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More "Stilted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brother; a wicked poor cousin, a pretty maid, and a fierce buccaneer. These people might pass three hours very well on the stage, and interest the audience hugely; but the author fails in filling up the outlines. His language is absurdly stilted, frequently careless; the reader or spectator hears a number of loud speeches, but scarce a dozen lines that seem to belong of nature ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... author's style—the stateliness of De Quincey's, for instance, the vividness of Webster's, the oratorical character of Macaulay's, the ruggedness of Carlyle's, the poetical beauty of Emerson's, the humor of Irving's, and the brilliancy of Holmes's—the last lines from whom are purposely stilted, as ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... is the first fruit of a spirited and apparently well-matured plan set on foot by students in Yale College, and heartily entered into by those of several other institutions. Its objects are clearly stilted in the well-written Prospectus and Introduction. They are briefly these:—"To record the history, promote the intellectual improvement, elevate the moral aims, liberalize the views, and unite the sympathies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... for election to the Royal Academy. Her portrait of herself created such a sensation that her election became assured. She had to paint the usual formal tableau de reception, and chose Allegory, painting her "La Paix ramenant l'Abondance," which, though a somewhat stilted affair such as Academies demand, is full of charm—and is still to be seen at the Louvre. She was received into the Academy on the last day of May in 1783 in her twenty-eighth year, and thenceforward had the valuable privilege ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... Methodism for these horrors simply because it is, as we know, the cult of ugliness, but there may have been another cause for the change; it was perhaps to some extent a reaction against the stilted, the pompous and silly epitaph which one finds most common in the first half ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... they were conscious of a pleasant surprise. Against the simplicity and pathos of the old ballad Buononcini's stilted artificialities sounded tame and monotonous. When Lavinia finished applause filled the room. She had ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... play do the boys and girls like, and in what sort do we like to see them take part? It should be a play, surely, in which the dialogue is simple and natural, not stilted and artificial; one that seems like a bit of real life, and yet has plenty of fancy and imagination in it; one that suggests and helps to perpetuate some of the happy and wholesome customs of Christmas; above all, one that ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... The firelight was too fitful to tell. Carl switched on the light in the cluster of old iron lanterns above the table and frowned heavily at the paper. No, it was the precise, formal English of a foreigner, with here and there a ludicrous error among the stilted phrases. And as Carl read, a gust of wild, incredulous laughter echoed suddenly through the quiet room. Again he read, cursing the dizzy fever of his head. Houdania! Houdania! Where was Houdania? ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... counted upon winning it. She had the feeling, too, that somehow the class lists did not represent the relative scholarship of the Jew and herself. He knew more German than she. It was this feeling that prompted her to write him a note which brought an answer in formal and stilted English. ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... helping himself to a third glass of wine; "here's a health to your young folk! And now to business." Here the visitor, drawing his chair nearer to his host, assuming a more grave aspect, and dropping something of his stilted pronunciation, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not ask of thee," Fra Paolo answered, suddenly unbending from the stilted mood of his last words. "By the light that is given him must each man ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... did come, it was a bitter disappointment. It was stilted and commonplace. Netty regretted that her mother felt it necessary to absent herself from home, and she was very wretched because father was still far from well, although recovering slowly. He was in the hands of Dora Dundas, who had volunteered to nurse him; ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... my tea, I am at my tea," running through it for refrain. Then a description of a lodging-house dinner: "a block of bread on a lonely plate, and potatoes that looked as if they had committed suicide in their own steam." A little ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty. I read on until I came to a young man who fell from his horse, or had been thrown from his horse, I never knew which, nor did I feel enough interest in the matter to make research; the young man was put to bed by his mother, and once in bed he began to talk!... four, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... enough," answered Janey, as she shot a sudden mischievous glance from the corners of her downcast eyes; "but I reckon he'll think more of me, ef he thinks I's goin' to die. I am not very happy," she resumed, in the same stilted tone as before; "an' las' night you came to me in a dream, an' tol' me you was dead. I done specks he'll cry like everything, when he reads dat," she interpolated, with a nod of triumph. "Sometimes I reckon we sha'n' never see each other no mo'; but you mus' never forget your Janey. Um-mm," ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... line of literary effort, we feel encouraged to believe that our success in a field of late so popular would be marked, and that we should obtain a degree of fame herein, beside which that of the moat shining light in the stilted firmament would pale its ray. But so long as God gives us the glorious privilege of emulating the stars, we shall not seek to win a place among the 'tallow dips' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on the heath. Edgar, still attired as a lunatic, soliloquizes in stilted terms about the instability of fortune and the advantages of a humble lot. Then there comes to him somehow into the very place on the heath where he is, his father, the blinded Gloucester, led by an old man. In that characteristic Shakespearean language,—the ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... she walked, not sideways as always, but erect, her chest thrown out, which gave her figure a droll, stilted air of importance. Her shoes made a knocking sound on the floor, and her ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... rambles in the beautiful country around, only returning when the plague has to a great extent abated. The superiority of the 'Decameron' is not only in the polish and grace of its style, the first complete departure from the stilted classicism of contemporary narrative, the happy naturalness of good story-telling,—but in the conception of the work as a whole, and the marvelous imagination of the filling-in between the framework of the story of the plague by the hundred tales from all lands and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... stilted that she had the sensation of throwing metal disks on a stone floor and waiting for their tinny clatter. She could see the high red drain out of his face and then rush up again as if he had ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... grappled with and strangled. While all admitted that a frightful state of things existed, and declared that something ought to be done, no one had the courage to demand drastic reforms, or strike a prophetic note. The Cabinet Minister enlarged in a somewhat stilted fashion upon what the Government had done to check drunkenness, while another speaker told of the magnificent work of the Y.M.C.A., and of the hostels and huts which had been provided, both in England ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... English, then, it is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett is worthy of the stilted encomium which has mopped and mowed about him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett has or has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, about which no two men who are even ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of his present communication, have you, Elmer?" questioned Mark, a little bit given to stilted language. ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... dominated French literature for twenty years. His genius, transcendent, unfortunate, noble in endeavour, unequal in accomplishment, typifies the ambiguous movement of the time. For still the flood of 'Precious' literature poured from the press—dull, contorted epics, and stilted epigrams on my lady's eyebrow, and learned dissertations decked out in sparkling tinsel, and infinitely long romances, full of alembicated loves. Then suddenly one day a small pamphlet in the form of a letter appeared on the bookstalls of Paris; and with its appearance the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... true that in his work Cavalcanti shows many of the stilted mannerisms which were common to the troubadours; but such expressions as "to her, every virtue bows," and "the mind of man cannot soar so high, nor is it sufficiently purified by divine grace to understand and ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... present-day standards, somewhat pompous and stilted, but all boys should read this account of the New York settlers' warfare against the Iroquois and know ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... high level of thought and composition. His earliest book, "Some Gospel Truths Opened," "thrown off," writes Dr. Brown, "at a heat," displays the same ease of style and directness of speech and absence of stilted phraseology which he maintained to the end. The great charm which pervades all Bunyan's writings is their naturalness. You never feel that he is writing for effect, still less to perform an uncongenial piece of task-work. He writes because he had something to say which was ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... numerous, and in the thick jungle bordering the tanks in places, and consisting mostly of nurkool and wild rose, hog-deer and wild pig were abundant. The dried-up bed of an old arm of the Koosee was quite close to my camp, and abounded in sandpiper, and golden, grey, goggle-eyed, and stilted ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... 'Commended' was an honour she had ceased to hope for. She had written and re-written, and altered and corrected, until all the freshness and originality were gone, and the whole was becoming stiff and stilted, and she was incapable of seeing whether she was ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... side of the medal. Like the authors we have mentioned, he too writes of the evil days which he himself has passed through, as of a horrid nightmare from which he has just awakened; but from his letters, artificial and stilted as they are in some respects, we learn that there were still to be found those who had not bowed the ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... and a haughtiness in his voice, in all his movements, in his every attitude which plainly showed the esteem in which he held himself. They were people who had a strict etiquette for everything, and whose feelings seemed always stilted, like their words. ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... be gracious, and only succeeded in being stilted, for the shadow of impending disaster lay black upon her. Medenham's only thrill came when Cynthia asked for letters or telegrams at the Green Dragon, and was told there were none. Evidently, Peter Vanrenen was not a man to create a mountain ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... me, sir, to express my gratitude—" and so on through the stilted compliment of the day. Assurances from both sides over at last, and the chaise discharged, the one walked briskly down the unpaved street toward the Eagle, and the other entered quietly the bare and business-like room from ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... fell forward, blind and drunk with rage, Droulde leant towards him automatically, quite kindly, and helped him to his feet. He would have asked the lad's pardon for his own thoughtlessness, had that been possible: but the stilted code of so-called honour forbade so logical a proceeding. It would have done no good, and could but imperil his own reputation without averting ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... or a stilted and difficult hand, is a great waste of time and energy, mainly the would-be reader's. There is no excuse, in these days of the typewriter and of common knowledge of stenography, for an illegible letter or manuscript, and the carelessness ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... deadlock which it seems impossible to break," he began, in the rather stilted manner which befits such assemblages, "I propose that we put up a substitute candidate. I propose the name of Miss ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... in the early part of the nineteenth century,—all are as interesting to the lover of children as they are unattractive to the modern children themselves. The little ones very naturally find the stilted language of these old stories unintelligible and the artificial plots bewildering; but to one interested in the adult literature of the same periods of history an acquaintance with these amusement books of past generations has a peculiar charm and value of its own. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... to make their commonplaces literary by couching them in stilted language, and then we have what is technically termed "fine writing." It is to this tendency that we owe such phrases as, "After the customary salutations he sought the arms of Morpheus," and "Upon ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... continuation of his elaborate courtesy and his purposely stilted phrasing, the Sepoy said: "If the sapphire was argument, this was certainly conviction. The moral barrier which could withstand the assault of the first, must, unquestionably, have yielded to the insidious attack of ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... because it is the end, and because, by the events foregone, the mind is prepared for it. But these men will have nothing but fifth acts; and seem to skip, as unworthy, all the circumstances leading to them. This, however, is part of the scheme—the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime, that our teachers have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and other antihumbuggists should heartily, according to the strength that is in them, endeavor to pull down. What, for instance, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... an attitude, bowed to each of his audience separately, cleared his throat impressively, and then began to declaim in a stilted, stagey voice, ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... understanding.[148] "I hope Mr. Gibbon will not come," replied the sage; "his coldness makes me think ill of him. I have been looking over his book again [the Essai sur l'etude de la litterature, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either."[149] Whether Gibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had been said of him by Jean ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... As for the stilted style, that presents little difficulty, when one remembers that people of a certain rank in life never use a short word when a long one ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... one more personage whose subsequent fortunes must be briefly glanced at here. Cassiodorus, the minister of Theodoric and Amalasuentha, remained, as we regret to find, in the service of Theodahad when sole king and composed his stilted sentences at the bidding of Amalasuentha's murderer. Witigis also employed him to write his address to his subjects on ascending the throne. He does not seem to have taken any part in the siege of Rome, and before ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... style was easy, colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly share, was offset by her vivid fancy ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... coming was postponed by Miss Eliza for various reasons several times. The correspondence on this subject was all between her and Elinor, for Miss Eliza wrote a stilted, old-fashioned hand, not easy to read, which Ross's impatience refused to take the ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... title "Excellency" is permitted. Yet, whether it is because the persons entitled to be so addressed do not think that even these mild titles are consistent with American democracy, or because the American public feels awkward in employing such stilted terms of address, they are not often used. I remember that on one occasion a much respected Chief Executive, on my proposing, in accordance with diplomatic usage and precedent, to address him as "Your Excellency", begged me to substitute instead "Mr. President". The plain democratic ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... single message as governor exhibited a knowledge of conditions and needs that must rank it among the ablest state-papers in the archives of the capitol. Unlike some of his predecessors, with their sentences of stilted formality, he wrote easily and with vigour. His message, however, was marred by the insincerity which shows the politician. He approved canals, but, by cunningly advising "the utmost prudence" in taking up new enterprises, he coolly disparaged the Chenango project; he shrewdly recommended the choice ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... wanderer, I came upon a lake, set in a land Which has no fear of wolves. A fisher folk Live there in houses stilted over the water, And the stars walk like spectres of white fire Upon the misty waters of the mere. Ay, if they have no wolves, they have the fear All as thou hast; the sedges in the night Shudder, and out of the reeds there comes a cry Half chuckling, half bewailing; but, as I think, It is the ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... detached capital which seems to have lost its shaft, but as there is no trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the corbel table of a form common in Portugal but rare elsewhere, ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... in," was the only way he could put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make yourself at home—at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform the feat he urged on his ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... they succeed as much as a hollow hyperbole would in competition with a most fervent truth. Every tragical common-place is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase; and even the most common remark is forced and stilted. A total poverty of sentiment is dressed out with wit and acuteness. There is fancy in them, or at least a phantom of it; for they contain an example of the misapplication of every mental faculty. The authors ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... done. But it is to be clearly understood that I promise nothing, and may throw in your face the very last thing you expect—or I expect. St. Ives will (to my mind) not be wholly bad. It is written in rather a funny style; a little stilted and left-handed; the style of St. Ives; also, to some extent, the style of R. L. S. dictating. St. Ives is unintellectual, and except as an adventure novel, dull. But the adventures seem to me sound and pretty probable; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... formal style and stilted language of the notes, and were amazed at the information that they were to make a longer visit than they ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... more endured extremity; this second peace again drifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor were overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts. Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in sabots. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, "An honorable scar, your honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... instead, three gradated series of birds put down the length of it (or half the length—or a quarter would do it—with judgment), showing the transition, in length of beak, from bunting to woodcock—in length of leg, from swift to stilted plover—and in length of wing, from auk to frigate-bird; the wings, all opened, in one specimen of each bird to their full sweep, and in another, shown at the limit of the down back stroke. For what on earth—or in air—is the use to me of seeing their boiled sternums ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... stately and magnificent, this morning! that speech sounded grand and stilted enough to have ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... to Nature. It is seen in Pope no less than in Wordsworth; in The Rape of the Lock no less than in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted conventions of the late literary epic. The Iliad is the story of a quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the immediate cause? The insulting ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... Betty, a little stilted we should call them now, but very interesting. Mr. King was confident of peace. Doris used to read them to Aunt Priscilla, who said Betty was very frivolous, but that she always had a good time, and perhaps good times were not as wicked as ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... I can like any one so unlike the stilted heroes of romance. Well, give me my flesh and blood lover, and I'll leave all the Sir Herberts and Valentines to you—if ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... writer, who charmed him and made him laugh by his amusing talk, kept his blue devils at bay, sent him first copies of his books, and sympathised with his views on political matters. M. de Hanski was also much flattered by Balzac's friendship for his wife, and would finish a polite and stilted epistle by saying that he need trouble Balzac no more, as he knows his wife is at the same time writing him one of her long chattering letters. Even when, by sad mischance, two of Balzac's love-letters fell into M. de Hanski's ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been though worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charadrius himaniopus, with no back toe, and therefore "liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations"! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance in Sussex of "an old family tortoise," ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... manner Frau von Greifenstein presented the most complete contrast to her husband. She had been pretty, fair and sprightly in her youth, she was now a faded blonde, full of strange affectations and stilted sentiments. Possessing but indifferent taste, she nevertheless devoted much time to the adornment of her person. She was small of stature, but delicately made, and if her nervous desire to please had granted to her outward personality a moment's repose during the day, she might ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... carefully the menu has been prepared, no matter how delightful the environment—if there are awkward lapses in the conversation; if there are moments of painful, embarrassing silence; or if the conversation is stilted, affected or forced. ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... were awaited with feverish impatience till the agony drew to an end, and the heroine died amid the sobs of ten thousand readers. Yet the story had power, and the central figure of Clarissa was impressive in its pathos and tragedy. The novel would still be readable if it were stripped of the stilted conversations and sentimental gush in which Richardson delighted; but that would leave precious ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... entire theatre-going public, including the poorer and less educated spectators who sat farthest from the actors. Since most of the audience was grouped above the stage and at a considerable distance, the actors, in order not to appear dwarfed, were obliged to walk on stilted boots. A performer so accoutred could not move impetuously or enact a scene of violence; and this practical limitation is sufficient to account for the measured and majestic movement of Greek tragedy, ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... had been presented, some one told Miss Fenler that Mrs. Marvin wished to see her, and what had begun in a stilted manner, became a ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... written evidently by some {457} "dropper-in," who found "honest John" suffering from a severe cold, and upon the first piece of paper that came to hand. The writer's caligraphy bespeaks age, and the punctuation and erasures show him to have been a literary man, and a careful though stilted writer. It is not, however, a hand of which I find any ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... time to write letters these days, and yet the post office department handles millions of them each year. True, they are not the formal, lengthy, somewhat stilted epistles of a century ago, when a lad began his home letters "Honoured Parents," and your correspondent announced, "I take my pen in hand to inform you," etc. The letter of today, however, is not less the messenger of good-will and remembrance than it was in those days. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... cornice of the chapels and outer aisles all round the church, a cornice of great noble leaves; then the parapets in changing flamboyant patterns, then the conical roofs of the chapels hiding the exterior tracery of the triforium, then the great clerestory windows, very long, of four lights, and stilted, the tracery beginning a long way below the springing of their arches; and the buttresses are so thick, and their arms spread so here, that each of the clerestory windows looks down its own space between them, as if between walls: above the windows ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... the manner in which these lords and ladies spent their time at court, filling idle hours with compliment, love-making, veiled jibe and swift retort; if we read our Euphues again, renewing our acquaintance with its absurdly elaborated and stilted style, its tireless winding of sentences round a topic without any advance in thought, its affectation of philosophy and classical learning; if we remember that to speak euphuistically was a coveted and studiously cultivated accomplishment, and that to pun, to utter ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... high, stilted voice, and as she sat primly in the straight-backed old chair, knitting away at nothing, she presented a ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... forgotten copy-book where my sister had written down (in a stilted manner) the impressions of that summer I find this description ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... desire to laugh at the stilted way in which he was talking, and, from the suppression of the desire, to laugh wildly at everything in the scene, and not least at the comic death of Will Starling, even at the corpse itself lying with a broken neck at his feet. By an effort of will he regained control of his muscles, and ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... not in the least denying that librarians are well enough,—that is, might be well enough,—but as things are going to-day, they all seem to contribute, somehow, toward making a library a conscious and stilted place. They hold one up to the surface of things, with books. They make impossible to a man those freedoms of the spirit—those best times of all in a library, when one feels free to find one's mood, when one gets hold of one's divining-rod, opens ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... South Pacific; the tenuous snowdrift of the reef, far out, and the horizon. On the starboard hand, beyond the little space of the anchorage, curved the beach, a pink-white scimitar laid flat. Then the scattering of thatched and stilted huts, the red, corrugated-iron store, residence and godowns of the Dutch trader, the endless Indian-file of coco palms, the abrupt green wall of the mountain.—A twelve-year-old girl, naked as Eve and, I've no doubt, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... vision of the mountains, and the breath of the great wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled with thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to translate into the written word. And the result of the effort seemed always to be bathos! Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, obscurity, and awkwardness clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win the great secret of language; the stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished away in clearer light. The periods of despair were often long and heavy, the victories very few and trifling; night ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... of conversation you should remember that short sentences predominate. A conversation composed of long sentences would seem stilted and made to order. What each person says, however short, is put into a separate division and indented. Explanatory matter accompanying the conversation is placed with the spoken part to which it most closely relates. Notice the indentations and the use of quotation marks in ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... take lines that were stilted and shoddy and speak them in a way to make them sound natural and distinctive and real. She was a clear blonde, but her speaking voice had in it a contralto note that usually accompanies ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... this time were considerable. He wrote an article for the Youth's Companion—"How to Tell a Story"—and another for the North American Review on Fenimore Cooper's "Literary Offenses." Mark Twain had not much respect for Cooper as a literary artist. Cooper's stilted artificialities and slipshod English exasperated him and made it hard for him to see that in spite of these things the author of the Deerslayer was a mighty story-teller. Clemens had also promised some stories to Walker, of the Cosmopolitan, and gave him one for his Christmas number, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... combined "to give the world assurance of" a bishop rather than a clerk. It needed familiarity with his inner life to know how much simpleness of purpose and simplicity of mind and contentment and piety lay hid under a pompous exterior and a phraseology somewhat stilted. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... tucked the paper in his pocket and thoughtfully left the room. "The boy distrusts me," he soliloquized, "afraid I'll go back on any promise I make him, so he demands my offer in writing. Some more of his notions of business, Spanish style. Stilted and unnecessary. How like all of his kind he is! Ponderous in minor affairs, casual ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... that time the air of the man with the brown eyes had been that of banter, of impish desire to harry and confuse by stilted language the ignorant stranger who had ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... every little bit of praise wrung from the world's cold, death-doomed lips. It is to me pathetically absurd to see gifted persons all struggling along, and rudely elbowing each other out of the way to win—what? A few stilted commonplace words of approbation or fault-finding in the newspapers of the day, and a little clapping and shouting from a gathering of ordinary minded persons, who only clap and shout because it is possibly the fashion to do so. It is really ludicrous. If the music the musician offers ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... Henry as the civilized brother I shall never forget. There was something in him to which the perfect style of the D'Orsay period appealed, and he spoke the stilted language with as much truth as he wore the cravat and the tight-waisted full-breasted coats. Such ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... in short, that appeared during that sudden outburst of first vigorous growth might bring delight into her solitary life, but not flexibility of mind or body. She stood strong and straight like some forest tree, lightning-blasted but still erect. Her dignity became a stilted manner, her social supremacy led her into affectation and sentimental over-refinements; she queened it with her foibles, after the usual fashion of those who allow their courtiers ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... learn what lies before them when they walk alone in the dark." The Hawaikan speech was stilted, ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... no really great poet[29] before Tegner; and that thus, relatively considered, the statement is true. But Tegner seems himself to have been conscious of the strait-jacket in which the old academic rules confined him, for in the middle of the poem he suddenly discards the stilted Alexandrines with which he had commenced and breaks into a rapturous old-Norse chant, the abrupt metres of which recall the fornyrdhalag of the Elder Edda. Soon after "Svea" followed, in 1812, "The Priestly Consecration," ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... brush. He was immensely long and sallow, wore a drooping moustache vaguely blonde, between the unkempt curtains of which a thin cheroot pointed heavenward. As he walked nervously up and down, with a suspiciously stilted gait, he observed Rosenheim with evident scorn and the picture with a strange pride. He was not merely odd, but also offensive, for as Rosenheim whispered 'Comme c'est beau!' there was an unmistakable snort; when he continued, ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... probably very just. Although her husband had many qualifications for writing prose fiction—insight into and appreciation of character, combined with much tragic force and a real gift for description—there is reason to think that he would have been stilted and artificial in dialogue, and altogether wanting in lightness of hand. Crabbe acquiesced in his wife's decision, and the novels were cremated without a murmur. A somewhat similar fate attended a set of Tales in Verse which, ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... structures involved, when inflamed, chronic inflammation is a more frequent termination than is complete recovery. Bilateral affections are seen in horses that are driven for years, regularly at a fast pace on paved streets. In such cases, the gait is stilted, that is, there is incomplete advancement of both members and, of course, the period of weight bearing is correspondingly shortened; hence ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... the idle pretensions and stilted pedantry of the men of the schools, can we wonder if good and earnest men still refuse to acknowledge the high worth and dignity of art, which, in accordance with such definitions, would be nothing but a manifestation and studied application of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the stilted wording of the hidden paper had led us all astray. Philip said he could not be sure—there was so much fuss and trouble and misunderstanding—but the old chief had nursed Theodomir through some dreadful illness and knew it all. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... of humbler natures,—country girls like Pamela,—Richardson is happiest: in his descriptions of high life he has failed from ignorance. He was not acquainted with the best society, and all his grandees are stilted, artificial, and affected; but even in this fault he is of value, for he shows us how men of his class at that time regarded the society of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... sounded forced and stilted to his ears, even while he pressed the little white hand that she put out blindly towards him. He was not sorry for his pledge; he felt that he could have done no less; but Sydney's proud, earnest face flashed ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... paths of the Kleine Rugen. He was walking slowly toward her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully upon the ground. When she accosted him, he was plainly confused, as she had said. After the first few passages in polite though stilted conversation, his keen, grey eyes resumed their thoughtful—it ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... lips as though fever burned there, and worked his Adam's apple vigorously. Probably if he had been in the accustomed freedom of outdoors he would have sworn soulfully and smashed the bandbox over the Honorable J. Percival's bald head. Now, in the stilted confines of that ornate parlor, he nursed the bandbox on his knees, as part of the rest of the spider-legged and frail surroundings. When they retired to their team he carried the bandbox held gingerly out in front of him, tiptoeing across the ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... different terms for nearly the same idea "difference," "odds," "distinction," and "contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. While it is true that the term "euphuism" has come to be applied to any stilted, antithetical style that pays more attention to the manner of expressing a thought than to its worth, we should remember that English prose style has advanced because some writers, like Lyly, emphasized the importance of artistic form. Shakespeare occasionally employs euphuistic contrast in an effective ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Resurrections," when these reflections were suddenly interrupted by a piteous whine at his elbow, and a deplorable appeal for alms. He looked around in some irritation, and with a sudden shock found himself confronted with the embodied proof of his somewhat stilted fancies. There, close beside him, his face altered and disfigured by poverty and disgrace, his body barely covered by greasy ill-fitting rags, stood his old friend Charles Herbert, who had matriculated on the same day as himself, with whom he had been merry and wise for twelve revolving ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... but himself. My talking about his reading was not as bad as Sheila's persuading him that he can play whist. Did you ever know a man who did not believe that everybody else's reading of poetry was affected, stilted and unbearable? I know Mackenzie must have been reading poetry to Sheila long before ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... of magazine from any you have," replied the woman soberly, though sorely tempted to smile at the stilted, unnatural tones of ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Germany and had acquired the essentials of our language. As a matter of fact, there was no need for special knowledge in this respect, as the sole problem seemed to be to make the French verses less stiff and stilted which poor Roche had constructed under the shameful control of Lindau, who used to make out that he knew everything better than any one else. The inexhaustible patience with which Truinet proceeded from one change to another in order to satisfy my ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... was the birthplace of Madison. His maternal grandfather, whose name was Conway, had a plantation at that place, and young Mrs. Madison happened to be there on a visit to her mother when her first child, James, was born. In the stately—not to say stilted—biography of him by William C. Rives, the christened name of this lady is given as Eleanor. Mr. Rives may have thought it not in accordance with ancestral dignity that the mother of so distinguished a son should have been burdened with so ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... swirlin' drifts of snow outside, do you? You ain't been swallowed up in no blizzard, be you, comin' into town? No, my stilted, stiff-laigged sheep of the mountain, we ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Yet Hadria was glad to notice some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term "second class," though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the impression, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... button-hole, and the corner of a colored silk handkerchief visible from a side pocket. Dignified, as became his exalted station, he never slapped his visitors' shoulders, or called them by their Christian names, but he treated them as entitled to his consideration without that stilted courtesy which rebuffs even when veneered with formal civility. He was a good listener and he conversed freely, although he carefully avoided committing himself upon political questions, and never indulged in criticisms of those arrayed in opposition to him. The code of etiquette ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... two records might afterward be compared and verified. 'That is,' Mr. Bell had added with the flicker of a smile, 'if we succeed in talking at all!' Well, they did succeed, as you have heard. At first they held only a stilted dialogue and conscientiously jotted it down; but afterward their exuberance got the better of them and in sheer joy they chattered away like magpies until long past midnight. Then, loath to destroy the ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... depreciation, and therefore here I will once more endorse what an anonymous writer has said of him: "An unconscious Christianity covers all his sentiments. If the fair fame of the man is sullied, the aspiration to a higher life cannot be denied to the philosopher; if the tinkling cymbal of a stilted Stoicism sometimes sounds through the nobler music, it still leaves the truer ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... continued so even after the later Emperors, by seizing the power of the State, had taken away the inspiration that comes from a love of freedom and had thus deprived the rhetorical art of practical value. The work of the schools then became highly stilted and artificial in character, and oratory then came to be cultivated largely as a fine art. [26] Men educated in these schools came to boast that they could speak with equal effectiveness on either side of any question, and the art came to depend ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... love of beauty had survived school life. He had had to keep it to himself, of course, so that not even the drawing-master knew of it; but it was there, fastidious and clear within him. And his poem seemed to him as lame and stilted as the night was winged. But he kept it, all the same. It was a "beast," but better than nothing as an expression of the inexpressible. And he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to show ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Best Society a provincial in whose conversation is perceptible the influence of much reading of the Bible. Such are seldom if ever stilted or pompous or long-worded, but are invariably distinguished for the simplicity ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... here one feels not that sense is lacking, but that one has failed to find the clue to the zigzag movements of Chapman's brain. Nor is it fair to speak of Chapman as dressing up dwarfish thoughts in stilted phrases. There is not the slightest tendency in the play to spin out words to hide a poverty of ideas; in fact many of the difficulties spring from excessive condensation. Where Chapman is really assailable is in a singular incontinence of imagery. Every idea ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... any longer. The Chief Factor went to Mr. Archibald Clavering Gunter and the Home Publishing Company, and they made a very large sale of it. I never cared for the book however; it seemed stilted and amateurish, though some of its descriptions and some of its dialogues were, I think, as good as I can do; so, eventually, in the middle nineties, I asked Mr. Gunter to sell me back the rights in the book and give me control of it. This he did. I thereupon withdrew ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pretty," murmured Lysbeth, through whose bewildered brain the stilted and meaningless words buzzed like bees in an empty hive, "though I am sure I cannot guess how you find the heart in such times as these to write poetry to fine ladies whom you ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... was a very tall, thin, yet square-shouldered man, with a pale face, and large features of delicate form. He looked severe, pure, and irritable. The tone of his voice, although the words were measured and rather stilted, led me to this last conclusion quite as much as the expression of his face; for it was thin and a little acrid. I soon observed that Charley started slightly, as often as his father addressed him; but this might be because his ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... favourably. Mr. Damon introduced me to a very handsome half white gentleman, a lawyer of ability, and lately interpreter to the Legislature, Mr. Ragsdale, or, as he is usually called, "Bill Ragsdale," a leading spirit among the natives. His conversation was eloquent and poetic, though rather stilted, and he has a good deal of French mannerism; but if he is a specimen of native patriotic feeling, I think that the extinction of Hawaiian nationality must be far off. I was amused with the attention ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... and melodious versification to relieve them. They were, for the most part, an ill-digested mass of incongruities, in which there was as little keeping and probability in the characters as in the incidents, while the whole was told in that stilted "Hercles' vein" and with that licentiousness of allusion and imagery which could not fail to debauch both the taste and the morals of the youthful reader. The mind, familiarized with these monstrous, over-colored pictures, lost all relish for the chaste ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... invitations, there came only polite, stilted little letters of regret, in the children's round script. "Mother would d'rather we shouldn't go to a sin-gul party until we are young ladies!" Ellen would say cheerfully, if cross-examined on the subject, leaving it to the more tactful Joanna to add, "But Mother thanks ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... lilies lave, Or plash upon the shadow'd wave; While birds, with darken'd pinions, fly Across that still intenser sky; Fish, with cold plunge, with startling leap, Or arrow-flight across the deep; And stilted insects, light-o-limb, Would dimple o'er the even brim; If, with my hand, in play, I chose The cold, smooth current to oppose, As fine a spell my senses bound ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... in flesh, the coat is rough and lusterless, and the skin tight and harsh, producing a condition termed "hidebound," with considerable "tucking up" of the abdomen. The horse shows a short, stilted, choppy gait, which later becomes stiffer and more restricted, while on standing a position simulating that in founder is assumed, with a noticeable drop to the croup. The animal at this stage usually lies down and remains recumbent for several days at a time. Bed sores frequently ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... me was Ian Hay's The First Hundred Thousand. I read Pat MacGill's Red Horizon about the same time, and thought Hay was stilted and superior with a public-school man's patronising Punch-like attitude to the working-class recruits. I thought that he didn't know what he was writing about, that he had not reached the souls of the men. MacGill, on the other hand, gave me the impression of a warm, passionate, ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... hands of the savages was a wandering schoolmaster, named John Filson, [Footnote: Do., John Small to G. R. Clark, June 23, 1786.] the first historian of Kentucky, and the man who took down, and put into his own quaint and absurdly stilted English, Boone's so-called "autobiography." Filson, having drifted west, had travelled up and down the Ohio and Wabash by canoe and boat. He was much struck with the abundance of game of all kinds which he saw on the northwestern side of the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... considerate of Ronnie to curb the glowing words he must have longed to pour forth. The very effort of that curbing, had reduced him to a somewhat stilted adjective. ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... to judge and produce the right touch, but the performer who is more concerned about the technical claims of a composition than its musical interpretation can only hope to give an uninteresting, uninspired, stilted performance that should rightly drive all intelligent hearers from ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... the Assembly's Catechism, many of the Psalms, read distinctly, and make pertinent remarks on many things she read. She asked many astonishing questions about divine mysteries." It is a truly comic anticlimax in her father's stilted letters to her to have him end his pious instructions with this advice: "And as you love me ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... he, Mr. James Clinch, the coolest head at a late supper,—he, the American, who had repeatedly drunk Frenchmen and Englishmen under the table—could be transformed into a sentimental, stagey idiot by a single glass of wine? He was conscious, too, of asking himself these very questions in a stilted sort of rhetoric, and with a rising brutality of anger that was new to him. And then everything swam before him, and he seemed to ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... inheritance and reared as a peasant. There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight groans, a ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its skeleton. The tale is infinitely tiresome, and is full of that edifying morality, fine sentiment and stilted dialogue—that "old perfumed, powdered D'Arblay conversation," as Thackeray called it—which abound in "Evelina," "Thaddeus of Warsaw," and almost all the fiction of the last quarter of the last century. Still it was a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce his disciple's performance tedious ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to get a large card and then cover it with specimens of the shell, in serried ranks. I also called literature to my aid, and produced several little books containing labored descriptions of my collection, couched, so far as possible, in the stilted and formal phraseology of the conchological works to which I had access, but with occasional outbursts after a style of my own. Here is a chapter from one of them; a pen-and-ink portrait of the shell is prefixed ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... ingenious measures he had resorted to in order to acquire more information about her, when suddenly the murmur of a human voice attracted his attention. He heard whispers, the complaining tones of a woman's voice mingled with entreaties, smothered laughter, sighs, and half-stilted exclamations of surprise; but above them all, the woman's voice prevailed. Saint-Aignan stopped to look about him; he perceived from the greatest surprise that the voices proceeded, not from the ground, but from the branches ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and again, after looking over spirit communications and wondering why a man should become so stilted because he ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... replied the giant, in correct but stilted English. "I have set the indicator to signal the alarm in every shop ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... pronoun who may be said to have no objective form in spoken English. We regularly say, "Who did you see?" or, "Who were they talking to?" etc. The more formal "To whom were they talking?" sounds stilted in conversation, and is ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... it is true, bettered their predecessors to the extent of exchanging a stilted greeting when they met; but this perfunctory salutation was usually hurtled across the historic borderline and was seldom concluded without some reference to it. For Ellen Webster was an aggravating old woman dowered ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... Mr. Merrill's house, the three girls and the one young man were seated around the fire, and their talk, Merrill as it had begun, was becoming minute by minute more stilted. This was largely the fault of Susan, who would not be happy until she had taken Jane upstairs and left Mr. Worthington and Cynthia together. This matter had been arranged between the sisters before supper. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... manifestations more potent, because more internal in its effects, than anything can ever be that is born merely of the intellect. There is no affectation, no straining for effect in simplicity. All is natural and genuine with it. Its wit is never forced, its wisdom is never stilted; nor is either ever dragged in for mere display. With the simple, Conversation is like a brook flowing through a beautiful country, and reflecting the varied scenes through which it passes in all ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... lift; exalt; sublimate; place on a pedestal, set on a pedestal. [ref] escalate (increase) 35, 102, 194. take up, drag up, fish up; dredge. stand up, rise up, get up, jump up; spring to one's feet; hold oneself, hold one's head up; drawn oneself up to his full height. Adj. elevated &c. v.; stilted, attollent[obs3], rampant. Adv. on stilts, on the shoulders of, on one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... beauties. Often the rhythm rises to a high degree of excellence, even elevation. Like Pensa, Zacuto was the disciple of great masters, and a comparison of either with Lope de Vega and Calderon will reveal the same southern warmth, stilted pathos, exuberance of fancy, wealth of imagery, excessive playing upon words, peculiar turns and phrases, erratic style, and other qualities characteristic of Spanish dramatic poetry in ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... were near enough to observe the visitors closely soon began to look upon Richard and Nathan as a couple of quaint, harmless, exceedingly well-bred old gentlemen, rather provincial in appearance and a little stilted in their manners, who, before the evening was over, would, perhaps, become tired of the gayety, ask to be excused, and betake themselves to bed. All of which would be an eminently proper proceeding in view of their extreme age and general infirmities, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... his Norman ancestors, and the poem, especially in the account of Senlac, has given some brilliant details to history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred Thomas—poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions. An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast grew up, absolutely identical in tongue with the Norman literature beyond the Channel, but ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... the trunk of the body erect, and a curvature, usually a double curvature, of the spine is the consequence. And if anything were needed to aggravate the spinal curvature, intensify the compression of the internal viscera, and add to the general deformity, it is found in the modern contrivance of stilted gaiters. These are made with heels so high and narrow that locomotion is awkward and painful, the centre of gravity is shifted "to parts unknown," and the head is thrown forwards and the hips projected backwards to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... the general word for that which is less than the whole: as, the whole is equal to the sum of all its parts.... Portion is often used in a stilted way where part would be simpler and better; portion has always some suggestion of allotment or assignment: as, this is my portion; a portion of Scripture. 'Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed. He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer its charm on ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... absence of pretence. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the Cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... but more opulent every year. It, is one of the few romances written in the epistolary form that do not oppress the reader with a sense of languor and unreality; for its creator poured into its pages a tide of passion unknown to his frigid and stilted predecessors, and dared to depict Nature as she really is, not as she was misrepresented by the modish authors and artists of the age. Some persons seem shy of owning an acquaintance with this work; indeed, it has been made the butt of ridicule by the disciples of a decadent school. ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... to furnish the best. Library trustees and librarian are in a like case. The silly, the weak, the sloppy, the wishy-washy novel, the sickly love story, the belated tract, the crude hodge-podge of stilted conversation, impossible incident, and moral platitude or moral bosh for children—these are not needed. It is as bad to buy them and circulate them, knowingly, as it would be for our school authorities to install ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... dropped into the careless modes of speech that were to come later on and be adopted as a sort of patois. They read their Bibles a good deal and the older divines, and if their speech was a little stilted it had a certain correctness. Then Chilian Leverett was ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Lightener he was presented last. He had expected, hoped, to be unfavorably impressed; he had known he would be ill at ease, and that any attempts he made at conversation would be stiff and stilted. ... It was some moments after his presentation when he realized he felt none of these unpleasant things. She had shaken hands with him boyishly; her eyes had twinkled into his—and he was at his ease. Afterward he studied over the thing, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... in every man's head, but even where the moment of the story naturally demands eloquence the eloquence seems frozen in the tap. Take any contemporary work of fiction and turn to the scene where the young Socialist denounces the millionaire, and then compare the stilted sociological lecture given by that self-sacrificing bore with the surging joy of words in Rob Roy's declaration of himself, or Athelstane's defiance of De Bracy. That ancient sea of human passion upon which high words and great phrases are the resplendent foam is just now at a low ebb. We have ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... the luxuriance of his imagination, which enforces that mode of speech.[16] Imagination is the first element of oratory, simplicity its first condition. We have seen that the Indian is wholly destitute of the former; and the stilted, meretricious, and ornate style, of even his ordinary communications, entirely excludes the latter from ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... Clinch, the coolest head at a late supper,—he, the American, who had repeatedly drunk Frenchmen and Englishmen under the table—could be transformed into a sentimental, stagey idiot by a single glass of wine? He was conscious, too, of asking himself these very questions in a stilted sort of rhetoric, and with a rising brutality of anger that was new to him. And then everything swam before him, and he seemed to lose ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to be a refugee, a person of interest to foreign monarchs. On the inner wrapping of his pack was written large, "Vive le Napoleon! Vive la France! Vive!" He had little hesitation about speaking of himself, though always with stilted courtesy, and always furtively. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... and by a certain inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the application of its stilted jargon to the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... reasonably good analogy and in consonance with the general spirit of the language. "Truthful," for example, is said to be an Americanism, and at one time gave offence on that account. It is not only a vast improvement on the stilted "veracious," but one of the prettiest and most thoroughly English words ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Lover,'—such names as that she was aware would be useless now. 'Mary Jane Walker,' if she could be very simple, would do, or 'Blanche De Veau,' if she were able to maintain throughout a somewhat high-stilted style of feminine rapture. But as she considered that she could best deal with rapid action and strange coincidences, she thought that something more startling and descriptive would better suit her purpose. After an hour's thought a name did occur to her, and she wrote it down, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... their stilted praises of her mother and accepted their platitudes in good faith. It was indeed comforting to hear so many nice things said of her ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... has had himself perforated by a pistol-bullet on her behalf? Mr. Gallenga's division of this book into acts and scenes is not justified by anything specially dramatic either in its structure or its method. The dialogue, in truth, is somewhat stilted. Nevertheless, its first-hand sketches of Roman society are not without interest, and one or two characters seem ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Croak James and Croak Elizabeth, a big white wedding-favour tied round the neck of each. To see these grave birds, none would have suspected how frequently they had been in the mince-pies that morning, though Popham had expressly ruled (in somewhat stilted language) that they should "take ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... the men who suffered at the hands of the savages was a wandering schoolmaster, named John Filson, [Footnote: Do., John Small to G. R. Clark, June 23, 1786.] the first historian of Kentucky, and the man who took down, and put into his own quaint and absurdly stilted English, Boone's so-called "autobiography." Filson, having drifted west, had travelled up and down the Ohio and Wabash by canoe and boat. He was much struck with the abundance of game of all kinds which he saw on the northwestern ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... continuous curve from the spring to the apex, they rise perpendicularly for some distance above the piers on either side, and then take rather an abrupt turn inwards, suggesting the imposition of a pointed heading on an original stilted form. Further signs of alteration appear on the northern side, where the capitals have been recut in the Perpendicular fashion; but the Norman pilasters and mouldings on the south remain untouched. On both sides the double ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... at the window on the left—a well, if rather showily, dressed young fellow, wearing a frock coat, white waistcoat, and patent-leather boots. He is handsome in a commonplace way, and, though stilted and self-conscious, ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... mountains, and the breath of the great wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled with thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to translate into the written word. And the result of the effort seemed always to be bathos! Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, obscurity, and awkwardness clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win the great secret of language; the stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished away in clearer light. The periods ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... alive, it moves so rapidly, that it is never so precise, so varied in its choice of words, as written material. The phraseology of written discourse sounds slightly or markedly stilted, bookish, if repeated by the tongue. This difference—though it may appear almost trifling—is apparent to everyone. Its recognition can be partly illustrated by the fact that after President Lowell and Senator Lodge had debated ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... surely he had counted upon winning it. She had the feeling, too, that somehow the class lists did not represent the relative scholarship of the Jew and herself. He knew more German than she. It was this feeling that prompted her to write him a note which brought an answer in formal and stilted English. ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... answer to all invitations, there came only polite, stilted little letters of regret, in the children's round script. "Mother would d'rather we shouldn't go to a sin-gul party until we are young ladies!" Ellen would say cheerfully, if cross-examined on the subject, leaving it to the ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... but which nobody had hitherto summoned courage to attack. She studied it now with deep attention, and gave a digest of its information for the benefit of weaker minds, less able than her own, to grapple with the stilted language. The school preferred lighter literature for their own reading, but were content to listen to legends of the past when told by Veronica, who had rather a gift for narrative, and could carry her audience with her. As the next afternoon was still hopelessly wet, the girls gathered ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... charmed him and made him laugh by his amusing talk, kept his blue devils at bay, sent him first copies of his books, and sympathised with his views on political matters. M. de Hanski was also much flattered by Balzac's friendship for his wife, and would finish a polite and stilted epistle by saying that he need trouble Balzac no more, as he knows his wife is at the same time writing him one of her long chattering letters. Even when, by sad mischance, two of Balzac's love-letters fell into ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... tried to write to Steve in those days and each time destroyed the badly scored sheet, either in dismay at the wilful intimacy of her pen or disgusted with its stilted aloofness. She saw less and less of Wickersham that winter, partly because his affairs were monopolizing all his time, partly because she managed to spend most of her waking hours with Miriam Burrell or her father, who appeared doubly, humbly glad of her companionship. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... would show whether or no our journey was to prove fruitless. Soon after leaving the village we entered a dense forest, the growth of which was wonderfully beautiful. Tall pandanus trees, some of them supported by a hundred and more long stilted roots, which rose many feet above our heads, reared their crowns of ribbon-like leaves above even some of the giants of the forest. Palms of all shapes and sizes, dwarfed, tall, slender and thick, surrounded us on every side, and at least three ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... grantor, in the formal and diffuse rhetoric peculiar to his generation, and, perhaps, too much contemned by ours. To say the least, we are no more warranted in despising the utterances of noble, self-sacrificing philanthropists, because they are clothed in phrases now deemed verbose and stilted, than we would be in disparaging the deeds of historic heroes, because they wore armor now antiquated and struck their doughty blows with weapons obsolete. When Peter Cooper wrote, in the letter now before me, "The great object ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... Summer dress, of fresh shavings and sawdust from the nearby shed whence came also the shriek of the band-saw and the tap-tap of mallets. Ballinger's Yacht Basin was a busy place at this time of the year, and the slips were crowded with sailboats and motor-boats, while many craft still stood, stilted and canvas-wrapped, in the shade of the long sheds. Perry whistled a gay tune softly as he basked there in the warm sunlight and awaited the arrival of the ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... for instance, the vividness of Webster's, the oratorical character of Macaulay's, the ruggedness of Carlyle's, the poetical beauty of Emerson's, the humor of Irving's, and the brilliancy of Holmes's—the last lines from whom are purposely stilted, as ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... differs from mediocrity. Yet Hadria was glad to notice some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term "second class," though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the impression, was difficult ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... himself. My talking about his reading was not as bad as Sheila's persuading him that he can play whist. Did you ever know a man who did not believe that everybody else's reading of poetry was affected, stilted and unbearable? I know Mackenzie must have been reading poetry to Sheila long before I mentioned it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... suppress her fear, she walked, not sideways as always, but erect, her chest thrown out, which gave her figure a droll, stilted air of importance. Her shoes made a knocking sound on the ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... relieve them. They were, for the most part, an ill-digested mass of incongruities, in which there was as little keeping and probability in the characters as in the incidents, while the whole was told in that stilted "Hercles' vein" and with that licentiousness of allusion and imagery which could not fail to debauch both the taste and the morals of the youthful reader. The mind, familiarized with these monstrous, over-colored pictures, lost all relish ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... brilliant with both these most charming qualities of the human mind. Though sometimes lax in points of grammar, as was much the custom in his day, he wrote as delightful a style as is to be found in all English literature, and that too when the stilted, verbose, and turgid habit was tediously prevalent. He was a man who impressed his ability upon all who met him; so that the abler the man and the more experienced in judging men, the higher did he rate Franklin when brought ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... series of birds put down the length of it (or half the length—or a quarter would do it—with judgment), showing the transition, in length of beak, from bunting to woodcock—in length of leg, from swift to stilted plover—and in length of wing, from auk to frigate-bird; the wings, all opened, in one specimen of each bird to their full sweep, and in another, shown at the limit of the down back stroke. For what on earth—or in air—is the use to me ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... eleven we went to welcome in Christmas. The church of San Moise is in the highest style of the Renaissance art, which is, I believe, the lowest style of any other. The richly sculptured facade is divided into stories; the fluted columns are stilted upon pedestals, and their lines are broken by the bands which encircle them like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible point theatrical saints and angels, only sustained from falling to the ground ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... handwriting, or a stilted and difficult hand, is a great waste of time and energy, mainly the would-be reader's. There is no excuse, in these days of the typewriter and of common knowledge of stenography, for an illegible letter or manuscript, ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... who could deliver his judgment in this stilted style of pompous word-building, in such circumstances as were then existing, would have required a powdered footman in spotless plush to precede him out of a house on fire. I must confess to a little misgiving as to the authenticity of this speech. It ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, the more attractive, no doubt, it ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... glance, just as Professor Enoch Crabbe, of the Riverside Academy, stepped up and greeted Joe. He was earnest in his congratulations, but his manner was so stilted that they looked at each other with an amused smile, as he stalked ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... you," said Ethel quickly. And then, because that sounded too grateful, she added, "Won't you sit down?" in rather a stilted little voice. This woman made her feel so young. "Now don't act like a school-girl!" With an appearance of lazy ease she turned and poked the small logs in the fire. "I do so love wood fires. Don't you?" she said, in carefully easy tones, but she did ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... battering, and danger may be apprehended when next they meet. It is difficult to give any account of this remarkable correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps not yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination is baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in bravura passages, into downright truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the thought of his mistress with the changing phases of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by the swain, but on the modern mind produces ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leaves him to cry himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control and development which the child does not possess. There is no doubt that our development of charity methods has reached this pseudo-scientific and stilted stage. We have learned to condemn unthinking, ill-regulated kind-heartedness, and we take great pride in mere repression much as the stern parent tells the visitor below how admirably he is rearing the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... Empress of Morocco, the Destruction of Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... rather, give the mind the opportunity to get them. First, then, this term thus employed is needlessly pretentious; secondly, it is totally misapplied. Would it not help both teacher and pupil, then, if we were to leave this stilted form of expression, and set forth the actual thing the lessons undertake, by using such caption as for for example, To give the idea, of a triangle, or to insure, or to furnish the idea of a curve? We think the misnomer yet ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... connected their pedestals with the spring of the vault by a series of inverted curves sweeping upwards along the height of the shallow attic. The omission of these details not only weakened the support given to the arches of the dome, but it also lent a stilted effect to the cupola by abruptly separating the perpendicular lines of the drum and attic from the segment of the vaulting. This is an error which could even now be repaired, if any enterprising ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... delivery and no gift of expression; he could not even give utterance to the ideas that did, not infrequently, act on his brain, nor hardly to the human tenderness which was his normal attitude towards mankind. But he did go on writing fresh ones, stilted and commonplace as they were. Mental activity was less of a burden to him than bodily activity, and he had kept himself up to that part of what he thought to be ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... residence with his umbrella under his arm, and no brass band or military guard at his heels, and unostentatiously taking his seat by the side of the meanest citizen in a public conveyance; while this is the case, there still lingers in American men-of-war all the stilted etiquette and childish parade of the old-fashioned Spanish court of Madrid. Indeed, so far as the things that meet the eye are concerned, an American Commodore is by far a greater man than the President of twenty ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... to the great effort of Norway in our days to supplant the Danish-Norwegian tongue with a language from the various dialects of her people. Nor can it be said that Grundtvig was immediately successful in his attempt. His version of the sagas sounds somewhat stilted and artificial, and it never became popular among the common people for whom it was especially intended. Eventually, however, he did develop his new style into a plain, forceful mode of expression that has greatly enriched the ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... Dictionary—and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale's Koran by their anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to the student, but utterly out of place for readers of "The Nights;" re-published, as these notes have been separately (London, Chatto, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... For the life of him he could not think of anything to say. Surely, he thought, he could find something in the shape of words to show his sympathy. But he could find nothing that would not sound horribly stilted ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... voices, these cities of men—from the Maxim-gun-like rattle of New York, with its chorus of strenuous steamers calling from the water, on over the gamut of different capitals to Tokio, where the city voice is the tinkling of stilted wooden shoes; not "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," but "Tinkle, tinkle, little feet," go the small wooden shoes on ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... upon the Count in one of the paths of the Kleine Rugen. He was walking slowly toward her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully upon the ground. When she accosted him, he was plainly confused, as she had said. After the first few passages in polite though stilted conversation, his keen, grey eyes resumed their thoughtful—it was even a ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... spread the empty blue of the South Pacific; the tenuous snowdrift of the reef, far out, and the horizon. On the starboard hand, beyond the little space of the anchorage, curved the beach, a pink-white scimitar laid flat. Then the scattering of thatched and stilted huts, the red, corrugated-iron store, residence and godowns of the Dutch trader, the endless Indian-file of coco palms, the abrupt green wall of the mountain.—A twelve-year-old girl, naked as Eve and, I've no doubt, thrice as handsome, stood watching us from the mid-decks in a perfection ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... which of those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable to genius. "London" has ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... red and hot. Almost before he knew what he was saying his tongue began to wag, and he heard himself saying, in a stiff, stilted voice, "It was very nice in the Park this afternoon!..." Oh, banal fool, he thought, she will despise you now, as if you were ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... a Christmas play do the boys and girls like, and in what sort do we like to see them take part? It should be a play, surely, in which the dialogue is simple and natural, not stilted and artificial; one that seems like a bit of real life, and yet has plenty of fancy and imagination in it; one that suggests and helps to perpetuate some of the happy and wholesome customs of Christmas; above all, one that is pervaded by the Christmas ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... better." Well, she had done better the next time. She had not forgotten him again—never, never again. That had been her first letter; how absurd of Jerry, the magnificently careless, to have treasured it all that time, the miserable, stilted little thing! She touched it with curious fingers. Surely, surely he must have cared, to have cared ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... appears that besides the composed and formal dignity of phrase which alone the public knows in published state papers and official correspondence, there is also an official language of wrath and retort not at all artificial or stilted, but quite homelike ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... grandiloquent speechifyings, the stately bows and graceful curtsies, the prevalence—nay, the domination—of taste, what a business it all was! The small electors, seigneurs, dukes and what not imitated the archducal courts; the archdukes mimicked the imperial courts: all was stiff, stilted, unnatural to a degree that seems to us nowadays positively soul-killing, devilish. But some surprising plants grew up, some wondrous fruits ripened in them. A peasant-mind, imbued with peasant-songs, was set in one; the peasant-mind in all outward matters conformed ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... comes in," was the only way he could put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make yourself at home—at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform the feat he urged on his visitor. "Any ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... near enough to observe the visitors closely soon began to look upon Richard and Nathan as a couple of quaint, harmless, exceedingly well-bred old gentlemen, rather provincial in appearance and a little stilted in their manners, who, before the evening was over, would, perhaps, become tired of the gayety, ask to be excused, and betake themselves to bed. All of which would be an eminently proper proceeding in view of their extreme age and general ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... luncheon-no matter how carefully the menu has been prepared, no matter how delightful the environment—if there are awkward lapses in the conversation; if there are moments of painful, embarrassing silence; or if the conversation is stilted, ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... impatience till the agony drew to an end, and the heroine died amid the sobs of ten thousand readers. Yet the story had power, and the central figure of Clarissa was impressive in its pathos and tragedy. The novel would still be readable if it were stripped of the stilted conversations and sentimental gush in which Richardson delighted; but that would leave precious little ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... criticism of this play is extraordinarily brilliant, does his best to extenuate the stiffness of it. But to my own ear, as I read it again after a quarter of a century, there rise the tones of the stilted, the unsmiling, the essentially provincial and boringly solemn society of Christiania as it appeared to a certain young pilgrim in the early seventies, condensing, as it then seemed to do, all the sensitiveness, the arrogance, the crudity which made communication with the excellent and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... ruined Roman sits among the ruins; he flies to no green garden; he does not look to heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he lives no more. The names which end in "us," seem to speak with lyric cadence. That measured cadence,—that tramp and march,—which are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so when compared with any other language,—make Latin a study in itself of mighty influence. The language alone, without the literature, would give one the thought of Rome. Man present in nature, commanding nature too sternly to be inspired ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... much fault with one another, and grudged each other every little bit of praise wrung from the world's cold, death-doomed lips. It is to me pathetically absurd to see gifted persons all struggling along, and rudely elbowing each other out of the way to win—what? A few stilted commonplace words of approbation or fault-finding in the newspapers of the day, and a little clapping and shouting from a gathering of ordinary minded persons, who only clap and shout because it is possibly the fashion to do so. It is really ludicrous. If the music the musician offers to the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of romanticism. They are so thoroughly unhealthy, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... merit Browne's work is most astonishingly unequal, though the general level of Britannia's Pastorals is distinctly higher than that of the Shepherd's Pipe. The author passes at times abruptly from careful and loving realism to the most stilted conventionality, and from passages of impassioned eloquence to others grotesquely banal. In some of his peculiarities, as in the perpetuai use of elaborate similes and in the indulgence in inflated paraphrases, he anticipates ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... short, fascinated him. For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to poor Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... republican he would take no oath to defend it. The only amusement that Comte permitted himself was a visit to the opera. In his youth he had been a playgoer, but he shortly came to the conclusion that tragedy is a stilted and bombastic art, and after a time comedy interested him no more than tragedy. For the opera he had a genuine passion, which he gratified as often as he could, until his means became too narrow to afford even that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... restraint that naturally obtained in the first moments gradually wore away. They were all in good spirits, anticipating a jolly afternoon at the ocean resorts, so when they discovered themselves to be congenial companions they lost no time in stilted phrases but were soon chattering away as if they had known one another ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... Despite the stilted style and absurdly pompous descriptions, with an occasional terrible breakdown, Charlie's love of Nature, and especially of the animal creation, seems to have been most genuine. He speaks of "the wide ocean which when angry roars and clashes over the beach, but when calm ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... during their whole lives. But the bridegroom was not so supported. He was manifestly agitated and nervous, especially during the reception which followed the ceremony. He stood with forced amiability responding to the stilted congratulations and gazing with wondering admiration at his bride, whose manner was the ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... again on the heath. Edgar, still attired as a lunatic, soliloquizes in stilted terms about the instability of fortune and the advantages of a humble lot. Then there comes to him somehow into the very place on the heath where he is, his father, the blinded Gloucester, led by an old man. In that characteristic Shakespearean ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... you, mignonne," he said, "for from you comes the mercy of France. Give it to these gentlemen to bear to the Queen; and for the present I must leave you for an hour, for the council awaits me. Come, Bertrandi." With these bald words, delivered in a stilted fashion, his voice only warming as he bade au revoir to La Valentinois, the King left us, followed ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... of letters written by my grandfather to my father in 1835, when the latter was in college. They were closely written with a fine pen in a small, delicate hand, and the lines of ink, though faded, were like steel engraving. They were stilted, godly—in an ingenuous fashion—at times ponderously humorous, full of a mild self-satisfaction, and inscribed under the obvious impression that only the writer could save my father's soul from hell or his kidneys from destruction. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... the meaning of his present communication, have you, Elmer?" questioned Mark, a little bit given to stilted language. ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... work with its deeper and more prophetic tones. In point of expression the poet's powers had attained their full development; he has perfect command of rime; the versification is free and shows no trace of the stilted style of his first volumes; the language is copious and eloquent, but exhibits few signs of that verbosity and tendency to vain repetition which, as has been already remarked, marred some of his later poetry. ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... polite and stilted speech while possessing himself of Polly's shawl and bag. He was a very superior young man of the clerk or foreman type, somewhat ill put together at the waist, with a flat back to his head, and a cadaverous countenance. Laura gave him a rapid look. But her chief ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Louis joined the Jesuit order,[213] against his father's passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house; and when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a "particular attention" to himself on God's part, and wrote letters of stilted good advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon became so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of his brothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... obediently over and sat down in the President's seat. Anger and mortification were ill inspirations for letter-writing, but under Lincoln's burning eyes Jason seized a pen and wrote his mother a stilted note. Lincoln paced the floor, pausing now and again to ...
— Benefits Forgot - A Story of Lincoln and Mother Love • Honore Willsie
... the dimensions of the "North American Review," and, like that, promises to visit us quarterly. It is the first fruit of a spirited and apparently well-matured plan set on foot by students in Yale College, and heartily entered into by those of several other institutions. Its objects are clearly stilted in the well-written Prospectus and Introduction. They are briefly these:—"To record the history, promote the intellectual improvement, elevate the moral aims, liberalize the views, and unite the sympathies of Academical, Collegiate, and Professional ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... day, and we went to the hotel, where we were besieged at once by tradesmen, each proclaiming himself the only honest outfitter and "agent for all good export firms." Monty departed to call on British officialdom (one advantage of traveling with a nobleman being that he has to do the stilted social stuff). Yerkes went to call on the United States Consul, the same being presumably a part of his religion, for he always does it, and almost always abuses his government afterward. So Fred and I were left to repel ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... in a high, stilted voice, and as she sat primly in the straight-backed old chair, knitting away at nothing, she presented a funny, attractive ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... into the little main street. The chilly, stilted aspect of it shocked him. Everything seemed frosty and pinched, just as the cutting air did after the warm balminess of California. Only several persons, strangers to his recollection, were abroad, and they favoured him with incurious glances. They were wrapped in ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... though less general—for instance, neither Sir Robert nor Mr. Champers-Haswell laughed. This merriment seemed to excite Jeekie. At any rate it caused him to cease his stilted talk and relapse into the strange vernacular that is common to all negroes, tinctured with a racy slang that was ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... said Darrell, pityingly. He understood now the wistful, appealing look of the brown eyes. He intended to say something expressive of sympathy, but the right words would not come. He could think of nothing that did not sound stilted and formal. Almost unconsciously he laid his hand with a tender caress on the slender little white hand lying near him, much as he would have laid it on a wounded bird; and just as unconsciously, the little hand nestled ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... Senlac, has given some brilliant details to history. Other Norman-French poems were written in England on the rebellion, on the conquest of Ireland, on the life of the martyred Thomas—poems which threw off the formal rules of the stilted Latin fashion, and embodied the tales of eye-witnesses with their graphic brief descriptions. An Anglo-Norman literature of song and sermon fast grew up, absolutely identical in tongue with the Norman literature beyond the Channel, but marked by special characteristics ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... rather absently; her heart was very full and she was thinking of other matters. But as he continued she answered at length, hesitating, using phrases as trite and quaintly stilted as the theme itself, gently defending the old names he sneered at. And in her words he savoured a certain old-time flavour of primness and pride—a vaguely delicate hint of resentment, which it amused him to excite. Pacing the dunes with ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... talking to him, so much was he in dread of the ordeal which he had prepared for himself. As he went down to the House after dinner, he almost made up his mind that it would be a good thing to leave London by one of the night mail trains. He felt himself to be stiff and stilted as he walked, and that his clothes were uneasy to him. When he turned into Westminster Hall he regretted more keenly than ever he had done that he had seceded from the keeping of Mr. Low. He could, he thought, have spoken very well in court, and would there have learned that self-confidence ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... as though fever burned there, and worked his Adam's apple vigorously. Probably if he had been in the accustomed freedom of outdoors he would have sworn soulfully and smashed the bandbox over the Honorable J. Percival's bald head. Now, in the stilted confines of that ornate parlor, he nursed the bandbox on his knees, as part of the rest of the spider-legged and frail surroundings. When they retired to their team he carried the bandbox held gingerly out in front of him, tiptoeing ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... hair was in clusters of curls, like bunches of grapes; her tight bodice seemed to crack with her vivacity; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her petticoat a small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted heel. She was attractive and impertinent, especially the latter. He seemed to think it was a great pity, what she had told him; but he lost himself in this consideration, or, at any rate, said nothing for some time, while his eyes wandered over Mrs. Luna, and he probably wondered ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Nature. It is seen in Pope no less than in Wordsworth; in The Rape of the Lock no less than in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted conventions of the late literary epic. The Iliad is the story of a quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the immediate cause? The insulting removal of a memorial emblem from an Italian ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... and, although the younger Colman wrote in a more flexible style than was possessed by any other dramatist of the time, excepting Sheridan, he was influenced to this extent by contemporary usage, that often when he became serious he also became artificial and stilted. The sentimental part of The Heir at Law is trite in plan and hard in expression. Furthermore that portion of it which, in the character of Dr. Pangloss, satirises the indigent, mercenary, disreputable private tutors who constituted a distinct and pernicious class of social humbugs ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... was acted under Catholic auspices; some of its dialogue was in |144| the Tyrolese patois and racy and humorous, other parts, and particularly the speeches of Mary and Joseph—out of respect for these holy personages—had been rewritten in the eighteenth century in a very stilted and undramatic style. Some simple shepherd plays are said to be still presented in the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... struggles vainly to resist the feelings of distrust and jealousy which he had declared absurd a little while earlier. And the two are forced at last to walk their different ways. Unfortunately the dialogue is heavy and stilted. The play is a tract rather than a piece of art, and the tirades of Fedor are equally unconvincing when he speaks for or against that "fiction" which is killing both his own and the girl's hope of happiness in mutual love. ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... replied in somewhat stilted fashion, "is not a question which I should be prepared to ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in stilted phrases, inconsecutive. They dared not converse naturally, each fearing to say too little or too much. For the memory of that surge of emotion, transient though it had been, in which their discussion had culminated, that afternoon, stood between ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... manner in which these lords and ladies spent their time at court, filling idle hours with compliment, love-making, veiled jibe and swift retort; if we read our Euphues again, renewing our acquaintance with its absurdly elaborated and stilted style, its tireless winding of sentences round a topic without any advance in thought, its affectation of philosophy and classical learning; if we remember that to speak euphuistically was a coveted and studiously cultivated accomplishment, and that to pun, to utter ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... infinite variety. Tassoni describes Paolo, the warrior, consumed with ravishing love, "shrunk with misery;" he fails to reach the youthful passion, and is as mediaevally chivalric as is Chaucer in "The Knightes Tale" of Palamon and Arcite. Leigh Hunt resorts to stilted ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... afterward be compared and verified. 'That is,' Mr. Bell had added with the flicker of a smile, 'if we succeed in talking at all!' Well, they did succeed, as you have heard. At first they held only a stilted dialogue and conscientiously jotted it down; but afterward their exuberance got the better of them and in sheer joy they chattered away like magpies until long past midnight. Then, loath to destroy the connection, Watson detached his telephone, replaced the Company's ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... I have given two of these Byzantine stilted arches: the one on the right, a, as they now too often appear, in its bare brickwork; that on the left, with its alabaster covering, literally marble defensive armor, riveted together in pieces, which ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... habitual revulsions. Was that, he asked himself, the sort of letter a lover should write to the beloved on her release, on the sudden long prayed-for opening of a way to her, on the end of her shameful servitude and his humiliations? He began to recall the cold and stilted sentences of that difficult composition. The gentility of it! All his life he had been a prey to gentility, had cast himself free from it, only to relapse again in such fashion as this. Would he never be human and passionate and sincere? Of course he was glad, and she ought to be glad, that ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... description you gave of his appearance;—a sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white neckcloth, and stilted up on his thick-soled ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... had succeeded in writing it, he read over and over again; but on each occasion he said to himself that it was cold and passionless, stilted and unmeaning. It by no means pleased him, and seemed as though it could bring but one answer—a cold acquiescence in the proposal which he so coldly made. But yet he knew not how to improve it. And after all it was a true exposition of that which he had determined ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... be." Mazie, grown suddenly a bit stiff and stilted, was obviously trying to be very polite and "grown up." "There must be an awful lot to do here. Mother says she don't see how ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... They enlarged Russell's book and made more credible to academics by making it less comprehensible to ordinary people with good education and intelligence through the introduction of unnecessary mathematical models and stilted prose. it lacks the human touch and simpler explanations of Russell's original ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... study. His love of learning, his keen appreciation of its beauty and its value, have tended to inflate his sentences with an appearance of display. His poetic diction is simpler than that of his prose; but here, too, he is habitually over-elevated, whence he becomes sometimes stilted, and oftentimes he drops below pitch with an inadequate and disappointing close. But we must honour him in the position which he holds. He is the leader of that noble series of English scholars who represent the first endeavouring stage ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... but not forgotten friend," and was simple and natural as girls' letters usually are. My Grandfather Kelly died that season, and I recall that I wrote a letter of condolence to my people, modeled upon one in the book. How absurd and stilted and unreal it ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... great composer Gluck, whose genius was destined to have such a profound influence on French music, came to Paris with his "Iphigenie en Aulide," by invitation of the Dauphiness Marie Antoinette, who had formerly been his musical pupil. The stiff and stilted works of Sully and Rameau had thus far ruled the French stage without any competition, except from the Italian operettas performed by the company of Les Bouffons, and the new school of French operatic comedy developed into form ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... huddled together and displayed some uncertainty as to whether they should remain or run. But the suspense was soon over, for the nearer bushes parted suddenly and out upon the tote-road floundered an immense moose, his bulbous nose wagging, his bristly mane twitching, his stilted fore ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... Jon was one of those boys (not many) in whom a home-trained love of beauty had survived school life. He had had to keep it to himself, of course, so that not even the drawing-master knew of it; but it was there, fastidious and clear within him. And his poem seemed to him as lame and stilted as the night was winged. But he kept it, all the same. It was a "beast," but better than nothing as an expression of the inexpressible. And he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to show it to Mother.' He slept terribly well, when he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... favour, and yet owned a villa and $25,000 a year income. However that may be, it was a brilliant match for the son of the slaughter-house inspector, and the wedding took place in the palace of a cardinal, the Archbishop of Bologna. As one poet wrote, in stilted Latin: ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... the rhythm rises to a high degree of excellence, even elevation. Like Pensa, Zacuto was the disciple of great masters, and a comparison of either with Lope de Vega and Calderon will reveal the same southern warmth, stilted pathos, exuberance of fancy, wealth of imagery, excessive playing upon words, peculiar turns and phrases, erratic style, and other qualities characteristic of Spanish dramatic ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... have written to Mr. Gilmore by the same post as will take this, and have just told him the bare truth. What else could I tell him? I have said something horribly stilted about esteem and friendship, which I would have left out, only that my letter seemed to be heartless without it. He has been to me as good as a man could be; but was it my fault that I could not love him? If you ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... revelers, extortioners, such were some of you; but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. One cannot find in the New Testament anything stiff and stilted about this experience. Paul's change came suddenly; Peter's came slowly. They did not even have, as we have come to have, a settled word to describe the experience. Ask James what it is and, practical-minded man that he is, he calls it conversion—being turned around. ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... smoking and exchanging compliments in the high-flown, stilted Samoan style, there entered the house a strapping young warrior, carrying a wickerwork cage, in which were two of the rare and famous Manu Mea (red-bird) of Samoa—the Didunculus or tooth-billed pigeon. These were the property of ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... their best stilted French ensued between him and Ammiani. It was pitched too high in a foreign tongue for Captain Gambier to descend from it, as he would fain have done, to ask the lady's name. They exchanged cards and formal salutes, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... painter once showed Apelles, they say, a picture, and said, "I have just done it." Apelles replied, "Without your telling me, I should know it was painted quickly; I only wonder you haven't painted more such in the time." As then (for I now return from my digression), I advise to avoid stilted and bombastic language, so again do I urge to avoid a finical and petty style of speech; for tall talk is unpopular, and petty language makes no impression. And as the body ought to be not only sound but in good condition, so speech ought to be not only not feeble but vigorous. For a ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... the form of Aunt Amanda on the ground. He stooped down and examined her, and stood up again. Then he eyed the company of travellers with a hard cold eye, and spoke deliberately and in a low voice. His manner of speech was somewhat stilted and precise, and scarcely what might have ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... in his work Cavalcanti shows many of the stilted mannerisms which were common to the troubadours; but such expressions as "to her, every virtue bows," and "the mind of man cannot soar so high, nor is it sufficiently purified by divine grace to understand and appreciate all her perfections," ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Write to me—not a stilted, legal kind of letter like the last. Tell me about yourself—your feelings, your conditions. We are old friends—friends long before Bridget came either into my life or yours. You can trust me. If you do not want me to repeat to Bridget anything you may tell me, I will faithfully observe ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... of the stilted letter touched and amused and also flattered Neeland; for no young man is entirely insensible to a young girl's gratitude. An agreeable warmth suffused him; it pleased him to remember that he had been associated in the moral and social rehabilitation ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... himself to a third glass of wine; "here's a health to your young folk! And now to business." Here the visitor, drawing his chair nearer to his host, assuming a more grave aspect, and dropping something of his stilted pronunciation, continued, "You had ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... consonant and the second begins with a vowel, as in eats apples, not at all, an ox, etc. On the other hand, too evident an effort to secure the proper enunciation of the sound elements should be avoided, since a stilted mode of utterance is ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... crimson and white, her eyes as candidly blue as flowers. Her features were finely moulded, and her shoulders, slipping out from azure lutestring, were like smooth handfuls of meringue. Her voice was always formal, and it sounded stilted, forced, in comparison with Mrs. Winscombe's ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... repetition of the same word. To find four different terms for nearly the same idea "difference," "odds," "distinction," and "contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. While it is true that the term "euphuism" has come to be applied to any stilted, antithetical style that pays more attention to the manner of expressing a thought than to its worth, we should remember that English prose style has advanced because some writers, like Lyly, emphasized the importance of artistic form. Shakespeare ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... feeling of the audience, as they certainly increased my dislike for the play. Here, too, I again encountered the formidable impression which Mrs. Siddons had produced in the part, of which, in spite of the turbid coldness and stilted emphasis of the style, she had made a perfect embodiment of heroic grandeur and classical grace. My Euphrasia was, I am sure, a pitiful picture of an antique heroine, in spite of Macdonald's enthusiasm for the "attitude" in the last scene, and my cousin Horace Twiss's ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a dear!" Norah said. "I adore her stilted little expressions, such as 'busy with my needle or pen,' instead of sewing or writing, and with it all she is at heart ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... a man," argued Hall, "because he doesn't live in accordance with our stilted notions. Professor Young says that the girl is a genius—that she has a beautiful voice. I promised that if he took up—a contribution for the family that I would send ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Robert. Oh, I can't get at what I want to say! Any talk about love always sounds very stilted or hollow. I only know that I want to live intensely in all that concerns you; that just to think of you makes me perfectly happy. When I said that learning Phedre and Juliet was the reason I lived, I was thinking of the time when I had no right ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... saying that sounded stilted," he returned. "I explained myself poorly. It is not easy for me to explain ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... to herself that she desires nothing better. Yes, papa dear, she will, indeed she will, tell him everything. And then makes a very fair revelation of her love-affair—a little dry and stilted in the actual phrasing, perhaps, but then, what can you expect when one's father is inclined to be stiff and awkward in such a matter, to approach it formally, and consider it an interview? It was ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... words were ridiculously stilted, John turned with a song on his lips and skipped across to the home porch swing, where his mother found him a moment later, and made him come in and ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... moment, and at the same time to give them a clear idea of his life. Without boasting, modestly and naturally, he describes the adventures of an aviator in the great World War. It could well serve as a guide to those who are studying aviation. Although he has avoided the stilted tone of the school-master, still his accomplishments as a knight of the air must fascinate any who know aviation. For the aviators as well as their machines have accomplished wonders. They are rightly called the eyes of the army—these iron-nerved boys who know no fear. Admiral ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... "run down to Naples" and a recommencement of Childe Harold. There was a limit to his defiance of the "world's rebuke." Home politics and the congress of Verona (November-December 1822) suggested a satire entitled "The Age of Bronze" (published April 1, 1823). It is, as he said, "stilted," and cries out for notes, but it embodies some of his finest and most vigorous work as a satirist. By the middle of February (1823) he had completed The Island; or Christian and his Comrades (published June 26, 1823). The sources are Bligh's Narrative of the Mutiny of the Bounty, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... rival him in the unstudied graces of oratory. His speeches have a freedom and a rhythmical flow which captivate the hearer. Though he gives full play to his imagination and recklessly faces the risks to which an impetuous speaker is exposed, he is seldom stilted, and rarely breaks the neck of a sentence. Here, perhaps, the favourable side of the catalogue should end. His speeches have the great blemish of insolence. They are wanting in geniality, and apparently wanting ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... and grandmothers and college brothers and baby sisters. They were learning the great secret of literary forcefulness—to suit their style to their audience. Ultimately, they arrived at the point of thanking imaginary young men for imaginary flowers. Mae listened to the somewhat stilted phraseology of these polite and proper notes with a supercilious smile. The class, covertly ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... dashing haughty Tybalt of a brother; a wicked poor cousin, a pretty maid, and a fierce buccaneer. These people might pass three hours very well on the stage, and interest the audience hugely; but the author fails in filling up the outlines. His language is absurdly stilted, frequently careless; the reader or spectator hears a number of loud speeches, but scarce a dozen lines that seem to belong of nature to ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me to a very handsome half white gentleman, a lawyer of ability, and lately interpreter to the Legislature, Mr. Ragsdale, or, as he is usually called, "Bill Ragsdale," a leading spirit among the natives. His conversation was eloquent and poetic, though rather stilted, and he has a good deal of French mannerism; but if he is a specimen of native patriotic feeling, I think that the extinction of Hawaiian nationality must be far off. I was amused with the attention that he paid to his dress under very adverse circumstances. ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... coach from Vicenza, which arrived at Padua every night of the year, brought with it in particular on the night of October 13, 1721, a tall, personable young man, an Englishman, in a dark blue cloak, who swang briskly down from the coupe and asked in stilted Italian for "La sapienza del Signer Dottor' Lanfranchi." From out of a cloud of steam—for the weather was wet and the speaker violently hot—a husky voice replied, "Eccomi—eccomi, a servirla." The young man took off his hat ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... Mediterranean; and sandpipers and curlews, the latter wild as ever, paced the smooth, pure floor. The shoreline was backed by a dark vegetable wall, here and there broken and fronted by single trees, white mangroves tightly corded down, and raised on stilted roots high above the tide. Between wood and wave lay powdered sandstone of lively yellow, mixed with bright white quartz and debris of pink shells. Upon the classic shores of Greece I should have thought of Poseidon and the Nereids; but the lovely scene was in ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... generally; but from poetry which is actually to be acted on the English stage it takes away the most indispensable of all qualities, the natural, life-like tone of real speech. Notice this in the difference between the two extracts below. Observe how stilted and artificial the first one seems; and see how the second combines the melody and dignity of poetry with the simple naturalness ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... are told that he had a "grave and sedate appearance", and the somewhat stilted form of the question is quite in harmony ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... running through it for refrain. Then a description of a lodging-house dinner: "a block of bread on a lonely place, and potatoes that looked as if they had committed suicide in their own steam." A little ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty. I read on until I came to a young man who fell from his horse, or had been thrown from his horse, I never knew which, nor did I feel enough interest in the matter to make research; the young man was put to bed by ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... to suit everybody. They try to furnish the best. Library trustees and librarian are in a like case. The silly, the weak, the sloppy, the wishy-washy novel, the sickly love story, the belated tract, the crude hodge-podge of stilted conversation, impossible incident, and moral platitude or moral bosh for children—these are not needed. It is as bad to buy them and circulate them, knowingly, as it would be for our school authorities to install in our schoolrooms as ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... the worst. Would not, perhaps, the reflections applied to the case of the French peasants of a century ago apply also to them?" It is not under oppression that we learn how to use freedom. The ordinary sophism by which misrule is defended is, when truly stilted, this: The people must continue in slavery, because slavery has generated in them all the vices of slaves; because they are ignorant, they must remain under a power which has made and which keeps them ignorant; because they have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... seems to have lost its shaft, but as there is no trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the corbel table of a form common in Portugal ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... has ruined, the scene has a great moving power. Allowing for differences of taste and time, the vogue of the Novel in Richardson's day can easily be understood, and through all the stiffness, the stilted effect of manner and speech, and the stifling conventions of the entourage, a sweet and charming young woman in very piteous distress emerges to live in affectionate memory. After all, no poor ideal of womanhood is ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... it. Conspicuous among these, and not far from the Palais Royal, was the famous Hotel de Rambouillet. The Salon Bleu has become historic. This "sanctuary of the Temple of Athene," as it was called in the stilted language of the day, has been illuminated for us by the rank, beauty, and talent of the Augustan age of France. We are more or less familiar with even the minute details of the spacious room, whose long windows, looking across the little ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... about her, when suddenly the murmur of a human voice attracted his attention. He heard whispers, the complaining tones of a woman's voice mingled with entreaties, smothered laughter, sighs, and half-stilted exclamations of surprise; but above them all, the woman's voice prevailed. Saint-Aignan stopped to look about him; he perceived from the greatest surprise that the voices proceeded, not from the ground, but from the branches ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the rest, they were conscious of a pleasant surprise. Against the simplicity and pathos of the old ballad Buononcini's stilted artificialities sounded tame and monotonous. When Lavinia finished applause filled the room. She had to ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
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