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More "Incongruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glass-bead curtain at the farther end of the long room she led them to a second room, all hung about with silks and furnished with deep-cushioned divans. There were mirrors in this room, too, so that Kirby laughed aloud to see how incongruous and completely out of place he and his adjutant locked. His gruff laugh came so suddenly that the maid nearly jumped ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... to his glass, perceived that it was the tall man with the stoop shoulders and incongruous clothing who had torn down the red flag. He was now in violent altercation with the man who had hung it out—the fellow whom he had called Heinrich some ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... The whole incongruous covering of the east end of the choir shown on p. 77 was then removed, and the change effected was most striking. It was evident that long before the introduction of the Grecian screen in 1717, the original arrangement had ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... and guest was so odd, so incongruous, that it afforded me plenty of food for a fresh line of conjecture as I traced my way back to the picture gallery, and from thence successfully to the drawing room, which, as the door was ajar, I could ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... all married men who are blest with active, managing, economical wives. Such were Mr. and Mrs. Pullens; and the appearance of the house offered no inadequate idea of the mistress. The furniture was incongruous, and everything was ill-matched—for Mrs. Pullens was a frequenter of sales, and, like many other liberal-minded ladies, never allowed a bargain to pass, whether she required the articles or not. Her dress was the same; there was always something to wonder at; caps that had been bought ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... delighted, foreseeing that the possession of such an article would increase his prestige enormously, and after several vain attempts he actually succeeded in screwing it into his own eye. Anything more incongruous than the old warrior looked with an eye-glass I never saw. Eye-glasses do not go well with leopard-skin cloaks and ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... arms groped stealthily around the pillars destined to avenge him. Ah! how calm, how holy, all outside of my heart seems! How in contrast with that charnel-house yonder vision of peaceful loveliness appears as incongruous as the nightingales which the soul of Sophocles heard singing in the grove of the Furies? After to-day will the world ever look quite the same to me? Thirty-three years have brought me swiftly to the last fatal page; and shall the hand falter ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... sexual magnetism of their own. Such men are generally more or less conscious of the influence, and the result is either a vague appreciation, which will make the male wonder why he gets on so well with the invert, or else the influence will be realized to be something incongruous and unnatural, and will be resented accordingly. Sometimes, indeed, the reciprocated feeling (circumstance and opportunity permitting) will prove strong enough to induce sexual relations. Reason will then generally overpower instinct, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... oppresses one with a strange incongruity; the charm of realism is wanting; it needs a population out of one of Watteau's pictures,—clean and deft as the painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to—sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. And the stiff parterres, terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a scene. If, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... age; affording an apt exemplification of his own character, in which piecemeal fragments of Roman virtue, and attachment to feudal state—abstract love of liberty, and practice of tyranny—formed as incongruous a compound. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... on Mrs. Amherst's delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and grace—looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to go, saying, as her hand met Amherst's, "Tonight, then, you must tell me all about those poor Dillons," he had the sense of having penetrated so far into her intimacy that a new ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... not whether, after his death, the good bishop's bones reposed beneath some gorgeous tomb, bedizened with the incongruous half-Pagan statues of the Renaissance; but this at least is certain, that Rondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument more enduring than of marble or of brass, more graceful and more curiously wrought than ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... earth, and for a blissful moment felt the sweetness of sleep before it overpowered him. In the morning, he seemed to hear the shriek of his alarm clock for hours before he could come up from the deep places into which he had plunged. All sorts of incongruous adventures happened to him between the first buzz of the alarm and the moment when he was enough awake to put out his hand and stop it. He dreamed, for instance, that it was evening, and he had gone to see Enid as usual. While she was ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... traces of some remote cataclysmal period, registering thus its throes and turmoils. The blue sky, seen beyond a gaunt profile of one of the farther summits that defined its craggy serrated edge against the ultimate distances of the western heavens, seemed of a singularly suave tint, incongruous with the savagery of the scene, which clouds and portents of storm might better have befitted. The little graveyard, which John Dundas discerned with recognizing eyes, albeit they had never before rested upon it, was revealed suddenly, lying high on the opposite side of the gorge. No frost glimmered ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... are distinctly elegant and effective. Occasionally we find in one piece of furniture a combination of the three styles which Chippendale most affected at different periods—Louis XV., Chinese and Gothic—and it cannot honestly be said that the result is as incongruous as might have been expected. Some of his most elegant and attractive work is derived directly from the French, and we cannot doubt that the inspiration of his famous ribbon-backed chair came directly from some of the more artistic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... something in the glance of those eyes that made the Chief Magistrate sit uneasily on his leather cushion. He betook himself to making all kinds of incongruous marks upon a sheet of paper that ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... of having separate divisions; the one including ancient and the other modern geography, to that of uniting both under the same alphabetical arrangement. When the title of this work is considered, it is somewhat incongruous that the account of places should be inserted under the modern names, and a mere reference under that of the ancient. These accounts appear to be in general correct, but they are in our judgment too brief to be satisfactory. As the above writer says he prefers two alphabets to ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... observed, it seems to me, this incongruous plant, I proceed to ask myself, over it, M. Figuier's question, 'Qu'est-ce c'est qu'un Pensee?' Is this a violet—or a pansy—or a ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... considerate than Dr. Holmes, always dares to be as funny as he can, and the wicked glee with which he groups persons incongruous and antipathetic and shows them doing things impossible to them, and makes pictures of them, is a thing to shock the Gradgrinds and dismay the Chadbands. The book is printed in two colors to divert the reader's mind from the jokes, lest laughter ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... on to her head, and brown boots with the flattest heels conceivable. Add to this a Scotch woolen muffler, and a pair of woolen gloves, and you have a mental picture of the second traveler—a truly incongruous ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... man is surely most troubled; griefs gone, still rankling; nor-strength yet in his limbs, passion yet in his heart-reconciled to what loom nearest in the prospect,—the armchair and the palsied head. Well! life is a quaint puzzle. Bits the most incongruous join into each other, and the scheme thus gradually becomes symmetrical and clear; when, lo! as the infant claps his hands and cries, 'See! see! the puzzle is made out!' all the pieces are swept back into the box,—black box with the gilded nails. Ho! Lionel, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no more. Over them, we find the wrecks of a former world—once as beautiful, as thickly peopled, but more thoughtless and more wicked than the present, which was hurled into one general chaos, and its component, but incongruous parts, amalgamated in awful mockery by the deluge—that tremendous evidence of the wrath of Heaven. But it has long passed away; and o'er the relics of former creation, o'er the kneaded mass of man in ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sank gracefully, and rested in a pose of languid indifference that was fascinating in itself, but at this moment for some inexplicable reason peculiarly aggravating to the man. It may be that her apparent ease at a critical period in their fortunes appealed to him as hatefully incongruous; it may be that the gracious femininity of her, her desirability as a woman, thus revealed by the lissome lassitude of her body, emphasized the fact that she was a creature created for joy and dalliance, not for ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... simplicity. But it amused him, too; in a world of shirking and shuffling, not to speak of downright dishonesty, it struck the humorous note of the incongruous. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... atmosphere had been to paralyse his simple and sturdy faculties; and his face had grown unintelligent during the process. More than once Chris had been seized with internal laughter, in spite of the tragedy; the rustic squire was so strangely incongruous with the situation. But he ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... to be. It is opinion, in the last resort, that governs every where,—under an absolute monarchy quite as determinedly as under a liberal polity like ours or England's. There is a large party in France, composed of the most incongruous materials, which has the profoundest interest in misrepresenting the policy of the Imperial government, and which is full of men of culture and intellect,—men whose labors, half-performed though they are, must have considerable effect ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... He did not want to talk about the fire. There was something incongruous, almost unholy, in having it discussed here. It jangled on his nerves. For there in front of him in the fireplace burned a mimic pit like the one into which the martyr Steve had fallen; and there before him on the couch sat the girl! What was there so familiar about ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... of an invitation to one of those reunions or seances at the house, in a fashionable quarter, of his distant connection, Lady Barbara Grille, whereat it was his hostess's humour to gather together those many birds of alien feather and incongruous habit that will flock from the hedgerows to the least little flattering crumb of attention. And scarce one of them but thinks the simple feast is spread for him alone. And with so cheap a bait may ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... their black kinsfolk with greater intolerance than a white man would do. His little page is devoted to him, apparently, which speaks well for his treatment of him. Altogether, the man is a curious mixture of incongruous qualities, and unless I am deceived in him will give me food for observation during ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the mournful gloom of a side street. All these vast rooms, twenty and four-and-twenty feet high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier tables mingling with modern bric-a-brac. And things become abominable when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there you no longer find an article of furniture, no longer a hanging, nothing ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... of our country the public business which devolves on the heads of the several Executive Departments has greatly increased. In some respects the distribution of duties among them seems to be incongruous, and many of these might be transferred from one to another with advantage to the public interests. A more auspicious time for the consideration of this subject by Congress, with a view to system in the organization of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... their time and arrangements in depositing the mortal remains of the loved in the grave. The black scarfs and chapeaux of the undertakers and their prescriptive orders were strangely dissonant to the group of Americans collected at the obsequies of a young countryman, and seemed incongruous when associated with the simple Protestant ceremonial performed in another tongue. Under the direction of those sable officials we entered the mourning coaches and followed the plumed hearse. It is an impressive ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... trusted, and faithful servants. It was a sensible thing to do in the circumstances, as Partab Singh had manoeuvred them, he owned, but the idea shocked him almost as much as it would have done a native. It was so incongruous. ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... struck out, without remorse or mercy, all except a mere mention of the subjects alluded to. The contiguity of lighter matter demands this sacrifice; not that I am one of those who deem a cheerful face and a prayerful heart incongruous: there is danger in a man, however religious, when his brow lowers, and his cheek is stern; so did Cromwell murder Charles; so did Mary (though bigoted, sincere,) consign Cranmer to the flames and Jane to the scaffold: innocence and mirth are near of kin, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... how far they could deviate from the original model. In Bordeaux, this is very striking. It appears as if the new city ought to have been built by itself on another site, leaving the gloomy recesses of the ancient city to themselves, for all that now surrounds it is incongruous and inharmonious. ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... to such perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters at the Harlot's Funeral, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful assemblage of depraved ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... never pass through this impressive portal, surmounted by the gilded equestrian figure of Louis XII, without a feeling of joy in the spaciousness and beauty of this wide sunny court. At a first glance we were bewildered by its varied and somewhat incongruous architecture, the wing of Louis XII, with its fine, open gallery; that of Charles d'Orleans, with its richly decorative sculpture; the Chapel of St. Calais, and the modern and less beautiful wing of Gaston, the work of Francis ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... harsh, incongruous sound startled the white stillnesses, in the lifting of an eyelid the little conqueror vanished. One of the canoeists stepped ashore, picked up the body of the slain mink, and threw it into the canoe. As the two resumed their ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... completion, everybody was tired out, and everything had been going badly. One of Fenwick's most beautiful scenes—carefully studied from the Trianon gardens on the spot—had been, in his opinion, hopelessly spoilt in order to bring in some ridiculous 'business' wholly incongruous with the setting and date of the play. He had had a fierce altercation on the stage with the actor-manager. The cast, meanwhile, dispersed at the back of the stage or in the wings, looked on maliciously or chatted among themselves; while every now and then one or other of the antagonists would call ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... has thrown a stone into a frog pond, or fired a shot into a covey of birds, can form an idea of the effect produced by these incongruous words, in the midst of the general attention. It made Gringoire shudder as though it had been an electric shock. The prologue stopped short, and all heads turned tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from being disconcerted by this, saw, in this incident, a good opportunity for reaping his ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... cavaliers in cuirasses a world too wide for them, and alpargatas, trotting up a village street. The alpargata is the mountain-shoe of canvas, with a hempen sole, worn by the Basque peasants. The association of surcoats of mail and rope slippers is incongruous; but what does that reck? Those ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... her eyes registered in memory the casual movements without, while her consciousness was occupied only with her soul's experience. But soon this period of blissful inaction was sharply terminated. Her still watching eyes brought her a message so incongruous with her immediate surroundings as to shake her out of her waking dream. She became suddenly conscious of a nineteenth-century intruder amid her almost ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... shaped rooms jutted out in many quarters; odd stairs climbed up in several directions; towers and turrets were added to the roof; passages, some narrow, some broad, connected the new buildings with the old. The whole made an incongruous and yet beautiful effect, the new rooms possessing the advantages and comforts which modern builders put into their houses, and the older part of the house the quaint devices and thick, wainscoted walls and deep, mullioned windows of the times which ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... have not reached the age of thirty-nine, without a stain upon my reputation, thank God! to compromise myself now, even for the empire of the Great Mogul. You and I are of an age when we both know the meaning of words. For an ecclesiastic, you certainly have ideas that are very incongruous. Fie! ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... Ruth, in pursuit of a sing-song girl! The idea was so incongruous that a cold little smile parted her lips. It seemed as if each time her imagination reached out investingly, an invisible lash beat it back. Still, she knew instinctively that all of Sidney Carton's life had not been put upon ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention, ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca—an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope—down to his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... served, misinterpreting the designs of the thriving dealer, forbade him the house; when he silenced their scruples by offering the girl his hand in marriage. Ill-starred Polly Lumm! Unhappy Girard! She accepted his offer; and in July, 1777, the incongruous two, being united in ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... is separated into small parcels, which are tied at intervals of about two inches, to the end, with thread, and others tie it together behind, after our manner, and stick branches of the cypressus thyoides in it. Thus dressed, they have a truly savage and incongruous appearance, but this is much heightened when they assume, what may be called, their monstrous decorations. These consist of an endless variety of carved wood masks or vizors, applied on the face, or to the upper part of the head or forehead. Some of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... arches that had fallen down, and now lay neglected upon the ground. In other places, the remains of ancient temples stood built in with the houses of the street, with market women at their stalls below, forming a strange and incongruous spectacle of ancient magnificence and splendor, surrounded and overwhelmed with modern poverty and degradation. As the carriage drove through these places, Rollo and Charles stood up in it, supporting themselves by pressing their knees against the front seat, and holding on to each other. ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... not actually consider him insignificant at all. She was rather interested in this plain, ordinary-looking youth with a lofty manner and an air of authority that seemed so incongruous, and yet, even while she laughed at him for them, impressed her in spite of herself. He was not quick at seeing a joke—especially against himself—and she enjoyed teasing and provoking him as she would not have done in the case of ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... dread, for parting from her uncle necessarily involved parting from his son. She hated him; still, to lose sight of him altogether would be very hard to bear. To go with Philippus and live with him as his sister would never do; nay, it struck her as something inconceivable, strangely incongruous. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be read, let us abstain from further unlawful canvassing for the votes of our readers. It is an incongruous thing for us to be thus piling up our own discourses about ourselves: we ought rather to wait for your judgment on ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... wealthy engineer, who on his way home from Europe had been visiting his friend Dr. Hamilton of Ballybrosna. His curiosity now was roused by Dan's evident eagerness to acquire materials for the drawing of diagrams, the pursuit striking him as so strangely incongruous with the aspect of the brown-faced stalwart ragged youth, that he stepped inside when the place was empty to make inquiries on the subject. The post-master's information was to the effect that "the O'Beirnes above at the forge had always had the name of bein' very dacint respectable people ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... of the dazzling sunshine that, as they came along, had seemed so unsympathetic. For here was a radiance equally incongruous! Here was faith shining like a solitary star on a dark night! Here was joy, singing her song, like the nightingale, amidst the deepest gloom! It was as though a merry peal of bells was being rung on ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... coat was a credit to the sporting house that had turned it out. His cartridge belt was new and squeaky, and he had the last patents in waterproof match safes and skinning knives. That goneness at his stomach, and the strange sensations up and down his spine, seemed incongruous in such valorous trappings. But he had them unmistakably, and they kept him cringing close against the wall as though ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... curtains concealed the delicate tracery and the interlacing columns of the Venetian windows. Beneath lay the Moorish garden, entered from the street by an arched gate-way, over which long trails of ivy hung. Beautiful in itself, the Moorish garden was an incongruous appendage to a Gothic palace. One of the Guinigi, commanding for the Emperor Charles V. in Spain, saw Granada and the Alhambra. On his return to Lucca, he built this architectural plaisance on a bare plot of ground, used ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... Eppes Creek, and soon we could not do otherwise than linger; for we wakened one morning to find the stream frozen over, and Gadabout presenting the incongruous spectacle of a houseboat fast ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... those fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim? Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. And whence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how out of place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because the Gothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere barbaric mediaevalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... at the snow peaks incandescent in dawn when the first Invader patrols trailed by below. Our equipment was a miracle of hot food and basic medication. Not pastimes, though; and by the second day of hiding, I was thinking too much. There was Clyde, an Inca chief with a thread of black mustache and incongruous hazel eyes, my friend and ICEG mate—what made him tick? Where did he get his delight in the bright eyes of danger? How did he gear his daredevil valor, not to the icy iron and obligatory killing, but to the big music and stars over the gorge? But in the Corps, we don't ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... movement of incongruous feelings that I read the first name on the list. I had no wish to look again on my own handiwork; my flesh recoiled from the idea; and how could I be sure what reception he designed to give me? The cure was in my own hand; I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... see them yet, those rows of shabby and incongruous volumes, the contents of which were transferred to our hungry little brains. Some of them are close at hand now, and I love their ragged corners, their dog's-eared pages that show the pressure of childish thumbs, and their dear old backs, broken ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the mist, and above them the later stars still glimmered. That pale interval over, the picture began to enlarge and fill up so fast that at every new peep I could have found enough to look at for an hour. Imperceptibly my candles became the only incongruous part of the morning, the dark places in my room all melted away, and the day shone bright upon a cheerful landscape, prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its massive tower, threw a softer train of shadow on the view than seemed compatible with its rugged character. But so from rough ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the play of the Fall of Man (Der Suendenfall). The subject is treated after the manner of Hans Sachs, but with this difference, that the simple-minded old Nuremberger saw nothing incongruous in making Cain and Abel say their catechism, and Cain go away from the examination to fight with the low boys in the street; whereas the author of Der Suendenfall is advisedly irreverent. Another proof, if one were wanted, that he was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... is composed of the most dissimilar things, the most unforeseen, the most contradictory, the most incongruous; it is merciless, without sequence or connection, full of inexplicable, illogical, and contradictory catastrophes, such as can only be classed as miscellaneous facts. This is why the artist, having chosen his subject, can only select such characteristic details as are of use to it, from this ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... at first when a young British officer came out and said, "Toppin' morning," or, "Any news from the Dardanelles?" There was something incongruous about this habitation of French chiteaux by British officers with their war-kit. The strangeness of it made me laugh in early days of first impressions, when I went through the rooms of one of those old historic houses, well within ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... accorded with his meagre frame. It was secretive, miserly. A black stock covered a withered collar. A dingy silk tile was tightly packed over a rusted black wig. Boots hid their tops under the skirts of his coat, and the coat in turn was partly concealed under a black shawl. But there was one incongruous item. Boots, coat, hat and all were crusted with brine. He had evidently passed through salty spray, had braved the deep, this shrinking old man in frayed black. Just now his eyes, normally moist and avaricious, were parched dry by fear, as though a flame had passed over ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... The question is not as he puts it, were those "audiences incapable of receiving the delights which a cultivated mind derives from the gradual development of a story, the just dependence of its parts upon each other, the minute beauties of language, and the absence of every thing incongruous or indecorous?" They may have been so, though we do not believe they were. But the question is, are Shakspeare's Plays, beyond all that ever were written, distinguished for those very excellences, and free from almost all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... what I love I do not mean to lose!" added she, with an inconsequence that fitted ill with her resolution regarding the Intendant. But Angelique was one who reconciled to herself all professions, however opposite or however incongruous. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... continues the Doctor, "as a work of art, in a critical, not religious light, I must venture to affirm, that the subject of this Fourth Book was foreign and heterogeneous, and the addition of it is injudicious, ill-placed, and incongruous, as any of those similar images we meet with in Pulci or Ariosto." The addition of a Fourth Book to a poem, previously consisting of Three, is not an image at all, look at it how you will, and cannot therefore be compared with "any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... feel that I know the truth about anything till I've read them both!" said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... on one of the slippery haircloth chairs, facing the mantel where the single candle threw its tiny light afar. Little by little the room crept into shadowy relief—the melodeon in the corner, the what-not, with its burden of incongruous ornaments, and even the easel bearing the crayon portrait of the former mistress of the ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... in the Toy Shop, took off her hat in front of the mirror and saw her red cheeks. She set the cyclamen safely in a warm corner. The four elephants with their fragrant freight of violets made an exotic and incongruous addition to the Christmas scene in ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... appropriate, and the hearers came under the influence of the earnest look from the deeply-set eyes and of the absolute integrity of purpose and of devotion to principle which were behind the thought and the words of the speaker. In place of a "wild and woolly" talk, illumined by more or less incongruous anecdotes; in place of a high-strung exhortation of general principles or of a fierce protest against Southern arrogance, the New Yorkers had presented to them a calm but forcible series of well-reasoned considerations upon which their ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... faculty and told a story in much the same solemn manner, bringing out the point as if it were something entirely irrelevant and unimportant and casually remembered. The subject of this sketch, however, was the only member of the family in whom a love for the droll and incongruous was a controlling disposition. As is frequently the case, a family trait was intensified in one individual to the point where talent passes over ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... family, and to pay for these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board." This image of a gentlewoman keeping a tavern and looking out for boarders, seems, from the point of view to which I allude, not at all incongruous. It will be observed that the lady in question was shrewd; it was probable that she was substantially educated, and of reputable life, and it is certain that she was energetic. These qualities would make ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... I trust, now shown that all these circumstances related by Chaucer, so far from being hopelessly incongruous, are, on the contrary, harmoniously consistent;—that they all tend to prove that the day of the journey to Canterbury could not have been later than the 18th of April;—that the times of observation were certainly 10 A.M. and 4 P.M.;—that the "arke ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... enough imagination to realize types of excellence altogether differing from their own. It is this, much more than vanity, that leads them to esteem the types of excellence to which they themselves approximate as the best, and tastes and habits that are altogether incongruous with their own as futile and contemptible."] Be sure that you are saying what you are saying for the other's good, and not to give vent to your own irritability or selfishness or sense of superiority; say what must be said sweetly or gravely, never patronizingly ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... funny that these maples should grow so tall on this mountain top!" "It is funny to think that James, who now pays his addresses to me, should once have been in love with my youngest sister." The foregoing illustrations are not more incongruous than those we daily hear. Odd, strange, peculiar, unusual, represent some of the ideas intended to be conveyed by ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... should have been born among buildings raised by Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it was surely ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... smiled them firmly away, to the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favor? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on the sidewalk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen's admiration was at its highest, however, when she rode in the annual steeplechase ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... you, O man! thus to find glory in an act, performed by a nation, which you condemn as a crime or a barbarism, when committed by an individual? In what vain conceit of wisdom and virtue do you find this incongruous morality? Where is it declared that God, who is no respecter of persons, is a respecter of multitudes? Whence do you draw these partial laws of an impartial God? Man is immortal; but nations are mortal. Man has a higher destiny than nations. Can nations ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... Seventeen-thousand-five-hundred-dollar ambassador! Particularly for America. Why it is the most ludicrous spectacle, the most inconsistent and incongruous spectable, contrivable by even the most diseased imagination. It is a billionaire in a paper collar, a king in a breechclout, an archangel in a tin halo. And, for pure sham and hypocrisy, the salary is just the match ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the thought of him that writ. What promised he to love of ease and wealth, When men should read and kindle at his wit. But here decay eats up the book by stealth, While it, like some old maiden, solemnly, Hugs its incongruous virginity! ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... first time it struck Abner as incongruous that another man should call Rosalie "his wife," although the fact of her remarriage had been made sufficiently plain to him. He accepted it as he would an earthquake, or any other dislocation, with his usual tolerant smile, and held out ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... interval elapsed ere she stood in Isabella's presence, Marie knew not. The most incongruous thoughts floated, one after another, through her bewildered brain—most vivid amongst them all, hers and her husband's fatal secret: had it transpired? Was he sentenced, and she thus summoned to share his fate? And then, when partially relieved by the thought, that such a discovery had never ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... wheel and a saddle might easily be cut. Bicycle lanterns, which resemble glowworms, should furnish decoration. If possible, a bicycle tea should be given out of doors, where outing costumes would not be incongruous. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... introduced have a relation to the adjacent parts and to the whole suitable to the design. Here the thing is real, is true, is human; a thing to be thought about. It has its place amongst other phenomena, with which, however apparently incongruous, it is yet vitally ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... States were in a condition that could not be safely permitted to continue for any indefinite period. It would be inconsistent with the purpose of the war, incongruous to the American system and idea of government, and antagonistic to American political, or even commercial or social autonomy. Naturally upon Mr. Lincoln would fall largely the duty and responsibility of formulating and inaugurating ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... weather-proof, so we lived in comparative luxury. Meals were provided for us at Katcherofsky's hospitable board, and on the evening of our arrival we sat down to a supper to which the kind-hearted old ispravnik had invited several "politicals." And here, for the second time, I witnessed the incongruous sight of a Chief of Police amicably hobnobbing with the exiles in his custody. And when one of the latter remarked at table, "I can always feel cheerful in Katcherofsky's house, even in Verkhoyansk," I could well believe ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... he would not take the trouble to be gracious to her, but he was always gracious to European ladies and there was no escape. The British polish over the Oriental suavity seemed to her a decidedly incongruous mixture. She ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... attractive. These buildings originally served many purposes—cathedral close, market and custom house, and even at times as bear-garden or zoo. To my thinking, the outside of the cathedral is far more attractive than the inside, which suffers from over-decoration in the incongruous style peculiar to Continental churches. I shall not conduct you personally round the Church ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... to some of the officers and found at once that his patient was a subject of deep interest to them. They felt sure (they told him) that he had a story. His polished manners and bright and cultivated conversation seemed to them incongruous with the duties of a private soldier, and they laughingly said that they suspected they were entertaining an angel unawares. Yet his duties were performed with the utmost faithfulness and efficiency. He had never been ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... with a wry wistfulness, was only comic in its incongruous coat of grease. But I was under no temptation to smile. I had to confine my mind pretty closely to the general principle, and rather studiously to ignore the particular instance, before I could bring myself to answer the almost infantile ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... until 1648, when the troubles of the Fronde commencing, its habitues were dispersed or absorbed by political interests. The presiding genius of this salon, the Marquise de Rambouillet, was the very model of the woman who can act as anamalgam to the most incongruous elements; beautiful, but not preoccupied by coquetry, or passion; an enthusiastic admirer of talent, but with no pretensions to talent on her own part; exquisitely refined in language and manners, but warm and generous withal; not given to entertain her guests with her ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... character of Bracciolini, I may glance aside for a moment to observe that nothing can be more incongruous than that his statue, which his countrymen originally placed in the portico of the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence (because he had praised them in his history of their city and abused all foreigners), should have been transferred in 1560 by the ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... admitted that the fare was a disgrace to the state. From that point it was easy to go on and agree with the short man and the tall man that the prison was mismanaged generally and that a man was lucky in being able to get away from such a place—no matter whether he was a guard or a prisoner. The incongruous ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... or maintained that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. But he is the advocate of a philosophical method which makes the belief in the existence of an immaterial principle superfluous and incongruous; he not only acknowledges no such distinction between the phenomena of mind and those of matter as to require the hypothesis of a free intelligence to account for it; he not only regards the ascertained laws of coexistence and succession in material ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... a dull chapter, nor, indeed, a dull page in the book; but the author has so carefully worked up his subject that the exciting deeds of his heroes are never incongruous ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... fashion to laugh at the East, and despise the Turks and all their ways, making Grand Viziers of barbers, and setting waiters in high places, with the utmost contempt for anything reasonable—all so incongruous and chance-ruled. In truth, all things in our very midst go on in the Turkish manner; crooked men are set in straight places, and straight people in crooked places, just the same as if we had all been dropped promiscuously ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... Congress! destined to unite All that's incongruous, all that's opposite. I speak not of the Sovereigns—they're alike, A common coin as ever mint could strike; But those who sway the puppets, pull the strings, Have more of motley than their heavy kings. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... cities—as for instance the ancient structure that spans the Tiber just below the tomb of Hadrian, or among modern works the spider web engineering feat of Brooklyn bridge—but if in the wilderness we run across them, there is something incongruous about them, and they disturb. Strange to say, there is the exception of high-flung trellis-viaducts bridging the chasm of mountain canyons. Maybe it is exactly on account of their unpretentious, plain utility; or is it that they reconcile by their ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... the other books. For in the greater number of passages which may be cited for and against this theory the objector may argue that the generally extravagant praise bestowed upon Soma through the Veda is in any one case merely particularized, and that it is not incongruous to say of the divine soma-plant, "he lights the dark nights," when one reads in general that he creates all things, including the gods. On the other hand, the advocate of the theory may reply that everything which does not apply to the moon-god Soma may be used metaphorically ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... the brave Indian who came on. There was nothing of retreat in his make-up. He had started to charge the fort, and take it. The fort was still untaken, and he was still alive—two things that seemed utterly incongruous to his mind. ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... wherever they caught the light; the shadowy, mysterious vaulted roof; the white stalactites that hung down thence to touch the stalagmites as they rose up from the floor, and formed with them endless vistas of stately colonnades, all were oddly incongruous with the drunken, bloated faces of the distillers. Rick could not have put his thought into words, but it seemed to him that when men had degraded themselves like this, even inanimate nature is something higher and nobler. "Sermons in stones" ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Beard, mingled together in the Cabinet des Fees with Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin's wondrous lamp; for that was an uncritical age, and its spirit breathed hot and cold, east and west, from all quarters of the globe at once, confusing the traditions and tales of all times and countries into one incongruous mass of fable, as much tangled and knotted as that famous pound of flax which the lassie in one of these Tales is expected to spin into an even wool within four-and-twenty hours. No poverty of invention or want of power on the part ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... these buildings, at one place darkened till they looked gigantic, at another lightened till they appeared ethereal; these crowded groups, seeming one great moving mass gleaming at this point in radiant light, obscured at that in thick shadow, made up a whole so incongruous and yet so beautiful, so grotesque and yet so sublime, that the scene looked, for the moment, more like some inhabited meteor, half eclipsed by its propinquity to earth, than ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... suggested, and coming so thick withal, that our powers might be swamped but for the prodigious momentum or gale of thought that carries us through. I am aware that several such passages have often been censured as mere jumbles of incongruous metaphors; but they do not so strike any reader who is so unconscientious of rhetorical formalities as to care only for the meaning of what he reads; though I admit that perhaps no mental current less deep and mighty than Shakespeare's would waft us ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... amity was pressed with still greater zeal, while the French envoy to England was instructed to offer Alencon to Elizabeth in place of his brother. And now were the wits of the statesmen on both sides of the channel exercised to find good reasons why the match would be no incongruous one. Unfortunately, Alencon, as already stated, was short even for his age; but this was no insuperable obstacle. "Nay," said Catharine de' Medici to Sir Thomas Smith, when she was sounding him respecting his mistress's ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... sarcasm and irony, with a keenness of application and effect rarely equalled. But, in all candour, it may be added, that just as a profusion of figures and metaphors sometimes tempted this great orator into incongruous images and coarse analogies, so his passion for irony was occasionally too intense. Hence, there are occasions where his pungency is embittered into acrimony, strength degenerates into vulgarism, and the vehemence of satire is infuriated with the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... saw that Mac and Potts knew. For the first time the Big Chimney men felt a barrier between them and that one who had been the common bond, keeping the incongruous allied and friendly. Only Nig ran in and out, unchilled by the imminence of the Colonel's withdrawal ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... plants, and if the law of intermixture of distinct races, or distinct species of the race, has been truly stated, the important argument to be drawn from it, which interests all Americans inquiring into the future of Mexico, is, that the present incongruous fragments of population which the internal disorders of Spain have set loose in Mexico can never be transformed into a homogeneous nationality, nor can sufficiently permanent elements of strength be found in this political chaos to constitute ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... of handsome cream-colored oxen in the suburbs: but we saw also in the highways, small, rough-coated donkeys overburdened with panniers of fruit; tall, bony horses mismatched with diminutive donkeys; incongruous teams composed of a cow and a donkey, or a large ox and a small cow; and a team even more grotesquely made up of a horse, a cow, and a donkey. We saw the elite of the city elegantly dressed in the latest ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... this unwholesome, gaslit building with its atmosphere of cheese and bacon. He would have been noticeably good-looking upon the cricket field or in any gathering of people belonging to the other side of life. Here he seemed almost a curiously incongruous figure. He passed through the glass-paned door and stood respectfully before his employer. Mr. Weatherley—it was absurd, but he scarcely knew how to make his suggestion—fidgetted for a moment and coughed. ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... furled as this ship bored on, answering to the steady throb of what could only be an engine. And his puzzlement held. A Viking longboat powered by motor? The mixture was incongruous. ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... in danger of acquiring a conforming attitude of tolerance toward the experience of being unsuccessful. Therefore it is particularly momentous to the pupil, should the school record ascribed to him prove frequently to be incongruous with his potential powers. It has already been pointed out in these pages that the failures frequently tend to designate specific difficulties rather than what is actually the negative of 'ability plus application.' This does not at all deny that in some instances there appears to be the ability ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... rehearsal was nearing its completion, everybody was tired out, and everything had been going badly. One of Fenwick's most beautiful scenes—carefully studied from the Trianon gardens on the spot—had been, in his opinion, hopelessly spoilt in order to bring in some ridiculous 'business' wholly incongruous with the setting and date of the play. He had had a fierce altercation on the stage with the actor-manager. The cast, meanwhile, dispersed at the back of the stage or in the wings, looked on maliciously or chatted among themselves; while every now and then one or other of the antagonists ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the requisite amount of food elements for proper nutrition, palatably prepared. These should be adapted to the season and also to the family purse. There should be an agreeable and pleasing change from day to day, with never too great variety at one meal, and no incongruous association of foods that do not harmonize, upon the same bill of fare. The amount of time and strength available for the preparation of the meal must also receive consideration. The problem would be easier of solution ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... art, intrinsically beautiful apart from its constructive use, would require a corresponding treatment in the setting of the doors and windows; but the most of what is commonly considered ornamental work, in such cases, is wholly incongruous with walls and ceilings of lath and plaster and floors of cheap boards. I know you will paste mouldy paper to the walls and spread dirty carpets on the floors (beg your pardon, I mean the paper will be mouldy before you know it, and if you ever saw a wool carpet that had ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... a strange and incongruous sight. Between the hiding party and the black scout of the savages there ran a high wall of dazzling green of many tints, bright flowers hung clustering down, the dazzling sun shone from the vivid blue sky, and every now and then ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... she could hardly keep from smiling at the idea, so wildly incongruous with the scene she had really undergone, of looking out for admirers during a ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... lean, rigidly set up man, with merry fire in his eye, and an instantly obvious gift for being obeyed. He sat at an enormous desk, but would have looked more at ease in a tent, or on horseback. The three long rows of campaign ribbons looked incongruous beside the bunch of flowers that somebody had crammed into a Damascus vase on the desk, with the estimable military notion of making the ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... perhaps itself borrowed from a higher-class code of taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance of this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily wooded areas; so that it is by no means ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... is surely most troubled; griefs gone, still rankling; nor-strength yet in his limbs, passion yet in his heart-reconciled to what loom nearest in the prospect,—the armchair and the palsied head. Well! life is a quaint puzzle. Bits the most incongruous join into each other, and the scheme thus gradually becomes symmetrical and clear; when, lo! as the infant claps his hands and cries, 'See! see! the puzzle is made out!' all the pieces are swept back into the box,—black ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... staircases, the lordly gallery, with its dark old portraits and vast fireplaces, the dim-lighted nooks where one could hide alone and dream away the present; but in the end, reality threw scorn upon such pleasure. Aston Hall was a mere architectural relic, incongruous and meaningless amid its surroundings; the pathos of its desecrated dignity made him wish that it might be destroyed, and its place fittingly occupied by some People's Palace, brand new, aglare with ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... Monsieur Breant, who had been one of the cardinal's principal servants, and who still remained the head custodian of the palace, was standing surveying the scene with a curiosity dulled by long familiarity. He was unaware that a sombrely clad hunchback, quite an incongruous figure in the merry crowd, was making for him, until the hunchback, coming along beside him, touched him on the arm and called him by name: ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... these districts, but their tyrannical and injudicious conduct stunted the growth of the infant colonies, and little progress was made till the religious dissensions of Boston swelled their population. Violent and even fatal dissensions, however, distracted this incongruous community, till the government of Massachusetts assumed the sway over it, and re-established order and prosperity. Gorges and Mason disputed for many years the rights of authority with the new rulers; ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... turban bobbed about among the rocks, with the large white face of the Nonconformist minister smiling from beneath it. He had a thick lance with which to support his injured leg, and this murderous crutch combined with his peaceful appearance to give him a most incongruous aspect—as of a sheep which has suddenly developed claws. Behind him were two negroes with a basket and ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the inevitable result of those which it has already committed; for, through its Constitution, bad is changed to worse, and the social edifice, already half in ruins through the clumsy havoc that is effected in it, will fall in completely under the weight of the incongruous or extravagant constructions which ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and the old vaulted chambers of the Dominican monastery at Perth echoed with sounds that would seem incongruous in such a home of austerity, but that the disturbed state of Scotland rendered it the habit of her kings to attach their palaces to convents, that they themselves might benefit by the "peace of the Church," which was in general accorded to all ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... story thus well illustrates one way of the mediaeval mind with such things—the way of combining at will incongruous stories, of accepting with no, or with little, criticism any tale of wonder that it happened to find in books, of using its own language, applying its own manners, supposing its own clothing, weapons, and so forth to ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... bed, and then with slow steps climbed up to her little attic room. It was cold and comfortless enough, bare of all luxuries, but even here the walls were lined with books, and Erica's little iron bedstead looked somewhat incongruous surrounded as it was with dingy-looking volumes, dusky old legal books, works of reference, books atheistical, theological, metaphysical, or scientific. On one shelf, amid this strangely heterogeneous collection, she kept her own particular treasures—Brian's ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... of natures in the world—and very noble, elevated natures too—whom love never comes near. You might have sought Cowper with the intention of loving him, and you would have looked at him, pitied him, and left him, forced away by a sense of the impossible, the incongruous, as the crew were borne from their drowning comrade by ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... my windows is the barn where my Catholic men are having High Mass, and where in half an hour, if alive, we shall have our service too. There was a good precedent for stables, I believe, 1915 years ago, so we do not view it as incongruous, but I understand that High Mass is unusual, and no doubt a great honour to the Regiment. I hear that our leave does not come off till January 6th. That puts me into the trenches to-morrow night again, for a short time. Last night, about 10.30 o'clock, I was snuggled in my ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... Prior's proposal, and the incongruous pair set out together,—the sober-paced friar on the convent donkey, and Ringan on his shaggy pony,—both looking to civilised eyes equally rough and unkempt. At the gates they heard that King Rene had the day before set forth on his way to Aix, ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it frequently enough later on the sight of a railway-station in or near a native village always seemed strangely incongruous. Do not for a moment imagine that by railway-station I mean anything so elaborate as the merest village station at home; except at Kantara even the best and largest of ours did not rise to such heights. The platform, if there was one, was of sleepers piled almost haphazard one upon another with ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... beautiful bay racer she had given to Lassiter. Venters uttered a savage outcry. Then the small, wiry, frog-like shape of the second rider, and the ease and grace of his seat in the saddle—things so strikingly incongruous—grew more and more familiar in ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... without remorse or mercy, all except a mere mention of the subjects alluded to. The contiguity of lighter matter demands this sacrifice; not that I am one of those who deem a cheerful face and a prayerful heart incongruous: there is danger in a man, however religious, when his brow lowers, and his cheek is stern; so did Cromwell murder Charles; so did Mary (though bigoted, sincere,) consign Cranmer to the flames and Jane to the scaffold: innocence and mirth are near of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... these maples should grow so tall on this mountain top!" "It is funny to think that James, who now pays his addresses to me, should once have been in love with my youngest sister." The foregoing illustrations are not more incongruous than those we daily hear. Odd, strange, peculiar, unusual, represent some of the ideas intended to be conveyed by ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... prize next to the Bible; "Man of the World;" Sterne, especially his "Sentimental Journey;" Macpherson's "Ossian," &c.; these are the glorious models after which I endeavour to form my conduct, and 'tis incongruous, 'tis absurd to suppose that the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame—the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race—he "who can soar above this little scene of things"—can he descend to mind the paltry concerns about which the terraefilial ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... authority such a procedure would be very injurious to health. The slow mastication of a meal in the presence of cheerful company is said to promote healthy digestion—moreover, custom and habit make even the most incongruous things acceptable, therefore the display of tables, crowded with food-stuffs and surrounded by eating, drinking, chattering and perspiring men and women, does not affect us to any sense of the ridiculous or the unseemly. On the ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... with an underlying credulity and seriousness as singularly pathetic as it seemed incongruous to their years and intelligence. Small wonder, however, that in their occupation and environment—living daily in an atmosphere of hope, expectation, and chance, looking forward each morning to the blind stroke of a pick that might bring fortune—they should see signs in nature and hear ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... Burke, like the one, was inexhaustible in resources, so composite and so averse from theory as to appear incongruous, but justified in the result; not formal, not always entirely perspicuous. Webster's mind, like the other, is eminently logical, reduced into principles, orderly, distinct, reconciling abstraction ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... minutes, absolutely unable to come to a decision. He invariably ended by seizing a pencil, closing his eyes tightly, and whirling his pencil round and round over the supper-list until he brought it down at haphazard somewhere. As may be imagined, repasts chosen in this fashion were apt to be somewhat incongruous. After the first decision of chance, Cecil would murmur to the patient waiter, "Some apple-tart to begin with, Charles." Then another whirl, and "some stuffed tomatoes," a third whirl, and "salt fish and parsnips, Charles, please. It's a thing that I positively ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... law' periodically to expand and contract constitutional standards to conform to the Court's conception of what at a particular time constitutes 'civilized decency' and 'fundamental liberty and justice.' * * * [This] 'natural law' formula, [he further contends] * * * should be abandoned as an incongruous excrescence on our Constitution. * * * [The] formula [is] itself a violation of our Constitution, in that it subtly conveys to courts, at the expense of legislatures, ultimate power over public policies in fields where no specific ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... box and went upstairs. For years to come and in the most incongruous surroundings John Penhallow now and then laughed as he saw again the look with which Mrs. Ann regarded the article so essential to Mr. Grey's comfort. She disliked all forms of tobacco use, and the law of the pipe had long ago been settled at Grey Pine as Mrs. Penhallow decreed, ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... he drawled, with that incongruous coast-of-Maine tang to his leisureliness. "I'll match you there, Mr. Locke. I don't care whether you make fifty thousand a year with your music writing, or whether you grind a street-piano with a tin-cup on top. It's nothing to me. I guess we can do without your ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... a loud laugh, stopped suddenly, sat down, and took Nick on his knee. It was an incongruous scene. Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... plot is less in his mind than the moral. But such hybrid productions are apt to fail of their end. If we desire to study philosophy, commend us to the regular documents. We do not wish for truth, as she emerges dripping from the well, to be clothed in the garments of fiction. Such incongruous unions can hardly fail to shock a correct taste, even if the story is managed with tolerable skill. In this instance, we can not highly praise the conduct of the narrative. It is full of improbable combinations. Persons and scenes are brought into juxtaposition, in a manner ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... once has Nathaniel Hawthorne touched the delicate fibres of the heart that thrill again in this memorial grief of his mother's; and, incongruous as is the connection of the following passage out of one of the Twice-Told Tales, it is not hard to trace the origin of the sensibility and insight which prompted it: "It is more probably the fact," so it runs, "that while men are able ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... was as ugly a sight as the world contained. He hated its arid desolation and all the litter of blackened bricks blocking up the site of former feastings and reckless merriment, and, above all, the incongruous aspect of the one gable still standing undemolished, with the zigzag marks of vanished staircases outlined upon its mildewed walls. But, most of all, he shrank from a sight of the one corner still intact where the ghosts of dead memories lingered, ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... the moonlight the grass seemed tipped with hoar frost. Most of the beeches were already bare, but the shoots, clustering round them, like children at their mother's skirts, still retained their leaves red and brown. Among the pines these leaves were as incongruous as a wedding-dress at a funeral. Gavin was standing on grass, but there were patches of heather within sight, and broom, and the leaf of the blaeberry. Where the beeches had drawn up the earth with them as they grew, their roots ran this way and that, ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... tracks remained on the book for a long time, preserved, doubtless, by the paper cover that I put over them. They had the power to recall a thousand things to me, thanks to that peculiarity of my mind that associates the most dissimilar and incongruous images if only once, for a single favorable moment, they have ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... photographs of men, in uniform and out of it, set about the incongruous room; but the girl's eyes were speedily caught and riveted by a full-length presentment of a Punjab cavalryman, which stood, solitary and conspicuous, on the upright piano. She rose and went ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Lord,—a simple, touching melody, followed by the chorale, "How shall I fitly meet Thee and give Thee welcome due," set to the old passion-hymn, "O Haupt, voll Blut und Wunden,"—a solemn and even mournful melody, which at first appears incongruous in the midst of so much jubilation. It is the same melody which Bach frequently uses in different harmonic forms in his "St. Matthew Passion." It is introduced here in the midst of the Christmas festivity for a special purpose. Bitter gives it ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... red turban bobbed about among the rocks, with the large white face of the Nonconformist minister smiling from beneath it. He had a thick lance with which to support his injured leg, and this murderous crutch combined with his peaceful appearance to give him a most incongruous aspect,—as of a sheep which has suddenly developed claws. Behind him were two negroes with a basket and ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... But not less incongruous, behind those walls of Rome, are all of us, bringing our absurd modernnesses, our far-fetched things of civilisation into the solemn, starved, lousy, silent Past! At moments like these I feel that one ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... pretend to understand its architecture. Every one who looked upon it felt that it was lordly and noble; and where one part seemed not to agree with another, the wise and modest dared not to call them incongruous, but presumed that the whole might be constructed on some higher principle of architecture than they yet understood. What helped them to this conclusion was, that no one had ever seen the whole of the edifice; that, even of the portion best known, some part or other was always wrapped ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... Duchemin stopped short, with jangled nerves and a barely smothered exclamation. Possibly a shape of spectral terror would have been less startling; in that weird place and hour humanity seemed more incongruous than the supernatural. It was at once apparent that the man had neither knowledge of nor concern with the stranger. For an instant he stood with his back to the latter, peering intently down the aisle which Duchemin had been following, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... tastefully-furnished house in the middle of it would have been as incongruous as a new patch in an old garment, and no one dreamt of disturbing the traditional aspect of the place by any attempt to repair ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... was losing the climacteric expression of the three- weeks' campaign, his displeasure grew. Within him was an undefined thought vibration akin to surprise, caused by the serenity of the hushed sky. Was it not incongruous that the heavens should be so peaceful with their quiet star-beacons, while man was exerting himself to the utmost of gesture and noise to glorify the Maker of that calm canopy? From the weather-stained canvas ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... beside the two empty chairs cross-questioning Hugh with a fresh show of her maturer mildness and he stood inwardly taking back his late farewell to sweet companionship and softly answering in his incongruous pomp of voice with a new tenderness, and while the worn-out mother gradually let her full weight sink on the tired slave, this obvious propitiousness was embarrassingly increased by the two weary ones ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... this atmosphere was extremely incongruous, and had the effect of making Mary remember all sorts of things that she had been glad ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... us to such perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters at the Harlot's Funeral, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter has lost half his purpose. ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown Fates. The beauty, too, that nature had given her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of the rarest art. All unconscious of the admiration surrounding her, she sat in that subway car, like a lonely butterfly, strangely there in her incongruous surroundings, for a mysterious moment,—to vanish as swiftly as she had come—and, as she stepped from the car, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... even, would have decided that these four maidens were bound together by an unusual bond of friendship—an incongruous friendship it might have seemed, and yet ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... There was a primitiveness, a certain hideous simplicity in the way Bennett had met the situation that filled her with wonder and with even a little terror and mistrust of him. The vast, brutal directness of the deed was out of place and incongruous at this end-of-the-century time. It ignored two thousand years of civilisation. It was a harsh, clanging, brazen note, powerful, uncomplicated, which came jangling in, discordant and inharmonious with the tune of the age. It savoured of the days when men fought the brutes with ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... we say, 'If Nature is uniform, science is true,' the hypothetical character of science appears in the form of the statement. Nevertheless, it seems undesirable to call our confidence in Nature's uniformity an 'hypothesis': it is incongruous to use the same term for our tentative conjectures and for our most indispensable beliefs. 'The Universal Postulate' is a better term for the principle which, in some form or other, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... States was sometimes pointed to, but in this matter there was no real analogy between Canada and the United States. The American Union is in reality a federation of sovereign states, of which Congress is the creation. This being the case, it is not incongruous that these states should retain control over congressional elections. But the Canadian provinces are not sovereign; on the contrary, they are, in a real sense, subordinate ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... it was her astonishing ordinariness that impressed me. It was surprising to see such a one during such a scene; it was as incongruous as a man riding a bicycle on the judgment Day. Yet she, too, served to make it all real. She was like the real tree in the foreground of a panorama. She served the same purpose as the Voix de Lourdes, a briskly written French newspaper that gives the ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... This new concept was a perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually in tracing the relationship between all things under the sun and on the other side of the sun. He drew up lists of the most incongruous things and was unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them all—kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... the sheltering walls out into the night where fifty men writhed in a death-struggle with hundreds—saw every bleeding wound, heard every smothered moan of pain, felt already the cold iron pierce their own breasts. The hours passed, and they did not yield. They had ceased from their incongruous tasks, and stood and waited, ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... yellow and red; green and blue. Two ill-assorted shades of the same colour, such as a dark and light blue; or a red lilac and a blue lilac; or a rose pink and a blue pink; or drab and yellow. Instances might be multiplied without end of incongruous inharmonious blending of colours, the mere sight of which is enough to give any one a bilious fever. There are colours which, in themselves, may be inoffensive, but of which only particular shades assort well together. Blue and pink was a very favourite combination at one time; but in ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... gazing after them. Her father emerged from the store with the bag of peaches dangling from his hand. He looked incongruous. Her father had too much the air of a gentleman to carry a paper bag. "I do hope your mother will like these ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... land where a man loved but one woman. She remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love. As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something incongruous in this spectacle. She observed the seamed and hardened features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening, beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married, and she thought of his score or so of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... close, market and custom house, and even at times as bear-garden or zoo. To my thinking, the outside of the cathedral is far more attractive than the inside, which suffers from over-decoration in the incongruous style peculiar to Continental churches. I shall not conduct you personally round the Church of Our Lady ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... she took a fancy to this little man, whose flannel shirt and faded purple necktie, whose blue, unshaven face and tousled black hair seemed incongruous with an alert, business-like, and efficient manner. His nose, though not markedly Jewish, betrayed in him the blood of that vital race which has triumphantly survived so many centuries of bondage ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... him, and began to write a letter. He was so absorbed over this letter and the manipulation of it, having but one hand to work with, that Sweetwater determined upon a hazardous stroke. The little book which the captain had consulted, and which had undoubtedly furnished him with a key to those two incongruous words, lay on the floor not far from him, having been flung from its owner's hand during the moments of passion and suffering I have above mentioned. To reach this book with his foot, to draw it toward him, and, finally, to get hold of it with his hand, ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... post-office they met a young fellow wearing a cassock, a strangely incongruous figure in the Wisconsin village. "Are you coming to vespers?" the young priest asked. His brown, heavy face did not accord with the clerical habit or with the thin ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Spaniard breathes no out-of-doors air all winter except through his cloak, and they stare at strangers who go about with uncovered faces enjoying the brisk air as if they were lunatics. But what makes the custom absurdly incongruous is that the women have no such terror of fresh air. While the hidalgo goes smothered in his wrappings his wife and daughter wear nothing on their necks and faces but their pretty complexions, and the gallant ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... a stone into a frog pond, or fired a shot into a covey of birds, can form an idea of the effect produced by these incongruous words, in the midst of the general attention. It made Gringoire shudder as though it had been an electric shock. The prologue stopped short, and all heads turned tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from being disconcerted by ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... elapsed ere she stood in Isabella's presence, Marie knew not. The most incongruous thoughts floated, one after another, through her bewildered brain—most vivid amongst them all, hers and her husband's fatal secret: had it transpired? Was he sentenced, and she thus summoned to share his fate? And then, when partially relieved by the thought, that ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... all the hats; orange favours at all the windows. And my supporters, I need not say, were men who had, like myself, been zealous for Catholic emancipation. I could not help remarking that the badge seemed rather incongruous. But I was told that the friends of Catholic emancipation in Yorkshire had always rallied under the orange banner, that orange was the colour of Sir George Savile, who brought in that bill which caused the No Popery riots of 1780, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a moment they saw the glare increase at the door, and presently a half-dozen of the rabble entered with torches, followed by some scores of their comrades. They paused at sight of that company ranged upon the stairs, as well they might, for a more incongruous sight could scarcely be imagined. Across the bodies of the slain, and revealed by the lifting powder smoke, stood that little band of thirty men, a blaze of gay colours, a sheen of silken hose, their wigs curled and powdered, their costly ruffles scintillant with jewels; calm, and supercilious, ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... joy, who had never even seen the Great Stillness, was very terrifying. She fixed her eyes on the back of the chauffeur, in his drab coat with the red collar, finding some comfort in its solidity. They were in a taxi-cab, in Richmond Park! Death—incongruous, incredible death! It was stupid to be frightened! She forced herself to look at Miltoun. He seemed to be asleep; his eyes were closed, his arms folded—only a quivering of his eyelids betrayed him. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... whiskey, with a convenient glass sampler that would yield through the bunghole a fair-sized drink to test the quality. One day I went into a store where a clever Chinaman was employed. He had printed numerous placards announcing the stock. I noticed a fresh one that seemed incongruous. It read, "Codfish and Cologne Water." I said, "What's the idea?" He smilingly replied, "You see its place? I hang it over the whiskey-barrel. Some time man come to steal a drink. I no see him; he read sign, he laugh, I hear ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... look rather out of place in such a curious environment, and telegraph wires concentrated at the city wall seem even more incongruous. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... exaggerations in the work of his imitators. The swaggering attitude, the freedom of gesture, and the dramatic expression, shorn of the strength and earnest emotion from which they sprang, became disagreeably incongruous in the pictures of the feeble painters who ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... awful, disorderly, crowded, incongruous. It contains a specimen of every kind of furniture since the period of hair-cloth down to mission—cast-offs from the homes of Oliver's more fortunate brothers and sisters. When I first saw Ruth there in the midst ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... doleful and incongruous love ballad of old lands, and old days, for the absurd reason that the youth of the world in his own land beat in his blood, and because in the night time one of the twinkling stars of heaven had dropped down the sky and become a girl of earth who touched a guitar and taught ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... plain rough overcoat that covered him from his neck to the tops of his high boots, and whose replica was to be seen any day in the meaner streets of Petersburg or Moscow. Like the bag, it was a little strange, a little incongruous in its comfortable surroundings—a little ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... he to do to get out of this incongruous and distasteful place? It was all very well to say that he had only to insist upon a hearing from the Doctor, but what if, as he had very grave reason to fear, the Doctor should absolutely refuse to listen, should even proceed to ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... proceeds, p. 145, "If any thing needs be added, the following observation is important, viz. that there is one passage so clearly inapplicable to the Jewish nation, and so totally incongruous with the rest of the interpretation, that Mr. English passes it over without even the attempt of an explanation. It is this: in a part of the prophecy which he puts into the mouth of the Gentiles we read, "for [the Hebrew I must remind ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... bear witness to this tendency, in more or less degree. And under the garish electric arc at night, or silhouetted against the new white stucco wall of some costly hygienic institution, or art gallery, or Governor's palace, glaring in the bright sun, stands the incongruous figure of the half-naked and sandalled Indian, ignorant and poverty-stricken! These, indeed, are elements of Spanish-American civilisation which the philosopher sees and ponders upon. In fact, the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... contemporary painters strong enough for the task, and the honours of the enterprise belong almost exclusively to Smirke's "Seven Ages" and one or two plates from the lighter comedies. The great "Bible" of Macklin, a rival and even more incongruous publication, upon which some of the same designers were employed, has fallen into completer oblivion. A rather better fate attended another book of this class, which, although belonging to a later ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... generally more or less conscious of the influence, and the result is either a vague appreciation, which will make the male wonder why he gets on so well with the invert, or else the influence will be realized to be something incongruous and unnatural, and will be resented accordingly. Sometimes, indeed, the reciprocated feeling (circumstance and opportunity permitting) will prove strong enough to induce sexual relations. Reason will then generally overpower instinct, and the feeling, aroused unaware, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and an early death from witnessing the worst calamities of her family and her native land; of the Princess Elizabeth, who was fated to share them in all their bitterness and horror; and (a strangely incongruous sequel to the morning visit to the Carmelite convent), the Countess du Barri also came into her presence, and was admitted to sup at the royal table; as if, even at the very moment when he might have been expected to conduct himself with some degree of respectful ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... immoral discourse gives to virtue, ought, methinks, to be punished by all good magistrates: Make a man once cease to believe a God, and he has nothing left to limit his soul. How incongruous is it to government, that a man shall be punished for drunkenness, and yet have liberty to affront, and even deny the Majesty of heaven? When if, even among men, one gives the lie to a gentleman in company, or perhaps speaks an affronting word, a quarrel will ensue, and ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... 15th century, but is in a good state of preservation. The theatre is part of what was formerly the "Chapel of St. John," used by the Templars. The porch over the doorway was erected in the 13th century, and is of the Transition style, utterly incongruous to the use now made of it; but this kind of sacrilege is unhappily now becoming of common occurrence! Leaving the theatre, in a short space we were in the "Place des Thermes," where the New Casino is being built among the shrubs on the right. The "Grand Etablissement," which occupies ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... gray. After a time black pinewoods intervened, and made sustained darknesses along the road, woods that frayed out at the edges to weirdly warped and stunted trees. Then isolated pine witches would appear, and make their rigid gestures at me as I passed. Grotesquely incongruous amidst these forms, I presently came on estate boards, appealing, "Houses can be built to suit purchaser," to the silence, to the shadows, and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... associated with that particular hour of the four-and-twenty to all well regulated minds and stomachs—it consists here of thin veneers of old mahogany-coloured thunny, varnished with oil, and relieved by an incongruous abomination of capers and olives. The cold fowls are infamous. The wine were a disgrace to the sorriest tapster between this and the Alps, and also fiery, like every thing else in this district. Drink it, and doubt not the old ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... seems to stand behind him, like the slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the consummate artist. He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant Popo. This defect was most mischievous where he was weakest, in his dramas and ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... health improving, he dictated, pacing a dark garret. He then entered upon "France in the New World." The difficulties were incalculable.... Wholly unable to use his eyes, he had before him the task of tracing out, collecting, indexing, arranging, and digesting a great mass of incongruous material, scattered on both sides of the Atlantic. He was unable to employ trained assistants and had to rely mainly on his own research, though, in some cases, receiving valuable aid of scholars and others. He used ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... element that cannot be overlooked in successful description, I give another example. This point really cannot be over-emphasized: a writer cannot be too careful in selecting materials. Careless grouping of incongruous matters cannot make a picture. Nor does the artistic author leave the reader in doubt as to the purpose of the description; its central thought is usually suggested in the first sentence. In the quotations from Shakespeare ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... not been informed previously. In the column headed "officers detailed on other duty" I find four "six-mule teams," and one "spike team of five mules." In the column "officers absent without leave" I find the entry "all gone off on a drunk." This, sir, is the most incongruous report that has ever been received at these head-quarters, from a reputably sober officer. Can this affair be satisfactorily explained, at once, or would you prefer to explain it to ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... any humor, deceived, perhaps, by their gravity of manner. But this very seriousness is often the outward sign of that humorous quality of the mind which delights in finding an element of identity in things seemingly the most incongruous, and then again in forcing an incongruity upon things identical. Perhaps Captain Hall had no humor himself, and if so he would never find it. Did he always feel the point of what was said to himself? I doubt it, because I happen to know a chance he once had given him in vain. The Captain ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... even Flint had never managed so to disturb her. She glanced about hastily as if measuring the room in a swift impulse toward escape. Stillman had chosen the dining-room for a temporary office, and upon the polished surface of the antique walnut table the typewriter struck an incongruous note; indeed, it was all incongruous, particularly Stillman and his assumed business airs. Yes, it was absurd for her to either cross-examine or protest, but it was equally absurd for him to pay her such an outlandish sum for nine ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... 60 Will dash the sceptre from the Monarch's hand, And from the warrior's grasp wrest the ensanguined brand. Oh! Peace, soft Peace, art thou for ever gone, Is thy fair form indeed for ever flown? And love and concord hast thou swept away, 65 As if incongruous with thy parted sway? Alas, I fear thou hast, for none appear. Now o'er the palsied earth stalks giant Fear, With War, and Woe, and Terror, in his train;— List'ning he pauses on the embattled plain, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Company, and the Hawaiian, Nicaraguan, and Pacific-Mexican Steamship-Company. He stirred up a bigger muss than he had anticipated, and even he was astounded at the wide ramifications of the struggle and at the unexpected and incongruous interests that were drawn into it. Every newspaper in San Francisco turned upon him. It was true, one or two of them had first intimated that they were open to subsidization, but Daylight's judgment was that the situation did not warrant such expenditure. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... on the brogue, you know," said she, looking round with an affectation of shyness, which was most incongruous on her melancholy visage; it was just like a death's head trying to grin, I thought to myself;—and then, she commenced, in a thin, quavering voice, the lay of the departed ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... solemnly; "Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve frightened! And of Granville Kelmscott, too! That's true wit, Elma; the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Why, what on earth has the man got to be frightened of, I should like to know? ... No, no; he's really ill; very seriously ill. Humphreys says the case is a most peculiar one, and he's telegraphed up to town for a specialist to ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... seemed to himself to be entangled in a net of words. He could not tell whether the man before him was entirely sincere or not. There seemed something hopelessly incongruous between the position of Mr. Strathmore as a religious leader and these opinions which seemed to strike at the very foundations of all creeds; yet the manner and look with which all was said were evidently ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... scribbling of the quasi-authoritative, statistical variety has lately focussed itself, bursting forth in a very tornado of long-winded, vilificacious ignorance. Certain subjects may be suitable vehicles for the exploiting of this species of personal vanity. But of them the most incongruous, and the most abused, has been the great, white, silent, unprotesting land. Nothing about it, from its origin to its beverages, but has had to bear the brunt of outrageous comment, for which the justification proffered is usually some six weeks' summer residence in the capital, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... to close the meeting quietly and let the excited people go. Mr. Meredith addressed a few earnest words to the boys in khaki—which probably saved Mr. Pryor's windows from a second onslaught—and Mr. Arnold pronounced an incongruous benediction, at least he felt it was incongruous, for he could not at once banish from his memory the sight of gigantic Norman Douglas shaking the fat, pompous little Whiskers-on-the-moon as a huge mastiff might shake an overgrown puppy. And he knew ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
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