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More "Incongruous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desired, it can be added. That is another excellence about our bill of fare. It has nothing in it which makes it incongruous with the richest or the plainest tables. It is not overcrowded by the addition of roast goose and plum-pudding; it is not harmed by the addition of herring and potatoes. Nay, it can give flavor and richness to broken bits of stale bread served on a ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... bell and bring a servant; but although the bell cord dangled within easy reach he made no movement toward it; it had occurred to his mind that the act might subject him to the suspicion of fear, which he certainly did not feel. He was more keenly conscious of the incongruous nature of the situation than affected by its perils; it was revolting, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... and obvious, to believe that the writer meant what he said, and to reject any interpretation which implies that when he came to speak of himself he said what he did not mean, or filled the picture with descriptions, situations or emotions, incongruous or inappropriate. And if in so reading they seem clear and connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted. We should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer that they are imitations of Petrarch, or that the genius of the poet, cribbed and confined by the fashion ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... and a red turban bobbed about among the rocks, with the large white face of the Nonconformist minister smiling from beneath it. He had a thick lance with which to support his injured leg, and this murderous crutch combined with his peaceful appearance to give him a most incongruous aspect,—as of a sheep which has suddenly developed claws. Behind him were two negroes with a basket and ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... events which happened, and of which I heard or read in my youth, are mostly chaotic and incongruous; but it is otherwise with the murders. I remember with what thrilling interest I read the story of Greenacre, who cut up the body of his victim, carrying the head wrapped up in a handkerchief, on his knees in the omnibus, and who was supposed to have nearly fainted with fright when, on asking ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... wounded were expected, if there was likelihood that British soldiers would be amongst them. These would cheer up at the sound of her pleasant voice speaking their tongue. Yet she would witness on such occasions incongruous incidents of German brutality. Once there came out of the train an English and a French soldier, great friends evidently. They were only slightly wounded and the English soldier stretched his limbs cautiously ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... head of a group, the other members of which are potassium, rubidium and caesium (the last not examined). Following these identities of composition, I think it is better to remove manganese and fluorine from their incongruous companions and place them with lithium and its allies as V a, the Spike Groups, marking, by the identity of number, similarities of arrangement which exist, and by the separation the differences of composition. It is worth while noting what Sir William ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... charm of realism is wanting; it needs a population out of one of Watteau's pictures,—clean and deft as the painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to—sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. And the stiff parterres, terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... dawn the streets of the city had begun to assume a festive appearance, which, to Dick and Earle at least, seemed distinctly incongruous until it was explained to them by Lyga—who came to them early—that the pageant was in nowise intended to be typical of a nation mourning the loss of its monarch (the theory being that the monarch never dies), but rather of the nation doing honour to one who, after ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... now that the battle in the hall was a very brief affair; while it lasted I had no sense of time; minutes or moments, they were (God forgive me!) some of the very happiest in all my life. My joy was as profound as it was also selfish and incongruous. The villains were being routed; of that there could be no doubt or question. I hoped Rattray might escape, but for the others no pity stirred in my heart, and even my sneaking sympathy with the squire could take nothing from the joy that was in my heart. Eva Denison was free. I was free. Our ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... reputation, thank God! to compromise myself now, even for the empire of the Great Mogul. You and I are of an age when we both know the meaning of words. For an ecclesiastic, you certainly have ideas that are very incongruous. Fie! ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... a plain clothes man from detective headquarters around the next bend of a peaceful Missouri road was so preposterous and incongruous that Billy had found it impossible to give ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Bullfinch, that the Linnet is not the Greenfinch; he will particularize and to a greater degree each day, as his faculty of observation becomes more fully trained. In the beginning he saw nothing but resemblances; he now sees differences, but still not plainly enough to avoid incongruous comparisons. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... pervading color of nature; it is chiefly used during the Epiphany Tide and the long period of the Trinity Season. Black is made use of at funerals and on Good Friday. This use of the colors applies to the stole as well as to the Altar hangings. The black stole is always out of place, incongruous, except at funerals and on Good Friday. Where they are used, the cope, chasuble, maniple, dalmatic and tunic also vary with the Season in the same manner. The use of the Church colors, besides "decking the place of His Sanctuary" is also most helpful to the devotions ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... been so incongruous, I shall attempt the task of drawing the character of the Quakers. I shall state, first, all the excellencies, that have been said to belong to it. I shall state also, all the blemishes with which it ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... a similar incongruous character are still traditionally connected with such occasions. Within the last thirty years, a laird of Dundonald, a small estate in Ross-shire, died at Inverness. There was open house for some days, and great eating and drinking. Here the corpse commenced its progress toward its appointed home ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... challenging the approach of any one who desires to pass along the platform. For a distance of about one hundred feet to the railroad signal tower are piled barrels of flour, boxes of provisions, and supplies of all descriptions. Under the shed of the station an incongruous collection of clothing is being arranged to allow of convenient distribution. While they waited for the signal to commence operations, a guard entered into conversation with a woman in the line. She was ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... appeared the fringed and raised banks of the river. Half tropical looking cottages with deep verandas—the homes of early Southern pioneers—took the place of incomplete blocks of modern houses, monotonously alike. In these sylvan surroundings Mr. Hamlin's picturesque rusticity looked less incongruous and more Arcadian; the young girl had lost some of her restraint with her confidences, and lounging together side by side, without the least consciousness of any sentiment in their words or actions, they nevertheless contrived to impress the spectator with the idea that they were a charming pair ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... everything fitted into our expectations and was as we planned it, then again there would be nothing comical. In a world without ideas, the comic could not exist. The comic depends upon our apperceiving an object in terms of some idea and finding it incongruous. The most elementary illustrations demonstrate this. The unusual is the original comic; to the child all strange things are comical—the Chinaman with his pigtail, the negro with his black skin, the ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... their ornamented certificates of stock to comfort them. Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, speaking of those times, says "that from morning until evening 'Change Alley was filled to overflowing with one dense mass of living beings composed of the most incongruous materials, and, in all things save the mad pursuit in which they were employed, the very ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the habit of mind which we bring with us to such perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters at the Harlot's Funeral, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Nobody is astonished when Mr. Moore pays a compliment of this kind to Sir Walter Scott, or Sir Walter Scott to Mr. Moore. The idea of either of those gentlemen looking out for some lord who would be likely to give him a few guineas in return for a fulsome dedication seems laughably incongruous. Yet this is exactly what Dryden or Otway would have done; and it would be hard to blame them for it. Otway is said to have been choked with a piece of bread which he devoured in the rage of hunger; and, whether this story be true or false, he was beyond all question miserably poor. Dryden, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... curate of S. Athanasius, Great Wabbleton, sat at the table in his little parlour with a local newspaper in his hand and a troubled expression on his face. There was something incongruous in the appearance of the deep frown that puckered the curate's brows; for his countenance, in its normal aspect, was chubby and plump and bland, and his little grey eyes were wont to shine with a benign and even a humorous twinkle. He was not remarkably young, as curates go; but he was quite young ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... old mode of having separate divisions; the one including ancient and the other modern geography, to that of uniting both under the same alphabetical arrangement. When the title of this work is considered, it is somewhat incongruous that the account of places should be inserted under the modern names, and a mere reference under that of the ancient. These accounts appear to be in general correct, but they are in our judgment too brief to be ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... secret of Dennis's toil and early work. Here were the results of his insatiable demand for the incongruous elements of ice ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the act of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always dangerous; Gray has made weavers of slaughtered bards by a fiction outrageous and incongruous. They are then called upon to "Weave the warp and weave the woof," perhaps with no great propriety, for it is by crossing the WOOF with the WARP that men weave the WEB or piece, and the first line was dearly ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... a smaller man than the unfortunate statesman. His delicate white hands, much exposed by the shortness of the sleeves, looked very unlike those of a day-labourer, and altogether the new mason presented a somewhat incongruous and wobegone aspect. Grotius was fearful too lest some of the preachers and professors frequenting the book-shop next door would recognize him through his disguise. Madame Daatselaer smeared his face and hands with chalk and plaster however and whispered encouragement, and so with ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... afterwards. On the contrary, the silence and solitude of the isolated domain had a new charm. They kept the memory of her experience intact, and enabled her to refill it with his presence. She could see his tall figure again pausing before her cabin, without the incongruous association of another personality; she could hear his voice again, unmingled with one more familiar. For the first time, the regular absence of her husband seemed an essential good fortune instead of an accident of their life. For the experience belonged to HER, and not to him and her together. ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and more surprised at the nature of the incongruous revelations coming to him in the surroundings and in the atmosphere of the open sea. It is difficult for us to understand the extent, the completeness, the comprehensiveness of his inexperience, for us who didn't go to sea out of a small private ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... it is equally inconsistent with arbitrary government, because this always dreads lest he should become enlightened, and is ever sedulous to render him servile, mean, contemptible, and cringing; that it is incongruous with laws that are not founded in equity, that are frequently bottomed on injustice; that it cannot obtain with those received customs that are opposed to good sense; that it cannot exist whilst public opinion is unfavourable to virtue; above all, that ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... an incongruous question was never put in an Arab town in the heart of Africa by a sheikh dressed in bernouse and turban, with a jewel-hilted yataghan at his side, sitting cross-legged on a cushion. No wonder Daireh ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... by a uniform will. He did not make the impression of having suffered too severely from the weather; he had simply emerged from the storm, like a pike from the water, in gray, unobtrusive apparel. In contrast to him the others all looked over-dressed, hung about with foreign stuffs and incongruous patches—all except the three queens, whose youth and beauty penetrated their clothes with a ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils, and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... marble steps that belonged to Pilate's house in Jerusalem are said to have been once trodden by Jesus and may be ascended only on one's knees. At no hour of the day can one visit the Scala Santa without finding the most motley and incongruous throng thus ascending, pausing on each step for meditation and prayer. These stairs were transported from Jerusalem to Rome under the auspices of St. Helena, the Empress, about 326 A.D., and in 1589 they were placed by Pope Sixtus ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... borrowed story, because it was less trouble and more fun to him to create them afresh; but none the less he heaps the murders and villainies of the borrowed story on his own essentially gentle creations without scruple, no matter how incongruous they may be. And all the time his vital need for a philosophy drives him to seek one by the quaint professional method of introducing philosophers as characters into his plays, and even of making his heroes philosophers; but when ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... not a dull chapter, nor, indeed, a dull page in the book; but the author has so carefully worked up his subject that the exciting deeds of his heroes are never incongruous ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... versatility of his mind, and the power he possessed of throwing himself with the utmost keenness into many absolutely dissimilar and incongruous enterprises at the same time, add further to the difficulty of understanding him. An extraordinary number of subjects had their place in his capacious brain, and the ease with which he dismissed one and took up another with equal ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... B. Willett, of New York, a wealthy engineer, who on his way home from Europe had been visiting his friend Dr. Hamilton of Ballybrosna. His curiosity now was roused by Dan's evident eagerness to acquire materials for the drawing of diagrams, the pursuit striking him as so strangely incongruous with the aspect of the brown-faced stalwart ragged youth, that he stepped inside when the place was empty to make inquiries on the subject. The post-master's information was to the effect that "the O'Beirnes above at the forge ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... astonished and delighted them. The girl dealt swiftly, surely; she handled the paraphernalia of the faro-table with the careless familiarity of long practice; but stranger still, she maintained a poise, a certain reserve and feminine dignity which were totally incongruous. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... and extension, as attributes of one and the same (created) substance. He therefore postulated two (created) substances,—one characterized by thought without extension, the other by extension without thought. These two are so alien and so incongruous, that neither can influence the other, or determine the other, or any way relate with the other, except by direct mediation of Deity. (The doctrine of Occasional Causes.) This is Dualism,— that sharp and rigorous antithesis of mind and matter, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... so great, and in its collective effect so pacifically magnificent, that to make war upon it seemed incongruous beyond measure, like laying siege to the National Gallery or attacking respectable people in an hotel dining-room with battle-axe and mail. It was in its entirety so large, so complex, so delicately immense, that to bring it to the issue of warfare was like driving ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... I say, may be visited for itself; but I hardly know for what the remnants of Plessis-les-Tours may be investigated. To reach them you wander through crooked suburban lanes, down the course of the Loire, to a rough, undesirable, incongruous spot, where a small, crude building of red brick is pointed out to you by your cabman (if you happen to drive) as the legendary frame of the grim portrait, and where a strong odour of pigsties and other unclean things so prostrates you for the moment ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... convent built in the 15th century, but is in a good state of preservation. The theatre is part of what was formerly the "Chapel of St. John," used by the Templars. The porch over the doorway was erected in the 13th century, and is of the Transition style, utterly incongruous to the use now made of it; but this kind of sacrilege is unhappily now becoming of common occurrence! Leaving the theatre, in a short space we were in the "Place des Thermes," where the New Casino is being built among the shrubs on the right. The "Grand Etablissement," which occupies the centre ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... has thrown a stone into a frog pond, or fired a shot into a covey of birds, can form an idea of the effect produced by these incongruous words, in the midst of the general attention. It made Gringoire shudder as though it had been an electric shock. The prologue stopped short, and all heads turned tumultuously towards the beggar, who, far from being ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... novel. The plot is less in his mind than the moral. But such hybrid productions are apt to fail of their end. If we desire to study philosophy, commend us to the regular documents. We do not wish for truth, as she emerges dripping from the well, to be clothed in the garments of fiction. Such incongruous unions can hardly fail to shock a correct taste, even if the story is managed with tolerable skill. In this instance, we can not highly praise the conduct of the narrative. It is full of improbable combinations. Persons and scenes are brought into juxtaposition, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... mere carelessness, but to incapacity. Something seems to stand behind him, like the slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the consummate artist. He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant Popo. This defect was most mischievous where he was weakest, in his dramas and his lyrics, least so where he ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing to-day. And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... portraits of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, Lincoln, Washington, and Cromwell, and the room, which had been furnished originally with chairs covered in chintz, was loaded with incongruous furniture. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... introduced."—Ib., p. 187. In these instances, we have an active participle without an agent; and this, by the preposition by, is made an adjunct to a passive verb. Even the participial noun of this form, though it actually drops the distinction of voice, is awkward and apparently incongruous ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... nature. I never sympathised with critics who resent the intrusion of fireworks upon scenes of natural beauty. The Giessbach, lighted up at so much per head on stated evenings, with a band playing and a crowd of cockneys staring, presents perhaps an incongruous spectacle. But where, as here at Foligno, a whole city has made itself a festival, where there are multitudes of citizens and soldiers and country-people slowly moving and gravely admiring, with the decency and order characteristic of an ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... accredited agent of the Davis government, but he was not molested, and mingled with men of his own stripe, without fear and without difficulty. It will be interesting by and by, to read of the Chicago Convention, and the incongruous elements there assembled. But as all things have an end, so did this remarkable gathering, and dispersed quietly, never again to meet as the representatives of ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... Selborne, relates a pleasing anecdote of affection, which existed between two incongruous animals—a horse and a hen, and which showed a mutual fellowship and kindness for each other. The following anecdote, communicated to me by a clergyman in Devonshire, affords another proof of affection between two animals of opposite ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... was not properly part of the Army of the Potomac, and untried as yet. For not only had the Eleventh Corps, as a corps, seen no active service, but the most of its regiments were made up of raw troops, and the elements of which the corps was composed were to a degree incongruous. Of itself this fact should have caused Hooker to devote serious attention to ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... most incongruous and strange. But the strangest part, of course, was the fact that I found myself where I was at that moment. Why was I thus received? Why was I, an ordinary and rather dirty cowpuncher, not sent as usual to the men's bunk house? It could not be possible ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... of men are sometimes fatally infected with this disease, either through unhappy prepossession, or some of the other causes above-mentioned, yet I am unwilling to believe that there is in nature so monstrously incongruous a being as a female infidel. The least reflection on the temper, the character, and the education of women, makes the mind revolt with horror from an idea so ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... is rich in bricabrac, but there is nothing more curious that these incongruous printings, clearly the work of a practiced hand. Even the outside of the old edifice is not without its interest for an antiquarian. The lightening-rod which protects the Warner House to-day was put up under Benjamin Franklin's own supervision in 1762—such at all events is the credited ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of character, it would strike the reader as very incongruous to say that Mr. Fox had fallen in love with Edith. Mr. Fox never stumbled or fell. He could slide down and scramble up to any extent, and when cornered could take a flying leap like that of a cat. But ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... got was in W. Java, while hunting one day for Lepidoptera. I observed a specimen of one of the Hesperidae sitting, as is often a custom of theirs, on the excreta of a bird on a leaf; I crept near it, intending to examine what they find in what one is inclined to consider incongruous food for a butterfly. I approached nearer and nearer, and at last caught it between my fingers, when I found that it had as I thought become glued by its feet to the mass; but on pulling gently the spider, to my amazement, disclosed itself by letting go its hold: only then did I discover ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... have been in peril. There are scores of men's queues and a few dusty braids of women's hair offered on account of vows or prayers, usually for sick relatives, and among them all, on the left hand, are a large mirror in a gaudily gilt frame and a framed picture of the P. M. S. China! Above this incongruous collection are splendid wood carvings and frescoes of angels, among which the pigeons find a ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... adventures that all his life he had longed for. And when he did at length fall asleep it was to have the most outlandish dreams, visions in which he endured shipwreck, fought pirates and was all but eaten by cannibals. The most incongruous phase of the dream, as recollected on waking, was that the Cockatoo had been, not a motor-boat at all, but a trolley-car! He distinctly remembered that the pirates, on boarding it, had each dropped a nickel in ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... masses of porphyry and granite with the nicest art, they were incapable of mortising their timbers, and, in their ignorance of iron, knew no better way of holding the beams together than tying them with thongs of maguey. In the same incongruous spirit, the building that was thatched with straw, and unilluminated by a window, was glowing with tapestries of gold and silver! These are the inconsistencies of a rude people, among whom the arts are but partially developed. ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... not for the redeeming Persian cap, the "Centre of the World" might be mistaken for a grocer of the Rue St. Denis in a shawl dressing-gown. On grand occasions the appearance of the Schah must be still more incongruous, if we are to believe the description which the author gives of the state dress preserved in the royal treasury. One can scarcely fancy a gouty Centre of the World attired in a European uniform of blue cloth, with the facings embroidered in diamonds, ruby ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... serving as shops, till they reached the open space round the Market Cross, on the steps of which women sat with baskets of eggs, butter, and poultry, raised above the motley throng of cattle and sheep, with their dogs and drivers, the various cries of man and beast forming an incongruous accompaniment to the bells of the churches that ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... first foster-mother, still preserves in her depths many of those singular and incongruous shapes which were the earliest attempts of the animal kingdom; the land, less fruitful, but with more capacity for progress, has almost wholly lost the strange forms of other days. The few that remain ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... not strike George that this was a rather sudden change, or that there was anything incongruous in Sylvia's considering her material interests in the midst of her grief. After examining the documents, he asked her a few questions, to which ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... to town in 1807 they entertained a guest of a very opposite character, but nearly as remarkable for eccentricity as was the hermit of Whitley. In Walter Stanhope's journal for January 30th of that year is recorded a dinner party of strangely incongruous elements. "This night there dined with us Wilberforce, Wharton, Smedley, Skeffington, Sir Robert ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... alive only on brandy and water. Col. Addenbrooke, the equerry to the Princess, is painted in more favourable colours, his only weak point being "a weak stomach, into which he carefully crams a mass of the most incongruous things, and then complains the next day of fearful headache." What a power of evil is a man who ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... sound was utterly unexpected, and completely incongruous. That was the wonder of her, Kennon reflected. Her mercurial temperament made life something that was continually exciting She was ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... fantastically, almost playfully, in many of the lines. The croak of the raven is taken up and moulded into rhyme by a nimble, if not a mocking spirit; and, fascinating as is the rhythmic movement of the verse, it appears like the dancing of the daughter of Herodias. This looks incongruous; and so do the words of the fool which Shakspeare has intermingled with the agonies and imprecations of Lear. In the tragedy, this is held to be a consummate stroke of art, and certainly the reader is grateful for the relief. Had Poe a similar design? Closely analyzed, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that he had looked his young man up—producing on the latter's part, as soon as the case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defined itself, the most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing could in fact have been more monstrous on the surface—and Densher was well aware of it—than the relief he found during this short period in the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news nor asking for it. That was what had come ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... was a success. Bessie beamed radiantly, with her plump arms and shoulders set off by a white gown, and a good deal of rather incongruous trinketry in the way of birthday presents, every item of which she felt bound to wear, lest the givers should be wounded by her neglect. Thus, dear mother's amber necklace did not exactly accord with Mr. Jardine's ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... said Ribalta, who, leaping over several piles of volumes and thrusting aside with his foot an enormous heap of cartoons, opened the drawer of a tottering press. In that drawer he rummaged among an accumulation of odd, incongruous objects: old medals and old nails, bookbindings and discolored engravings, a large leather box gnawed by insects, on the outside of which could be distinguished a partly effaced coat-of-arms. He opened that box and extended toward Montfanon a volume ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... valley, and drawn from it large quantities of costly furs and skins. Here and farther west is spoken the famous Chinnook jargon, invented by the Company to facilitate its trade with the Indians. It borrows words from the English, from the French, from all the Indian tongues, and works them all into an incongruous combination. It has an entire lack of system or rule, but is quickly learned, and is designed to express only the simplest ideas. The powerful influence of the Company introduced it everywhere, and it was found of indispensable utility. Ardent Oregonians are said to woo their coy maidens ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... Ramusio, and partly consisting of an ingenious attempt to explain and bolster up the more than dubious production of Marcolini: But these observations are here considerably abridged; as an extended, grave, and critical commentary on a narrative we believe fabulous, might appear incongruous, though it did not seem proper to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... derived its strongest stimulus from his imbittered domestic life and from his travels in Spain, Italy and Greece. This twofold character of the poet it is that is revealed in his best poems, "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan." He used both works as receptacles for the most incongruous ideas. "If things are farcical," he once said to Trelawney, "they will do for 'Don Juan'; if heroical, you shall have another canto of 'Childe Harold.'" This means of disposing of his poetic ideas accounts for the great volume of Byron's verse as well as ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... through scented shadow to Graham's homestead and discussed crops and cattle with the rancher. On these occasions, he had long conversations with Helen Savine, who, finding no person of liberal education thereabouts, was pleased to talk to him. There was nothing incongruous in this, for petty class distinctions vanish in the bush, where, when his daily task is done, the hired man meets his master on ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Madam, so incongruous?—Methinks the very name of Love exhilerates; meaner delights were meant but to persuade us, Toys to provoke and heighten our desires, which Love confirms ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... on the brogue, you know," said she, looking round with an affectation of shyness, which was most incongruous on her melancholy visage; it was just like a death's head trying to grin, I thought to myself;—and then, she commenced, in a thin, quavering voice, the lay of the departed ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Lowell notes with some resentment the change from nature's simple beauties to the pretentiousness of wealth shown in incongruous buildings. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... them. The American officer in command engaged the local Russian priest to perform the religious service. By some trick of fate it had happened that these first Americans who fell in action were of Slavic blood, so the strange funeral which the doughboys witnessed was not so incongruous ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... then by suggestion fell to the plain rough overcoat that covered him from his neck to the tops of his high boots, and whose replica was to be seen any day in the meaner streets of Petersburg or Moscow. Like the bag, it was a little strange, a little incongruous in its comfortable ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... were not gaining upon his daughter; and so in truth she was, personally, though it was exceedingly painful to see her where Mary had been used to see that dear suffering face; and it was impossible not to feel the contrast with her father as painfully incongruous. Mr. Ponsonby was a large man, with the jovial manner of one never accustomed to self-restraint; good birth and breeding making him still a gentleman, in spite of his loud voice and the traces of self-indulgence. He was ruddy and bronzed, and his eyebrows and hair looked as if ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bitter fight with the Coastwise Steam Navigation Company, and the Hawaiian, Nicaraguan, and Pacific-Mexican Steamship-Company. He stirred up a bigger muss than he had anticipated, and even he was astounded at the wide ramifications of the struggle and at the unexpected and incongruous interests that were drawn into it. Every newspaper in San Francisco turned upon him. It was true, one or two of them had first intimated that they were open to subsidization, but Daylight's judgment was that the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... not have been reproved by Christ. And indeed this is the zeal to which we are redeemed by Christ. Tit. ii. 14. Be ye zealous of good works, of works that are unquestionably good, such as piety, equity, and sobriety. There is nothing more incongruous than to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, to spend the vital spirits upon things of small concernment to our own or others' edification, and to have nothing to spare for the weightier matters of true godliness. It is as if a man should strike a feather or the air with all his ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... judgments, and shrank more and more from the small society of the countryside. For his part, when he was not "mooning" in the beloved fields and woods of happy memory, he shut himself up with books, reading whatever could be found on the shelves, and amassing a store of incongruous and obsolete knowledge. Long did he linger with the men of the seventeenth century; delaying the gay sunlit streets with Pepys, and listening to the charmed sound of the Restoration Revel; roaming by peaceful streams ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... there, as in Sicily or Southern Gaul. I would not assert that the aged Francis Joseph imagines that he is Emperor of Scotland or of Denmark; but I should guess that he retains some notion that if he did rule both the Scots and the Danes, it would not be more incongruous than his ruling both the Hungarians and the Poles. This cosmopolitanism of Austria has in it a kind of shadow of responsibility for Christendom. And it was this that made the difference between its proceedings ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... of English literature, I could not induce myself to tack on an inadequate chapter on American literature; and, besides, I think that to treat the two subjects in one volume would be as incongruous as to write a joint biography of Marlborough and Washington. American literature is too great and noble, and has had too marvelous a development to be made an appendix to ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... organism of states such men are necessary, as wolves are necessary in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always appear and hold their own, however incongruous their presence and their proximity to the head of the government may be. This inevitability alone can explain how the cruel Arakcheev, who tore out a grenadier's mustache with his own hands, whose weak nerves rendered ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... tyrannical and injudicious conduct stunted the growth of the infant colonies, and little progress was made till the religious dissensions of Boston swelled their population. Violent and even fatal dissensions, however, distracted this incongruous community, till the government of Massachusetts assumed the sway over it, and re-established order and prosperity. Gorges and Mason disputed for many years the rights of authority with the new rulers; nor ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... and turn at sharp angles till they lead you out on a muddy strand overflowed continually by the rushing tide. Everywhere the brick houses have a mellow look, and in Mrs. Glegg's day there was no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no plate-glass in shop-windows, no fresh stucco-facing or other fallacious attempt to make fine old red St. Ogg's wear the air of a town that sprang up yesterday. The shop-windows were ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... perhaps, indeed, may admire such things; but the judicious few whose opinion you despise will always laugh at what is absurd, incongruous, and inconsistent. Everything has a beauty peculiar to itself; but if you put one instead of another, the most beautiful becomes ugly, because it is not in its proper place. I need not add, that praise is agreeable only to the person praised, and disgustful to everybody else, ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... It was laid in scales; and upon the legs was a brown fuzz of stiff hair. There were many joints, both of the legs and the torso. Clothing was worn; a single garment, hanging from a wide belt halfway down the legs seemed incongruous, fantastically aping humanity. ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... hope there may be enough in it to keep him pleased. The marriage is utterly incongruous ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... gables and spires, and again meets her French acquaintances, and throws herself into their arms and into their interests with all her old warmth and excitability. The little grey bonnet only gives certain incongruous piquancy to her pleasant, kind-hearted exuberance. She returns to England, but far-away echoes reach her soon of changes and revolutions concerning all the people for whom her regard is so warm. In August, ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... grooms to lead back the horses, all kicking their heels at the bridge of the Anio: worthy persons, no doubt, and conscientiously subserving our higher existence; but the bare fact of whom, their well-appointed silhouettes, seem somehow incongruous as we get further and more solitary among the pale grass billows, deeper into that immense space, that unlimited ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... curiously incongruous elements. The railway meeting in the first act is pure comedy of a kind to compare with the meeting in Ibsen's An Enemy of Society; the last act is melodrama with a large admixture of remarkably interesting ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... found only in the dust of libraries; a cloudy day, or a fit of indigestion, would deprive an inventor of his theory all at once; and as one of them said, "after dinner, all that I have written in the morning appears to me dark, incongruous, nonsensical." At such moments we should find this man of genius in no pleasant mood. The true cause of this nervous state cannot, nay, must not, be confided to the world: the honour of his darling theory ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... who comes into a family," he remarked, "should always conform himself to the family order; then there is no reaction upon him, and all are comfortable and happy. He is not felt as a thing foreign and incongruous, but as homogeneous. To break up the usual order, and to bend all to meet his personal prejudices and peculiarities, is only to so disturb the family sphere as to make it actually repellent. He is then felt as an unassimilated foreign body, ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... emperors' vices as much as they once reverenced their virtues in older days. Moreover Galba had let fall a remark, which augured well for Rome, though it spelt danger to himself. 'I do not buy my soldiers,' he said, 'I select them.' And indeed, as things then stood, his words sounded incongruous. ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... As I look back upon the great event of this convention, the nomination of Woodrow Wilson for the governorship of New Jersey, I feel that destiny was inscrutably engaged there, working in mysterious ways its wonders to perform, working perhaps through strange, incongruous instrumentalities to bring the man of destiny into action, led by those who were opposed to everything Woodrow Wilson stood for, opposed by those who were yearning for and striving for just the dawn of political liberalism that his advent in politics ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... burst out into a loud laugh, stopped suddenly, sat down, and took Nick on his knee. It was an incongruous scene. Mr. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... material efficacy which may be attributed to it is the proper efficacy of matter—an efficacy which matter would doubtless claim if we knew enough of its secret mechanism. And when that imputed and incongruous utility was subtracted from ideas they would appear in their proper form of expressions, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... said that when Sani, the Hindu Saturn, failed to adapt an elephant's head to the mutilated trunk of Ganesh who had been accidentally slain by Siva, Viswakarma, the celestial artificer, was sent for, and by careful dissection and manipulation he fitted the incongruous parts together, and made a man called Kedara Sena from the slices cut off in fashioning his work. This Kedara Sena was ordered to fetch a drink of water for Bhagavati, weary and athirst. Finding on the river's bank a shell full of water he presented ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... had long been following him attentively, without, however, addressing him. But when he had reached the middle of the bazar, where the best and most costly wares are exposed for sale, and when, as though intoxicated by the sight, he seized the most incongruous things, and untiringly pushed them into his sack—pearls from Ormuz and blades from Damascus, tons of Mocha coffee, and bales of silk, fishes and rings, bracelets and dates, watches, saddles, and diamonds—then the Caliph, for it was no less a personage who was following ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... know the truth about anything till I've read them both!" said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... fireplace occupying half the farther side, having a great fire of logs and branches burning on the hearth. In the middle of the floor stood a solid old oak table, whereon smoked a most inviting supper, served in an incongruous array of quaint and curious dishes and antique vessels—fine glass, splendid silver, broken delft, and translucent porcelain that drew a cry of admiration from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... greenish window-panes, was assigned to the stranger, and his African servant, Jake, was installed in a smaller adjoining apartment. The day after his arrival Maurice spent in unpacking and polishing his precious instruments, which, in the incongruous setting of rough-hewn timbers and gaily painted Norse furniture, looked almost fantastic. The maid who brought him his meals (for he could waste no time in dining with the family) walked about on tip-toe, as if she were ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... cheaply and easily effected by large stamps, renders forgivable vagaries of design, which when translated, as they have been of late years in France, into the time-honoured and solemn leather, seem merely incongruous ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... images merely suggested, and coming so thick withal, that our powers might be swamped but for the prodigious momentum or gale of thought that carries us through. I am aware that several such passages have often been censured as mere jumbles of incongruous metaphors; but they do not so strike any reader who is so unconscientious of rhetorical formalities as to care only for the meaning of what he reads; though I admit that perhaps no mental current less deep and mighty than Shakespeare's would waft us ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... simplicity. But it amused him, too; in a world of shirking and shuffling, not to speak of downright dishonesty, it struck the humorous note of the incongruous. He said: ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... luxurious leisure. Jombateeste himself came to Cynthia with his mending, and her needle kept him tight and firm against the winter which it amused Westover to realize was the Canuck's native element, insomuch that there was now something incongruous in the notion of Jombateeste and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... open road and looked at the stars, reading in their splendour a brilliant destiny for Jean. He felt, in his sensitive way, that the two sweet-souled Englishwomen had deepened and sanctified his love for Jean. When he returned to the hotel he kissed his incongruous room-mate with the gentleness ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... think, Mr. Brudenell, that as the usual professional observations seem to strike Mr. Dudgeon as incongruous under the circumstances, you had better omit them until—er—until Mr. Dudgeon can no longer be inconvenienced by them. (Brudenell, with a shrug, shuts his book and retires behind the gallows.) YOU seem in a hurry, ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... shown that all these circumstances related by Chaucer, so far from being hopelessly incongruous, are, on the contrary, harmoniously consistent;—that they all tend to prove that the day of the journey to Canterbury could not have been later than the 18th of April;—that the times of observation were certainly 10 A.M. and 4 P.M.;—that ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... writes Mr Brooke in his journal, "was held, at which were present Macota, Subtu, Abong Mia, and Datu Naraja, two Chinese leaders, and myself—certainly a most incongruous mixture, and one rarely to be met with. After much discussion, a move close to the enemy was determined on for to-morrow; and on the following day to take up a position near the defences. To judge by the sample of the council, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the table, to stop his incongruous remarks. But Sister Gabrielle seemed not to have listened to him. She went on serving us smilingly; changed our plates, and brought us ham and cheese. B. went on devouring everything that was put before him; but this did not put a stop ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... that question he found himself in the garden before his house, Hudig's wedding gift. He looked at it with a vague surprise to find it there. His past was so utterly gone from him that the dwelling which belonged to it appeared to him incongruous standing there intact, neat, and cheerful in the sunshine of the hot afternoon. The house was a pretty little structure all doors and windows, surrounded on all sides by the deep verandah supported on slender columns clothed in the green foliage of creepers, which also ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... much the same solemn manner, bringing out the point as if it were something entirely irrelevant and unimportant and casually remembered. The subject of this sketch, however, was the only member of the family in whom a love for the droll and incongruous was a controlling disposition. As is frequently the case, a family trait was intensified in one individual to the point where ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... there is a perpetual blending of the natural and the supernatural, the human and divine. The Iliad is an incongruous medley of theology, physics, and history. In its gorgeous scenic representations, nature, humanity, and deity are mingled in inextricable confusion. The gods are sometimes supernatural and superhuman personages; sometimes the things and powers of nature personified; and sometimes they are deified ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... puzzle. Bits the most incongruous join into each other, and the scheme thus gradually becomes symmetrical and clear; when, lo! as the infant clasps his hands, and cries, "See, see! the puzzle is made out," all the pieces are swept back into the box—black box ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... height of summer. Under ordinary circumstances Sweetwater would have met not more than a half-dozen carts or sledges between the club-house gates and the city streets. But to-day, the road was full of teams carrying all sorts of incongruous people, eager for a sight of the spot made forever notorious by a mysterious crime. He noted them all; the faces of the men, the gestures of the women; but he did not show any special interest till he came to that portion of the road where the long line of half-buried fences began to ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... school-books that jauntily swung from a strap in her gloved hand, she bore no resemblance to a pupil; in her pretty gown of dotted muslin with bows of blue ribbon on the skirt and corsage, and a cluster of roses in her belt, she was as inconsistent and incongruous to the others as a fashion-plate would have been in the dry and dog-eared pages before them. Yet she carried it off with a demure mingling of the naivete of youth and the aplomb of a woman, and as she swept ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... unmistakable ways, is to be found; and in not a few, that of the Heptameron and of Desperiers; while not unfrequently the same tales are found in more than one collection. The fatrasie character—that is to say, the stuffing together of all sorts of incongruous matter in more or less burlesque style—is common to all of them; the licence of subject and language to most; and there are hardly any, except a few mere modernisings of old fabliaux, in which you will not find the famous farrago of the Renaissance—learning, religious ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... something so absurdly incongruous in these comments that they acted instantly upon my overstrained nerves, and I burst into a laugh, in which the other two immediately joined. Evidently, this was not at all the effect that this carefully arranged reception was intended to have ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... McDonald, J. Ramsay, quoted McDowell, Mary E. McNamara, Maggie Mahoney, Hannah (Mrs. Nolan) Maloney, Elizabeth Marot, Helen Marriage, an unstandardized trade and factory life and organization Marriage, and the working-woman Married woman, as a half-time worker as a wage-earner economic status of incongruous position of Married women and the labor movement Matthews, Lillian, quoted Maud Gonne Club Maurice, F.D. Mead, George H. Merriam, Charles E. Mill, John Stuart Minimum wage, employers' objections to for the immigrant in Australia Mitchell, ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... Ayres, Lima, Santiago, Mexico—all bear witness to this tendency, in more or less degree. And under the garish electric arc at night, or silhouetted against the new white stucco wall of some costly hygienic institution, or art gallery, or Governor's palace, glaring in the bright sun, stands the incongruous figure of the half-naked and sandalled Indian, ignorant and poverty-stricken! These, indeed, are elements of Spanish-American civilisation which the philosopher sees and ponders upon. In fact, the character of the Latin races seems sometimes to tend to run off into ultra-scientific ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... to be sixteen years old, but no one would have given her credit for such dignity who had seen the incongruous little figure perched upon the slippery haircloth sofa, twinkling with delight at Miss Becky's encomiums. She wore a voluminous nightgown, from under the hem of which a pink gingham ruffle insisted upon poking itself out; her ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... insensibly prepared the mind for the brisk, assertive woman who now presented herself. Mr. Hammersmith, at sight of her open, not unpleasing face, understood for the first time the decided attitude of the coroner. If this woman corroborated her husband's account, the poor young girl, with her incongruous beauty and emotional temperament, would not have much show. He looked to see her quailing now. But instead of that she stood firm, determined, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... remember that there was a boat about the place. I had not seen one. As I thought all this in a wild, excitable way, I snatched up some of my clothes, slipped them on partly as I ran; and even then, incongruous as it may sound, I could not help thinking how the wet hindered me. Then running on, I came upon Gunson, with his face cut and bleeding, struggling back from ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... before he could think or reflect, was the rush of a poignant and searching tenderness. This intimate, human sound, heard amid the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so pitifully incongruous—and so vain! Tears—in this vast and cruel wilderness: of what avail? He thought of a little child crying in mid-Atlantic.... Then, of course, with fuller realization, and the memory of what ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... the sheltering walls out into the night where fifty men writhed in a death-struggle with hundreds—saw every bleeding wound, heard every smothered moan of pain, felt already the cold iron pierce their own breasts. The hours passed, and they did not yield. They had ceased from their incongruous tasks, and stood ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... composed of articles which supply the requisite amount of food elements for proper nutrition, palatably prepared. These should be adapted to the season and also to the family purse. There should be an agreeable and pleasing change from day to day, with never too great variety at one meal, and no incongruous association of foods that do not harmonize, upon the same bill of fare. The amount of time and strength available for the preparation of the meal must also receive consideration. The problem would be easier of solution could one select her menu ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... grotesque. The habiliments themselves were of proper cut and make, according to the standards of the time—spike-tailed coats, white ties, patent- leather pumps, and the customary trimmings, but the effects produced were as ludicrous as they were incongruous, though the studied bearing of the gentlemen was meant to prove ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... heavy mass of woolly green which expands and hovers over the bombarded region and draws out in every direction. This touch of strangely incongruous color in the picture summons attention, and all we encaged prisoners turn our faces ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... dragging him and forcing him to leave his chair, and throw himself at the Philosopher's feet and confess everything. This was the mesmeric effect of those reproachful eyes fixed steadily upon him. And in the doorway, like some figure in a nightmare—a figure incongruous and out of place—the Man in Possession sitting, passive and unconcerned, with one eye on the street and the other on the shop. Upstairs Mr. Emblem was sitting fast asleep; joy had made him sleepy; and Iris was at work among her pupils' letters, ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... dressed in a period when little attention was paid clothes by the San Franciscan, might, it is true, in some men have suggested assumption of an air of superiority; but with Mr. Harte, to dress well was simply a natural instinct. His long, drooping moustache and the side-whiskers of the time—incongruous as the comparison may seem—called to mind the elder Sothern as "Lord Dundreary." His natural expression was pensive, even sad. When one considers that pathos and tragedy, perhaps even more than humor, pervade his stories, that was ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... the organic load in these tributaries consists of raw human waste, incongruous and particularly obnoxious around a modern city. The bulk of it is released in periodic surges when local rainstorms overload the old-fashioned combined sewer systems of the District of Columbia and Alexandria. In dry weather these systems send both collected sanitary ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... it an unpleasant smile. Perhaps, somewhere in his savage composition, he had a grain of humor; perhaps it was only the foolish smile of a man whose wits are not equal to so incongruous a situation. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... trade became clogged and blocked by its constant increase. Auction houses became the means of brokerage; and their number increased to such an extent that half a dozen red flags at last dotted every block on Main street. And incongruous, indeed, were the mixtures exposed at these sales, as well as in the windows of the smallest shops in Richmond. In the latter, bonnets rested on the sturdy legs of cavalry boots; rolls of ribbon were festooned along the crossed barrel of a rifle and the dingy cotton ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... walked along, hardly knowing where I was going or what I did there, but feeling impelled, as one sometimes is, to explore still further, with a vague idea of reaching some unknown goal. Thus I forged up the street, noting the small traffic of the milk-shop, and wondering at the incongruous medley of penny pipes, black tobacco, sweets, newspapers, and comic songs which here and there jostled one another in the short compass of a single window. I think it was a cold shudder that suddenly passed through me that first told me that I had found what I wanted. I looked up from ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... picture could not be placed to advantage in the grand gallery at the Tuileries. But he soon changed his mind when he reflected that most of the figures were represented in naturalibus, which would appear incongruous in an apartment used for grand diplomatic receptions, and in which the Council ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... So incongruous did the peculiar sounds appear, that all stared in amazement. Then when they beheld Frontier Samson standing near the door, their faces broadened into knowing grins, followed by hearty ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... heard on the occasion of his second visit to Cherry Orchard haunted Anstice for days. There was something so incongruous in the notion of this woman having served a sentence of imprisonment for an offence which, of all others, might well be supposed the most impossible for any decent person to commit; yet Anstice knew instinctively that Mrs. Carstairs had spoken the truth; and although for the last few years ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... but this did not hinder the glad smile from rising to her lips as she saw us—or rather him, for she hardly seemed to notice my presence. I learned afterward that this aunt had been greatly instrumental in bringing these incongruous natures together; that for reasons of her own, which I have never attempted to fathom, she thought Edwin Urquhart the best husband that her niece could have, and not only introduced him into the house, but stood so much his friend during the first days of his courtship that she gradually imparted ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... Pilgrims shall make their landing at Plymouth to try the not hopeful experiment of living in the wilderness, and a settlement of Swedes in Delaware and of Hollanders on the Hudson shall be added to the incongruous, unconcerted, mutually jealous plantations that begin to take root along the Atlantic seaboard. Not only grandeur and sagacity of conception, but success in achievement, is illustrated by the comparative area occupied by the three great European ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... that the High Street was on a slope of considerable sharpness did not add to her ease and comfort. Two stout gentlemen, perspiration bedewing their foreheads, strove to restrain the ponies, and their classic clothing, that turned them into rather tattered Bacchuses, did not make them less incongruous. ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... deliberate young man, he put out the lights of the three seven-branched candlesticks which illumined the beautiful old room; and, as he moved about, he suddenly became aware that nearly opposite the door giving into the staircase lobby was a finely-carved, oak, confessional-box. What an odd, incongruous ornament ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... fatigue. She seemed to bring with her into the cool, quiet garden, with its country odours and general air of peace, an alien note. One almost heard the deep undercry from a far-away world of suffering—the great, ever-moving wheels seemed to have caught her up and thrown her down in this most incongruous of places. Clara, in her cool white dress, her fresh complexion, her general air of health and girlish vigour, seemed, as she rose to her feet, a creature of another sex, almost of another world. The two ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was nearly full of spectators, and one and all did not fail to remark Judy's wedding present. A bride in white from top to toe—a lovely bride in the tenderest bloom of youth, to carry a bouquet of strong dark green and crimson—had anything so incongruous ever been seen before? But Hilda held the flowers tightly, and Judy's hungry ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... observer even, would have decided that these four maidens were bound together by an unusual bond of friendship—an incongruous friendship it might have seemed, and yet it was ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... now Estaiblished!" and Francesca, clad in Miss Grieve's Sunday bonnet, shawl, and black cotton gloves, entered and curtsied demurely to the floor. She held, as corroborative detail, a life of John Knox in her hand, and anything more incongruous than her sparkling eyes and mutinous mouth under the melancholy head-gear can hardly ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... in his wildest mood, And marked him reeked with human blood, But never so repulsive made. Something incongruous strikes the mind Whene'er a barbarous race we find With shreds of civil ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... colour of the earth from which it was fashioned, one sees depicted still the representation of some long-abolished custom, of some feudal right, of the former condition of some place, of an obsolete way of pronouncing the language, which had shaped and wedded its incongruous syllables and which I never doubted that I should find spoken there at once, even by the inn-keeper who would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival, taking me down to watch the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church; ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... most elaborate beauties as "heavy and barbarous." Its celebrated portals are pronounced "diminutive, and in very bad taste." Its throng of pillars gives it the air of "a park rather than a temple," and the whole is made still more incongruous by the unequal length of their shafts, being grotesquely compensated by a proportionate variation of size in their bases and capitals, rudely fashioned after ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... great metropolis of India—and observes what miserable straw huts are intermingled with magnificent palaces—how much Oriental filth and squalor and idleness and superstition and poverty and ignorance are associated with savage splendour, and are brought into immediate and most incongruous contact with Saxon energy and enterprize and taste and skill and love of order, and the amazing intelligence of the West in this nineteenth century—and when familiarity breeds something like contempt for many things that originally excited a vague and pleasing wonder—the English ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... it, save for mild relapses on festive occasions. A more seemingly incongruous marriage could scarcely be imagined, and yet it was a success from the start. From a slim, silent, self-willed girl Susan had grown up into a tall, rather rawboned and energetic young woman. She was what we called in those days ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I know the truth about anything till I've read them both!" said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... that are not infrequent in the use of metaphor. A metaphor should not be blended with plain language in the same sentence, nor should it be extended too far. The latter fault is called "straining the metaphor." Two incongruous metaphors should not be used in the same sentence. In the following lines from Addison his muse is first conceived of as a steed that needs to be restrained with a bridle, and then as a ship that is eager ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... is awakened in the bosom: too simple, however, in itself for a stage-plot, though impressive and interesting as a narrative, Mr. Colman has jumbled up with it metal of a lower kind, and so rudely alloyed the gold of Florian, that the value of it is rather injured. Such a mass of incongruous beauties we do not recollect to have seen. A tale of the most pathetic kind is interwoven with low comedy—the most lofty sentiments, the most exalted virtues, and heroism and magnanimity strained almost beyond the limits of probability, are checkered by uncouth pleasantries, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... capabilities. It has been said of Artaxerxes, that the attempt then made to apply recitative to the English language is unsuccessful; but it may be asked, whether the long continued popularity of this work may not, in some degree at least, be owing to the absence of the incongruous mixture of speech and song. However this may be, it is at least a singular coincidence, that the single opera of our language, in which dialogue does not break and interrupt the unity and consistent action of the drama, should ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... scorn. She was not altogether a pleasant woman to look upon. Her cheeks were thin and hollow, her eyes a little too prominent, some hidden expression which seemed at times to flit from one to the other of her features suggested a sensuality which was a little incongruous with her somewhat angular figure and generally cold demeanour. But that she was a woman of courage and resource history ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... him. Prince Caramanico, then viceroy of Sicily, had scientific leanings, and was easily won over to the project of building an observatory, a commodious foundation for which was afforded by one of the towers of the viceregal palace. This architecturally incongruous addition to an ancient Saracenic edifice—once the abode of Kelbite and Zirite Emirs—was completed in February, 1791. Piazzi, meanwhile, had devoted nearly three years to the assiduous study of his new profession, acquiring a practical knowledge ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Blacktons, and Peggy and Paul, who were busy over some growing geraniums in the dining-room window, faced about with a forced and incongruous appearance of total oblivion to everything that had happened. It lasted less than ten seconds. Joanne's lips quivered. Aldous saw the two little dimples at the corners of her mouth fighting to keep themselves out of ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... just off the Vlamertinghe road about half a mile our side of Ypres. Its grounds are ploughed up by shells and bombs, but most of the fountains and wretched garden statuary remains with the fishponds which perhaps gave the villa its army name, and rustic bridges most egregiously incongruous with the ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... faculties so strong and richly matured, reduced now even to imbecility! The image of death I could withstand, for it is the lot of mortals, but the spectacle of such a mind associated with living extinction, appears incongruous, and to exceed the power of possible combination. Those who witnessed the progressive advances of this mournful condition were prepared for the event by successive changes, but with my anterior impressions, if in his present state I were ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... execution of his plans for the public benefit, and the fulfilling his duties as Protector. But, extreme in all things, given up to immediate impressions, he entered with ardour into this new pursuit of pleasure, and followed up the incongruous intimacies occasioned by it without reflection or foresight. The council-chamber was deserted; the crowds which attended on him as agents to his various projects were neglected. Festivity, and even libertinism, became ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... for which Steele stood sponsor, and was very patiently traduced and calumniated, as he acknowledges to Congreve, in the Dedication prefixed to "The Drummer." There is nothing in the style or manner of any of the three that appears incongruous with such a supposition; and the nature of their principal contents seems to support it. They consist chiefly of pleasantries and oblique strokes, apparently on persons of fashion, in that age, of both sexes. It appears from the Dedication to "The Drummer," that Steele had Addison's direct injunctions ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... the smoking-room, and chatted with a popular composer and one or two men he knew. It was while the waiter was holding out the coffee-tray to him that Mary Ann flashed upon his consciousness. The thought of her seemed so incongruous with the sober magnificence, the massive respectability that surrounded him, the cheerful, marble hearth reddened with leaping flame, the luxurious lounges, the well-groomed old gentlemen smoking eighteenpenny cheroots, the suave, noiseless satellites, that Lancelot ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... sorrowful at the thought that they might not meet again. Trimble Rogers fished out his battered little Bible and quoted a few verses, as appeared to be his habit on all solemn occasions. Jack Cockrell knew him well enough by now to find it not incongruous. Among this vanishing race of sea fighters had been many a hero of the most fervent piety. Their spirit was akin to that of Francis Drake who summoned his crew to prayers ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... turmoils. The blue sky, seen beyond a gaunt profile of one of the farther summits that defined its craggy serrated edge against the ultimate distances of the western heavens, seemed of a singularly suave tint, incongruous with the savagery of the scene, which clouds and portents of storm might better have befitted. The little graveyard, which John Dundas discerned with recognizing eyes, albeit they had never before rested upon it, was revealed suddenly, ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... manifesting its desire for excitement in idle changes of subject and purpose. Incapable of true imagination, it will seek to supply its place by exaggerations, incoherencies, and monstrosities; and the form of the grotesque to which it gives rise will be an incongruous chain of hackneyed graces, idly thrown together,—prettinesses or sublimities, not of its own invention, associated in forms which will be absurd without being fantastic, and monstrous without being terrible. And because, in the continual pursuit of pleasure, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... were no contemporary painters strong enough for the task, and the honours of the enterprise belong almost exclusively to Smirke's "Seven Ages" and one or two plates from the lighter comedies. The great "Bible" of Macklin, a rival and even more incongruous publication, upon which some of the same designers were employed, has fallen into completer oblivion. A rather better fate attended another book of this class, which, although belonging to a later period, may be briefly referred to here. The "Milton" of John Martin has distinct individuality, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... from the graceful movement of some of the little poems, that Esther must have had ambition as a writer. Then, again, she seemed so wholly, simply, passionately, a woman, to love and be loved, that all thought of anything else in her nature or her life seemed incongruous. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... time to have friends of her own to stay with her; she might ask the Raymonds, or some of the quiet, clerical families (the real elite, be it observed) to spend a day or drink tea, but the dinner and ball life was too utterly incongruous for an elderly heiress. When it came to the elderly heiress poor Miss Wells was always shut up in utter despair—she who thought her bright-locked darling only grew handsomer each day of ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... presently move across the stage, now in shouting crowds of sword-armed men, now in pitiable incidents of small account, are to be properly understood, and their dramatic setting, stirring blood-thrilling, incongruous as they must be and can only be. I feel that something will come—I even know it. I have been talking vaguely about this and about that; have begun preparing colours, as it were, in the usual careless fashion without explanations or digressions—until ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... artistic, but its effect was deeper than mere prettiness. It was cool, though the autumn sunshine streamed in, and the girl had somehow impressed her personality upon it. Soft colorings, furniture, even the rather incongruous mixture of statuettes and ivory carvings, blended into a harmonious whole, and the girl made a most satisfactory central figure, as she sat opposite him in her unusually thoughtful mood. He felt the charm of her presence, though he could hardly have analyzed it. As he said, it was not even needful ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... savage the outburst, so raucous the voice, so charged with angry chagrin—the whole so incongruous with soft dreams and evening light—that 'twas in a shiver of terror my sister and I turned to discover whose presence had ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... die and should remain as white clothed ghosts in heaven forever they would be an incongruous environment and abiding scandal to the immortality of the Son of God Himself. A living, immortal man shining in a glorified human body surrounded by bodiless souls forever! What a contradiction that would be, what a scandal, indeed. It would be the declaration that the Son of ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... obligation to give the State her full representation on the score of the alleged irregularity of the government through which she has expressed her will; and there does seem to me, in this connection, something incongruous in the proposition that we may impose upon the people a government without legal sanction and demand their obedience to and support thereof, said government meanwhile determining the character of its successors and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... He was aware that he must seem awkward in the role of brother, and he suspected that the little man had noticed it; possibly the little man was one of those keen-witted and humorously inclined persons who find amusement in the incongruous. ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and mused. She was tall and stately, but her figure was well developed, and her form softly moulded. He admired her immensely. How incongruous an outcome from a clerical family! "It's curious," he said, gazing hard at her, "that you should ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... tastefully-furnished house in the middle of it would have been as incongruous as a new patch in an old garment, and no one dreamt of disturbing the traditional aspect of the place by any attempt ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... not harmonize. If I felt it borne in upon me that I must be a profane fellow to prove my manliness, I would choose another diet than spoon victuals to nourish my formidable zest for naughtiness. Rare beef or wild game would be less incongruous. There are times when a man may be excused for using objectionable language. Stress of righteous indignation, seasons of personal conflict with hansom cabmen, large-headed street car conductors, ubiquitous, never-dying expectorators and many ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... fine, clean-cut nose; the jaws were heavy and brutal; yet the menace of the face was not in these, but in the thin straight lips which closed like the shears of Fate. A cruel smile gathered about the lips as he answered the questions of the court. There was something peculiarly incongruous in the jovial, happy-go-lucky name to which this ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... would tell that person most sincerely there is not a particle of fatuity, shall I call it, in that avowal; cannot be, seeing that from the beginning and at this moment I never dreamed of winning your love. I can hardly write this word, so incongruous and impossible does it seem; such a change of our places does it imply—nor, next to that, though long after, would I, if I could, supplant one of any of the affections that I know to have taken root in you—that great and solemn one, for instance. I feel that if I could get myself remade, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... you, O man! thus to find glory in an act, performed by a nation, which you condemn as a crime or a barbarism, when committed by an individual? In what vain conceit of wisdom and virtue do you find this incongruous morality? Where is it declared that God, who is no respecter of persons, is a respecter of multitudes? Whence do you draw these partial laws of an impartial God? Man is immortal; but nations are mortal. Man has a higher destiny than nations. Can nations be less amenable to the supreme moral ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... on one of the slippery haircloth chairs, facing the mantel where the single candle threw its tiny light afar. Little by little the room crept into shadowy relief—the melodeon in the corner, the what-not, with its burden of incongruous ornaments, and even the easel bearing the crayon portrait of the former mistress of the house, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... many remarks on persons, I have found not one of a censorious, cynical, envious, or unfriendly nature. Youth is often captious and keenly critical; partly because youth generally has an ideal, partly, perhaps chiefly, from mere intellectual high spirits and sense of the incongruous; occasionally the motive is jealousy or spite. Murray's sense of fun was keen, his ideal was lofty; of envy, of an injured sense of being neglected, he does not show one trace. To make fun of their masters ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... be," cried the empress. "There is no sympathy between Austria and Prussia, and peace will never come to Europe until one succumbs to the other. No dependence is to be placed upon alliances between incongruous nations. In spite of our allies, the English, the Dutch, and the Russians, the King of Prussia has robbed me of my province; and all the help I have ever got from them was empty condolence. For this reason I have sought for alliance with another power—a power which will ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... stores from the Agrippina and Bahama had perforce been conducted. Everything, in fact, was in the wildest confusion. The ship herself was dirty and unsettled, and her decks below lumbered in all directions with all manner of incongruous articles. No one was berthed or messed, nothing arranged or secured. Spare shot-boxes, sea-chests, and heavy articles of baggage or cabin furniture were fetching away to the destruction of crockery and other brittle ware, and the no small danger ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... that each, through some undefined attraction, was veering toward the other. Neither might be aware of this; but it was surely true. Little as social creeds influenced Anice, she could not close her eyes to the incongruous—the unpleasant features of this strange situation. And, besides, there was a more intimate and personal consideration. Her own feeling toward Fergus Derrick was friendship at first, and then she had ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Works where severe Knowledge and Judgment are chiefly exercis'd; those superior Productions of the Understanding must be express'd in a clear and strong manner, without intervening Strains of Wit or facetious Fancies, which, were they admitted, would appear incongruous and impertinent, and diminish the Merit of the Writing. Hence Wit has no place in History, Philology, Philosophy, or in the greater Lyrick or Epick Poems; the two last of which containing either the Praises ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... deal of her time "in the moon with Phil" as she put it, departed for Crest House, carrying Philip with her "for inspection," as he dubbed it somewhat ruefully. He wasn't particularly enamored of the prospect of being passed upon by Carlotta's friends and relatives. It was rather incongruous when you came to think of it that the lovely Carlotta, who might have married any one in the world, should elect an obscure village store keeper for a husband. But Carlotta herself had no qualms. She ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... you concerned at the back-slidings of so near a relation; a man of his years and infirmities: These are fine doings, truly — This is a rare example, set by a guardian, for the benefit of his pupils — Monstrous! incongruous! sophistical!' — I thought it was but an act of justice to set her to rights; and therefore explained the mystery. But she would not be undeceived, 'What (said she) would you go for to offer for to arguefy me out of my senses? Did'n't I hear him whispering to her to hold ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... coat and hearty English face looked incongruous, as at sight of the blue and white uniform he came forward with all the hospitable courtesy due to a post-captain. There was shaking of hands, and doffing of cocked hats, and calling for wine, and pipes, and coffee, in the Alhambra-like ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and horses, and little humorous donkeys, browse together in the meadows, and come down in troops to the river-side to drink. They make a strange feature in the landscape; above all when they are startled, and you see them galloping to and fro with their incongruous forms and faces. It gives a feeling as of great, unfenced pampas, and the herds of wandering nations. There were hills in the distance upon either hand; and on one side, the river sometimes bordered on the wooded spurs of ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... course of nature."—Bp. Butler cor. "Then the not-interposing is so far from being a ground of complaint."—Id. "The bare omission, (or rather, the not-employing,) of what is used."—Campbell and Jamieson cor. "The bringing-together of incongruous adverbs is a very common fault."— Churchill cor. "This is a presumptive proof that it does not proceed from them."—Bp. Butler cor. "It represents him in a character to which any injustice is peculiarly ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... odes, whereunto, I must plainly confess to, you, I have seen yet nothing parallel in our language." The criticism was just. It is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is discharged from the labour of uniting two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even above himself. Then, like his own good Genius bursting from the earthly form and weeds of Thyrsis, he ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a proviso that might eventually defeat free trade by postponement. After some finessing, the Government showed a determination to go on with both bills. Lord John Russell and the Whigs saw their opportunity, and to the dismay of the First Lord, he found the strange, incongruous, unprecedented combination of Irish Repealers, Tory Protectionists, Whigs, and Manchester League-men prepared to vote against him on his Irish Coercion Act. The debate on it occupied six nights. It was closed on the 25th of June by Mr. Cobden; the division ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... ingenious home-maker often finds that the worse a thing is, the better it can be made by competent and careful study. To complete and adapt incompetent things to orderliness and beauty, to harmonise incongruous things into a perfect whole requires and exercises ability of a high order, and the consciousness of its possession is no small satisfaction. That it is constantly being done shows how much real cleverness is necessary ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... prairie. Her greatest accomplishments consisted of some skill in bakery and the handling of half-broken teams; but she had once or twice given him what he recognised as excellent advice. There was something incongruous in the situation, but, as usual, he preferred ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... in waking has had the confused memory of a dream in which events have been so mingled and mixed as to present no uniform narrative, but only a mass of strange and incongruous occurrences, without object or connexion, may form some notion of the state of restless excitement my brain suffered from, as the many and conflicting ideas my late adventures suggested, presented themselves to my mind in ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... thing to save the Skip; and never let any Man Reproach the Gallunarian King with breaking the Treaty of Division, and disregarding the Faith and Stipulations of Leagues; for this is an Action so inconsistent with it self, so incongruous to common Justice, to the Reason and Nature of things, that no History of any of these latter Times can parallel it, and 'tis past the Power of Art to make any reasonable Defence ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... right to be there, since they lead to nothing, lend view to nothing, clamour for bronze and sculpture to explain their existence as niches and receptacles for statuary. It is nevertheless indubitably true that these incongruous and misplaced elements, crowded together, leave a strong impression of picturesque force upon the mind. From certain points and angles, the effect of the whole, considered as a piece of deception and insincerity, is magnificent. It would ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... had a strain of melancholy in it, partly the result of chronic asthma, and partly, no doubt, of a melancholic temperament. This strain, being constant, sometimes had a curiously incongruous effect as contrasted with the subject or circumstances in hand. Whether hailing the dawn of the millennium; holding playful converse with a child, making a speech before the Board,—under whatever rhetorical conditions, Mr. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... it was an old incident, that he had never spoken a word to the young man he had seen, and that he had only seen him once for a few minutes. The reason of his remembering him so well was that he had been struck by his appearance, so strangely incongruous in the circumstances, and that had made him look very sharply at him. Over two years had passed since, but it was still distinct in his memory. He had come to a small frontier settlement, a military outpost, on the extreme north-eastern border of the Republic, and ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... too incongruous in its ineptitude with the serious, brooding and enigmatic glance he turned ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... matter-of-fact tone (obviously assumed) which was very incongruous with the feeling it excited in Cecily. She could not hear the ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Henry on the bridge staring after him, and as he went towards the Grafton Street gate, there was something slightly incongruous about his look. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... one takes the pains to analyze the standard he will be impressed by the perfect co-relation of harmony of all parts of the dog, from the tip of his broad, even muzzle, to the end of his short screw tail. Nothing incongruous in its makeup presents itself, but a graceful, symmetrical style characterizes the dog, and I firmly believe that any change whatever would be ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... possible, the bent of their own minds, or whatever it is they have in place of minds. It is the attitude of the sensible hen towards her ducklings, when she has had frequent experience of their incongruous ways, and is satisfied that they know best what is good for them; though, of course, their ways seem peculiar to her, and she can never entirely sympathize with their fancy for going into water. I ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... coarse exaggerations in the work of his imitators. The swaggering attitude, the freedom of gesture, and the dramatic expression, shorn of the strength and earnest emotion from which they sprang, became disagreeably incongruous in the pictures of the feeble painters who ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... my windows is the barn where my Catholic men are having High Mass, and where in half an hour, if alive, we shall have our service too. There was a good precedent for stables, I believe, 1915 years ago, so we do not view it as incongruous, but I understand that High Mass is unusual, and no doubt a great honour to the Regiment. I hear that our leave does not come off till January 6th. That puts me into the trenches to-morrow night again, for a short time. Last night, about 10.30 o'clock, I was ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... Cartwright, and three or four more officers riding. After them came the caissons and the other ammunition wagons, and then more warriors, hundreds and hundreds, joining in that ferocious whining chorus. The red coats of the British officers lent a strange and incongruous touch to this scene ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ladies in his wild train: the mother to whom he was spiritual physician, director, and guide; the gentle and silent daughter who was his wife; flaming over the Continent and through all the troubles in Scotland with these incongruous followers behind him, then coming back to drop the two tame sparrows in the quiet nest which their mother had left for love of him! All we know of them is that in their early childhood he did not spare the rod; yet was grieved to see them ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... parallel. The divergence is not less impressive. In contrast with the solid political unity into which the various and incongruous elements have settled themselves, the unity of the Christian church is manifested by oneness neither of jurisdiction nor of confederation, nor even by diplomatic recognition and correspondence. Out of the total population of the United States, amounting, according to ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... (the Spaniard), under the pretence of a superannuated transgression, contrary to the opinion of the more honest sort of gownsmen, who maintained that his Majesty's pardon lay inclusively in the commission he gave him on his setting out to sea; it being incongruous that he, who remained under the notion of one dead in the law, should as a general dispose of the lives of others, not being ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... didn't say it. The brutality of his expression slowly changed as he looked at her. A gentle light stole slowly, and it seemed with difficulty, into his eyes, where it looked as out of place as the love-light in the eyes of a tiger. But there was no mistaking it. However incongruous it was there, and the lips that had been framing a cruel retort merely gave utterance ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... the old mare's back, and Jarvis, at the bits of the young horse, were bringing back the plough undamaged by its brisk career across the field. Jarvis certainly presented a somewhat incongruous appearance in his afternoon attire, as he plunged along the furrows in foot-gear not intended for locomotion over freshly ploughed land. Jake rose to his feet, answering the queries of Ferry at his side as ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... to do but sit down and wait. The very chairs were of an architecture and upholstery incongruous to them. They knew something of luxury, but not of this school. There was nowhere for them to look that something alien did not meet their eyes. So they ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... the sheriff heavily, "was a preliminary; like they say in the sporting papers. The big event is that you're goin' to say your adoos to Socorro without bein' allowed to make any farewell announcement. The reason is that you an' Socorro is incongruous—like a side-saddle on a razor-back hog. Socorro won't stand for you a minute longer. You're a Public Favorite which has lost its popularity an' which has become heterogeneous to the established order of things. In other words, ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... dead. Yet he lingered. And now, at the sight of her bruises, he rushed forward with inferior regrets. He will bear study, this weeping one. Of all the sprawling Mallares, he alone lacks logic. But I will come to him later. The plot is more entertaining than this incongruous spectator weeping and hissing out ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... idea for England at the time, it was a fairly well established tradition on the Continent, and Handel may very likely have seen a similar entertainment in Italy. The subscribers to the opera would see little in it that was incongruous. They were accustomed to see singers in all operas wearing dresses that differed very little from their own, and scenery which recalled their own Italianate gardens and palaces; Handelian opera, in any case, left little ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... themselves obtain admittance, that they will not be allowed to continue members after they are known to be such; nor will it be well taken, if, on any pretense whatever, any shall attempt to introduce or impose any youth upon this seminary, whose character shall be incongruous to, and militates against, the highest, chiefest, and dearest interests of ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... ranking Shakspeare the great poet of Nature, it is meant that he had the purpose and the power to think what was natural, and to select and follow it,—that, among his thick-coming fancies, he could perceive what was too fine, what tinged with personal vanity, what incongruous, unsuitable, feeble, strained, in short, unnatural, and reject it. His vision was so strong that he saw his characters and identified himself with them, yet preserving his cool judgment above them, and subjecting all he felt through them to its test, and developing it through this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... fierce, tender and hospitable. The inner life of his household is exceedingly charming, because one is astonished to find the graces and accomplishments of womanhood displayed in a scene which has a certain sort of savage rudeness about it after all, and where all kinds of incongruous accidents are visible in the service of the table, in the furniture of the house, in its decorations, menials, and surrounding scenery."[18] The Southerners themselves took its incongruities much as a matter of ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... which may be cited for and against this theory the objector may argue that the generally extravagant praise bestowed upon Soma through the Veda is in any one case merely particularized, and that it is not incongruous to say of the divine soma-plant, "he lights the dark nights," when one reads in general that he creates all things, including the gods. On the other hand, the advocate of the theory may reply that everything which does not apply to the moon-god Soma ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... upon the dismal aspect of the chimney and orchard, round which so many horses and wagons had not gathered since the daughter of the house was long ago married here. There was a sprinkle of gray in his hair, and he remembered the jollities of the wedding,—incongruous recollection,—and once more he looked at the stark figure, its face covered with a white cloth, which had been done in a sentiment of atonement for the unseemly ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... delicate hands and feet! I hear the ignorant patois of the East Side underworld. I smell the brimstone in his suppressed rage at my dislike. There's something uncanny in the sensuous droop of his heavy eyelids and the glitter of his steel-blue eyes. There's something incongruous in his whole personality. I was afraid of him the moment ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and, as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the child lighted ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... perhaps hypaethral; there is no central court, and other apartments form distinct blocks. For possible geographical reasons for this duality of type see CRETE. In spite of many comparisons made with Egyptian, Babylonian and "Hittite'' plans, both these arrangements remain incongruous with any remains of prior or contemporary structures elsewhere. Whether either plan suits the "Homeric palace'' does not affect the present question. (4) A type of tomb, the dome or "bee-hive,'' of which the grandest examples ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Boer burgher was none the less incongruous than the physical appearance of the majority of them, although no expensive uniform and trappings could have been of more practical value. The men of the Pretoria and Johannesburg commandos had the unique honor of going to the war in uniforms ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... serpentine. A man's is jerks, hops, convulsions, and acute angles. The woman is light, airy, indistinctly defined. Airy movements are in keeping. The man is sombre in hue, grave in tone, distinctly outlined; and nothing is more incongruous, to my thinking, than his dancing. The feminine drapery conceals processes and gives results. The masculine absence of drapery reveals processes, and thereby ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... it has its place as one of the instruments of poetical effect, is a dangerous element to handle. Spenser's age was very insensible to the presence and the dangers of the grotesque, and he was not before his time in feeling what was unpleasing in incongruous mixtures. Strong in the abundant but unsifted learning of his day, a style of learning, which in his case was strangely inaccurate, he not only mixed the past with the present, fairyland with politics, mythology with the most serious ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the day, for I am now Estaiblished!" and Francesca, clad in Miss Grieve's Sunday bonnet, shawl, and black cotton gloves, entered, and curtsied demurely to the floor. She held, as corroborative detail, a life of John Knox in her hand, and anything more incongruous than her sparkling eyes and mutinous mouth under the melancholy ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... if the widow had taken a fancy to some nice girl and had had her to live in the house. But Mrs. Ogilvie did not take fancies to nice girls. She loved Jane Erskine, but disguised the feeling under a sort of whimsical indifference. And the friendship seemed incongruous enough if one came to think of it. Jane, with her wholesome love of outdoor life, her fresh beauty, her heedlessness of learning and ignorance of books—what had Jane in common with Mrs. Ogilvie in her Parisian gowns ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... led me to suspect 'more was meant than met the ear.' Whenever this chord is touched, my heart instantly becomes tremulous; and with sensibility so painful as fully to lay open its weakness; against which I must carefully and resolutely guard. It is these incongruous these jarring tokens that engender doubt, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... to him, only his arm keeping her from falling. A man had thrown his coat about her, and Garland pulled it over her, then, looking down, saw her feet, bare and scratched in pointed, high-heeled slippers. The sight of them, incongruous reminders of the intimate aspects of life, brought him down to the moment and her place ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside—the great table in the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books, flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers, and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides—all this self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch—and ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... believed he had taxed the forbearance of the powers above to the extremity of endurance and that this was the result. It might have seemed to him a waste of pomp and ammunition to kill a bug with a battery of artillery, but there seemed nothing incongruous about the getting up such an expensive thunderstorm as this to knock the turf from under an ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... three days. Latish, on the very first day of the hiring, close upon dark, he had despatched imperative orders to Phippun and Company to take the glass out of his house on the spot. And why? Because, as he maintained, there was a fault in the glass causing an incongruous and absurd reflection; and he was at that moment awaiting the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at Overstow was certainly a strange and incongruous one, consisting as it did of persons who seemed all in league with each other, the master-criminal whose shrewd, steel-grey eyes were so uncanny, and his accomplices and underlings who all profited and grew fat upon the great coups planned by Rayne's amazing mind. The squire of Overstow mesmerized ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... considerable extent, despotic though his power is supposed to be. It is opinion, in the last resort, that governs every where,—under an absolute monarchy quite as determinedly as under a liberal polity like ours or England's. There is a large party in France, composed of the most incongruous materials, which has the profoundest interest in misrepresenting the policy of the Imperial government, and which is full of men of culture and intellect,—men whose labors, half-performed though they are, must have considerable effect ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... to doubt that if that faith should prove to be incompatible with our knowledge, or necessary want of knowledge, some other hypostasis of men's hopes, genuine enough and worthy enough to replace it, will arise. But that the incongruous mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry, out of which Comte manufactured the positivist religion, will be the heir of the Christian ages, I have too much respect for the humanity of the future to believe. Charles the Second told his ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... almost to a minute. When you are received as a guest in a friend's house, consider compliance with the hours and habits of the family, as a natural return for the hospitality which is shown to you. There is something incongruous in seeing a young person deranging, by his unpunctuality, the economy and regularity of a whole household. And do not suffer the kindness and indulgence of your parents to induce you, when with them, to be less attentive to punctuality than you are, when ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... display of landscape gardening as well as architecture, but the former has been neglected. The one thing that strikes a stranger and almost bewilders him is the vivid colors. They seem unnatural and inappropriate for a sacred city, but are not more incongruous than other features. ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... with the ease of happy youth and her flushed cheeks were pinker than her simple gown. She looked farther removed from her occupation than any woman in the room and to Dr. Harpe, following her with her eyes, the connection seemed incongruous. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... saddle, his expression ugly and defiant, and yet touchingly helpless, the look of a boy in trouble and at bay. The horseman came into sight on the trail below, riding hard, a middle-aged man in a dark sack suit and a straw hat, an oddly incongruous figure and manifestly weary. He rode bent forward, and now and again he raised his eyes from the trail and searched the wall above with bloodshot, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... forced to pull up and halt. In the meantime some slow but steady operations went on with a perseverance that was highly creditable; and it was now that, having a little agreeable leisure to observe and look about him, he began to examine the extraordinary costumes of the incongruous society in which, to his astonishment, he found himself a party. We must, however, first account for the oddness and incongruity of the apparent characters which they were ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... by a committee. The proposition met with able advocacy and also with some warm opposition. It is illustrative of the crude conceptions regarding the uses of books which prevailed in the minds of some members, that the library was objected to on the somewhat incongruous grounds of embracing too many editions of the Bible, and a number of the French writers in skeptical philosophy. It was gravely proposed to pack up this portion of the library, and return it to the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Walked much alone, shunned companionship rather than sought it, worked as he walked, and was marked down as a 'pot-hunter.' He 'worked while he ate, he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable, definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.' With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had weakened him just when he should have been ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... till it seems as if a repetition of it must produce bodily effects dire to contemplate, yet that happens to be the very story you must tell. What can you do? I answer, "Make believe." The device seems incongruous with the repeated warnings against pretence; but it is necessary, and it is wise. Pretend as hard as ever you can to be interested. And the result will be—before you know it—that you will be interested. ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... there are a winter sea and a summer sea, brilliantly different, with a delicate variety between the hastening blue of spring and the lingering blue of September. There you bathe from the rocks, untroubled by tides, and unhurried by chills, and with no incongruous sun beating on your head while your fingers are cold. You bathe when the sun has set, and the vast sea has not a whisper; you know a rock in the distance where you can rest; and where you float, there float ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... man, he put out the lights of the three seven-branched candlesticks which illumined the beautiful old room; and, as he moved about, he suddenly became aware that nearly opposite the door giving into the staircase lobby was a finely-carved, oak, confessional-box. What an odd, incongruous ornament to ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... be conveyed by this scene is one of the beautiful, vivid life of the sea all about—sunshine on the deck in a great flood, the fresh sea wind blowing across it. In the midst of this, these two incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived, ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
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