DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Homely' Quotes from Famous Books

... patiently marching Una to be a creative thinker, yet she did hunger for self-mastery, and ardently was she following the erratic gibes at civilization with which young Walter showed his delight in having an audience, when the brown, homely ...

— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... making for charm in a coarse homely face was a set of white even teeth. I found her singularly unattractive. A tear rolled down her cheek and its course was that of a rill in ...

— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... who are conversant with the wonderful features of the Egyptian religion and priestcraft, will observe how eagerly they seized upon and deified anything symbolical of their mysterious tenets, and transmitted them to posterity, figured as hieroglyphics; and it is but natural to presume that this homely-looking flower, with its halo, so typical of glory and resurrection, would have ranked high in their mythology, if it, and its properties, had been known to them. Moreover, an examination of the elaborate works of Josephus, Herodotus, King, and Diodorus, so full in their description of Egyptian ...

— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... had got her off to Chicago to study piano, and who had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match she would be likely to make in that part of the country. Johanna Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country. She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental. She was so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her niece because of her talent, because of ...

— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... when I offer you this. Many times I have come bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And yet—and yet—it is something better than flowers; it is a SEED-CAPSULE. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... farfetched constructions have been put by the commentators upon this very homely sentence. As long as the question was, whether their wits should have licence to go a-woolgathering or no, one could feel no great concern to interfere: but it appears high time to come to Shakspeare's rescue, when MR. COLLIER'S "clever" old commentator, with ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various

... of Sponges, the soft skeletons of which form the useful article of everyday use. There are many forms who weave a home of far more delicacy and beauty than their more familiar and homely brothers. The sponge creature itself is a slimy, soft creature, which fills in the spaces in its spongy skeleton. It is fastened to one spot, and gathers in its food from the water around it (and oxygen as well), ...

— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... three-masted, and passenger-carrying, I have nothing to say, feeling in general little sympathy with people who want to go anywhere; nor caring much about anything, which in the essence of it expresses a desire to get to other sides of the world; but only for homely and stay-at-home ships, that live their life and die their death about English rocks. Neither have I any interest in the higher branches of commerce, such as traffic with spice islands, and porterage of ...

— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, ...

— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... head?" Who lived on the scanty fare of a small purse in common with the family of his disciples? Who withdrew from the entertainments of Jerusalem to the humble cottage of Mary and Martha, cheerfully subsisting on the most homely and casual provision?—HE, who has taught us to limit our desires of temporal good within the narrow circle of one short request—"GIVE US THIS ...

— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox

... robs each part o'th world With borrowed beauties to enflame thine eye: The Sea, to fetch her Pearle, is div'd into; The Diomond rocks are cut to make her shine; To plume her pryde the Birds do naked sing: When my Enanthe, in a homely gowne— ...

— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... my cousins having given me carte blanche to effect what alterations I pleased, and a sum having been set aside for that purpose. The ordinary sitting-room and bedrooms I left much as they were: for I knew Diana and Mary would derive more pleasure from seeing again the old homely tables, and chairs, and beds, than from the spectacle of the smartest innovations. Still some novelty was necessary, to give to their return the piquancy with which I wished it to be invested. Dark handsome new carpets and ...

— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... in making bad scholars; and I believe that those boys who take part in rough, hard play outside of school will not find any need for horseplay in school. While they study they should study just as hard as they play football. It is wise to obey the homely old adage, "Work while you work; play while ...

— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... constant friend in him. No beggar ever asked the Captain for a shilling without getting it, if the Captain had a shilling anywhere about him. Sometimes he had plenty of money, yet when at home he always lived in a frugal, homely way. Great was the rejoicing therefore, among his friends (and they were many), when it was known that he had fallen in with a streak of good fortune. Having been instrumental in saving the British bark Dauntless from shipwreck, the insurance companies had awarded him a liberal salvage, ...

— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes

... that under no circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moralised upon this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas. ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... It is to this primitive parish that David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, refers, in his "Orcadian Sketches," as "celebrated over the whole archipelago for the peculiarities of its inhabitants, their singular manners and habits, their uncouth appearance, and homely address. Being the most landward district in Pomona," he adds, "and consequently having little intercourse with strangers, it has become the stronghold of many ancient customs and superstitions, which modern innovation has pushed off from their pedestals in almost all the other parts of ...

— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... principles of that government for which you fight, they would renounce the English allegiance, and the whole of this territory would be yours. I know them, from Quebec to Detroit and Michilimackinac and Saint Vincennes. Listen, monsieur," he cried, his homely face alight; "I myself will go to Saint Vincennes for you. I will tell them the truth, and you shall have the post ...

— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... their tufts of crimson berries Over stone walls gray with mosses, Pause by some neglected graveyard, For a while to muse, and ponder On a half-effaced inscription, Written with little skill of song-craft, Homely phrases, but each letter Full of hope and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter; Stay and read this rude inscription, Read ...

— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow

... upon the sacred yet oft-times homely duties of married life, if this love had been mine, how would that life have been transfigured! The petty faults of my husband under which I chafed would not have moved me; I should have welcomed Martha and her father to my home and made them happy there; I should have had no conflicts with my servants, ...

— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss

... with the full assurance that she had not been mistaken concerning the beauty of the little face which she had seen in the looking-glass. All that troubled her was the consideration that her aunt Maria, whose homely face seemed to glare out of the darkness at her, might have looked just as she did when she was her age. She hoped, and then she hoped that the hope was not wicked, that she might die young rather than live to look like ...

— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... ever stole such a name as that," said Foley. "And for all he's homely enough to stop traffic, his face sorta lives up to his name. ...

— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... standby to the amateur gardener should undoubtedly be the blue-flowered shrub known as "plumbago". This homely but hardy plant will grow anywhere. It naturally prefers a good soil, and a sufficient rainfall, but if need be it will worry along without either. Fowls cannot scratch it up, and even the goat turns away dismayed from its hard-featured ...

— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... did you say? Not a bit of it. For my part, I think she is homely; her face is too round ...

— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... but never a laugh. Herein they are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her "Dutch painter's" portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately skilful reproduction of its homely wit and harmless absurdity. Happily neither these writers, nor the purveyors of mere sensation who cannot get on without crime and mystery, exhaust the list of our romancers, many of whom are altogether healthful, cheerful, and helpful; and it is ...

— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... Suffolke Street most richly, which is a most infinite shame. It seems she is a bastard of Colonell Howard, my Lord Berkshire, and that he do pimp to her for the King, and hath got her for him; but Pierce says that she is a most homely jade as ever she saw, though she dances beyond any thing in the world. She tells me that the Duchesse of Richmond do not yet come to the Court, nor hath seen the King, nor will not, nor do he own his desire of seeing her; but hath used means to get her to Court, but ...

— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... wind howls round the valley with a dismal sound, it seems as if one were looking on at some unholy, magical incantation; so that it is pleasant to return after a while to the comfortable rooms and cheerful fires within, which have so homely and domestic an air. We hope to spend to-morrow here, and the following day to go on to Toluca, from whence I shall ...

— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... that I should join them, and I had good cause to be grateful, the place being delightfully clean, and little, quaint, homely Mrs Dean looking upon me as a lodger who was to be treated with ...

— To The West • George Manville Fenn

... looked down at Peggy from the little platform where she sat in the old mahogany chair, she thought with a throb of satisfaction that she was glad she didn't have to change places with that homely little thing. Evidently, Peggy was just up from a severe illness. Her hair had been cut so short one could scarcely tell the color of it. She was so thin and white that her eyes looked too large for her face and her neck too slender for her ...

— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... Huntsmen" and observe that while the wicked huntsman is effective in his own way, the good huntsman is weak in every way, a sort of sexless woman with a face like a teaspoon. But there is more in these first forest tales, these homely horrors. In the earlier stages they have exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy does not shudder. They are made fearful that he may be fearless, not that he may fear. As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric dreamland is decent; and though individuals ...

— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton

... of divers hue. But his legs were flat and corded like a racer's, his neck long and thin as a thoroughbred's, his nostrils large, his ears sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings around his eyes hinted at a cross, somewhere in his pedigree, with Arabian blood. A huge, bony, homely-looking horse he was as he drew the deacon and Miranda into the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose, shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar that the smart village chaps, riding along in their jaunty turn-outs, used to chaff the good ...

— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely, adventurous, drunken, incontinent and delightful, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar ...

— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... and also made machines to sew other things than cloth, as leather. Agricultural machinery was now in common use. The horse reaper had been much improved, and countless machines had been invented to make agricultural labor more easy and economical. Hundreds of homely articles, as friction matches and rubber shoes, came into use in these years. In short, the thirty years from Jackson's inauguration to the secession of the Southern states were years of great progress. But this progress was confined ...

— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing

... there upon his pillow Being so troublesome a bedfellow? O polished perturbation! golden care! That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide To many a watchful night!—Sleep with it now, Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet As he whose brow with homely biggin bound Snores out the watch ...

— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... said my father, throwing it on the table. "There is more poetry, more romance, more sublimity, more splendid imagery hidden away in that homely document than could be found in all the traditions of ...

— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... little story, very simple, and homely; but yet, one that illustrates very well the point of which we are speaking. It is ...

— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton

... von Rosen, who was one of the guests and who sat behind Annie Eustace, looked at Margaret with wonder. "Was this the way of women?" he thought. He did not doubt for one minute that the Western girl had spoken the truth. It had been brutal and homely, but it had been the truth. Little Annie Eustace, who had been allowed to come to a dinner party for the first time in her life and who looked quite charming in an old, much mended, but very fine India muslin ...

— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... find her in almost every generation, in almost every country, in almost every city. She is not a typical adventuress, she is not a genius. The reason for her strong power is occult. The nameless charm is found as often in homely, clumsy, dull, old masculine women as in the reverse of ...

— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham

... her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off ...

— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... His homely figure seemed to be lightened up by his fidelity and generosity. Every word he uttered had a force that no other grace could have ...

— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... (his mother's diamond-guard, which he wore constantly,)as a pledge for some advance of money; but the kind Welsh people would not have it. They had not much spare cash, but what they had they readily lent to the survivors of the Anna-Maria. Dressed in the homely country garb of the people, Frank and Maggie set off in their car. If was a clear, frosty morning; the first that winter. The road soon lay high up on the cliffs along the coast. They looked down on the sea rocking below. At every village ...

— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... special merit to these letters. They were not written for publication, but for an intimate circle of relatives and friends. And because of this they are not artificial, but are free and graceful, with homely touches here and there which add so much to their value. Amidst the incessant roar of mighty guns; surrounded by the wounded and the dying; shivering at times with cold, and wearied almost to the point of exhaustion, these letters were hurriedly penned. No time had she for finely-turned phrases. ...

— 'My Beloved Poilus' • Anonymous

... pernitiosa, saith the same Fabius, many childish tracts and sentences he hath, sermo illaboratus, too negligent often and remiss, as Agellius observes, oratio vulgaris et protrita, dicaces et ineptae, sententiae, eruditio plebeia, an homely shallow writer as he is. In partibus spinas et fastidia habet, saith [128]Lipsius; and, as in all his other works, so especially in his epistles, aliae in argutiis et ineptiis occupantur, intricatus alicubi, et parum compositus, sine copia rerum hoc fecit, he jumbles up ...

— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... historic feat, usually related to war. But this column stood for those sturdy virtues that were developed, not through the hazards and the excitements and the fevers of conquest, but through the persistent and homely tests of peace, through the cultivation of those qualities that laid the foundations of civilized living. Isidore Konti designed the frieze typifying the swarming generations, by Matthew Arnold called "the teeming millions of men," and to Hermon A. MacNeil ...

— The City of Domes • John D. Barry

... poles just cut, three inches in diameter at the butt and twenty feet long, drawn on carts. Both men and women were carrying young children and older ones were playing and singing in the street. Very many old women, some feeble looking, moved, loaded, through the throng. Homely little dogs, an occasional lean cat, and hens and roosters scurried across the street from one low market or store to another. Back of the rows of small stores and shops fronting on the clean narrow streets were the dwellings whose ...

— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King

... which had been adopted at Ullathorne Court. What, not an oriel? says Miss Diana de Midellage. No, Miss Diana, not even an oriel, beautiful as is an oriel window. It has not about it so perfect a feeling of quiet English homely comfort. Let oriel windows grace a college, or the half-public mansion of a potent peer, but for the sitting room of quiet country ladies, of ordinary homely folk, nothing can equal the square, mullioned windows ...

— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... unheeded—held Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame—Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand, Ascending and dilating, it disclosed Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass With roots that groped about eternity, And in each drop of dew upon each blade The mirror of the ...

— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... questioner with alacrity; perhaps he feared he had wounded his friend's feelings, and dreaded lest there might ensue a squabble, for sparrows, it must be confessed, are easily affronted over trifles, though, as a rule, they are good-tempered little fellows enough, putting up with scanty fare and homely lodgings very contentedly and cheerfully. 'I wonder what kind of seed it is, do you know?' he still further questioned, being of an ...

— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer

... made up of just such contrasts," he thought, "and Pietro at his homely breakfast is more to be dreaded than Achmet casting the horoscope. Ah! Sir Jasper Kingsland, it is a very fine thing to be a baronet with fifteen thousand pounds a year, a noble ancestral seat, a wife you love, and a son you adore. And ...

— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming

... and her room together always carried me back to a dead and gone generation. There was a rag carpet on the floor, of the "hit-or-miss" pattern; the chairs were ancient Shaker rockers, some with homely "shuck" bottoms, and each had a tidy of snowy thread or crochet cotton fastened primly over the back. The high bed and bureau and a shining mahogany table suggested an era of "plain living" far, far remote from the day of Turkish rugs and Japanese bric-a-brac, and Aunt Jane was in perfect correspondence ...

— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... manners, their art and literature to, at least, a level with the highest. It has been impossible in these pages (it would perhaps be impossible in any pages) to give any unified picture of this national character with its activity, its self-reliance, its belief in the homely virtues and its earnest ambition to make the best of itself. But of the future of a people with such a character there need be no misgivings, and Americans are justified in the confidence in ...

— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... hands Of Protestant Plymouth held his memory long; Often in strange and distant dreams he saw That scene which now he tenderly portrayed To Doughty's half-ironic smiling lips, Half-sympathetic eyes; he saw again That small inn parlour with the homely fare Set forth upon the table, saw the gang Of seamen dripping from the spray come in, Like great new thoughts to some adventurous brain. Feeding his wide grey eyes he saw them stand Around the crimson fire and stamp their feet And scatter the salt drops from their ...

— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... his employment at the docks, a third earns a few shillings weekly, as an errand boy, or office messenger; and the employment of the man himself, detains him at some distance from his home from morning till night. Sunday is the only day on which they could all meet together, and enjoy a homely meal in social comfort; and now they sit down to a cold and cheerless dinner: the pious guardians of the man's salvation having, in their regard for the welfare of his precious soul, shut up the bakers' shops. The fire blazes high in the kitchen chimney of these well-fed hypocrites, and the rich ...

— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens

... he began to write; and though it was some time before he discovered where his strength lay, his writings were not unsuccessful. They were coarse, indeed; but they showed a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly-bought spiritual experience. They therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and the spelling, were well received by ...

— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... I liked his unaffected way of saying it. His voice had more of the homely, homelike, rural twang in it than I had heard in New York in many a day. I mentally added fifty dollars to the fee I had intended to give him. And now Anita and Alva were coming down the stairway. I was amazed at sight of her. Her evening dress had given place to a pretty ...

— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... helpless Fanny, I would that I knew she was safe,—I would not despise it, I would throw myself into it, and regard the training her and forming her boys as a most sacred office. It would not be too homely for me. But I had far rather become the founder of some establishment that might relieve women from the oppressive task-work thrown on them in all their branches of labour. Oh, what a ...

— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... liking a boy just because he was handsome, was too foolish to even consider. The fact that Dick Saxon—supposedly her arch enemy, but really her best friend—had flaming red hair and was undeniably homely—may, of course, had something to do with her disgust for good looks. Like lots of other girls, The Three judged boys by their ability to do; while the road to Fanny's heart was by way of ...

— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill

... no hand with a square-rigger, and he had shown it. But he was a sailor and a born captain of men for all homely purposes, where intellect is not required and an eye in a man's head and a heart under his jacket will suffice. Before the others had time to understand the misfortune, he was bawling fresh orders, and had the sails clewed up, and took soundings ...

— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... of comfort or bit of quaint philosophy. Into the fever-hot hands of one flaxen-haired farmer lad lying half delirious and dreaming of home, he dropped a few flowers plucked in the prison yard that morning; to a lonely, discouraged Frenchman he spoke in his own tongue, uttering a homely proverb that caused the homesick foreigner to laugh back into his smiling face. At last he came to Louis, and, with a nod toward the puzzled Jonas, lifted the bowl of soup and placed it to the ...

— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger

... of the twins burst into the room with the information that the bishop had arrived, and Katherine, walking like one in a dream, went out from her chamber and crossed the homely kitchen to ...

— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant

... Despite this homely exterior, she herself was a 'lady' in every sense of the word. Her manner was dignified and courteous to everyone. To her daughters and to myself she was gentle and affectionate. Her voice was sympathetic, almost musical. I never saw her temper ruffled. I ...

— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... most extraordinary efforts in this line is related by Mr. Jerdan. A dinner was given by Mansell Reynolds to Lockhart, Luttrell, Coleridge, Hook, Tom Hill, and others. The grown-up schoolboys, pretty far gone in Falernian, of a home-made, and very homely vintage, amused themselves by breaking the wine-glasses, till Coleridge was set to demolish the last of them with a fork thrown at it from the side of the table. Let it not be supposed that any teetotal spirit suggested this inconoclasm, far from it—the glasses were too small, and the poets, ...

— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... itself. If you let slip time, like a neglected rose It withers on the stalk with languished head. Beauty is Nature's brag, and must be shown In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities, Where most may wonder at the workmanship. It is for homely features to keep home; They had their name thence: coarse complexions And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply The sampler, and to tease the huswife's wool. What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for ...

— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... course," said our homely landlady. "Boys who are growing want plenty to eat. I hate to ...

— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn

... Santos, only occurred to me on our unexpected—shall I say PROVIDENTIAL?—arrival at that spot; and the necessity of expedition forbade me either inviting your cooperation or soliciting your confidence. Human intelligence is variously constituted—or, to use a more homely phrase, 'many men have many minds'—and it is not impossible that a premature disclosure of my plans might have jeopardized that harmony which you know it has been my desire to promote. It was my original intention to have landed you at Mazatlan, a ...

— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... Hrad[vs]any and its congregation did all honour to the crowning of Bohemia's first King. It is also interesting to note that Vratislav had "contributed to the party funds"; he had lent money to the Emperor. This should strike a homely, familiar note ...

— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... he was delightedly alive. Hence, in such a passage as this about the Epsom shepherd, the result upon the reader's mind is entire conviction and unmingled pleasure. So, you feel, the thing fell out, not otherwise; and you would no more change it than you would change a sublimity of Shakespeare's, a homely touch of Bunyan's, or a favored ...

— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... made an apology for the humble style in which her table was set out, which she owned could not be equal to what they met with at their own homes; but hoped they would not be dissatisfied with her homely fare. The cakes she produced were excellent, for she spared ...

— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin

... almost fiercely, one night to the children—"you'll love mamma, no matter how cross and homely she gets, ...

— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie

... the south. There, broad and fertile below her, running away across the miles, were the Howard acres. She even made out the clutter of head-quarters buildings. Somehow she fancied that the sweep of homely view snatched from these bleak uplands something of their loneliness. When her father announced that this was just the spot he had longed for, Helen nodded her approval. Here for a ...

— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... greater than it was among the few hundred who settled it. Probably our own superabundance of good things has actually lessened our capacity to enjoy, in comparison with theirs. Their simple tastes and homely joys amid their rude surroundings were probably more productive of positive pleasure and real happiness, than all the refinement and culture ...

— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport

... Striking example of its display is connected with Yedo Castle. This fortress, as built originally by Ota Dokwan, was not of imposing dimensions even as a military stronghold, and the dwelling-house in the keep presented most homely features, having a thatched roof and a porch of rough boat-planks. Yet Ieyasu was content to make this edifice his palace, and while he devoted much care to strengthening the fortifications, he bestowed none on the enlargement and adornment of the ...

— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... do Yet love must needs come breaking through, And now and then the office hum Dies like a mist, ... and there will come An Oxford breakfast scene: the quad All blue and grey outside—O God— And there sits Twiston at the feast Proclaiming he will be a priest! I see his eyes, his homely neb— Ring, telephones, ...

— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley

... soldier, reeling from his anguish and weariness, was admitted into the beleaguered fortress, his first words, more homely in expression than Murat's, were to the same dreadful purpose—"Your honour," he said, "all is dished;" and this being uttered by way of prologue, he then delivered himself of the message with which he had been charged, and that was a challenge from the Kandyan general to come ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... foregather. The sullen husband, the flighty wife, is no longer there to plague the innocent spouse. All is sweet and peaceful. It is the long rest cure after the nerve strain of life, and before new experiences in the future. The circumstances are homely and familiar. Happy circles live in pleasant homesteads with every amenity of beauty and of music. Beautiful gardens, lovely flowers, green woods, pleasant lakes, domestic pets—all of these things are fully described in the messages ...

— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... cleared away, the same wild mood possessed her. The man wondered if her mind was going with all else; but as she hung up the towel, her humor changed, and she ran out of the cabin into the dusk as if she could not bear the simple, homely tasks in a homeless world, the firelight and the bounds of a dwelling when doom must be at hand. The man put a fresh log on the fire, and covered the coals with ashes. He would have preferred to remain there, but he knew why she was hurrying back ...

— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith

... renders their sight weak at an earlier age than we in general find ours affected. These large black eyes are universally shaded by the long thick sweepy eyelash, so much prized in appreciating beauty, that, perhaps hardly any face is so homely which this aid cannot in some degree render interesting; and hardly any so lovely which, without it, bears not some trace of insipidity. Their tone of voice is loud, but not harsh. I have in some of them found ...

— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench

... after dinner," resumed Mary, "that is to say, if papa does not want me to read to him." And as, during dinner, Harriet contrived to make her wishes very evident, Mr. Mannering dispensed with the reading, and, accepting the arm of a neighbour, a new and homely acquaintance, took a second stroll in ...

— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin

... the child was right in the word used. God is lonesome, though for an utterly different reason than was in the child's mind. God was lonesome that day, left standing alone under the trees of the garden. He is lonesome for fellowship with every one who stays away from Himself. That homely human word may well express to us the longing ...

— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon

... at the catalogue of sins that lie side by side with this exhortation of my text! They are all small matters—bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil-speaking, malice, stealing, lying, and the like; very 'homely' transgressions, if I may so say. Yes, and if you pile enough of them upon the spark that is in your hearts you will smother it out. Sin, the wrenching of myself away from the influences, not attending to the whispers and suggestions, being blind to the teaching of the Spirit through the Word ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... is thickly wooded to the water's edge, with here and there an exposure of red granite. It is a very beautiful stream, and it was a pleasure to get out of the great river and its oppressive vastness into the familiar-looking, homely water, its eastern rocks and exquisite curves and bends. Rounding a point, we came upon a camp of Chipewyans drying fish and making birch-bark canoes, all of them fat, dirty, like ourselves, and happy; and, passing on, at dusk we reached the outlet ...

— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... remarkable, that he retained in his memory very slight and trivial, as well as important things. As an instance of this, it seems that an inferiour domestick of the Duke of Leeds had attempted to celebrate his Grace's marriage in such homely rhimes as he could make; and this curious composition having been sung to Dr. Johnson he got it by heart, and used to repeat it in a very pleasant manner. Two of the ...

— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... in all their lives would moments so full of sweetness and splendor come to them. They were all the sweeter because blended with the homely duties that fell to Antonia's hands. As she went about ordering the breakfast, and giving to the table a festal air, Dare thought of the old Homeric heroes, and the daughters of the kings who ministered to their wants. The bravest of them had done no greater deeds ...

— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr

... letters which formed Major Pendennis's budget for that morning there was only one unread, and which lay solitary and apart from all the fashionable London letters, with a country postmark and a homely seal. The superscription was in a pretty delicate female hand, and though marked 'Immediate' by the fair writer, with a strong dash of anxiety under the word, yet the Major had, for reasons of ...

— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... of the earth, Contented with our homely fare, How cheerful was the orphan's hearth Before cold Death ...

— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams

... very man you are looking for. He has come up from the ranks and is now the most popular member of the Legislature. He can make a stirring speech and they say he is going to be the President of the United States. He's wise and witty and straight as a string but a rough diamond—big, awkward and homely. You're just the girl to take him in hand and give him a little polish and push him along. ...

— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller

... the fact that on that day the simple, homely, stirring, and inspiring melody of Old John Brown was heard for the first time by the people of Boston. It was a surprising and a gladsome spectacle—a regiment bearing Daniel Webster's talismanic name, commanded ...

— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... sips his wine And says nothing. You know him of old, dear. He's only too happy to rest,— After making three millions in gold, dear. He's played out, it must be confessed,— And I—I'm to wed an old Baron Three weeks from to-day, in great style (He's as homely and gaunt as old Charon, And they say that his past has been vile); And I've promised to cut you hereafter,— Small chance, though, we ever shall meet,— So let's turn our old love into laughter, And face the thing through. ...

— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall

... Park or a field day at Windsor. The one side was as sad and sombre as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and warmth of a military pageant. The holders of the hill had come from their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among them came in the decent civic suits they wore behind their desks or counters. Few men's weapons were fellows in that roughly armed array. Each militant citizen carried ...

— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... with the general development of culture, Greek feeling for Nature passed through various stages. These can be clearly traced from objective similes and naive, homely comparisons to poetic personifications, and so on to more extended descriptions, in which scenery was brought into harmony or contrast with man's inner life; until finally, in Hellenism, Nature was treated for ...

— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... Pegg! Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut!" And as the young subaltern gave utterance to these homely sounds, he was recalling certain sarcastic remarks of the stern master of drill respecting officers and gentlemen demeaning themselves by associating ...

— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... to my taste, and to yours too! Give, but, if you can, spare to the poor the shame of holding out a hand."[9] And the important thing, as we have said, is that Diderot was as good as his sentiment. Unlike most of the fine talkers of that day, to him these homely and considerate emotions were the most real part of life. Nobody in the world was ever more eager to give succour to others, nor more careless ...

— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... weeping, no, not the guard themselves. Yet at last with a full heart she was severed from him, at which time another of our women embraced him; and my aunt's maid Dorothy Collis did the like, of whom he said after, it was homely but very lovingly done. All these and also my grandfather witnessed that they smelt a most odoriferous smell to come from him, according to that of Isaac, 'The scent of my son is as the scent of a field which ...

— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... upon a couch, propped up with pillows, and her face was turned full towards John as he looked round the door. He could have cried out as his eyes rested upon it, for there were Mary's pale, plain, sweet homely features as smooth and as unchanged as though she were still the half child, half woman, whom he had pressed to his heart on the Brisport quay. Her calm, eventless, unselfish life had left none of those rude traces upon her countenance which are the outward emblems of internal conflict ...

— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Perrin, of Marseilles. She had little technical knowledge of the objects surrounding her, but she submitted to the strange and soothing charm they never failed to work on her—the charm of stillness, of peace, as of things which, made for common homely uses, had passed beyond that stage into an existence ...

— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... homely, sneaky, shifty-eyed looking things!" thought Billy. "I would not like to meet one alone after dark, but still I hear they are cowardly and wait until one is dead before they try to eat him up. I don't think I will make a long call, for they grin and laugh too much, ...

— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery

... toss of her bobbed-off black hair, said: "Oh, Pen, why do you waste your time on a commonplace architect? He will never satisfy you—not in a thousand years. Bye-bye, I'll see you at the party." Then away she went, her eyes challenging Seraphine who stands for all the old homely virtues, including unselfish love, that Bobby Vallis entirely disapproves of. What shall I do? Seraphine says I must not go to this party, but—I ...

— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett

... who to their great commendations, be it spoken, spared no pains, night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, ... in a word did all the homely, ...

— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... of the matter might have been given in much more homely terms; it was natural that Mrs Yule should leave out of sight the sufficient, but ignoble, cause of ...

— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... Eyck's sarcasm was inspired by a mind's-eye picture of Miss Martha Gamble. To quote Jo Grigsby, she was "so plain that all comparison began and ended with her." Without desiring to appear ungallant, I may say that there were many homely young women in Essex; but each of them had the delicate satisfaction of knowing that Martha was incomparably her superior in ...

— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon

... enough to cause her to smile at their homely enthusiasm, and the striking contrast of language. It was a relief to hear intelligible language once more, and in the rural dialect so ...

— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')

... is this!" said the father. "Hoc credam! I thought that wax doll did not come up. Can my eyes deceive me? non verum est! There is a doll there—and what a doll! on crutches, and in poor, homely gear!" ...

— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various

... are too apt to say, 'Ask your Sunday-school teacher,' when such questions are put to them. The decay of parental religious teaching is working enormous mischief in Christian households; and the happiest results would follow if Joshua's homely advice were attended to, 'Ye shall let your ...

— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... sundry lessons she had received, and the tears came up into her eyes as she felt that she must be proud and not show her delight at the receipt of homely delicacies to which they ...

— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn

... The faces, dress, passions, gratitudes, and revenues of the great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers who had been the first to gaze from those rectangular windows, and had stood under that key-stoned doorway, could be divined and measured by homely standards of to-day. It was a house in whose reverberations queer old personal tales were yet audible if properly listened for; and not, as with those of the castle and cloister, silent beyond the ...

— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... what you have heard on this subject you confidently expect the British barmaid to be buxom, blond, blooming, billowy, buoyant—but especially blond. On the contrary she is generally brunette, frequently middle-aged, in appearance often fair-to-middling homely, and in manner nearly always abounding with a stiffness and hauteur that would do credit to a belted earl, if the belting had just taken place and the earl was still groggy from the effects of it. Also, she has the ...

— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... a whole leaden existence. That reminds her of her graduating essay, which she digs out of the trunk, tied with baby-blue ribbon. "One Crowded Hour" was her burning topic, but her hours and days and years have been crowded only with homely toil and poverty ...

— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... smile on her face as she rose—a smile that brought a hot mist of tears to my eyes. There was tragedy itself in that spare, homely figure standing there in the garden, the wind twining her skirts ...

— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... not for sitting on; just to give the room a social standing in an emergency. It sneers at the other chairs with an air of insolent superiority, like a haughty bride who has married into the house for money. Otherwise the furniture is homely; most of it has come from that smaller house where the Wylies began. There is the large and shiny chair which can be turned into a bed if you look the other way for a moment. James cannot sit on this chair without gradually sliding down it till he is lying luxuriously ...

— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie

... author. His works may be said to have merits peculiarly their own. His graceful, easy, fluent style; his admirable capacity for illustration; his graphic delineations of scenery and character; and, above all, his unfailing use of simple, terse, homely Saxon, have combined to place him in the front rank of living writers. Among his more notable publications we may mention "The Home School" (Edinburgh, 1856, 12mo), a reprint and extension of lectures for working ...

— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans

... beautiful—almost too trite to write—but the beauty is lonesome and terrifying, and my city-bred soul longs for some good, homely, human "blot on the landscape." There are no trees on the cliffs now. I understand, however, that Nature is not responsible for this oversight. The people are sorely in need of firewood, and not being far-seeing enough ...

— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this dependence. A hand-wrought silver spoon, of a commercial value of some ten to twenty dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable—in the first sense of the word—than a machine-made spoon of the same material. It may ...

— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... became cordial. She inquired my name, and I repeated the plain, homely Scotch-Irish cognomen that had been handed down ...

— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... to make which ill accords with my luxurious surroundings of the moment. It is that I am accustomed to press my trousers myself by the homely and ignoble expedient of sleeping on them. My only excuse is that I am a heavy sleeper. So automatic is the process, that I was wrapped in sheets and darkness before it occurred to me that I had placed the trousers I had just doffed under the mattress ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various

... we can explain this more fully by a homely but practical illustration: A great many of my readers have probably seen in operation in the summer amusement parks the "human roulette." This contrivance consists of a large wheel, board-covered, somewhat raised in the center, ...

— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... possession, a sense of her natural charms: but no matter what their college may have been, no matter how little illustrious, historically or architecturally, it is round the college life, the rooms, the friendships, the homely details, that their loving memory hangs. It is there that first they knew what independence meant: there that the chairs and table were their very own: there that they could come and go almost as they liked: there that they first knew the delight ...

— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How

... If, as in seeking other gift to gain, (For Nature, without study, yieldeth nought) With mighty diligence, and mickle pain, Illustrious women day and night have wrought; And if with good success the female train To a fair end no homely task have brought, So — did they for such other studies wake — As ...

— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... with the theoretical niceties of wifely submission, but with his creature comforts. His instructions as to how to make a husband comfortable positively palpitate with life; and at the same time there is something indescribably homely and touching about them; they tell more about the real life of a burgess's wife than a hundred tales of Patient Griselda or of Jehanne la Quentine. Consider this picture (how typical a product of the masculine imagination!) of the stout bread-winner, buffeted about in all weathers ...

— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... apron full, Brings fuel to the homely flame; I see the smoky columns roll, And, through ...

— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... The once homely Maria, whose home had rung with laughter by the taunt and ridicule of those who made fun of her ugliness, [94] now graced her house with sweet smiles and engaging features, which drew scores of visitors to ...

— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... the best fighters in the Revolution. He was a homely little man. He was also a very good man. Another general said, "Mar-i-on ...

— Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans • Edward Eggleston

... in any other of the dignified importations transplanted from Greece or Rome and forced to grow on uncongenial soil. They must ever be to us exotics, with perhaps the beauty of the exotic, but without the homely qualities which endear ...

— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 01, No. 12, December 1895 - English Country Houses • Various

... Munro asked for a loan till next week. He explained the state of our purses and the uselessness of applying to the Captain so early in the week; James was dubious. Munro urged the case in homely Doric; James, though pleased to hear the old tongue, was still hesitating when Munro skilfully put a word of the Gaelic here and there. A master move! James was highly flattered at our thinking he had the Gaelic (though never a word he ...

— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone

... valetudinary.... When he is in pretty good health, that he may venture upon more savoury hotter things, &c." The most rigorous Protestants will relax to hear how "To make a Pan Cotto as the Cardinals use in Rome." And if "My Lord Lumley's Pease Pottage" sounds homely, be it known, on the word of the eloquent Robert May, that his lordship "wanted no knowledge in the discerning this mystery." What fastidious simplicity in the taste of the great is suggested by "My Lord d'Aubigny eats ...

— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby

... directness and homely strength of "The Village Blacksmith" have made it deservedly popular. One questions whether the last stanza might not have been omitted with advantage both to the unity and ...

— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... unconventional manners, who, without the slightest effort to put on dignity, treated all men alike, much like old neighbours; whose speech had not seldom a rustic flavour about it; who always seemed to have time for a homely talk and never to be in a hurry to press business; and who occasionally spoke about important affairs of State with the same nonchalance—I might almost say irreverence—with which he might have discussed an every-day law case in his ...

— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,—the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. It is strange, after our beautiful Apollo statues and clear smiling mythuses, to come down upon the Norse Gods 'brewing ale' to hold their feast with Aegir, the Sea-Joetun; sending out Thor to get the caldron ...

— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... president's full face, and while pondering on it he remembered that he had never seen him in profile. Nor was this all that set the two men apart in Joseph's consciousness. The prior's simple and homely language came from the heart, entered the heart and was remembered, whereas Mathias spoke from his brain. The heart is simple and always the same, but the brain is complex and various; and therefore ...

— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... Dalcastle partook of all the gaiety, not of that stern age, but of one previous to it. There was feasting, dancing, piping, and singing: the liquors were handed, around in great fulness, the ale in large wooden bickers, and the brandy in capacious horns of oxen. The laird gave full scope to his homely glee. He danced—he snapped his fingers to the music—clapped his hands and shouted at the turn of the tune. He saluted every girl in the hall whose appearance was anything tolerable, and requested of their sweethearts to take the same freedom with his bride, by ...

— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg

... Olympus. This over, bonfires of hay and straw were lighted, music was made with cymbal and flute, and shepherds and sheep were purified by passing through the flames. A feast followed, the simple folk lying on benches of turf, and indulging in generous draughts of their homely wines, such, probably, as the visitor to-day may regale himself with in the same region. Towards evening, the flocks were fed, the stables were cleansed and sprinkled with water with laurel brooms, and laurel boughs were hung about them as adornments. Sulphur, incense, ...

— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... was, besides, a clever draughtsman, though he worked chiefly from the designs of Thurston and others. One of the most successful of his illustrated books is the "Vicar of Wakefield," after Mulready, whose simplicity and homely feeling were well suited to Goldsmith's style. Another excellent engraver of this date is Samuel Williams. There is an edition of Thomson's "Seasons," with cuts both drawn and engraved by him, which is well worthy of attention, and (like Thompson and Branston) he was ...

— The Library • Andrew Lang

... affected folio, long forgotten, in praise of monarchy and monarchs. The necessities of the Churchills were pressing: their loyalty was ardent: and their only feeling about Arabella's seduction seems to have been joyful surprise that so homely a girl should ...

— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... window came the clear trill of a canary singing blithely in its cage. Within the tidy, homely little room a pale-faced girl and a youth of slender frame listened intently while the bird sang its song. The girl was the first to break ...

— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various

... have begun to popularise the results of their laborious researches; although it cannot be said that they have taken the lead of the age, we may at least affirm that they have gone along with it. They have not lingered in the rear. They have adapted their instruction and language to homely understandings, and have increased rather than lessened their dignity by the condescension. They have become more honoured and respected as the benefits of their labours have grown more palpable to common sight; they have been more renowned since the many ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... himself. I'm not a tall man: just the dull average five foot ten or eleven that appears taller, while it keeps lean—so naturally I have a hopeless yearning for nymph-like creatures who pretend to be engaged when I ask them to dance. Still, there's consolation and homely comfort in talking with a little woman who makes you feel the next best thing to a giant. Biddy is an old-fashioned five foot four in her highest heels; and as she smiled up at me I saw that she hadn't changed a jot in the last ten years, despite ...

— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... so intermarried, as to create the most curious net of cousinship, the meshes of which are yearly becoming more intricate and numerous. Yet there are no especial indications of exclusiveness or spirit of clique; rather it is the homely feeling of kinsmanship, which makes the intercourse of relations more familiar and unceremonious, than that ...

— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... bring dried corn husk to school, she brought brightly colored raffia, and taught them how to make baskets. The children were clamorous for more knowledge of basket making. The fascinating task of forming objects of beauty and usefulness from homely corn husk and a few gay threads of raffia was novel to them. Amanda was willing to help the children along the path of manual dexterity and eager to have them see and love the beautiful. Under her guidance they gathered and pressed weeds and grasses and the airy, elusive ...

— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers

... in every week the King assembled his Wazirs for the purpose of meting out justice to all strangers in the land. The palace within was richly adorned and furnished with costly furniture: without, upon the wall faces were limned homely landscapes and scenes of foreign parts and notably all manner beasts and birds and insects even gnats and flies, portrayed with such skill of brain and cunning of hand that they seemed real and alive and the country-folk and villagers seeing from afar paintings of lions ...

— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... were silent, for every man there felt that the hour was big with doom. At length Panda rose with difficulty, because of his unwieldy weight, and uttered these fateful words, that were none the less ominous because of the homely idiom in which ...

— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard

... the Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies held session. His room, which served him for bed-chamber as well as for the uses of the day, was scantily furnished, and he shared the homely fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter, a sworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family cherished their guest as if he had been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldest daughter of the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, and Robespierre ...

— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... red rep cushions along the pew where the hours were very slow in passing; the white clover in the field behind the garden, got at easily through a hole in the privet hedge. The play of light and shadow over the hills of home, the dusk at nightfall, and the homely cawing of rooks. All the delicious things that went with the smell of ripe strawberries under nets, where thieving birds fluttered until the gardener let them free again; and the mystery of sparks flying up the chimney when the winter logs blazed. Every simple joy ...

— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie

... me, my loving Proteus. I will not, like a sluggard, wear out my youth in idleness at home. Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits. If your affection were not chained to the sweet glances of your honored Julia, I would entreat you to accompany me, to see the wonders of the world abroad; but since you are a lover, love on still, and may your ...

— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... admitted, frankly, "'kase thar war sech a many o' them mealy-mouthed cusses a-waitin' on 'Genie. The kentry 'peared ter me ter bristle with Luke Todd; he 'minded me o' brumsaidge—everywhar ye seen his yaller head, ez homely an' ...

— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... drawings—the list is large; all these various aspects of the world he has recorded with a fresh, unfailing touch. His horses are not as rhythmic as those of Degas, his landscapes are not as sun-flooded as those of Monet, nor are his Holland bits so charged with homely sentiment as those of Josef Israels. But Liebermann is Liebermann, with a supple, flowing, pregnant line, his condensed style a versatile conception, a cynical, at times, outlook upon the life about ...

— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... as he always did; with great distinctness and deliberation, so that everybody in the church, young and old, could catch every syllable; and he preached, considerately enough, a very short sermon—pithy, homely, and affectionate. He reminded them that he was then preaching his thirty-first Christmas-day sermon from that pulpit! The service and the sacrament over, none of the congregation moved from their places till the occupants of the squire's pew had quitted it; but as soon ...

— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... the cafe, the boy felt as though he were taking leave of an old and tried friend. By homely methods, this unerring diagnostician of the human soul had been reading him, liking him, and making him feel a heart-warming sympathy. The man who shrunk from lion-hunters, and who could return the churl's answer to the advances of sycophant and flatterer, enthusiastically poured out ...

— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... was a churchyard; the time, midnight; the persons, Edward Chester, a clergyman, a grave-digger, and the four bearers of a homely coffin. They stood about a grave which had been newly dug, and one of the bearers held up a dim lantern,—the only light there—which shed its feeble ray upon the book of prayer. He placed it for a moment on the coffin, when he and his companions were about to lower it down. There was no inscription ...

— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... was Eben Jackson, and the homely appellation was no way belied by his aspect. He never could have been handsome, and now fifteen years of rough-and-tumble life had left their stains and scars on his weather-beaten visage, whose only notable features were ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... whose bars to-day Drooped heavy o'er our early dead, And homely garments, coarse and gray, For orphans that must earn ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... deny. His performances of those parts have shown him to be a man of weird imagination, and they have shown that his characteristics, mental and spiritual, are sombre. Accordingly, when it was announced that he would play Dr. Primrose—Goldsmith's simple, virtuous, homely, undramatic village-preacher, the Vicar of Wakefield,—a doubt was felt as to his suitability for the part and as to the success of his endeavour. He played Dr. Primrose, and he gained in that character some of the brightest ...

— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... found of other mould than these; Who are their own upholders, to themselves Encouragement and energy and will; Expressing liveliest thoughts in lively words As native passion dictates. Others, too, There are, among the walks of homely life, Still higher, men for contemplation framed; Shy, and unpractised in the strife of phrase; Meek men, whose very souls perhaps would sink Beneath them, summoned to such intercourse. Theirs is ...

— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... as the opportunity presented itself, the Active Committee feeling an unusual desire to hear their story, began the investigation by inquiring as to the cause of their escape, etc., which brought simple and homely but earnest answers from each. These answers afforded the best possible means of seeing Slavery in its natural, practical workings—of obtaining such testimony and representations of the vile system, as the most eloquent orator or able pen might labor in vain to ...

— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... it's worth explaining. We have rather luxurious quarters at the hotel, but this room is somehow different. It's restful—I think it's homely—in fact, as I said, it's nice ...

— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... an exquisite sensation to feel her body once more normal, her usual home, and not a scaring, almost hostile entity, apart from her. When she finished, she leaned against Neale's shoulder with a long breath. For an instant, she had no emotion but relieved, homely, bodily comfort. ...

— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... nearer he fell to wondering what she was like. Could she talk, for instance, of anything but the homely details of her own rough life? He shrugged his shoulders as he fancied her crude attempts at conversation, her uncouth language and raw expressions. The girl turned her horse toward the hotel entrance. As she drew still nearer he saw that she was not pretty. Her mouth was too large, her face too ...

— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... That man has seen a good deal of what they tacked on to his name. I laughed when I seen him first. Little lame fellar, crooked-legged an' ragged, with thet awful homely face! But I forgot how he ...

— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey

... the Chinese represent wife by a woman holding a broom—certainly not to brandish it offensively or defensively against her conjugal ally, neither for witchcraft, but for the more harmless uses for which the besom was first invented—the idea involved being thus not less homely than the etymological derivation of the English wife (weaver) and daughter (duhitar, milkmaid). Without confining the sphere of woman's activity to Kueche, Kirche, Kinder, as the present German Kaiser ...

— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe

... through which one was obliged to pass. I took my daughter with me and gave up the largest room for her and the maid who was to take care of her. I was lodged in a little hole on straw, to which I went up by ladder. As we had no other furniture but our beds, quite plain and homely, I brought some straw chairs and some Dutch earthen and wooden ware. Never did I enjoy a greater content than in this little hole, which appeared so very conformable to the state of Jesus Christ. I fancied everything better ...

— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon

... unexpected, as now when motoring with Thornton in the car that he had brought back with him on, his return to Needley, when laughing at the Flopper's determined pursuit of Mamie Rodgers, when engaged in the homely, practical details of housekeeping about the cottage, there came flashing suddenly upon her the picture of Mrs. Thornton lying on the brass bed in the car compartment that night, every line of the pale, gentle face as vivid, as actual as though ...

— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... cart-track sloped to the river, which at this point sweeps southward with a strong rush of water, its steep banks forming a plateau on either hand. The narrow gorge was spanned by a rough bridge of boats lashed firmly together; and on the farther side Honor found a lone dak bungalow, its homely dovecot and wheeling pigeons striking a friendly note amid the callousness ...

— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... he gan the virgin deare Towards his cottage gently home to guide; His aged wife there made her homely cheare, Yet welcomde her, and plast her by her side. The princesse dond a poore pastoraes geare, A kerchiefe course vpon her head she tide; But yet her gestures and her lookes (I gesse) Were such as ...

— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... figure of the burly townsman of Jerusalem who lifts his cap in acknowledgment of Joachim and Anna, as they meet at the Golden Gate, in his illustrations of the Life of the Virgin (Fig. 243), may be cited for its homely truth, a characteristic which runs through all Duerer's works, and gives them a certain naivete. The figure is an evident study of an honest townsman of Nuernberg, and is as little like an ancient Jew as ...

— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... angrily, "and dost not thou reckon us amongst the happy men at all?" Solon, unwilling either to flatter or exasperate him more, replied, "The gods, O king, have given the Greeks all other gifts in moderate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is a cheerful and a homely, not a noble and kingly, wisdom; and this, observing the numerous misfortunes that attend all conditions, forbids us to grow insolent upon our present enjoyments, or to admire any man's happiness that may ...

— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... man, one movement, one kind of badness. "Man" denotes the whole human race, while it implies a feeling, thinking, speaking, willing animal. "Whittier" denotes but a single person, but beside all the common qualities implied by the, word "man," "Whittier" suggests, among other things, a homely face, serious and kind, a poet, and an ...

— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... was mightily hungry, too, and fell upon the good cheer with an appetite that entertained his host. The food he found most excellent, though seasoned something too strongly for his palate. But the wines were less to his taste, and he presently made bold to ask for a tankard of homely ale, which was brought to him from the servants' quarters; Lord Claud leaning back with his glass in his hand, and smiling to see the relish with which Tom enjoyed the ...

— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green

... her, with which his volume closes, may thus be translated in homely guise. In the original it has no merit, except as uttering his affectionate and reverent feeling towards his patient, the peasant girl,—"the sick one, the poor one." But we like to see how, from the mouths of babes and sucklings, praise may be so perfected as to command this ...

— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... cook wholesomely, make the home sanitary. Nursing is a fine art now, and comforts can be placed within the reach of every invalid, if the mother knows how to do it. If home is to be hospitable, and a centre of social influence, all the artistic and homely powers are demanded. If the family is to be well- dressed, the mother must attend to it. If home is to be beautiful, the mother and daughter must make it so. In these days, there is little need of slaving; ...

— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... the lilt alone. One thing only about it is sure, and that is that the diction must be conversational. There will be tears in the voice, but the voice must be that of the homely earth, never of the stage, never of the pulpit If you agree with that, you will have to cut out practically all the poets from Dryden to Cowper, Gray and Collins among them; for Gray has a learned sock, and hardly allows familiarity when he is elegising Horace Walpole's cat. But Shakespeare ...

— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett

... the Danish giant, slain in the presence of King Athelstan, by Sir Guy of Warwick, just returned from a pilgrimage, still "in homely russet clad," and in his hand a "hermit's staff." The combat is described at length by ...

— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... guile, of society and its masks. How could he ever have thought her common or beneath him! She towered up in his thought like the pines of her native mountains, as fresh and natural and wild as they. He would not have her different. She was far above him. Faith, and church, and simple homely virtues, and all that is holy, were linked in Job's mind with the memory of artless, honest, great-hearted Jane that came back to him in the lonely hours at ...

— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher

... had to listen to all the morning but for my thinking of that album, which I'm glad has amused you both, my dears, so well. Ah, children, children, there's nothing like having something to do. I'll tell you something one of the poets, Cowper I think, has written about this in his homely verse:— ...

— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson

... upon his pillow, Being so troublesome a bedfellow? O polish'd perturbation! golden care! That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide To many a watchful night! sleep with it now! Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet As he whose brow with homely biggen bound Snores out the watch of night. O majesty! When thou dost pinch thy bearer, thou dost sit Like a rich armour worn in heat of day, That scalds with safety. By his gates of breath There lies a downy feather which stirs not: Did ...

— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]

... Portsmouth, thence on to his home at Meadow-Brook. The girls stood waving to him as long as the big car was in sight, he occasionally leaning out to wave back at them. They then retraced their steps to the camp, talking animatedly about the great treat in store for them—the sailboat with the homely name. They could scarcely contain themselves until the morrow, when the boat was to arrive. In the meantime everybody went over to examine the trail that Tommy Thompson had found. As she had said, it led ...

— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge

... purpose a great number of the women were assembled, each more lovely than the fairest woman man has ever seen, and all clad in such gauzelike glistening robes as would make the finest fabrics of this world look coarse and homely. ...

— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin

... arrived with De Lacy, stayed that night and shared with great apparent relish the homely fare of the family. He was a gay and gallant Frenchman, and the beauty of the younger lady, and her pleasantry and spirit, seemed to make his hours pass but too swiftly, and ...

— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... of conversation and manner of his simple home—ways which might have seemed abrupt and rough but for the singular sweetness and charm of his nature. To those who looked on the outside he was always the homely, rigidly orthodox country clergyman. On Isaac Williams, with his ethical standard, John Keble also impressed his ideas of religious truth; he made him an old-fashioned High Churchman, suspicious of excitement and "effect," suspicious ...

— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... as Master. Ruskin (to whom reference is made in the second letter) gave the larger part of his originally large fortune to the founding of St. George's Guild. This was intended to be a sort of agricultural community of "old-world virtues" for young and old, "and ancient and homely methods." One of his great aims was the promoting of home industries. As regards Newman's reference to politics at the end of letter No. 2 in 1888, Gladstone's Government was but just breathing after ...

— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... Among the dusty scents of sun and hay. He showed me how to snare the bulky trout That lurked under the bank of yonder brook. Indeed, he taught me many a country craft, For I was apt to learn, and, as I learnt, I loved the teacher of that homely lore. Deep in my boyish heart he shared the glad Influence of the suns and winds and waves, Giving my childhood what it hungered for— The rude ...

— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes

... threads of parable, precept allegory, and narrative, leading nowhere if you will, or else weaving themselves into the little fiction story about Cliff McGowan and his one talent. There is but a definition to follow; and then the homely actors trip on. ...

— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... on Wednesday morning they rounded Cape Bird and came in sight of Mount Discovery and the Western Mountains. 'It was good to see them again, and perhaps after all we are better this side of the Island. It gives one a homely feeling to see such a familiar scene.' Scott's great wish now was to find a place for winter quarters that would not easily be cut off from the Barrier, and a cape, which in the Discovery days had been called 'the Skuary,' ...

— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... some other as ample provision should be devised; Toleration of Dissent and of free expression of religious belief, but still on this side of Quakerism and other anomalies, heresies, and extravagancies: such, after all, was the homely outcome. If Vane and the theorists of the Harringtonian Club were disappointed, Ludlow was even in worse despair; and at the last moment he proposed an extraordinary addition. If the late Rump was not to be restored, and if they were to adopt ...

— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... rather simple, yet with a fund of homely wit and philosophy that stood him in good stead. He described Beatonville to them, and the farm where he and his aged parents tried to wrest a living from nature—that was none ...

— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope

... dead— Than did we urchins to that seaman's voice. He many a tale of wonder told: of where, At Argostoli, Cephalonia's sea Ran over the earth's lip in heavy floods; And then again of how the strange Chinese Conversed much as our homely Blackbirds sing. He told us how he sailed in one old ship Near that volcano Martinique, whose power Shook like dry leaves the whole Carribean seas; And made the sun set in a sea of fire Which only half was his; and dust was thick On deck, ...

— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... entirely in his young American wife; his sole possession, according to report, being a title much less substantial but a great deal more picturesque than the large, much-handled piece of paper down in the safety deposit vault—lying close and crumpled among a million sordid, homely little slips ...

— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... quaint old parlor organ with the quaver in its tongue, Seemed to tremble in its fervor as the sacred songs were sung, As we sang the homely anthems, sang the glad revival hymns Of the glory of the story and the light ...

— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln

... warriors bold, Were the Swedes from time untold; Breasts for honor ever warm, Youthful strength in hero arm. Blue eyes bright Dance with light For thy dear green valleys old. North, thou giant limb of earth, With thy friendly, homely hearth." ...

— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald

... Bratley, at that time in his dotage, and recurring to the crude idioms of his homely youth, constantly said to ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... employment at the docks, a third earns a few shillings weekly, as an errand boy, or office messenger; and the employment of the man himself, detains him at some distance from his home from morning till night. Sunday is the only day on which they could all meet together, and enjoy a homely meal in social comfort; and now they sit down to a cold and cheerless dinner: the pious guardians of the man's salvation having, in their regard for the welfare of his precious soul, shut up the bakers' shops. The fire blazes high in the kitchen ...

— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens

... cleared with his own hands, and the beautiful wild country he lived in, telling her he hoped her future life would be free from all care. All this, and even more, dear reader, he told her—in plain, homely words, it is true; but love's language is always sweet, be it in courtly ...

— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... life in which her great love for her sister had been tinged with envy. No young lad had ever waited in the dusk to hear the sound of her footfall; no half-impudent but half-bashful glances had ever been thrown after her as she went through the village on her business. To be a homely, household thing, useful indeed in this world, and with high hopes for the future,—but still to be a drudge; that had been her destiny. There was never a woman to whom the idea of being loved was not the sweetest thought that her ...

— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... edited by Robert Ganger;" and study an annexed system of colonization as a remedy for their distress. The Letter is written by a plain-sailing, plain-dealing man of the world, and though on a foreign topic, is in a homely style. We are therefore persuaded that a few extracts will be useful to the above class of thinkers and readers, as well as to others who do not, like the great man of antiquity, ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various

... girl with two hundred ruble-dowry, but she was awfully homely and deaf; and he knew a widow with three hundred rubles, but she was twenty years older than himself. It was a ...

— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... could recall Elspeth's words without a sensation of prickly heat: it is strange how painfully these little pin-pricks to our vanity affect us. I was angry with myself for remembering them, and yet they rankled, in spite of Elspeth's quaint and homely consolation. Alas! I was not better than my fellows: Ursula Garston was not the strong-minded woman that Miss Darrell ...

— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... soldiers kept their watch on the blue Danube, and were planting outposts on the far-off grey Euphrates. The city of Rome itself contained about a million and a half of inhabitants. It was well governed and sumptuously adorned. A real belief in the homely vulgar gods of their forefathers had declined among educated people, and the humane principles of Stoic philosophy were instilling a new regard for the less fortunate classes of mankind. Strange foreign devotions were satisfying some of the yearnings which found no ...

— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... girl who had never been taught to do the simplest household task. Amy returned the loving kindness full measure, and, determined to be a help to those who so much helped her, advanced rapidly in the knowledge of her homely duties. Dressed in the plain working garb of a farm girl, with arms bare and face flushed by the heat of the kitchen, one would scarcely have recognized in her the beautiful young woman who moved with Boyd City's society leaders, or ...

— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright

... them, and on the character of the English nation at large, he succeeded in making a very favourable impression on all the crew—with the exception of Hinton, a shrewd old boatswain, who, unmoved by all the imperial blandishments, growled, at the close of every fine speech, the same homely comment, "humbug." Saving this hard veteran, the usual language of the forecastle was, that "Buonaparte was a very good fellow after all"; and when, on finally leaving the Undaunted, he caused some 200 Napoleons to be distributed ...

— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... spiritless manner, because there is nothing else to do. He seemed to have no hope, nor even a thought of retrieving the past and of reasserting his own manhood. Accustomed as the young artist had ever been to a household in which affection, allied to high-bred courtesy and mutual respect, made even homely daily life noble and beautiful, he could not look on the discordant Mayhew family with the charity, or the indifference, of those who have seen more of the wrong side of life. Had there been only poor, besmirched Mr. Mayhew, and stout, ...

— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... Amy," he cried; "isn't this a dandy day?" and Amy felt herself on good, homely, familiar ground, and she answered him with a heart grown suddenly light ...

— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... course handed on its errors as faithfully as its perfections. But, such as it is, it is a fine specimen of fourteenth-century English. He translated not for scholars or for nobles, but for the plain people, and his style was such as suited those for whom he wrote—plain, vigorous, homely, and yet with all its homeliness full of a solemn grace and dignity, which made men feel that they were reading no ordinary book. He uses many striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... some people let their looks make them miserable. They worry because they are homely or freckled, or short or tall, or thin or stout, all of which is very foolish. And Danny Meadow Mouse was just as foolish in worrying because his ...

— The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse • Thornton W. Burgess

... view; it was resting on a youthful figure, clad in Parisian draperies, and on a face rising above the draperies, that bent lovingly over the deep-throated fireplace, basking in its warmth, and revelling in its homely perfume. We were silent also, as the picture of that transfigured daughter of the house flitted across our own ...

— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... of us, I dare say, in his life which are evidently referred to in the phrase 'He reproved kings for their sakes.' The principle remains in full force to-day, and God says to every thing and person, Death included, 'Do My prophets no harm.' They may slay; they cannot harm. If I might use a very homely metaphor, sportsmen train retriever dogs to bring their game without ruffling a feather. God trains evils and sorrows to lay hold of us, and bring us to, and lay us down at, ...

— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... ballet dancer, was a little girl, with skinny legs and a skinnier future, being extremely homely and with no prospects of ...

— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... of course—a bride all in white with a lovely misty veil. I've never seen one, but I can imagine what she would look like. I don't ever expect to be a bride myself. I'm so homely nobody will ever want to marry me—unless it might be a foreign missionary. I suppose a foreign missionary mightn't be very particular. But I do hope that some day I shall have a white dress. That is my highest ideal of earthly bliss. I just ...

— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... a homely, but accurate illustration of the action of the flying machine. The motor does for the latter what the force of your arm does for the cardboard—imparts a motion which keeps it afloat. The only real difference is that the motion given by the motor is continuous and much more ...

— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell

... its face to the wall in an innermost nook. This spot was Faith's own temple; here, among these deserted antiques, Faith was always happy. Christopher looked on at her for some time before she noticed him, and dimly perceived how vastly differed her homely suit and unstudied contour—painfully unstudied to fastidious eyes—from Ethelberta's well-arranged draperies, even from Picotee's clever bits of ribbon, by which she made herself look pretty out of nothing at all. Yet this negligence ...

— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... "too true it is! A simple homely thing, like Eve, Hath not a chance to rival this, But must resign herself ...

— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore

... authoritative verdict, that he would shine best in that which we call the "domestic drama." Here it was thought his broad fun, rustic waggery, and curious mastery of provincial dialect might admirably contrast with the melodramatic intensity, and the homely, but touching pathos of which in so eminent a degree he was the master. Hence the dramas, written expressly and deliberately to his measure and capacity, of "Daddy Hardacre," "The Porter's Knot," ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... which Ieyasu certainly possessed. Striking example of its display is connected with Yedo Castle. This fortress, as built originally by Ota Dokwan, was not of imposing dimensions even as a military stronghold, and the dwelling-house in the keep presented most homely features, having a thatched roof and a porch of rough boat-planks. Yet Ieyasu was content to make this edifice his palace, and while he devoted much care to strengthening the fortifications, he bestowed none on the enlargement and adornment of the dwelling. The system he adopted ...

— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... have thought so," laughed the forewoman, "if you could have seen how they fought the first caps and aprons we tried to get them to wear. They were homely things, even if they were life savers. So we kept at it till we got something so trim and pretty that the girls would rather wear ...

— Sure Pop and the Safety Scouts • Roy Rutherford Bailey

... high days and holidays, when a festive garb was desirable, without a scornful protest, dumbly uttered, against so shining a name. There was such a choice, and I would rather have been Deborah or Leah, or even plain Susan, or Molly; anything homely, that would have suited my dark, low-browed face. Tall and angular, and hard-featured—what business had I with ...

— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... on the subject, quoting freely from Hazel Fredericks on the injustices to women in this man-made world. Ernestine listened with a smile of sceptical amusement on her homely face, and slowly ...

— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... on the pageantry of the marriage day itself, but I do not find that they have authority for the splendor of their descriptions. I cannot find a word in the older Chronicles about the jewels or dress of the brides, and I believe the ceremony to have been more quiet and homely than is usually supposed. The only sentence which gives color to the usual accounts of it is one of Sansovino's, in which he says that the magnificent dress of the brides in his day was founded "on ancient custom."[32] However this may ...

— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... show itself in many little attentions, after the death of Mr Sutterby. He could not avoid seeing how the father's and mother's affections were more and more drawn away from their little son, while he keenly felt that the poor child had done nothing to deserve it; so in a plain and homely way he tried to draw him out of himself, and made him as free of his pantry as his sister was. And when Walter came, a few years before Mr Sutterby's death, putting Amos into almost total eclipse, Harry would have none of this third baby. "He'd got notice enough and to spare," ...

— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... she, presently, looking down and jabbing the fence top with a pin. "I suppose you think I'm very homely." ...

— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller

... Literature. In his treatment of Dickens, he writes very contemptuously of 'that Little Bethel to which Kit's mother went,' and he likens it to 'a monstrous mushroom that grows in the moonshine and dies in the dawn.' Now no man who was really fond of the esculent and homely fungus would have employed such a metaphor by way of disparagement. I can only infer that Mr. Chesterton thinks mushrooms very nasty. His opinion of Little Bethel does not concern me. It is neither here nor there. But Mr. Chesterton does not like mushrooms! I cannot ...

— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham

... sometimes upon presumptive ground. If the prospect has been a little clouded, it only caused us to be more attentive, that we might not be deceived. But, though we have attended her through so immense a space, we have only seen her in infancy. Comparatively small in her size, homely in her person, and coarse in her dress. Her ornaments, wholly of iron, from ...

— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... money than I know what to do with, anyway, and if it must be blown in somehow, why, this is a harmless way of doing it, dangerous only to myself, and any other foolish chap whom I may influence to accompany me on my mad expeditions," and as he spoke he glanced affectionately in the direction of the homely, freckled but good-humored Eli, who returned the look with a grin and ...

— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne

... "You? Here?" The homely piece of news seemed to shatter all her plans. She had spent a long half-hour in elaborate approaches, in high moral attacks; she had neither frightened her enemy nor made him angry, nor interfered with the least ...

— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster

... have done the precise motive which will hold them back. If your act be such as to invoke a minor penalty, then not only others, but yourself, may profit by the punishment which we inflict. On the homely principle that "a burnt child dreads the fire," it will make you think twice before venturing on a repetition of your crime. Observe, finally, the consistency of our conduct. You offend, you say, because you cannot help offending, to the ...

— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... "There is one very homely esculent which we crave in the camp—I mean the onion. It is an excellent preventive of scurvy, a disease to which our mode of living particularly exposes us. We eat as many as we can get, and should be glad of more. Tell Frank he may plant a whole acre of them. ...

— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... monograph of Dean Burgon, that, though the biographers had themselves tasted and enjoyed to the full the peculiar flavour of his fun, they utterly failed in the attempt to convey it to the reader. Puerile puns, personal banter of a rather homely type, and good stories collected from other people are all that the books disclose. Animal spirits did the rest; and yet, by the concurrent testimony of nearly all who knew him, Bishop Wilberforce was not only one of the most agreeable but one of the most amusing men of his ...

— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... own clean linen to Harry, while Harry's underwent washing and mending at the hands of the maid. Old Valentine, who visited the house every day, the weather being cold and sometimes cloudy, but without rain, called at the sick chamber now and then, and filled it with tobacco smoke, homely philosophy, and rustic reminiscence. Harry had no other visitors. During these five days he saw not Elizabeth or Miss Sally, save from his window twice or thrice, at which times they were walking on the terrace. In daytime, when no artificial light was in the room to betray ...

— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... a matron plump and comely, You dwelt in fashion's brightest blaze; My earthly lot was far more homely; But I too had my festal days. No merrier eyes have ever glistened Around the hearth-stone's wintry glow, Than when my youngest child was christened,— But that was twenty ...

— Successful Recitations • Various

... and essentially bad whom you can really dislike after you come to know them. And the human beings who are thus essentially bad are very few. Something of the original Image lingers yet in almost every human soul: and in many a homely, commonplace person, what with vestiges of the old, and a blessed planting-in of something new, there is a vast deal of it. And every human being, conscious of honest intention and of a kind heart, may well wish ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... that forms one of its chief attractions. Besides, it was unavoidably scorched in the preparation; but the mixed pepper and salt sprinkled over it improved the flavor. But the great thing was their insatiate appetites, for it is a homely truth that there is no sauce like hunger. So it came about that they not only made a nourishing meal, but had enough left to serve them in ...

— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis

... shaking hands and fondling their little ones, while the venerable aboriginal sequoia, ancient of other days, keeps you at a distance, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among its neighbor trees as would the mastodon among the homely bears and deers. Only the Sierra juniper is at all like it, standing rigid and unconquerable on glacier pavements for thousands of years, grim and silent, with an air of antiquity about as pronounced as ...

— The Yosemite • John Muir

... of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless, and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm grey morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away in her wooden shoes over ...

— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... the other hand, happily unaware of his savageness and unnatural spirit, drooped his homely, ungainly head in a dejected manner. To him, Mary was only one more burden, one more wriggling, gasping infliction, to be jogged slowly about for her first ride. He snorted in disdain. Mary jumped. Why didn't she use her own feet? "Dolly" didn't want to be bothered. ...

— The 1926 Tatler • Various

... calico that hung down to the floor. There was an old hair trunk in one corner, and a guitar-box in another, and all sorts of little knickknacks and jimcracks around, like girls brisken up a room with. The king said it was all the more homely and more pleasanter for these fixings, and so don't disturb them. The duke's room was pretty small, but plenty good enough, and so was ...

— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... her companion—a homely neighbour, one of those persons whose goodness had, perhaps, helped to shape poor Margaret's philosophy of life—looked round ...

— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... man to do things by halves, therefore it occurred to him that, as he had consented to George's marriage with Mab, he was bound in all honour to deliberate on the position of his youngest son with regard to Miss Mosk. To use a homely but forcible proverb, it was scarcely just to make beef of one and mutton of the other, the more especially as Gabriel had behaved extremely well in relation to his knowledge of his parents' painful position and ...

— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... from being a beautiful woman. From all appearances she had never been pretty, or even good-looking. Her form had a few too many sharp angles where it should have been curved. Her face was long and thin, and now age and worry had dug deeply into the homely features, obliterating the last trace of middle life. She always dressed in black, and to-day the Captain saw that her clothes were worn and faded. He moved uneasily as his quick eye took in ...

— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper

... interval of embarrassing commonplaces. And, with the suspicion of some indefinable insincerity—either of his own or Louise's—haunting him, Minty's frank heartiness and outspoken loyalty gave him a strange relief. It seemed to him as if the clear cool breath of the forest had entered with her homely garments, and the steadfast truth of Nature were incarnate in her shining eyes. How far this poetic fancy would have been consistent or even coexistent with any gleam of tenderness or self-forgetfulness in Louise's equally pretty orbs, I leave the satirical ...

— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... our apparel; but is that more eligible than to see the shivering wretch clad in warm and comfortable attire? Can the greatest luxury of the table afford so true a pleasure as the reflection that instead of its being over-charged with superfluities, the homely board of the cottager is blessed with plenty? We might spend our time in going from place to place, where none wish to see us except they find a deficiency at the card-table, perpetually living among those whose vacant minds are ever seeking after ...

— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott

... social order to be established under new conditions. They came from the sunny skies of France to the capricious climate where the summers were fierce and the winters terrible with winds and snows. They left the polished amenities of an old civilization, for the homely ways of rude settlers of another race and language. Their lips, which had shaped themselves to the harmonies of a refined language, which had been used to speaking such names as Rochefort and Beauvoir and Angouleme, had to distort themselves into the utterances of words like Manchaug ...

— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... Gibson—about the actual event of my being swept out to sea from Bolderhead, nor had I said a word about my father. The fact that he had been a sea-going physician would not help me hold my own with the crew of the Scarboro. At sea, according to the homely old saw, "every tub must stand ...

— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster

... cheerful room, full of homely comfort. Bright red window-curtains were drawn against the cold white world outside, and the fire crackled merrily in ...

— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... of Bunyan, like the slant beams of evening on the winking lids of the ocean; nor can you gather out of his writings such anecdotes as, like garnet in some Highland mountain, sparkle in every page of Brooks and Flavel. Nor was it the simplicity of homely language. It was not the terse and self-commending Saxon, of which Latimer in one age, and Swift in another, and Cobbett in our own, have been the mighty masters, and through it the masters of their English fellows. But it was the simplicity of clear conception and orderly ...

— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... he loved As man; and, to the mean and the obscure And all the homely in their homely works, Transferred a courtesy which had no air Of condescension.... A kind of radiant joy Diffused around him. ...

— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... homes as homely as the one I preferred—for there was sand enough to go round. It went round and round, as God probably intended it should, until a city sat upon it and kept it quiet. Some of these homes were perched upon solitary hilltops, and were lost to sight when the fog came in from ...

— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... struggle that ensued. Both were large and powerful men; the one strong in a resolute purpose to meet boldly a desperate case, the other mad with fever. They swayed to and fro, and fell on and smashed the homely furniture of the place; sometimes the one and sometimes the other prevailing, while both gasped for breath and panted vehemently; suddenly Dorkin sank down exhausted. He appeared to collapse, and John lifted him with difficulty again into his bed; but in a ...

— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne

... was one day walking in one of those beautiful avenues that lead out of the village of Saratoga Springs, my attention was arrested by two of those insects, which children call by the homely name of "grand-father-long-legs." They were laboriously occupied in rolling a round ball, of the size of a walnut, covered with a glutinous substance, dried hard in the sun. I could not be so cruel as to break it in pieces, to gratify my curiosity; ...

— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb

... house was the best in the village. Not handsome in its exterior, which bore the same plain and somewhat clumsy character as all the other buildings in its neighbourhood; but inside it was spacious, and had a certain homely elegance. Rooms were large and exceedingly comfortable, and furnished evidently with everything desired by the hearts of its possessors. That fact has perhaps more to do with the pleasant, liveable air of a house than aesthetic tastes or artistic combinations ...

— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... a pair of old steel-rimmed specs from the vest-pocket over his heart, and pushed them upon his thin nose. He picked up the top oval frame, blew off the dust and laughed at the homely face that stared out at him. He turned to Mrs. Fabian with a twinkle in his eyes and ...

— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... came back with the hot food, which I followed by a charcoal tablet. And the difference in Aggie was marked. Possibly some of the courage of the mountain lion, that bravest of wild creatures, had communicated itself to her through the homely ...

— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... for dinner, spattering the bacon fat upon the floor. She smiled alternately at her father and Professor Young; she caroled like a spring bird with bursts of happy song. Then they three sat down to the table to eat the homely squatter fare. ...

— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... furnishing a miraculous table? Who had not "where to lay his head?" Who lived on the scanty fare of a small purse in common with the family of his disciples? Who withdrew from the entertainments of Jerusalem to the humble cottage of Mary and Martha, cheerfully subsisting on the most homely and casual provision?—HE, who has taught us to limit our desires of temporal good within the narrow circle of one short request—"GIVE US THIS DAY ...

— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox

... the power of and availing himself of such a remedial agent as the pilgrimages to the Notre Dame de Lourdes, is an evidence of the intelligent and enlightened practitioner, who has learned, what the Bible taught, long, long ago, that human nature must be taken as it is found, and that, like the homely saying of Mohammed, as the mountain would not come to him, he must go to the mountain. Moses and all the Scriptural writers were well aware of this state of affairs, and their manner of using their knowledge was adapted and timed to the general ...

— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... with Job in 1827, were of great importance as aids, to the interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. His translation of the New Testament, which appeared after his death, in 1868, gave the best results of critical studies in homely prose, and with painstaking fidelity to the original. That Noyes was in advance of the criticism of his time may be indicated by the fact that, when he published his conclusions in regard to the Messianic prophecies ...

— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... always was. She was aye plain-looking—nothing on earth could alter her features—but with great happiness comes a look of marvellous contentment, which can beautify the most homely face, and she was such a clever housekeeper (no one could salt beef as she could), and so modest and gentle, that her handsome husband grew to love her more and more, and I wot that her face became to him the bonniest and the sweetest face ...

— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson

... the sunshine of its garden. He did not tell them the splendor of its past, the noble fortress for good that it had been, how its tonic had strengthened generations of their fathers. No; wrath he spoke of, and never once of love. It was the bishop's way, I knew well, to hold cow-boys by homely talk of their special hardships and temptations. And when they fell he spoke to them of forgiveness and brought them encouragement. But Dr. MacBride never thought once of the lives of these waifs. Like himself, like all mankind, they were invisible dots in creation; like ...

— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various

... Burgomaster Six" went for over L7000. This wife of Burgomaster Half-a-dozen was a marvellous specimen of a woman. The Burgomaster was so faithful a husband that "Six to One" has long since become a homely proverb. ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various

... firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound of the vesper bell. In Christabel we float dreamily through scenes as unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music of magic beauty. ...

— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... boast of wondrous beauty. The moment man passes the pale of savagery he demands something more than mere physical perfection in a companion. Purity, Gentleness, Dignity—such are the three graces of womanhood that ofttimes make Cupid forgive a shapeless bosom and adore a homely face. The love of a parent for a child is the purest affection of which we can conceive; yet is the child the fruition of a love that lies not ever in the clouds. Platonic affection, so-called, is but confluent smallpox masquerading as measles. Those who have it may not know what ...

— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... She revisits alone the church of her marriage At the Entering of the New Year They would not come After a romantic day The Two Wives "I knew a lady" A house with a History A Procession of Dead Days He Follows Himself The Singing Woman Without, not within her "O I won't lead a homely life" In the small hours The little old table Vagg Hollow The dream is—which? The Country Wedding First or Last Lonely Days "What did it mean?" At the dinner-table The marble tablet The Master and the Leaves Last words to a dumb friend A ...

— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... and windows, and over the lumber on the platform. The one tall pine beside. the ledge was steeped in silver. Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant squalls. But once we had lit a candle, and began to review our improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grow up in the hearts of the lords of Silverado. A bed had still to be made up for Strong, and the morning's water to be fetched, with clinking pail; and as we set ...

— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... few remaining days of his stay with us, that untutored, uninteresting, stupid man knew no lack of friendly courtesy at our hands. We were the better for his homely presence; unawares, he ministered unto us. When we knew that he came directly from speaking to the Master to speak to us, we felt that he was greater than we, and we remembered that it is written, "If any man serve me, him will ...

— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson

... unfamiliarity; he is not a genuine foreign-grown savage; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, in body a common creature of the common streets, only in soul a heathen. Homely filth begrimes him, homely parasites devour him, homely sores are in him, homely rags are on him; native ignorance, the growth of English soil and climate, sinks his immortal nature lower than the beasts that perish. Stand forth, Jo, in uncompromising ...

— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... most scientific test of the uniformity of these fibers, I shall next refer to one more homely. It is simply this: The common garden spider, except when very young, cannot climb up one of the same size as the web on which she displays such activity. She is perfectly helpless, and slips down with a run. After vainly trying to make any headway, she finally puts her hands ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various

... as far as authority is concerned, to rest our claims to attention, rather upon that which bears a more modern date, and to bring forward the evidence of facts instead of the theories of ingenuity. The subject itself we may venture to hope, though a little homely, is not without interest, and certainly not unimportant. It is somewhat scientific from its very nature, and so far from being a matter confined to the medical faculty, it is one on which every man exerts, every day of his existence, his own free choice, ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various

... movements came to light. His study was visited by the masters. It disclosed the usual state of grime and confusion. His fishing-rod and tackle were there. There had been no attempt to pack his few belongings, which lay scattered about in dismal disorder. The photograph of the pleasant, homely-looking woman on the mantelpiece, with the inscription below, "Alfred, from Mother," stood in its usual place. His Aristophanes lay open in the window-sill at the place for to-day's lesson. Everything betokened an ...

— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed

... his reading, he began an address full of homely wit and pathos, in which, with all the rich and striking imagery culled from a varied life in the wildernesses of the great forests and the great cities of our continent, he appealed to that consciousness of "the true, the beautiful and the good" which he ...

— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... and with an obstreperous bound, Fly flew to the new-comer, a young man in the robust strength of eight-and-twenty, of stalwart frame, very broad in the chest and shoulders, careless, homely, though perfectly gentleman-like bearing, and hale, hearty, sunburnt face. It was such a look and such an arm as would win the most timid to his side in certainty of tenderness and protection, and the fond voice ...

— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... semi-indolence soon became to him unendurable; and presently his offer was accepted of service with the troops, but instead of being sent as he desired into the thickest of the fray, he found himself detailed for hospital and other homely duties, at De-Aar Nauwpoort and Norval's Pont. Here for over twelve months he rendered admirable, though to him monotonous, service; when, lo, suddenly the Boers doubled back upon their pursuers, and attempted not unsuccessfully though unfruitfully, a second ...

— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... with his face towards Alt Waldnitz, that all the village, old and young, might see; and then to the beat of drum and scream of fife they marched away; and forest-hidden Waldnitz gathered up once more its many threads of quiet life and wove them into homely pattern. ...

— The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl • Jerome K. Jerome

... exist in a descendant of Henry the Fourth of France, as they did exist in that father of his country. Henry the Fourth wished that he might live to see a fowl in the pot of every peasant in his kingdom. That sentiment of homely benevolence was worth all the splendid sayings that are recorded of kings. But he wished perhaps for more than could be obtained, and the goodness of the man exceeded the power of the king. But this gentleman, a subject, may this day say this at least with ...

— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... to me extremely probable he will. It would show great lack of curiosity if he didn't, since he knows he has a young one here that he has never seen. And then there's you, besides, and you're not so very homely but he might like to have another look ...

— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... themselves are giving, at once cheerfully and sadly, in strange destructions and strange births, a better answer than I can give. I have set forth, as far as in me lay, the data of my problem: and surely, if the premises be given, wise men will not have to look far for the conclusion. In homely English I have given my readers Yeast; if they be what I take them for, they will be able to bake with ...

— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... young patriot and his warmly sympathizing Martha, who now kindly supplied their wants, and then conducted them to their attic chamber, where, it being now nearly dark, they immediately betook themselves to their homely but grateful couch. And, overcome by the fatigues and harrowing anxieties of the day, they soon fell asleep, expecting to be roused in the morning by the din of the battle, which they felt confident was yet to take place before the invaders would be permitted to advance ...

— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... society, he sees a very interesting class who are not far from the kingdom of God; who, nevertheless, are not within that kingdom, and who, therefore, if they remain where they are, are as certainly lost as if they were at an infinite distance from the kingdom. The homely proverb applies to them: "A miss is as good as a mile." They are those who suppose that elevated moral sentiments, an aesthetic pleasure in noble acts or noble truths, a glow and enthusiasm of the soul at the sight or the recital of examples of Christian virtue and Christian grace, ...

— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... Charles heard, strove to believe and be consoled, and brought out his letters, trying, with voice breaking down, to show Mr. Ross how truly he had judged of Amy, then listened with a kind of pleasure to the reports of the homely but touching laments of ...

— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... All the little homely things of the post and the woods crept into her heart, that seemed to her to be opening to a vague knowledge, to be looking down sweet vistas of which she had never dreamed among her other dreams of forest and lake and plain, and, at each distant focus where appeared ...

— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... county of Cavan, called at a homely but hospitable house, where he knew he should be well received. The Lady Bountiful of the mansion, rejoiced to have so distinguished a guest, runs up to him, and with great eagerness and flippancy asks him ...

— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... the east—and the west; it permeates the business world and stiffens the economic backbone of the nation. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole German people, barring the inevitable though small percentage of weaklings, is trying with terrific earnestness to live up to the homely Hindenburgian motto, "Durchhalten!" ("Hold out,") or, in more idiomatic American, "See the ...

— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... you do with Nancy if you didn't marry her off? If she were homely she'd have to fill in chinks in other people's lives, but with her nice little basket of eggs, good looks, money, not too much wit, and a desire to please, she just naturally is put up for ...

— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... to be rigorously suppressed—a habit not infrequently in evidence, especially under strain of active operations—is that of absent-mindedly pocketing documents needed in the work under way. This subject might, but for limitations of space, be illustrated by numerous other examples whose homely character may not safely be permitted to detract from their considered importance to unity ...

— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College

... without concern, a great moral principle darkened by party motives, or placed in risk by accident: hence the dignity and benefit of our public disputes; hence, also, their ultimate relation to the Christian faith. We do not, indeed, in these days, as did our homely ancestors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cite texts of Scripture as themes for senatorial commentary or exegesis; but the virtual reference to scriptural principles is now a thousand times more frequent. The great principles of Christian morality are now so interwoven ...

— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... convex mirror of the newspapers. It is more serious objection to The Pillars of Society that in it, as little as in The League of Youth, had Ibsen cut himself off from the traditions of the well-made play. Gloomy and homely as are the earlier acts, Ibsen sees as yet no way out of the imbroglio but that known to Scribe and the masters of the "well-made" play. The social hypocrisy of Consul Bernick is condoned by a sort of death-bed repentance at the close, ...

— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... set forth only as a novel and pleasing fancy, it may be classed with other ingenious fictions, that are published without a thought of deception. But if seriously proposed, it can be fitly characterized only by borrowing the homely but energetic ...

— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... contemplation of her next step in advance—shrinking from the fast-darkening future, with which Noel Vanstone was now associated in her inmost thoughts—she looked impatiently about the room for some homely occupation which might take her out of herself. The disguise which she had flung down between the wall and the bed recurred to her memory. It was impossible to leave it there. Mrs. Wragge (now occupied in sorting her parcels) might weary of her employment, ...

— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... knowingly into their pockets and heads on one side, jammed into the corners. Coming and going all day. Only one woman. She came late, and outstayed them all. A Quaker, or Friend, as they call themselves. I think this woman Was known by that name in heaven. A homely body, coarsely dressed in gray and white. Deborah (for Haley had let her in) took notice of her. She watched them all—sitting on the end of the pallet, holding his head in her arms with the ferocity of a watch-dog, if any of them touched the body. There was no meekness, no sorrow, in ...

— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis

... led them to a small dining cabin, where the white cloths had been removed from the tables and homely red ones substituted. ...

— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock

... glowing with I know not how many lights; there were separate lamps, also, on two or three tables, and on marble brackets, adding their white radiance to that of the chandelier. The furniture was exceedingly rich. Fresh from our old farmhouse, with its homely board and benches in the dining-room, and a few wicker chairs in the best parlor, it struck me that here was the fulfilment of every fantasy of an imagination revelling in various methods of costly self-indulgence and splendid ease. ...

— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... a small person to harbour so great a guest, and a trembling sense of insufficiency possessed her. She had no high musings to offer to the new companion of her hearth. Every one of her thoughts had hitherto turned to Evelina and shaped itself in homely easy words; of the mighty speech of silence she knew not ...

— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton

... number of the women were assembled, each more lovely than the fairest woman man has ever seen, and all clad in such gauzelike glistening robes as would make the finest fabrics of this world look coarse and homely. ...

— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin

... of architecture displayed in those first temples of the great God was homely indeed and humble. Nevertheless, it might favorably compare with similar buildings erected by wealthy Protestant congregations. This fact alone is sufficient to convict Protestantism of want of faith, namely, that its adherents have never been struck by the thought that the majesty ...

— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... unlimited. Short of saluting the tricolour on Mont Blanc, or of echoing the Marseillaise four hundred and odd feet underground in the cave of Padirac, I think I may fairly say that I have exhausted France as a wonder-horn. But quiet beauties and homely graces have also their seduction, just as we turn with a sense of relief from "Notre Dame de Paris" or "Le Pere Goriot," to a domestic story by Rod or Theuriet, so the sweet little valley of the Loing refreshes after the awful Pass of Gavarni, and soothing to the ear is the gentle flow ...

— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... fine place, they say; but, doctor, I am not worthy on't. I am contented with this homely world; 'tis good enough for such a poor, rascally Mussulman, as I am; besides, I have learnt so much good manners, doctor, as to let my betters be served ...

— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... the scanty fare of a small purse in common with the family of his disciples? Who withdrew from the entertainments of Jerusalem to the humble cottage of Mary and Martha, cheerfully subsisting on the most homely and casual provision?—HE, who has taught us to limit our desires of temporal good within the narrow circle of one short request—"GIVE US THIS DAY ...

— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox

... Union Village were evidently men who did their work thoroughly; the dwellings and houses they built early in the century, all of brick, have a satisfactory solidity, and are not without the homely charm which good work and plain outlines give to any building. Two of these old houses in the Church Family are now used as the boys' and the girls' houses, and are uncommonly good specimens of early Western architecture. The whole village is a pattern of neatness, with flagged walks and pleasant ...

— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... Lincoln was more than a threat to confiscate three thousand millions of dollars which the South had invested in slaves. The homely rail splitter from the West was the prophecy of a new social order which threatened the foundations of the modern world. He himself was all unconscious of this fact. And yet this big reality was the secret of the electric tension which strangled men into silence and threw over the ...

— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon

... to the no small wonder of her neighbor, Mrs. Sharp, the shack began to take on an air of homely brightness and comfort which that lady's more pretentious place lacked, even after a ...

— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett

... the penalty of mortal presumption. The Superman who would shatter the homely decencies of mankind and set his foot on the world's neck is himself bound captive. He is the slave of the djinn whom he has called from the unclean deeps. There can be no end to his quest. Weariness does not ...

— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... white man. At the door he dismounted, threw the reins on the ground, and walked past me into the store, lifting his slouch hat as he entered. A man rather short of stature, sturdy, with a wide-set jaw and flat features that would have been homely had they not been ...

— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... under the narrow brim of a snug winter hat, great furs framing her beautiful face, and her slender figure wrapped in furs. Here also was a picture of Florence Haviland, her handsome face self-satisfied, her trio of homely, distinguished-looking girls about her, and a small picture of Gardner, and two of Clarence's dead mother: one, as they all remembered her, a prim-looking woman with gray hair and magnificent lace on her unfashionable gown, the other, taken thirty years before, showing ...

— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... of action, integrity of character, temperance, chastity, moderation, sincerity, subordination to just authority, conjugal fidelity, filial love and honor—these duties, and others closely connected with them, bear old and homely names. But, Christian women, you can not ask for a task more noble, more truly elevating, for yourselves and your country, than to uphold these plain moral principles, first by your own personal example, and then by all pure influences ...

— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... benediction, it was only with the greatest difficulty that her father could prevent the indignant congregation from seizing her and carrying her before the sheriff for violation of the church-peace. Had she been poor and homely, then of course nothing could have saved her; but she happened to be both rich and beautiful, and to wealth and beauty much is pardoned. Aasa's beauty, however, was also of a very unusual kind; not the ...

— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... errors as faithfully as its perfections. But, such as it is, it is a fine specimen of fourteenth-century English. He translated not for scholars or for nobles, but for the plain people, and his style was such as suited those for whom he wrote—plain, vigorous, homely, and yet with all its homeliness full of a solemn grace and dignity, which made men feel that they were reading no ordinary book. He uses many striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the best-known ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... matter, we should not, surely, apply to a pickpocket to know what he thought on the point. It might naturally be presumed that he would be rather a prejudiced person—particularly as his reasoning, if successful, might get him OUT OF GAOL. This is a homely illustration, no doubt; all we would urge by it is, that Madame Sand having, according to the French newspapers, had a stern husband, and also having, according to the newspapers, sought "sympathy" elsewhere, her arguments ...

— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... screen. Or the farm scenes,—the winter barnyards littered with husks and straw, the rough-coated horses, the cattle sunning themselves or walking down to the spring to drink, the domestic fowls moving about,—there is a touch of sweet, homely life in these things that the winter sun enhances and brings out. Every sign of life is welcome at this season. I love to hear dogs bark, hens cackle, and boys shout; one has no privacy with nature now, and does ...

— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... accuse the girls of purloining it. After some pain and deliberate thought, he decided to go out and speak to the old servants, who were still up, in the kitchen. They received him respectfully, and yet with a sort of sour expression which was natural to their homely Scotch faces. ...

— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade

... fair dame! I am not to you known, Though in your state of honor I am perfect. I doubt some danger does approach you nearly: If you will take a homely man's advice, Be not found here; hence, with your little ones. To fright you thus, methinks, I am too savage; To do worse to you were fell cruelty, Which is too nigh your person. Heaven preserve you! I ...

— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... to the landscape painters we find that JAN VAN GOYEN, born at Leyden in 1596, was destined to exert a really powerful influence, inasmuch as he was the founder, as is generally acknowledged, of the Dutch school of homely native landscape. Beginning with figure subjects, he discovered in their landscape backgrounds his real metier, and seems only to have realized his great gifts when he looked further into nature than was possible when painting a foreground picture. He ...

— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... The weather was clear and frosty. The snow creaked under the runners of the sledge and glittered and sparkled in the fields. Towards sunset the vast plain assumed pink and purple shades. The rooks, cawing and flapping their wings, flew in and out the lime trees. Winter, the strong, homely winter, is a beautiful thing. There is a certain vigor in it, and dignity, and what is more, so much sincerity. Like a true friend, who, regardless as to consequences, hurls cutting truths, it smites you between the eyes without asking leave. By way ...

— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... boat-pullers and steerers have made their spritsails, bound the oars and rowlocks in leather and sennit so that they will make no noise when creeping on the seals, and put their boats in apple-pie order—to use Leach's homely phrase. ...

— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... transition from these homely scenes, which humor commends to our liking, to the chivalrous pageant unrolled for us in the "Conquest of Granada." The former are more characteristic and the more enduring of Irving's writings, but as ...

— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... disappearance of the anemones as the season advances, their place is taken by blood-red poppies, by golden hawkweeds and by masses of tall magenta-coloured blooms of the wild gladiolus, the "Jacob's Ladder" of our own English gardens. Strange enough amongst these familiar homely flowers appear the sub-tropical clumps of prickly pear, and the hedges of aloe which here and there have thrown up a gigantic spike of blossom eight or ten feet in height, a triumphal favour of Nature that the plant itself must pay for by its ...

— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... the children to bring dried corn husk to school, she brought brightly colored raffia, and taught them how to make baskets. The children were clamorous for more knowledge of basket making. The fascinating task of forming objects of beauty and usefulness from homely corn husk and a few gay threads of raffia was novel to them. Amanda was willing to help the children along the path of manual dexterity and eager to have them see and love the beautiful. Under her guidance they gathered ...

— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers

... charming manner. Her greeting to her friends was sweet and familiar, and was accompanied with much kissing, of a sisterly, motherly, daughterly kind; and yet with this expression of simple, almost homely sentiment there was something in her that astonished and dazzled. She might very well have been, as the foreign young man said, the most distinguished woman in France. Dora had not rushed forward to meet ...

— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James

... hands in silence; and in his own homely manner, brother Charles related the particulars he had heard from Nicholas. The conversation which ensued was a long one, and when it was over, a secret conference of almost equal duration took place between brother Ned and Tim Linkinwater in another room. ...

— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... and the child reluctantly let it fly. It made straight for the distant roofs behind them, but the rest of the pigeons still strutted and pecked round the perambulator with tiny mincing steps, like court ladies practising the minuet. Malcolm looked on with unabated relish—the homely idyll always ...

— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... a girl can have is "nice manners;" they will contribute more to her lasting popularity than beauty or wealth. Girls sometimes wonder how it happens that a girl they have regarded as "too homely" to be accounted dangerous, still carries off the matrimonial prize of "her set." Ten chances to one it is because she has that charm of manner that makes a man overlook her physical deficiencies. Her manners, in such ...

— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... on her day off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off and she goes riding into the country ...

— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... The comparison may to a European reader seem a homely one. But Spenser likens an infuriate woman to a cow "That is berobbed of her youngling dere." Shakspeare also makes King Henry VI compare himself to the calf's mother that "Runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her harmless young ...

— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... true prophet, but he did not live to see the verification of his predictions, which would have been to him a source of so much grief. In the midst of his anxieties about public affairs, and of the quiet, homely interests which made the days at Mount Vernon so pleasant, the end suddenly came. There was no more forewarning than if he had been struck down by accident or violence. He had always been a man of great physical vigor, and ...

— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge

... first lesson, parts of the prophecy of Amos. They are somewhat difficult, here and there, to understand; but nevertheless Amos is perhaps the grandest of the Hebrew prophets, next to Isaiah. Rough and homely as his words are, there is a strength, a majesty, and a terrible earnestness in them, which it is good to listen to; and specially good now that Advent draws near, and we have to think of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and what His coming means. ...

— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... the great ballet dancer, was a little girl, with skinny legs and a skinnier future, being extremely homely and with no prospects of success, ...

— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane

... vases of red and white Bohemian glass. The Cuban girl could not know how eloquent were all these things to the exiled Vermont woman; but she looked sympathetic, and felt so, her heart warming to the homely soul, with her rugged ...

— Rita • Laura E. Richards

... of old gold, with a great amethyst in the centre of the lid. Its splendour was in such contrast to his homely ways and simple life that I could not help commenting ...

— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... instruct other nations, Belgian pencils have, for a century, caused the canvas to glow with colors and combinations never seen before. Flemish fabrics are exported to all parts of Europe, to the East and West Indies, to Africa. The splendid tapestries, silks, linens, as well as the more homely and useful manufactures of the Netherlands, are prized throughout the world. Most ingenious, as they had already been described by the keen-eyed Caesar, in imitating the arts of other nations, the skillful artificers of the country at Louvain, Ghent, and other places, ...

— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... trivial affairs passed away the short time between the coming of Natura, and dinner being brought in; on which, the yeoman intreated him to sit down, and partake of such homely food as he found there.—'That I shall gladly do,' answered Natura, 'but I waited for your fair daughter; I hope we shall have her company. I do not know,' said the yeoman, 'I think they told me she was not very well, had got the head-ach, or some such ailment;—go, however,' pursued he, ...

— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... rushed (so that every board in the house shook) up to my lost Lorna's room, and tore the little wall-niche open and espied my treasure. It was as simple, and as homely, and loving, as even I could wish. Part of it ran as follows,—the other parts it behoves me not to open out to strangers:—"My own love, and sometime lord,—Take it not amiss of me, that even without farewell, I go; for I cannot persuade ...

— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... finicky mothers!" he exclaimed. "Why will they turn up their noses at every poor girl? If Alice had rich parents she would be all right, no matter if she were as homely as ...

— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn

... response of the English people to that sympathy—the recognition of that motherhood—is written, not only in the printed records of the reign, but on the "fleshly tables" of English hearts. Let one homely citation suffice as an illustration. It is taken from a letter of condolence addressed to the Queen in 1892, on the death of ...

— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... and more congenial companionship of the young patriot and his warmly sympathizing Martha, who now kindly supplied their wants, and then conducted them to their attic chamber, where, it being now nearly dark, they immediately betook themselves to their homely but grateful couch. And, overcome by the fatigues and harrowing anxieties of the day, they soon fell asleep, expecting to be roused in the morning by the din of the battle, which they felt confident was yet to take place before the invaders would be permitted to advance farther on their ...

— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were ...

— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... of many, that "the past, which still holds its ground in the back chambers of the brain, would persuade us that 'tis a demon-haunted world, where not God but the devil rules; we are not yet persuaded that this is a cheerful, homely, well-meaning universe, whose powers, if strict in their working, are nevertheless beneficent and not diabolic." Against these phantasmal fears the doctrine of God's immanence, rightly understood, offers the best of antidotes, ...

— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... dollars reward for capture and return of one Sadler, that committed humiliatin' assault on one Hillary, and sp'iled the stomachs and b'iled the skins of patriotic municipal guardsmen, which shameful person is more'n six feet of iniquity, and his features homely beyond belief, complexion dilapidated, and conscience dyspeptic.' Of course, Excellency, there couldn't anybody give you points on a Proclamation. I ain't doin' that, but I was supposin' it was printed in the national colours, with a spectacular reward precedin' ...

— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton

... would the burning of a borrel ignorant burgess like me serve? Men offer not up old glove leather for incense, nor are beacons fed with undressed hides, I trow. Sooth to speak, I have too little learning and too much fear to get credit by the affair, and, therefore, I should, in our homely phrase, have both the scathe and ...

— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... ugliest face I ever saw was that of a woman whom the world calls beautiful. Through its "silver veil" the evil and ungentle passions looked out hideous and hateful. On the other hand, there are faces which the multitude at the first glance pronounce homely, unattractive, and such as "Nature fashions by the gross," which I always recognize with a warm heart-thrill; not for the world would I have one feature changed; they please me as they are; they are hallowed by kind memories; they are beautiful ...

— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... Toro as I sat on him and scratched him with a nail and as he was when he turned himself loose for a happy day in the country. In the stable he was as mild as milk. I could have almost imagined him purring like a cat. He chewed the cud and made homely sloppy noises with his tongue, and regarded me with a calm, bovine gaze, which was as gentle as that of any pet cow's. I could have fallen asleep beside him. It is reported that my predecessor Jack, on one occasion, came home much the worse for liquor and was found ...

— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... the clown go over to a stool and place a homely, old-fashioned watch and a spoon and medicine bottle Miss Nellis had ...

— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness

... remind us of Shagbag and Black Will in Arden) to murder his nephew; and again in the quarrel between these two ruffians. Allenso's affection for his little cousin and solicitude at their parting are tenderly portrayed with homely touches of quiet pathos. The diction of the Two Tragedies is plain and unadorned. In reading Arden we sometimes feel that the simplicity of language has been deliberately adopted for artistic purposes; ...

— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen

... had remained some time in the Netherlands, in order to settle the affairs of that country, he embarked for Spain; and as the gravity of that nation, with their respectful obedience to their prince, had appeared more agreeable to his humor than the homely, familiar manners and the pertinacious liberty of the Flemings, it was expected that he would for the future reside altogether at Madrid, and would govern all his extensive dominions by Spanish ministers and Spanish counsels. Having met with a violent tempest on his voyage, he no sooner ...

— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... signs, the lambs, the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint devices that hung before the doors; covered lamps burned before the Nativities and Crucifixions painted on the walls or let into the wood-work; here and there, where a shutter had not been closed, a ruddy fire-light lit up a homely interior, with the noisy band of children clustering round the house-mother and a big brown loaf, or some gossips spinning and listening to the cobbler's or the barber's story of a neighbor, while the oil-wicks ...

— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)

... the world." If set forth only as a novel and pleasing fancy, it may be classed with other ingenious fictions, that are published without a thought of deception. But if seriously proposed, it can be fitly characterized only by borrowing the homely but energetic language ...

— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... of individual statues, and who could never be invoked in prayer. Out of sight of these effigies and paintings, however, the oppression was at once lightened. True, these model folk could not be permitted to decline from their prescribed standards, but they might be allowed companions of more homely tastes, and the duly authorized wicked ones, such as the Devil, Cain, and Herod, might display their iniquity to the full without offence. Thus it is that in this play we find great prominence given to the Devil and his brother demons. They would delight the common people: therefore ...

— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... respect to the famed moral philosophy of Molire in his pretended master-piece. From what has been stated, I consider myself warranted to assert, in opposition to the prevailing opinion, that Molire succeeded best with the coarse and homely comic, and that both his talents and his inclination, if unforced, would have determined him altogether to the composition of farces such as he continued to write even to the very end of his life. He seems ...

— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... in these familiar details, Devon's features unconsciously relaxed. He was very young, and rather cold, and the quick reaction from the emotions he had experienced in the outer hall was a relief. Also, Shaw's manner was as reassuring as his homely room. He dropped the visitor's coat and hat on a worn leather couch, which seemingly served him as a bed, and waved a hospitable hand toward an easy-chair. Simultaneously, he casually indicated a figure bending over a table on the ...

— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan

... said, and again applied his lips to the mouth organ. The girl laughed then, throwing back her head. Her throat was long and slim and brown. She clasped her knees with her arms and looked at Nick amusedly. Nick thought she was a kind of homely ...

— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... the inevitable in a very short time, and soon began to talk as mothers do—that is to say, homely mothers—for almost as soon as she had wiped ...

— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... that chanced to have been made and carry her off for a day up the river, where a quiet little lunch, in the tranquil shade of overhanging trees, and the cosy, intimate talk that was its invariable concomitant, seemed like an oasis of familiar, homely pleasantness in the midst of the gay ...

— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... So through those homely and familiar sounds they listened, listened, listened; and very gradually, so that they could neither of them have said at any moment 'Now it has begun,' yet quite beyond mistake the sound for which they listened was presently loud in their ears. And it was the sound of steel on steel; the ...

— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit

... another class of friends who stand before young people, wooing them to noble things. They may be plain, perhaps homely, almost stern in their earnestness of purpose and in the seriousness with which they talk of life. They call to toil, to diligence, to self-denial, to heroic qualities of character, to purity, to usefulness, to ...

— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller

... said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious spectacle. "How full it is of homely and lovely and ...

— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... Then the drawers, having cleared the tables, brought up a huge bowl of hot spiced wine, a dish of tobacco, and some pipes. The Don then offered us to smoke some cigarros, but we, not understanding them, took instead our homely pipes, and each with a beaker of hot wine to his hand sat roasting before the fire, scarce saying a word, the Don being silent because his humour was of the reflective grave kind (with all his courtesies he never smiled, as if such demonstrations ...

— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett

... was kind, and loved to sit In the low hut or garnished cottage, And praise the farmer's homely wit, And share the widow's homelier pottage: At his approach complaint grew mild, And when his hand unbarred the shutter, The clammy lips of Fever smiled The welcome ...

— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... you in a careless way, to please your Humour, know now, I do love thee beyond measure; thou shalt have Progeny innumerable; we'll walk to Church with our good Deeds after us; and let 'em be dull or homely, as we must suppose 'em, when they are lawfully begot, there is a Pleasure, a Tenderness in nursing Children, which ...

— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker

... a wagon, from which the horses had been detached, and which now offered a tempting though homely shelter to those among the pedestrians who might choose to sit on the shady side, or to avail themselves of the accommodation afforded by the awning over the interior. Ferrers threw himself full length ...

— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May

... you have taken fright on account of the case of diphtheria that is occurring here. I am an old man, as you see, and have had a hundred, perhaps five hundred cases as like this as two peas in a pod." (He stopped, expecting a smile at least for his homely comparison, but every face was as sober as if he had come to sound a death-knell.) "Miss Blair is sick, I might say is very sick, but I am not in the least anxious about her, or about any of you. Under ordinary ...

— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins

... went off, the two ladies resumed their old homely life. But the homeliest life had now ceased to be repulsive to Elizabeth. Her common duties were no longer wearisome: for the first time, she experienced the delicious companionship of thought. Her chief task was still to sit by the window knitting soldiers' socks; but even Mrs. Ford ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... northern coast of Ireland. It has long been unroofed; and, though of considerable size, we could not, by any power of imagination, figure it as having been a suitable habitation for majesty[1006]. Dr. Johnson, to irritate my old Scottish[1007] enthusiasm, was very jocular on the homely accommodation of 'King Bob,' and roared and laughed till the ...

— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... all the day on the new stable, and he enjoyed the homely work. Sometimes he filled in the deeper places in the floor with chunks of dead wood and then heaped the leaves on top. When it was finished it was all in such condition that the animals could occupy it without ...

— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler

... a soldier, purely brought up as such—and it is of such only I speak, and not of rare and even then perilous exceptions,—men educated in philosophy like Epaminondas, or in homely household virtues and citizenship like Washington—but there never was a soldier such as I speak of, who did more for the world than was compatible with his confined and arbitrary breeding. I do not speak, of course, with reference to the unprofessional part of his character. Circumstances, ...

— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt

... the walls; quaint blue-and-white china holds the simple dinner; old furniture brings to mind the generations of the past. At the right as you enter is Mr. Emerson's library, a large square room, plainly furnished, but made pleasant by pictures and sunshine. The homely shelves that line the walls are well filled with books. There is a lack of showy covers or rich bindings, and each volume seems to have soberly grown old in constant service. Mr. Emerson's study is a ...

— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley

... these homely chores was very effective in relieving the untrained and tired mother, it added little to the family income. Edward looked about and decided that the time had come for him, young as he was, to begin some sort of wage-earning. But how and where? The answer he ...

— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok

... were beginning to feel the thirst often felt in childhood—the restless craving of the spirit for something new: no wonder, then, that they seized the fruit so "pleasant to the eye," and as it seemed to them "desirable to make one wise." Thus the poor girls were lured from the plain homely path, which, plain and homely as it is, always proves at last the way of pleasantness and the path of peace. They knew that people called them odd, and in this they gloried. Fanny Brighton they regarded ...

— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell

... went about her homely tasks with an alacrity that Mrs. Grubbling, knowing nothing of the hope that had been let in upon her dreariness, attributed wholly to the salutary effect of a "good scolding" she had administered the day before. The work she got out of the girl that Thursday forenoon! Never once ...

— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... me, while I tell The pleasures of that cell, Oh, little maid! What though its couch be rude, Homely the only food Within its shade? No thought of care Can enter ...

— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert

... West End,—that sharply defined residential area of Vancouver which real estate agents unctuously speak of as "select." There was half a block of ground in green lawn bordered with rosebushes. The house itself was solid, homely, built for use, and built to endure, all stone and heavy beams, wide windows and deep porches, and a red tile roof lifting ...

— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... the privacy of her chamber, and the Widow Crane confessed her disappointment to the confiding ear of her bosom friend, Mrs. Merrill. Not many years later a man named Grant was to be in Springfield, with a carpet bag, despised as a vagabond. A very homely man named Lincoln went to Cincinnati to try a case before the Supreme Court, and was snubbed by a man ...

— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... Madame de Stael came to Weimar. * * * If she comes to pay me a visit, she shall be well received, and, if I know of her coming four-and-twenty hours beforehand, a part of Loder's house shall be furnished for her use; she would find homely fare, but we should really meet and speak to each other, and she could remain as long as she liked. What I have to do here can be done at odd quarters of an hour, and the rest of my time I would ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... elasticity of manner—"I am indeed a fool, and worse than a fool, for a moment to doubt my father's probity.—Confide in him, dearest lady; he is wise though he is grave, and kind though he is plain and homely in his speech. Should he prove false he will fare the worse! for I will plunge myself from the pinnacle of the Warder's Tower to the bottom of the moat, and he shall lose his own ...

— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... parts of the abode presented much the same appearance as when Stephen Lord first established himself antiquated, and in primitive taste. Nancy's bedroom alone here. The furniture was old, solid, homely; the ornaments were displayed the influence of modern ideas. On her twentieth birthday, the girl received permission to dress henceforth as she chose (a strict sumptuary law having previously been in force), and at the same time was allowed to refurnish her chamber. Nancy pleaded ...

— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... garb of the age, which is now a man's [Imprimis and all the Item.[40]] He has not humbled his meditations to the industry of compliment, nor afflicted his brain in an elaborate leg. His body is not set upon nice pins, to be turning and flexible for every motion, but his scrape is homely and his nod worse. He cannot kiss his hand and cry, madam, nor talk idle enough to bear her company. His smacking of a gentlewoman is somewhat too savoury, and he mistakes her nose for her lips. A very woodcock ...

— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... Glazier is reputed to have been a man of fine countenance, wise in homely counsel, honest in all his dealings. Rachel Leah, his wife, had a reputation for practical wisdom even greater than his. She was the advice giver of the village in every perplexity of life. My father remembers his grandmother as a tall, ...

— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... touch, gently; and as the woman obeyed she thought the task an odd one, and in her curiosity tried the effect of the ointment upon one of her own eyes. At once a change was wrought in the appearance of everything around her. The new mother appeared no longer as a homely cottager, but a beautiful lady attired in white; the babe, fairer than before, but still witnessing with the elvish cast of its eye to its paternity, was wrapped in swaddling clothes of silvery gauze; while the elder children, who sat on either side of the bed, were transformed into ...

— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... one of the most pathetic of histories, was at hand; the end was not the less pathetic because it came in so homely a fashion. On a cold day in March he stopped his coach in the snow on his way to Highgate, to try the effect of cold in arresting putrefaction. He bought a hen from a woman by the way, and stuffed it with snow. ...

— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... in those days for superiors to address their inferiors in the third person singular. Directly to address a serving-man or maid was deemed incorrect, for it would have betokened an unfitting equality. However, Madame de Ruth's peasant lad responded with alacrity to his lady's homely speech, and in an astonishingly short time he reappeared with an enormous bowl of the steaming hot spirits—the punch, which Marlborough's army had brought into fashion on the Continent, and which the damp of South Germany in the autumn made a ...

— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... dozen or two fine-looking creatures who had high brows, who said they were Co-eds. This did not mean that these fairies had ever been through college. "Certainly the college never went through them," said one very homely fairy, who was spiteful and jealous. The simple fact was that the one they called Betty, the Co-ed, and others from that Welsh village, called Bryn Mawr, and another from Flint, and another from Yale, and still others ...

— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis

... two chieftains; who having travelled to Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from what it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said to be the first reformers of our English metre and style." The dull moralizings of the rimers who followed Chaucer, the ...

— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... rich, such as the court of Louis XV. But now it happened suddenly and universally to all arts. There were no longer vulgar rich only but also vulgar poor and vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there spread a kind of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of this I will give one simple and homely example. The beautiful flowers of the cottage garden were no longer grown in the gardens of the well-to-do, because they were the flowers of the poor. Instead were grown lobelias, geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous mixture, not because any ...

— Progress and History • Various

... shall never forget the fierce actions and utterances of one suffering from delirium tremens. Whether in its wrath, disdain, or its dismay, the countenance was infernal. I called once upon a time on a most respectable yeoman, and I was, in language earnest and homely, pressed to accept the hospitality of the house. I consented. The word to me was, 'Nah, Maister, yah mun stop an hev sum te-ah, yah mun, eah, yah mun.' A bountiful table was soon spread; at all events, time soon ...

— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell

... his boyhood in the old Canadian city presented themselves unasked; the maple-foliage, incredibly dense and verdant, the shabby, comfortable houses behind the trees, and the homely, happy-go-lucky people who lived in the houses and sprayed their lawns on summer evenings; friendly people, like people everywhere prone to laughter and averse to thought. "People are so foolish and likeable, ...

— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... handsome. He was, as Slim had said, a hammer-headed brute of imposing proportions. But for his eyes no turfman would have looked at him twice. They were large, clear, and unusually intelligent; they redeemed his homely face. Without them he would have been ...

— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan

... it was not long before shrewd people began to see that this fine humor, with its home-thrusts, was not in reality written by a country bumpkin. Through the rough dialect and homely way of stating the case, there shone the fine intellect of a cultivated and skillful writer. The Post guessed that James Russell Lowell was the real author. This was regarded only as a rumor, however, and many people scouted the idea that a young ...

— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody

... more than masculinely coarse she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that, while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot, who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was—well, some say he was not effeminate; and he could break ...

— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes

... reading that passage and after making some allowance for an antiquated style, and a certain degree of quaintness, one of the characteristics of the age,—the impression produced upon the mind of any candid person, who admires strong good sense, though presented in a homely dress, is not in a very high degree favourable to the character and talents of the author (See Kirkton's History, pp. 227, 228). In the preface to Stevenson's History of the Church and State of Scotland, ...

— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... prisoner, who remained on deck, over-joyed at the recapture, and anticipating an immediate return to his own country; by which it would appear that the "L'homme propose, mais Dieu dispose" of France, is quite as sure a proverb as the more homely "Many a slip between cup and lip" ...

— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... time they met; behind all her goodness and care lay the same touch of maidenly reserve as at that time. She received his caresses silently, she herself giving chiefly by being something for him. He noticed how every little homely action she did for him grew out of her like a motherly caress and took him into her heart. He was grateful for it, but it was not that of which ...

— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... those very practices of which Bacon was guilty, and which, as Mr. Montagu seems to think, nobody ever considered as blamable till Bacon was punished for them. We could easily fill twenty pages with the homely, but just and forcible rhetoric of the brave old bishop. We shall select a few passages as fair specimens, and no more than fair specimens, of the rest. "Omnes diligunt munera. They all love bribes. ...

— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... however, to play at tropical forests properly, when homely accents of the human voice intrude; and all my hopes of seeing a tiger seized by a crocodile while drinking (vide picture-books, passim) vanished abruptly, and earth resumed her old dimensions, when ...

— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... revolt again. Now all felt that there was nothing left but fight. In great haste the Dalecarlians sent after Gustavus and brought him back. They held a great meeting, and to it came Gustavus' wood-cutter friend, Liss Lars. He made a great homely speech, saying, "This Gustavus, son of Eric, is a man. He has threshed with me, and I know him. We can trust him, and sense has he, more than all of us put together. ...

— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... but the saw. For, as Epaminondas is reported to have said afterwards, of his table, "Treason lurks not under such a dinner," so Lycurgus perceived before him, that such a house admits of no luxury and needless splendour. Indeed, no man could be so absurd as to bring into a dwelling so homely and simple, bedsteads with silver feet, purple coverlets, golden cups, and a train of expense that follows these: but all would necessarily have the bed suitable to the room, the coverlet of the bed and the rest of their utensils ...

— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... advanced towards a cliff, overhung with cedars, Emily following in trembling silence. They lifted her from her mule, and, having seated themselves on the grass, at the foot of the rocks, drew some homely fare from a wallet, of which Emily tried to eat a little, the better to disguise ...

— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... to him that merrits curtesie, loathed of thee that doth deserue all loue, Basely reiected, scorn'd most churlishly, that honors thee aboue the Saints aboue. True loue is pricelesse, rare, and therefore deere, VVe feast not royall Kings with homely cheere. ...

— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale

... flock to the museum in holiday times prove its attractions; and it is with the hope that these attractions may be enhanced by the help of a methodical and homely guide, chattering to the visitor various bits and scraps of pertinent information as he passes from one object to another, that these four visits have been presented to the public. They do not pretend to be scientific books, but simply companions of the hour, that urge little points of information ...

— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... see "Boney," the foeman of his race - The great Sir Walter, this is he With that grave homely Border face. He claims his poem of the chase That rang Benvoirlich's valley through; And THIS, that doth the lineage trace And fortunes of the bold ...

— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang

... was with Mandy Ann, and that she, too, was hurrying on to the clearing, still in the distance. Had there been any doubt of her identity, it would have been swept away when, through an opening in the trees, he caught sight of a slender girlish figure, clad in the homely garments of what Ted called poorwhite trash, and of which he had some knowledge. There was, however, a certain grace in the movements of the girl which moved him a little, for he was not blind to any point of beauty in a woman, and the beauty of this girl, hurrying on so fast, had been ...

— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes

... for an utterly different reason than was in the child's mind. God was lonesome that day, left standing alone under the trees of the garden. He is lonesome for fellowship with every one who stays away from Himself. That homely human word may well express to us the ...

— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon

... of the turkey, Bill?" began Master Robert Peabody, the flat-featured, rising from his pillow like a homely porpoise. ...

— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews

... The latter accepted Loring's invitation to drink a cup of coffee with "the boys," but he disposed of it in great haste, hot as it was, as if he hoped by his example to induce them to do likewise. But Bob and his companions were in no hurry. They lingered a long time over their homely meal, and then the smokers were allowed to empty a pipe apiece before the order was given to "catch up." The squatter began to breathe easier after that, and when he saw the troopers in their saddles and ready to start, his delight was so apparent that ...

— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon

... that Macaulay was so often content with an effect of an essentially vulgar kind, offensive to taste, discordant to the fastidious ear, and worst of all, at enmity with the whole spirit of truth. By vulgar we certainly do not mean homely, which marks a wholly different quality. No writer can be more homely than Mr. Carlyle, alike in his choice of particulars to dwell upon, and in the terms or images in which he describes or illustrates them, but ...

— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley

... from Giotto to Raphael, amidst all diversities, is characterized throughout by a deference of Art to something extraneous. It is not beauty that Fra Angelico looks for, but holiness, or beauty as expressing this; it is not beauty that draws Filippo Lippi, but homely actuality. It is from this point of view that the Renaissance has been attacked as wanting in faith, earnestness, humility. The Renaissance had swallowed all formulas. Nothing was in itself sacred, ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... little homely sparrows Chirping, in the cold and rain, Their impatient sweet complaining, Sing out from their hearts again; Bid them set themselves to mating, Cooing love in softest words, Crowd their nests, all cold and empty, ...

— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous

... bedfellow? O polished perturbation! golden care! That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide To many a watchful night!—Sleep with it now, Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet As he whose brow with homely biggin bound Snores ...

— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... house to admit of a twist in the flue, and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three inverse, the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable here. However, the aspect of the room, though homely, was cheerful, a somewhat contradictory group of furniture suggesting that the collection consisted of waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the old articles exercising a curious and subduing effect on the bright faces of the new. An oval mirror ...

— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... To a remarkable extent the local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans—social, theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial, without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness of ...

— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... the soldiers have gone on, but the members of our own immediate group are scattered about the valley, engaged chiefly in agricultural or other homely pursuits, while they await your recovery, and incidentally earn their bread. Sergeant Whitley, Captain St. Clair and Captain Mason are putting a new roof on the barn, and, as I inspected it myself, I can certify that they are performing the task in a most ...

— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler

... old man's daughter is coming home wealthy and happy as never before, and the old woman's daughter is somewhere around as homely and ...

— Folk Tales from the Russian • Various

... of Dutch wagons, guarded by the homely soldiery, jolted slowly over the stumps and roots of the newly made road, and the regiments followed at their leisure. The hardships of the way were not without their consolations. The jovial Irishman who held the chief command made himself very agreeable to the ...

— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, Sweet William with his homely cottage smell, And stocks in fragrant blow: Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And open, jasmined-muffled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden trees, And the full moon, ...

— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... reason why neither we nor theology require much learning in women; and that Francis, Duke of Brittany, son of John V., one talking with him about his marriage with Isabella the daughter of Scotland, and adding that she was homely bred, and without any manner of learning, made answer, that he liked her the better, and that a woman was wise enough, if she could distinguish her husband's shirt from his doublet. So that it is no so ...

— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... hunting and seising their prey. The sheriff being answerable for the misdemesnors of these bailiffs, they are therefore usually bound in a bond for the due execution of their office, and thence are called bound-bailiffs; which the common people have corrupted into a much more homely appellation. ...

— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... come breaking through, And now and then the office hum Dies like a mist, ... and there will come An Oxford breakfast scene: the quad All blue and grey outside—O God— And there sits Twiston at the feast Proclaiming he will be a priest! I see his eyes, his homely neb— Ring, telephones, ...

— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley

... for this part of the work, the stateliness and dignity of the Latin corresponded to the proud claims which he made for his conception of the knowledge which was to be. English seemed to him too homely to express the hopes of the world, too unstable to be trusted with them. Latin was the language of command and law. His Latin, without enslaving itself to Ciceronian types, and with a free infusion of barbarous but most convenient words from the ...

— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... devoting herself so whole-heartedly to his career. She had an air—and it wasn't consciously assumed, either—of living wholly with reference to him, which people found exceedingly engaging. (A cynic might observe at this point that the same quality in a homely unattractive woman would fail ...

— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... poets know, the charm that human association lends to the simplest English landscape, and he cherished the memory of these scenes long after he had gone to live among the richer beauties of the south. From the garners of memory he drew the familiar features of this homely land ...

— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... purple velvet, which she called 'the Branciani dress,' and once attired in it, and the rich purges and swelling creases over the shoulders puffed out to her satisfaction, and the run of yellow braid about it properly inspected and flattened, she would not return to her more homely wear, though very soon her mother began to whimper and say that she had lost her so long, and now that she had found her it hardly seemed the same child. Emilia would listen to no entreaties to put away her ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... country for a neighbor, but had promised to come to the old Corner House about four o'clock. Almost always he took supper Saturday evening with the girls. Mrs. MacCall usually had fishcakes and baked beans, and Neale was extravagantly fond of that homely New England combination. ...

— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... field-flowers that gem the earth with beauty! And then in sickness! What, what is so refreshing as the perfume of sweet plants? We speak not of the glazed and costly things that come from foreign lands, but of the English nosegay—(how we love the homely word!)—the sweet briar, lavender, cowslip, violet, lily of the valley, or a sprig of meadow sweet, a branch of myrtle, a tuft of primroses, or handful of wild thyme! Such near the couch of sickness ...

— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... The great philosopher, Dr. Franklin, inspired the mouthpiece of his own eloquence, "Poor Richard," with "many a gem of purest ray serene," encased in the homely garb of proverbial truisms. On the subject of frugality we cannot do better than take the worthy Mentor for our text, and from it address our remarks. A man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, "keep his nose all his life to ...

— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... cookery, they "neither affect to despise their native dishes nor squeamishly reject the solid joints which characterize our own repasts." I was astonished, at one Russian dinner, which I was assured was thoroughly national in style, to meet with the homely roast leg of mutton and baked potatoes of my native land. Like the English, the Russians take potatoes with nearly every dish—either plain boiled, fried, or with parsley and butter over them. Plum-pudding, too, and boiled rice-pudding with currants in it, and with melted butter, are known in Russia—at ...

— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... further contemplation of her next step in advance—shrinking from the fast-darkening future, with which Noel Vanstone was now associated in her inmost thoughts—she looked impatiently about the room for some homely occupation which might take her out of herself. The disguise which she had flung down between the wall and the bed recurred to her memory. It was impossible to leave it there. Mrs. Wragge (now occupied ...

— No Name • Wilkie Collins