a journey round the world, and had much to tell of his travels in foreign lands. Gradually as he talked, he dropped the precise English manner of speech and reverted to the homely phrases and drawling intonation of the West. And so they ceased to think of him as Lord St. Olave, regarding him without restraint as ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... were silent, for every man there felt that the hour was big with doom. At length Panda rose with difficulty, because of his unwieldy weight, and uttered these fateful words, that were none the less ominous because of the homely idiom ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... more particularly in the less sumptuous gardens, those of a more homely grace, that Pierre realised that even things have souls. Ah! that Villa Mattei on one side of the Coelius with its terraced grounds, its sloping alleys edged with laurel, aloe, and spindle tree, its box-plants forming arbours, its oranges, its roses, and its fountains! ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... of these two men were to be written, their deeds could be compressed into homely statistics. And this leads us to inquire what was the sum of their achievement. It has been variously estimated. It is not an uncommon statement that thirty thousand witches were hanged in England during the rule of Parliament, and this wild guess has been copied by ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... they have authority for the splendor of their descriptions. I cannot find a word in the older Chronicles about the jewels or dress of the brides, and I believe the ceremony to have been more quiet and homely than is usually supposed. The only sentence which gives color to the usual accounts of it is one of Sansovino's, in which he says that the magnificent dress of the brides in his day was founded "on ancient custom."[32] However this may ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... immediately remember that impressions depend upon the minds receiving them; and that to a group of simple New England lads, upwards of sixty years ago, the halls and groves of Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have been, may have seemed replete with Academic stateliness. It was a homely, simple, frugal, "country college," of the old-fashioned American stamp; exerting within its limits a civilizing influence, working, amid the forests and the lakes, the log-houses and the clearings, toward the amenities and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offering ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... presence of Democracy the negro has learned to keep silence. But in search of the truth let him go to the file of over 3,000 letters in the Governor's office from negroes in the South, and read in them the homely but truthful tales of suffering, oppression, and wrongs. Let him note how real is their complaint, but how modest the boon they seek; for in different words, sometimes in quaint and often in awkward phrases, the questions are always the same: Can we be free? Can we have work, and can ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... purchased a pair of pajamas in London? This is homely stuff I write, yet there's pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not the English wear pajamas? Does not the ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... your homely carcass down to the Girl because you're an unpolished gem of good nature and beauty—and for those two things I know she'll love you. She is my sister, you know. Now, if I could only take ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... eleven sonnets of Milton's silent period, from 1645 to 1658, are records of present feeling kindled by actual facts. In their naked, unadorned simplicity of language, they may easily seem, to a reader fresh from Petrarch, to be homely and prosaic. Place them in relation to the circumstance on which each piece turns, and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic effect of real emotion over emotion meditated and revived. History has in it that which can ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... which could not have differed much from those of Shakespeare's common people. The influence of this is seen in his mastery of what is called the Yankee dialect, development of old chimney-corner English. For the same reason there is visible in his writings also some of that homely astuteness which seems to have died out with the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Eusebius spoke with such homely kindness, and his voice was so full of fatherly sympathy that hope revived in Agne's breast, and she told him with frank confidence all he wanted ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Attendez!" I heard him jump out of bed, stumble and grope about, and then strike a match; and in another instant the door opened, and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped bourgeois pulling on his trousers. There flashed on me incongruously the thought of our English laureate's stately home by the sea, in which, jealously guarded by hedges and flunkeys, the poet chiselled his calm stanzas; and all the vagabond in ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... country, Where the tangled barberry-bushes Hang their tufts of crimson berries Over stone walls gray with mosses, Pause by some neglected graveyard, For a while to muse, and ponder On a half-effaced inscription, Written with little skill of song-craft, Homely phrases, but each letter Full of hope and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter; Stay and read this rude inscription, Read this Song ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... in her purified and refined. Charles heard, strove to believe and be consoled, and brought out his letters, trying, with voice breaking down, to show Mr. Ross how truly he had judged of Amy, then listened with a kind of pleasure to the reports of the homely but touching laments of ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been havin' bad luck," O'Malley said. "I can stand a Nissen hut jest to be flyin' one o' them babies. We'll meet up with plenty o' Jerries." O'Malley grinned eagerly, his homely face lighting up. "Remember how we used to mix it with them Jerry ...
— A Yankee Flier Over Berlin • Al Avery
... all this correspondence, and declared herself satisfied with it. There was no sentiment, no declaration of affection, in these letters; they were quite practical epistles, telling of home matters in a homely fashion, but they evinced Will's intention to keep his word and marry his cousin on the day appointed, and now near ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... first book she got hold of out of the hidden treasury threw the "Pilgrim's Progress" quite into the shade. It was the story of a youth who ran away and lived on an island,—one Crusoe,—a homely narrative, but evidently true, though full of remarkable adventures. There too was the history, coming much nearer home, of Deborah Sampson, the young woman who served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, with a portrait of her in man's attire, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... place at one of the tables, he was disgusted to find upon his plate—not, as he had confidently expected, a couple of plump poached eggs, with their appetising contrast of ruddy gold and silvery white, not a crisp and crackling sausage or a mottled omelette, not even the homely but luscious rasher, but a brace of chill forbidding sardines, lying grim and headless in bilious ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... with a sudden shame of his homely patronymic. "It's an ugly name," he said. "But you are right in trusting me. I would—I would do anything ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... grew a matron plump and comely, You dwelt in fashion's brightest blaze; My earthly lot was far more homely; But I too had my festal days. No merrier eyes have ever glistened Around the hearth-stone's wintry glow, Than when my youngest child was christened,— But that was ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... There were no longer vulgar rich only but also vulgar poor and vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there spread a kind of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of this I will give one simple and homely example. The beautiful flowers of the cottage garden were no longer grown in the gardens of the well-to-do, because they were the flowers of the poor. Instead were grown lobelias, geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous mixture, not because any one thought them more beautiful, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... briskly, "That's good. Neither have I. I don't feel a bit like cramming, so I shall bluff. When father was studying art in Paris, he knew a man who had been one of Napoleon's guards at St. Helena. He was old and lame and half blind and stunningly homely then, and an artist's model. He used to tell merry tales about what a tiger of a man—" Madeline stopped short in the act of replacing the life of Napoleon on the table and stared at Betty in ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... table? Who had not "where to lay his head?" Who lived on the scanty fare of a small purse in common with the family of his disciples? Who withdrew from the entertainments of Jerusalem to the humble cottage of Mary and Martha, cheerfully subsisting on the most homely and casual provision?—HE, who has taught us to limit our desires of temporal good within the narrow circle of one short request—"GIVE US THIS DAY ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... those stormy times; sighing for peace when his whole soul should have been in war; and repentant alike whether with the Parliament or the king, but still a personage of elegant and endearing associations; a student-soldier, with a high heart and a gallant spirit. Come and look at his features,—homely and worn, but with a characteristic air of refinement and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... fougasso, so perfect of its kind that any Provencal of that region—though he had come upon it in the sandy wastes of Sahara—would have known that its creator was Mise Fougueiroun. To compare the fougasso with our homely dough-nut does it injustice. It is a large flat open-work cake—a grating wrought in dough—an inch or so in thickness, either plain or sweetened or salted, fried delicately in the best olive-oil of Aix or Maussane. It is made throughout the winter, but its making at Christmas time ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... of scene is about to open on our heroine, and we shall show her to you, for an evening at least, in new associations, and with a different background from that homely and rural one in which she has fluttered as a white dove ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... I'd been gone from Mrs Dinkman's threequarters of an hour. I had left a small group excited at the free show consequent upon the too successful beautification of a local eyesore; I returned to a sizable crowd viewing an impressive phenomenon. The homely levity had vanished; no one shouted jovial advice. Opinions and comments passed in whispers accompanied by furtive glances toward the lawn, as though it were sentient and might be offended by rude speculation. As we pushed through the bystanders I was suddenly aware ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... think you had decided rightly. There seems to me to be such a spirit of energy in her, that if she does not act, she will either speculate and theorise, or pine and prey on herself. I do believe that hard homely work, such as this school-keeping, is the best outlet for what might otherwise run to extravagance—more especially as you say the hope of it has already been an incentive to improvement in ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... was enjoying herself. All this homely gayety, of which she was the cause, made her feel happy. She enjoyed the pleasure of those around her. With her compassionate eyes she thanked her mother in the distance for having prepared this fete in ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... slight, frail, homely lady of seventy, with kindly eyes of a faded blue, smiled upon his fears. She had sheltered fugitives before—in the old days of the Commonwealth—and nothing but good had ever come of it. She would ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... passing through the county of Cavan, called at a homely but hospitable house, where he knew he should be well received. The Lady Bountiful of the mansion, rejoiced to have so distinguished a guest, runs up to him, and with great eagerness and flippancy asks him what he will have for dinner. "Will you have an apple-pie, sir? Will you have a gooseberry-pie, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... light, surrounded by dancing motes, was the landlord's daughter. Then, as if a thin filmy cloud had passed over the sun, a cloud which grew thicker and thicker, so that the broad beam of light gradually died away, the pleasant young homely face grew less and less distinct, and, lastly, all was confused and mingled with singing noises and murmurs in his head, and then—a ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... deductive author as it is for the inductive; many times the romantic writer gains as much as the realist by confining his fiction to his own environment of time and place. Scott, after all, was less successful with his medieval kings and knights than with his homely and simple Scottish characters. Hawthorne, in "The Marble Faun," lost a certain completeness of effect by stepping off his own New England shadow. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," with its subversion of the actual, is the sort of story that might be set ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... homely old thing, and I hate it," answered 'Lena, again bursting into tears. "I hate everybody, and I wish I was dead, or back in ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... to have to write to Susan and tell her that after twenty months' hard work he was just where he had been at first starting. One day, as George was eating his homely dinner on his knee by the side of his principal flock, he suddenly heard a tremendous scrimmage mixed with loud, abusive epithets from Abner. He started up, and there was Carlo pitching into a sheep who was trying to jam herself into the crowd to escape him. Up ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... pleased. The smiling chief Approved her courage and dispell'd her grief; Then to their homely bower in haste they move. Begin their labors and prepare to rove. Soon grow the robes beneath her forming care, And the fond parents wed the wondrous pair; But whelm'd in grief beheld the following dawn, Their joys all vanish'd and their children gone. Nine days they march'd; the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... crying. Banneker pushed briskly through the ring. About twenty wounded lay upon the ground or were propped against the rock-wall. Over them two women were expertly working, one tiny and beautiful, with jewels gleaming on her reddened hands; the other brisk, homely, with a suggestion of the professional in her precise motions. A broad, fat, white-bearded man seemed to be informally in charge. At least he was giving directions in a growling voice as he bent over the sufferers. Banneker went ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... these garments, lying among her own wraps, gave her a sense of homely intimacy. It was as if her happiness came down from the skies and took on the plain dress of daily things. At last she seemed to hold ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... themselves to the daughters of men, seeing that they were fair. The sons of men who were proud and strong and passionately given to pleasure, without doubt despised the plain maidens of the pious race who had been reared by the holy patriarchs not delicately, but simply and modestly, being arrayed in homely garb. There was hence no necessity of making a law also for the maidens, inasmuch as they were in any case ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... Standing sometimes upon presumptive ground. If the prospect has been a little clouded, it only caused us to be more attentive, that we might not be deceived. But, though we have attended her through so immense a space, we have only seen her in infancy. Comparatively small in her size, homely in her person, and coarse in her dress. Her ornaments, wholly of iron, ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... and went to the fireside, and drew the few coals together, and lit a lamp. For a moment she stood still, looking at the closed door between her and her child; then she lifted a large book from the window-sill, laid it on the small round table, opened it wide, and sat down before it. It was a homely, workaday-looking book, and she did not read a word of it, though her eyes were upon the page. But it was the Bible. And the Bible is like the sunshine, it comforts and cheers us only to sit ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... place in all the earth, and at no time in all its history, has the hearth done more in moulding human character than it did in the wilderness on the north side of the lower Ohio when the men who felled the forest and conquered nature offered their humble devotions on its homely altar. ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... Gabrielle, indignantly running into mamma's room with an open volume in her hand, "that papa was as homely and awkward when a boy and young man as this writer describes him? 'Tow-head,' 'gawky,' 'plain,' and 'clownish,' are some of the most uncomplimentary epithets applied to him. He is described as having 'white hair with a tinge of orange at the ends,' ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... every one of us," said Mrs. Morell, with tears, to the elderly homely governess, "that we are under the deepest obligations to you. But for you, the children would have grown up without any education at all. And, for the greatest service you or any one could possibly render us, we have never been ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... him an account, e're our entertainment came in: 'Twas common homely food, but very nourishing: Our half starv'd doctor attacqu'd it very briskly, but when he had well fill'd himself, began to tell us, philosophers were above the world, and to ridicule those that condemn every thing, because 'tis common, and only ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... that the girls should not lack more homely knowledge. Each took her share in the day's work, and learned all details of it as accurately as any German maiden at her cookery school. Emily took very kindly to even the hardest housework; there she felt able and necessary; and, doubtless, upstairs, grimly listening ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... domestic life, was never excelled, used to say that two movings were equal to one fire. And gentlemen, as if they were afraid that this besetting sin of republican governments, this rerum novarum lubido (to use a very homely phrase, but that comes pat to the purpose), this maggot of innovation, would cease to bite, are here gravely making provision that this Constitution, which we should consider as a remedy for all the ills of the body politic, may itself be amended or modified at any future time. Sir, I ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... jonquils. She took a woman's joy in the immaculate napery and in the charm and variety of the china. Such housekeeping was an art, and quite impossible without the personal touch of the mistress, and, as she looked across towards Kate's homely, pleasant face, her heart went out to her in gratitude and love. She could be trusted, this frank, laughing, graceful woman. She represented a most modern union of housewife and intellectual companion. No ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... struggles, these perpetual abasements of your highest self—a few more years of them—they will wreck and ruin you, body and soul. How many men of genius have married their housekeepers even—good clumsy, homely bodies, who have kept their husbands' brain calm and his pillow smooth. And again, a man of genius is the one man who can marry anybody. The world expects him to be eccentric. And Mary Ann is no coarse city weed, but a sweet country bud. ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... their ease,—the women among cushions on a rattan couch, the men stretched in long chairs. He put questions, indolent, friendly questions, opening vistas of reply and recollection; so that Rudolph, answering, felt the first return of homely comfort. A feeble return, however, and brief: in the pauses of talk, misgiving swarmed in his mind, like the leaping vermin of last night. The world into which he had been thrown still appeared disorderly, incomprehensible, and dangerous. The plague—it ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... creditable to Mrs. Fogg that she sent for Clara Belle to live with her and go to school part of the year. "She'll be useful," said Mrs. Fogg, "and she'll be out of her father's way, and so keep honest; though she's so awful homely I've no fears for her. A girl with her red hair, freckles, and cross-eyes can't fall into no kind of sin, ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the catastrophe at Washington; under any circumstances we should have shuddered at the means by which it was accomplished. But in the character of the victim, and even in the accessories of his last moments, there is something so homely and innocent that it takes the question, as it were, out of all the pomp of history and the ceremonial of diplomacy,—it touches the heart of nations and appeals to the domestic sentiment of mankind. Whatever the various and varying opinions in this house, and in the country generally, on ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... most remarkable piece of head architecture possible. How shall I describe it? Imagine a frying-pan inverted, its inner rim resting on the crown of the head, and the handle depending down the back, and you will have a correct, though a homely idea, of the fashion of her hair. Each individual hair seemed as if picked out from it fellows, stiffened by some process until it appeared like a wire bent into shape; gathered in and tied a little below the nape of the neck, and from thence downward traced into a queue. Hers was the ideal type ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... instances of persons of as humble condition as themselves accidentally falling upon a princely fortune, and they know, too, what a miraculous change such a discovery makes in the social condition of a peon, for every miner in Zacatecas knows the homely distich: ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... clamber over rocks and boulders to the snow near by, or they would wander to a dark valley not far away, where a third lake lay quite inclosed by steep rocky walls, and known to very few people in all the world. Simmen kept a boat on this lake, a homely old thing with only one oar. When Vincenza brought Cain over here one day, he was much excited and' thought that he had never in his life seen anything so beautiful as this water and the perfect stillness that brooded over it, and he would go to ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... have produced on this subject would certainly have wanted that tinge of chivalrous feeling which the manners of the age and the character of the king alike demanded. But with Burns's ardent admiration of Bruce, and that power of combining the most homely and humorous incidents with the pathetic and the sublime, which he displayed in Tam o' Shanter, we cannot but regret that he never had the leisure and freedom from care, which would have allowed him to try his hand on a subject so ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... beheld so lovely a maiden; and he was right, for in all England there were few to compare with Anne of Bletso. She had seen him too, and had observed how far superior he was in appearance to other rustic swains, for the shepherd's frock of homely grey could not conceal the graces of his person, which also attracted the notice of the worthy knight, her father, who, on one occasion, said ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... craving of the spirit for something new: no wonder, then, that they seized the fruit so "pleasant to the eye," and as it seemed to them "desirable to make one wise." Thus the poor girls were lured from the plain homely path, which, plain and homely as it is, always proves at last the way of pleasantness and the path of peace. They knew that people called them odd, and in this they gloried. Fanny Brighton they regarded as a rude girl, who, though she vexed them, never put them out ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... loving Proteus: Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits. Were't not affection chains thy tender days To the sweet glances of thy honour'd love, I rather would entreat thy company 5 To see the wonders of the world abroad, Than, living dully sluggardized at home, Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness. But since thou lovest, love ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... ready to marry him, he was still waiting. He wrote of his handsome farm he had cleared with his own hands, and the beautiful wild country he lived in, telling her he hoped her future life would be free from all care. All this, and even more, dear reader, he told her—in plain, homely words, it is true; but love's language is always sweet, be it in courtly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... peculiar dreamy feeling that he ought to listen and know who the boy was so addressed. Then he became conscious that it was he who was drinking from a mug of water held to his lips; and, opening his eyes, he looked up into a pleasant, homely face bending over him in an open doorway, upon whose step he was sitting, half leaning against the doorpost, half against the woman who was ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... very fair in the sun of that May day, with its homely gables of warm red brick and sunburnt timber, its cheery roof of Holland tile, and with the sunlight flashing from the diamond panes that were leaded into the sashes of the great bay-window on the eastern ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... dishevelment, his harmless little round light-blue eyes, pinkish from late night reading, generally betraying the absence of his vagrant thoughts, and I know not what of goodness, as well as queerness, in his homely features. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... satirist, because of the affluence of inward substance that fed his satiric appetite—namely, a clear, moral sensibility, distinguishing by instinct the true from the false, rare intellectual nimbleness, homely common sense, shrewd insight into men, a keen wit, with vivid perception of the comic and absurd. For a satirist so variously endowed, the stage was the best field, and for Moliere especially, gifted as he was with histrionic genius. The vices and ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... distance, but flock about me like a host of brothers, and make this place like home. Indeed, gentlemen, indeed, if it be natural and allowable for each of us, on his own hearth, to express his thoughts in the most homely fashion, and to appear in his plainest garb, I have a fair claim upon you to let me do so to-night, for you have made my home an Aladdin's Palace. You fold so tenderly within your breasts that common household lamp ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... forgotten to observe a golden rule which should be strongly impressed upon every man and woman. The maxim should be inculcated upon the young with at least as much earnestness as the Catechism or the Ten Commandments. In homely language, it runs something in this fashion: "Say what you like, but ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... western half of the edifice, was devoted to more homely uses. It contained an eating-room and divers sleeping-rooms far the domestics and labourers, besides store-rooms, garners, and omnium gatherums of all sorts. The vast ranges of garrets, too, answered for various purposes of household and farming economy. ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... brave fellows," said the duke; "be firm a little longer, and you shall have at them by-and-by." This homely appeal kept each man in his place in the ranks. But now the superior officers ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... of these poor men, with the things you tell them. Be careful; they are very well meaning, but they are very ignorant. And having been ignorant all their lives, it is dangerous to turn such men into sages at one blow. It is as if I, being accustomed to the homely stew, were taken to-day to His Eminence's table. I should gorge myself and drink too much; at night I should have a colic, and should probably hop ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... time the ladies spent the day either in their own boudoirs or in the morning-room looking over the cliff. Here, while the cold weather lasted, Etta had tea served, and thither the gentlemen usually repaired at the hour set apart for the homely meal. They had come regularly the last few evenings. Paul and Steinmetz had suddenly given up their long drives to distant ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... are other matters of more import than such homely things; so now we come to the time when Stern felt the pressing imperative of a return to the tower. For he lacked tools in every way; he needed them to build furniture, doors, shutters; to clear away the brush and make the place orderly, rational ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... effort? Chesnel's virtues belong essentially to the classes which stand between the poverty of the people on the one hand, and the greatness of the aristocracy on the other; for these can combine homely burgher virtues with the heroic ideals of the noble, enlightening ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... butcher's bill without any difficulty. We pull along on a even keel wonderfully well, Creary being a good-natured man, and as pleasant a shipmate as one could wish. He has brought his bits of things with him, and alongside of mine they make a homely look. I miss your voice about the house, and sometimes I feel a bit lonely, but being a rough seafaring man I know that Malabar Cottage was hardly fit for a lady like yourself. The Count de Lloseta has twice been down to see me, sitting affable down to our bit ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... Yale and Harvard and Princeton; the enfranchised miner of California and the Rockies, his bags of gold and silver in his hands. Here was already the bewildered foreigner, an alien speech confounding him—the Hun, the Pole, the Swede, the German, the Russian—seeking his homely colonies, fearing his ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... love of gossip amounted almost to a passion, and nothing came amiss to her; she liked to know everything about everybody, and in the main I think her interest was a kindly one, though she found that a little bit of scandal, every now and then, added a piquant flavour to the homely fare provided by the commonplace ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... death, my friend, for all his scorns? With Aesop's slave will leave his bush of thorns. But since these trait'rous lords will have my head, Their lordships here upon this homely bed Shall find me sleeping, breathing forth my breath, Till they their shame, and I my fame, attain by death. Live, gentle Marius, to revenge my wrong! And, sirrah, see they stay not over-long; For he that erst hath conquer'd kingdoms many, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... to understand something of the complicated problem of earth tensions, and the corresponding movements of the rocks, by considering certain homely illustrations. He may observe how the soil cracks as it shrinks in times of drought, the openings closing when it rains. In a similar way the frozen earth breaks open, sometimes with a shock which ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... an old Bible that we've carted around for years and it is such a nuisance to move that they don't mean to pack it this time at all. There are a lot of names in the back and some awfully homely pictures. I rubbed my finger on one and it smooched the nose clear off and blurred both eyes, but he wasn't good looking anyway. It isn't much worse now. On one page it says 'Births,' and on another 'Deaths,' and ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... the famed moral philosophy of Moliere in his pretended master-piece. From what has been stated, I consider myself warranted to assert, in opposition to the prevailing opinion, that Moliere succeeded best with the coarse and homely comic, and that both his talents and his inclination, if unforced, would have determined him altogether to the composition of farces such as he continued to write even to the very end of his life. He seems always to have whipped himself up as it ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the chief incidents of Alfred's life nicely painted, with BURDETT, late Old Glory, and now Old Corruption. As for the poetry, when we consider the capacities of the learners, that cannot be too simple, too homely. The House, however, may order a Committee of Versification, if it please; all that we protest against is D'ISRAELI ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... wrong. It was true that in all Mlle. Vinteuil's actions the appearance of evil was so strong and so consistent that it would have been hard to find it exhibited in such completeness save in what is nowadays called a 'sadist'; it is behind the footlights of a Paris theatre, and not under the homely lamp of an actual country house, that one expects to see a girl leading her friend on to spit upon the portrait of a father who has lived and died for nothing and no one but herself; and when we find in real life a desire for melodramatic effect, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... never, in the long, long course of his years, had a sensation like that which took him, as the queer voice melted away, blending imperceptibly with the homely rustlings and lowings of the farm night. The ache he had carried in his heart for those last weeks seemed suddenly to bulge and burst, like a bubble. The old moon, the hills and trees and trail of his long travel; the night, the world, and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... two of us and we knew it: Joe Whitermore and a chap named Fred Farrell. So, after a time, we just sort of stood off and watched the race—as pretty a race as ever you see. Farrell had the money and the good looks, while Whitermore was poor as a church mouse, and he was homely, too. But Whitermore must have had somethin'—maybe somethin' we didn't ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... joyance, Drinking but a cup of water, Eating but the bitter tan-bark. Wherefore should I not be singing, And the children not be chanting Of the beer of Kalevala, Brewed from barley in perfection, Dressed in quaint and homely costume, As they sit beside their hearth-stones. Wherefore should I not be singing, And the children too be chanting Underneath these painted rafters, In these halls renowned and ancient? This the place for men to linger, This ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... mourners have but just received the news of their bereavement, and are under the operation of a paroxysm of grief, anger and revenge; or, unless the prisoner is very old, sickly, or homely, they generally save him, and treat him kindly. But if their mental wound is fresh, their loss so great that they deem it irreparable, or if their prisoner or prisoners do not meet their approbation, ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... All is simple and domestic, yet we have here the beginnings of what became in time the most wide-reaching and highly organized of human systems. An elaborate hierarchy, a complicated theology were to arise out of the informal conclave, the memorial meal; and in like manner, out of the homely meeting-place of the disciples would be developed the costly and beautiful forms of ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... had passed some very comfortable-looking settlements that afternoon, one, where we got information about our road, belonging to a man called Shank, who had been settled about four years, and had quite a homely-looking shanty covered with creepers, and garden fenced in. At Oak River we had rather speculated on getting both food and lodging; but when we found the fare offered no better than ours, we decided ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... front door, where the gleam of lamps shone with a homely welcome through the glass panels. The clergyman released his companion's arm; then bent down towards him and added in a tone that held in it for the first time something ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... which I am now about to write will be thought too homely, to relate to matters much too personal and private, to have sufficient interest for the public eye; but it must be remembered that the loftiest interests of man are made up of a collection of those that are lowly; and, that he who makes a faithful picture of only a single important ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... not improved since he had been deprived of the congenial surroundings of Baker Street. Without his scrapbooks, his chemicals, and his homely untidiness, he was an uncomfortable man. He shrugged his shoulders in ungracious acquiescence, while our visitor in hurried words and with much excitable ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... meek, like-minded people. But when it comes to the handling of a great state, you will find that nature has emptied a box of chessmen before you, and you must play with them so as to give each its proper move, or sweep them off the board, and come back to the homely game such as I used to see played with beans and kernels of corn on squares marked upon the back ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... teaching first, we have only to turn to the Old Charges or Constitutions of the order, with their quaint blending of high truth and homely craft-law, to find the moral basis of universal Masonry. These old documents were a part of the earliest ritual of the order, and were recited or read to every young man at the time of his initiation as an Entered Apprentice. ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... thou'lt sing! for well thy magic muse Can to the topmost heaven of grandeur soar; Or stoop to wail the swain that is no more! Ah, homely swains! your homeward steps ne'er lose; 90 Let not dank Will[46] mislead you to the heath; Dancing in mirky night, o'er fen and lake, He glows, to draw you downward to your death, In his bewitch'd, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... act of joining, with an air of vast condescension, a party of three; two of whom her stately salute had already frozen in their places. These two, a slight perky man of middle age, and a frightened rustic-looking woman in homely black—who, by the way, sat with her mouth, open and her knife and fork resting points upward on the table—could do nothing but stare. The third, a handsome girl, very simply dressed, returned her ladyship's gaze with ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... fierce actions and utterances of one suffering from delirium tremens. Whether in its wrath, disdain, or its dismay, the countenance was infernal. I called once upon a time on a most respectable yeoman, and I was, in language earnest and homely, pressed to accept the hospitality of the house. I consented. The word to me was, 'Nah, Maister, yah mun stop an hev sum te-ah, yah mun, eah, yah mun.' A bountiful table was soon spread; at all events, time soon went while I scaled the hills to see ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... whose hands were the destinies of the North to be? In those of Mr. Lincoln? or in those of the cabinet? or in those of influential advisers, something like what have been called "favorites" in Europe, and "kitchen cabinet" in the more homely phrase of the United States? The early impression was that Mr. Lincoln did not know a great deal. How could he? Where and how could he have learned much? It must be admitted that it was entirely natural that his ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... square-set figure of George up the long slope of the semi-suburban road. Dosia had preferred to walk instead of driving. There was a strong breeze, although the sun was warm; and the summerish wayside trees and grasses had inspired him with the recollection of a country boy's calendar—a pleasing, homely monologue. He was, however, never too occupied with his theme to stoop over and throw a stone out of her path, or to hold her little checked umbrella so that the sun should not shine in her eyes, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... this. Vernacular (from verna, a slave born in his master's house). 1. The homely idiomatic language in opposition to any mixed jargon, or lingua franca, spoken by an imported slave:—2. Hence, generally, the pure mother-tongue as opposed to the same tongue corrupted by false refinement. By vernacular ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... details of the argument which brought him to his final conclusions, is still one of the most interesting unsettled questions of the war. The general argument has already been indicated in the comprehensive language of Rawlins and that was doubtless strengthened by Mr. Lincoln, whose homely but astute reasoning convinced him that the better and safer line of operations was overland against Lee's army wherever it might be encountered, and not through a widely eccentric movement by water to a secondary base on the James River and thence ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... "Well," says he, "if this be your town life, much good may you do with it; give me my poor, quiet hole again, with my homely but comfortable ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... scale of society, had not a certain loftiness of manner, and bold, though reckless deportment, argued pretensions on the part of the wearer to a more elevated station in life, and contradicted, in a great measure, the impression produced by the homely appearance of his habiliments. A cap of shaggy brown fur, fancifully, but not ungracefully fashioned, covered his head, from beneath which, dropping, in natural clusters over his neck and shoulders, a cloud of raven hair escaped. Subsequently, when his face ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the simplest and neatest manner. Her face was radiant with the pleasure of seeing me where I was, and excitement had deepened the colour on her cheeks, which were never pale, except with emotions. As for her eyes, I can only describe them by the homely phrase, that "they ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
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