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More "Stilted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... how enjoyable the stage might be, cleared of all its traditionary nonsense, stilted language, stilted behavior, all the rubbish of false sentiment, false dress, and the manners of times that were both artificial and immoral, and filled with living characters, who speak the thought of to-day, with the wit and culture that are current ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... while they continued to obey their paroles, and such was the logic of his argument and the force of his character that those indictments were soon after quashed. So that he penned no idle platitude; he fashioned no stilted epigrams; he spoke the earnest convictions of an honest heart when he said, "Let us have peace." [Applause.] He never tired of giving unstinted praise to worthy subordinates for the work they did. Like the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... it is the end, and because, by the events foregone, the mind is prepared for it. But these men will have nothing but fifth acts; and seem to skip, as unworthy, all the circumstances leading to them. This, however, is part of the scheme—the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime, that our teachers have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and other antihumbuggists should heartily, according to the strength that is in them, endeavor to pull down. What, for instance, could Monsieur Lafond ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Morocco, the Destruction of Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... singularly ready to be shown what to do, and to be criticized. "Knock-about" farce—the counterpart in drama of their comic songs—pleased them best, and they did well in it. But "Box and Cox" was almost beyond them, because they missed the meanings of the rather stilted dialogue. In helping to coach them in their parts I had the best of opportunities to know this. They produced a resemblance to the sound of the sentences, and were satisfied, though they missed the sense. Instead of saying that he "divested" ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett is worthy of the stilted encomium which has mopped and mowed about him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett has or has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, about which no two men ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... a consonant and the second begins with a vowel, as in eats apples, not at all, an ox, etc. On the other hand, too evident an effort to secure the proper enunciation of the sound elements should be avoided, since a stilted mode of utterance ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... will be the next novel done. But it is to be clearly understood that I promise nothing, and may throw in your face the very last thing you expect - or I expect. ST. IVES will (to my mind) not be wholly bad. It is written in rather a funny style; a little stilted and left-handed; the style of St. Ives; also, to some extent, the style of R. L. S. dictating. ST. IVES is unintellectual and except as an adventure novel, dull. But the adventures seem to me sound and pretty probable; and it is a love story. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... words were ridiculously stilted, John turned with a song on his lips and skipped across to the home porch swing, where his mother found him a moment later, and made him come in and get washed ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... Frau von Greifenstein presented the most complete contrast to her husband. She had been pretty, fair and sprightly in her youth, she was now a faded blonde, full of strange affectations and stilted sentiments. Possessing but indifferent taste, she nevertheless devoted much time to the adornment of her person. She was small of stature, but delicately made, and if her nervous desire to please had granted to her outward personality a moment's repose during the day, she might still ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... favourite's delinquency, it was not to be in his well-known handwriting and accompanied by his penitent tears and written caresses, but to be laid before her with all the formality of parchment and sealingwax, in the stilted diplomatic jargon of those "highly-mighty, very learned, wise, and very foreseeing gentlemen, my lords the States-General." Nothing could have been managed with ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... coach from Vicenza, which arrived at Padua every night of the year, brought with it in particular on the night of October 13, 1721, a tall, personable young man, an Englishman, in a dark blue cloak, who swang briskly down from the coupe and asked in stilted Italian for "La sapienza del Signer Dottor' Lanfranchi." From out of a cloud of steam—for the weather was wet and the speaker violently hot—a husky voice replied, "Eccomi—eccomi, a servirla." The young man took off his hat ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... grantor, in the formal and diffuse rhetoric peculiar to his generation, and, perhaps, too much contemned by ours. To say the least, we are no more warranted in despising the utterances of noble, self-sacrificing philanthropists, because they are clothed in phrases now deemed verbose and stilted, than we would be in disparaging the deeds of historic heroes, because they wore armor now antiquated and struck their doughty blows with weapons obsolete. When Peter Cooper wrote, in the letter now before me, "The great object I desire to accomplish by the establishment of an institution ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... she walked, not sideways as always, but erect, her chest thrown out, which gave her figure a droll, stilted air of importance. Her shoes made a knocking sound on the floor, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... inclination in a continuous curve from the spring to the apex, they rise perpendicularly for some distance above the piers on either side, and then take rather an abrupt turn inwards, suggesting the imposition of a pointed heading on an original stilted form. Further signs of alteration appear on the northern side, where the capitals have been recut in the Perpendicular fashion; but the Norman pilasters and mouldings on the south remain untouched. On both sides the double ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... the heroine died amid the sobs of ten thousand readers. Yet the story had power, and the central figure of Clarissa was impressive in its pathos and tragedy. The novel would still be readable if it were stripped of the stilted conversations and sentimental gush in which Richardson delighted; but that would leave ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... be." Mazie, grown suddenly a bit stiff and stilted, was obviously trying to be very polite and "grown up." "There must be an awful lot to do here. Mother says she don't see how you ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... is a desideratum amongst you, and I am glad that I have got so much left; though Heaven knows how I retain it: I hear none but from my valet, and his is Nottinghamshire: and I see none but in your new publications, and theirs is no language at all, but jargon. Even your * * * * is terribly stilted and affected, with 'very, very' so soft ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... high, stilted voice, and as she sat primly in the straight-backed old chair, knitting away at nothing, she presented a ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... combined "to give the world assurance of" a bishop rather than a clerk. It needed familiarity with his inner life to know how much simpleness of purpose and simplicity of mind and contentment and piety lay hid under a pompous exterior and a phraseology somewhat stilted. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... in one of the paths of the Kleine Rugen. He was walking slowly toward her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully upon the ground. When she accosted him, he was plainly confused, as she had said. After the first few passages in polite though stilted conversation, his keen, grey eyes resumed their thoughtful—it was even ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... baneful Miltonic infection. Coleridge found the source of "our pseudo-poetic diction" in Pope's Homer. But Pope was from boyhood a sedulous student of Milton, and a frequent borrower. The mock-heroics of the Dunciad are stilted on Miltonic phrases; and in the translation of Homer, above all, reminiscences of Milton abound. In most of them Milton's phraseology is weakened and misapplied. Two instances among many may serve. When Vulcan, in the ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... "Quaking Dread and Humble Obedience"; nor are they affected by descriptions of Beauty, attended by her fair damsels, Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, Pleasance, and Lusty Cheer. The whole conduct and machinery of such things are too artificial and stilted for modern tastes. Stately masques are no longer performed in earls' mansions; and when a sovereign enters a city, a fair lady, with wings, representing Loyalty, does not burst out of a pasteboard cloud and recite a poetical address to Majesty. In our theatres the pantomime, which was ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... year he made me read Meredith—the novels, I mean. One of Our Conquerors, he vowed, was the finest thing ever written. He scoffed at me for liking Diana and Richard Feverel better, because they were easier. And now, nothing's bad enough for Meredith's 'stilted nonsense'—'characters without a spark of life in them'—'horrible mannerisms'—you should hear him. Except the poems—ah, except the poems! He daren't touch them. I say—do you know the 'Hymn to Colour'?" The girl's eager eyes questioned her ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Who are you?" asked the girl, her stilted, saleslady manner changing to amazement ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... sometimes necessary or advisable to have one's camp on stilts, so to speak. Especially is this true in the more tropical countries where noxious serpents and insects abound. A simple form of stilted shack is shown by Fig. 63. To build this shack we must first erect an elevated platform (Fig. 64). This is made by setting four forked sticks of equal height in the ground and any height from the ground to suit the ideas of the camp builder. If, for some reason, the uprights are "wabbly" ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... midway between his earlier poetry with its more lyric note and his later work with its deeper and more prophetic tones. In point of expression the poet's powers had attained their full development; he has perfect command of rime; the versification is free and shows no trace of the stilted style of his first volumes; the language is copious and eloquent, but exhibits few signs of that verbosity and tendency to vain repetition which, as has been already remarked, marred some of his later poetry. In the Legende, no ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... said and wrote was brilliant with both these most charming qualities of the human mind. Though sometimes lax in points of grammar, as was much the custom in his day, he wrote as delightful a style as is to be found in all English literature, and that too when the stilted, verbose, and turgid habit was tediously prevalent. He was a man who impressed his ability upon all who met him; so that the abler the man and the more experienced in judging men, the higher did he rate Franklin when brought into direct contact ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... breath of the great wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled with thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to translate into the written word. And the result of the effort seemed always to be bathos! Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, obscurity, and awkwardness clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win the great secret of language; the stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished away in clearer light. The periods of despair were often long and heavy, the victories very few and trifling; night after ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... Dictionary—and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale's Koran by their anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo of Moslem learning was most valuable to the student, but utterly out of place for readers of "The Nights;" re-published, as these notes have been separately (London, Chatto, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... has two fine heads of apostles bending sorrowfully over the body of St John. Though it is not necessary to do it, in strict justice, because good work rises superior to all accidents of comparison as well as accidents of circumstance, one must remember in regarding this, the stilted and frozen figures and faces, which, before Giotto broke their bonds and inspired them, had professed to tell the ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... promises to visit us quarterly. It is the first fruit of a spirited and apparently well-matured plan set on foot by students in Yale College, and heartily entered into by those of several other institutions. Its objects are clearly stilted in the well-written Prospectus and Introduction. They are briefly these:—"To record the history, promote the intellectual improvement, elevate the moral aims, liberalize the views, and unite the sympathies of Academical, Collegiate, and Professional Students, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... near enough to observe the visitors closely soon began to look upon Richard and Nathan as a couple of quaint, harmless, exceedingly well-bred old gentlemen, rather provincial in appearance and a little stilted in their manners, who, before the evening was over, would, perhaps, become tired of the gayety, ask to be excused, and betake themselves to bed. All of which would be an eminently proper proceeding ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... longer. The Chief Factor went to Mr. Archibald Clavering Gunter and the Home Publishing Company, and they made a very large sale of it. I never cared for the book however; it seemed stilted and amateurish, though some of its descriptions and some of its dialogues were, I think, as good as I can do; so, eventually, in the middle nineties, I asked Mr. Gunter to sell me back the rights in the book and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... blame Methodism for these horrors simply because it is, as we know, the cult of ugliness, but there may have been another cause for the change; it was perhaps to some extent a reaction against the stilted, the pompous and silly epitaph which one finds most common in the first half ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... stooped, and picked up two books from the ground. 'May I be permitted to take the liberty of asking to whom these books belong? What is the reason for their exceedingly great number? Do they serve a special department of study?' He made his inquiries in such a stilted way that I was forced laboriously to keep my answers on the same level. He owned he would be happy if I would agree that he should help in the work, for he had not had a book in his hand for a year. ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Griffiths replied in somewhat stilted fashion, "is not a question which I should be prepared to ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... much fault with one another, and grudged each other every little bit of praise wrung from the world's cold, death-doomed lips. It is to me pathetically absurd to see gifted persons all struggling along, and rudely elbowing each other out of the way to win—what? A few stilted commonplace words of approbation or fault-finding in the newspapers of the day, and a little clapping and shouting from a gathering of ordinary minded persons, who only clap and shout because it is ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... the kindly editor, and full of wholesome advice, cut like a surgeon's knife in some desperate case when it is a question whether the patient can endure the heroic treatment necessary. Haldane's stilted and unnatural tales had been projected into being by such fiery and violent means that they might almost be termed volcanic in their origin; but the fused mass which was the result, resembled scoria ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... a picture, and said, "I have just done it." Apelles replied, "Without your telling me, I should know it was painted quickly; I only wonder you haven't painted more such in the time." As then (for I now return from my digression), I advise to avoid stilted and bombastic language, so again do I urge to avoid a finical and petty style of speech; for tall talk is unpopular, and petty language makes no impression. And as the body ought to be not only sound but in good condition, so speech ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... argued Hall, "because he doesn't live in accordance with our stilted notions. Professor Young says that the girl is a genius—that she has a beautiful voice. I promised that if he took up—a contribution for the family that I would ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... attention studiously to this line of literary effort, we feel encouraged to believe that our success in a field of late so popular would be marked, and that we should obtain a degree of fame herein, beside which that of the moat shining light in the stilted firmament would pale its ray. But so long as God gives us the glorious privilege of emulating the stars, we shall not seek to win a place among the 'tallow ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that was said, but I shall never forget it, and probably he never will. The conversation was brief, but yet how full of food for thought! How true, how earnest, how natural! Nothing stilted or false about it. It was the natural expression of two minds that were too great to be verbose or to ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... turrets. Nobody in the novels, except the talkative, comic servant, who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... smell as sweet. 'The Faultless Father,' 'The Mysterious Mother,' 'The Lame Lover,'—such names as that she was aware would be useless now. 'Mary Jane Walker,' if she could be very simple, would do, or 'Blanche De Veau,' if she were able to maintain throughout a somewhat high-stilted style of feminine rapture. But as she considered that she could best deal with rapid action and strange coincidences, she thought that something more startling and descriptive would better suit her purpose. After an hour's thought a name did occur to her, and she wrote it down, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... play do the boys and girls like, and in what sort do we like to see them take part? It should be a play, surely, in which the dialogue is simple and natural, not stilted and artificial; one that seems like a bit of real life, and yet has plenty of fancy and imagination in it; one that suggests and helps to perpetuate some of the happy and wholesome customs of Christmas; ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... those writings can be said to have any life to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely—that stilted romance. "The Lives of the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary, a huge piece of spadework, a monument to ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... paced wearily to and fro, he saw something white slip under the door. He stooped and picked up a note, folded European fashion. His heart thrilled as he read the stilted script: ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... Conway was the birthplace of Madison. His maternal grandfather, whose name was Conway, had a plantation at that place, and young Mrs. Madison happened to be there on a visit to her mother when her first child, James, was born. In the stately—not to say stilted—biography of him by William C. Rives, the christened name of this lady is given as Eleanor. Mr. Rives may have thought it not in accordance with ancestral dignity that the mother of so distinguished a son should have been burdened with so commonplace and homely ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... four different terms for nearly the same idea "difference," "odds," "distinction," and "contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. While it is true that the term "euphuism" has come to be applied to any stilted, antithetical style that pays more attention to the manner of expressing a thought than to its worth, we should remember that English prose style has advanced because some writers, like Lyly, emphasized the importance of artistic form. Shakespeare occasionally ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... observed the form of Aunt Amanda on the ground. He stooped down and examined her, and stood up again. Then he eyed the company of travellers with a hard cold eye, and spoke deliberately and in a low voice. His manner of speech was somewhat stilted and precise, and scarcely what might have ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... general word for that which is less than the whole: as, the whole is equal to the sum of all its parts.... Portion is often used in a stilted way where part would be simpler and better; portion has always some suggestion of allotment or assignment: as, this is my portion; a portion of Scripture. 'Father, give me the portion of goods that ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... underfoot; our hands were torn by thorny aromatic shrubs. Then we came out in a glen that cut far into the mountains, full of the laughter of falling water and the rustle of sappy foliage. Seven stilted arches of an aqueduct showed white through the canebrakes inland. Fragrances thronged about us; the smell of dry thyme-grown uplands, of rich wet fields, of goats, and jessamine and heliotrope, and of water ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... luxuriance of his imagination, which enforces that mode of speech.[16] Imagination is the first element of oratory, simplicity its first condition. We have seen that the Indian is wholly destitute of the former; and the stilted, meretricious, and ornate style, of even his ordinary communications, entirely excludes the latter from our ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... appeared during that sudden outburst of first vigorous growth might bring delight into her solitary life, but not flexibility of mind or body. She stood strong and straight like some forest tree, lightning-blasted but still erect. Her dignity became a stilted manner, her social supremacy led her into affectation and sentimental over-refinements; she queened it with her foibles, after the usual fashion of those who allow their courtiers ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... manner wherein excellence differs from mediocrity. Yet Hadria was glad to notice some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term "second class," though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the impression, was difficult ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been though worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charadrius himaniopus, with no back toe, and therefore "liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations"! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... Herring and eighty percent of the American people," said he in stilted, pompous tones, "is that our friend Herring unwisely voices his protest, while the others merely think—and consider it the part of wisdom to ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... sufficiently pretty; her hair was in clusters of curls, like bunches of grapes; her tight bodice seemed to crack with her vivacity; and from beneath the stiff little plaits of her petticoat a small fat foot protruded, resting upon a stilted heel. She was attractive and impertinent, especially the latter. He seemed to think it was a great pity, what she had told him; but he lost himself in this consideration, or, at any rate, said nothing for some time, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... are very stately and magnificent, this morning! that speech sounded grand and stilted enough to have suited ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... whether or no our journey was to prove fruitless. Soon after leaving the village we entered a dense forest, the growth of which was wonderfully beautiful. Tall pandanus trees, some of them supported by a hundred and more long stilted roots, which rose many feet above our heads, reared their crowns of ribbon-like leaves above even some of the giants of the forest. Palms of all shapes and sizes, dwarfed, tall, slender and thick, surrounded us on every side, and at least three different ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... was, "To my absent, but not forgotten friend," and was simple and natural as girls' letters usually are. My Grandfather Kelly died that season, and I recall that I wrote a letter of condolence to my people, modeled upon one in the book. How absurd and stilted and unreal it ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... heart was very full and she was thinking of other matters. But as he continued she answered at length, hesitating, using phrases as trite and quaintly stilted as the theme itself, gently defending the old names he sneered at. And in her words he savoured a certain old-time flavour of primness and pride—a vaguely delicate hint of resentment, which it amused him to excite. Pacing the dunes with her waist enlaced, ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... French, and professed to be a refugee, a person of interest to foreign monarchs. On the inner wrapping of his pack was written large, "Vive le Napoleon! Vive la France! Vive!" He had little hesitation about speaking of himself, though always with stilted ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... half-dozen girls had been presented, some one told Miss Fenler that Mrs. Marvin wished to see her, and what had begun in a stilted manner, became a genuine ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... Roswell had the slightest predilection for the law. By nature and by a certain inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the application of its stilted jargon to the simplest forms ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... stilted manner left him. He set down his cup hastily. "Oh, my dear!" he exclaimed. "I was tactless! Forgive me!" Again he looked about the room and back at Lydia's face above the meager dress fashioned the ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... boys were in full chase of a giraffe a-piece, Mr Rogers had galloped on after the great creature he had cut off from the herd, though for a time he could not gain upon it at all. The beast's mode of progression was very ungainly, and its great stilted legs moved in an awkward manner, but it got over the ground ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... lyric beauties. Often the rhythm rises to a high degree of excellence, even elevation. Like Pensa, Zacuto was the disciple of great masters, and a comparison of either with Lope de Vega and Calderon will reveal the same southern warmth, stilted pathos, exuberance of fancy, wealth of imagery, excessive playing upon words, peculiar turns and phrases, erratic style, and other qualities characteristic of Spanish ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... again on the heath. Edgar, still attired as a lunatic, soliloquizes in stilted terms about the instability of fortune and the advantages of a humble lot. Then there comes to him somehow into the very place on the heath where he is, his father, the blinded Gloucester, led by an old man. In that characteristic Shakespearean language,—the chief peculiarity of which is that ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... candles burning at her elbows, sat Alix. There were tears in her eyes, a wistful little smile on her lips. She was reading again the clumsy lines David had written in those long-ago days of adolescence. Now they meant something to her. They were stilted, commonplace expressions; she would have laughed at them had they been written by any one else, and she still would have been vastly amused, even now, were it not for the revelations contained in his letter. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... away from the mid-gallery, and instead, three gradated series of birds put down the length of it (or half the length—or a quarter would do it—with judgment), showing the transition, in length of beak, from bunting to woodcock—in length of leg, from swift to stilted plover—and in length of wing, from auk to frigate-bird; the wings, all opened, in one specimen of each bird to their full sweep, and in another, shown at the limit of the down back stroke. For what on earth—or in air—is ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Burks, although a master artist in comparison to Knight, is pretty poor—terrible, in fact. His style is dull, repetitious, and stilted. His melodrama is exaggerated to the point of nauseating absurdity. His characters are lifeless and unnatural puppets. So much for ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... is reached and the awed and penitent Lovelace describes the death-bed moments of the girl he has ruined, the scene has a great moving power. Allowing for differences of taste and time, the vogue of the Novel in Richardson's day can easily be understood, and through all the stiffness, the stilted effect of manner and speech, and the stifling conventions of the entourage, a sweet and charming young woman in very piteous distress emerges to live in affectionate memory. After all, no poor ideal of womanhood is pictured in Clarissa. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... is, according to present-day standards, somewhat pompous and stilted, but all boys should read this account of the New York settlers' warfare against the Iroquois and know Deerslayer, the ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... serious and positive than Heine, he pursues a steady aim in his satires. Tears mingle with his laugh, and if he castigates, it is in order to chasten. More original and more poetic than Borne, he thinks clearly and to the point, and the effect of his thought is in no way impaired by his stilted mannerisms. Without bias or passion, and with fine irony, he rallies the Hasidim on their baneful superstitions, their worship of angels and demons. He criticises the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the Rabbis, and scourges the shabby vanity of ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... about for a few moments, noting the timbered roof, the remains of old frescoes on the walls; the tomb of a knight who lay still and stiff, his head resting on his hand. I read an epitaph or two, with the faint cry of love and grief echoing through the stilted phraseology of the tomb, and then I ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... composed with the obvious purpose of surpassing them; in which attempt they succeed as much as a hollow hyperbole would in competition with a most fervent truth. Every tragical common-place is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase; and even the most common remark is forced and stilted. A total poverty of sentiment is dressed out with wit and acuteness. There is fancy in them, or at least a phantom of it; for they contain an example of the misapplication of every mental faculty. The authors have found out the secret of being diffuse, even to wearisomeness, and at the same ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... least denying that librarians are well enough,—that is, might be well enough,—but as things are going to-day, they all seem to contribute, somehow, toward making a library a conscious and stilted place. They hold one up to the surface of things, with books. They make impossible to a man those freedoms of the spirit—those best times of all in a library, when one feels free to find one's mood, when one gets hold of one's divining-rod, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... spy," whose mission was well understood, was hailed by the English nation with execration, modified only by a few stilted lines of greeting from Dryden, as laureate, and some indecent verses by St Evremond—efforts which the new beauty equally rewarded with gracious smiles and thanks. That the English frankly hated ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... consider whether it is formed on a reasonably good analogy and in consonance with the general spirit of the language. "Truthful," for example, is said to be an Americanism, and at one time gave offence on that account. It is not only a vast improvement on the stilted "veracious," but one of the prettiest and most thoroughly English ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... Euphuism. If we consider the manner in which these lords and ladies spent their time at court, filling idle hours with compliment, love-making, veiled jibe and swift retort; if we read our Euphues again, renewing our acquaintance with its absurdly elaborated and stilted style, its tireless winding of sentences round a topic without any advance in thought, its affectation of philosophy and classical learning; if we remember that to speak euphuistically was a coveted and studiously ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... flesh, the coat is rough and lusterless, and the skin tight and harsh, producing a condition termed "hidebound," with considerable "tucking up" of the abdomen. The horse shows a short, stilted, choppy gait, which later becomes stiffer and more restricted, while on standing a position simulating that in founder is assumed, with a noticeable drop to the croup. The animal at this stage usually lies down and remains recumbent for several days at ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... is not my fault if you have had teachers of taste so rococo as to bid you find masterpieces in the tiresome stilted tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Poetry of a court, not of a people, one simple novel, one simple stanza that probes the hidden recesses of the human heart, reveals the sores of this wretched social state, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... humane, so full of a brave delight in life, was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of circumstance, broke into the stilted literary world of 1742; and Murphy's Irish rhetoric is not too warm when he talks of this sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when his genius broke forth at once, with an effulgence superior to all the rays ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... foreign. French, was it not? The firelight was too fitful to tell. Carl switched on the light in the cluster of old iron lanterns above the table and frowned heavily at the paper. No, it was the precise, formal English of a foreigner, with here and there a ludicrous error among the stilted phrases. And as Carl read, a gust of wild, incredulous laughter echoed suddenly through the quiet room. Again he read, cursing the dizzy fever of his head. Houdania! Houdania! Where was Houdania? Surely the name was familiar. With a superhuman effort of will he clenched ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... the regulation phrase used by the rejected lover in the novel of the day. It had thrilled Deleah a hundred times as she had read it. There was nothing stilted or theatrical in the words as Charles Gibbon said them, but they brought home to her the unwelcome fact that he was in deadly earnest, that he loved her, and she was dealing him a cruel blow. She felt miserable, humiliated, ashamed. ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... This, delivered in the stilted tone of one who is half-quoting and half-improvising, was irresistibly funny, and ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... not look to heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he lives no more. The names which end in "us," seem to speak with lyric cadence. That measured cadence,—that tramp and march,—which are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so when compared with any other language,—make Latin a study in itself of mighty influence. The language alone, without the literature, would give one the thought of Rome. Man present in nature, commanding nature too ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... we shrank back from our first glimpse of a little swamp of foul brown water, backed up by the sand-brush, with trees in every stage of decay, fallen and tangled into a doleful thicket, through which the spider-legged Mangroves rose on stilted roots. We turned, in wholesome dread, to the white beach outside, and picked up—and, alas! wreck, everywhere wreck—shells—old friends in the cabinets at home—as earnests to ourselves that all was not a dream: delicate prickly Pinnae; 'Noah's-arks' in abundance; great Strombi, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... stateliness of De Quincey's, for instance, the vividness of Webster's, the oratorical character of Macaulay's, the ruggedness of Carlyle's, the poetical beauty of Emerson's, the humor of Irving's, and the brilliancy of Holmes's—the last lines from whom are purposely stilted, as we ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... world was not responsible for his son's bringing up. When the boy had learned it, and was willing to acknowledge the error of his ways, then, perhaps, he might kill the fatted calf—that is, of course, if the prodigal should return on all fours and with no stilted and untenable ideas about his rights—ideas that St. George, of course, was instilling into him every ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... him an indignant glance, just as Professor Enoch Crabbe, of the Riverside Academy, stepped up and greeted Joe. He was earnest in his congratulations, but his manner was so stilted that they looked at each other with an amused smile, as he stalked ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... each light spring from a detached capital which seems to have lost its shaft, but as there is no trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the corbel table of a form common in Portugal but rare elsewhere, where each corbel is something like the bows ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... &c. v.; beautified &c. 847; ornate, florid, rich, flowery; euphuistic[obs3], euphemistic; sonorous; high-sounding, big- sounding; inflated, swelling, tumid; turgid, turgescent; pedantic, pompous, stilted; orotund; high flown, high flowing; sententious, rhetorical, declamatory; grandiose; grandiloquent, magniloquent, altiloquent[obs3]; sesquipedal[obs3], sesquipedalian; Johnsonian, mouthy; bombastic; fustian; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in," was the only way he could put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make yourself at home—at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform the feat he urged ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... two's voyage in his flat-boat, and, in short, fascinated him. For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to poor Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... probably very just. Although her husband had many qualifications for writing prose fiction—insight into and appreciation of character, combined with much tragic force and a real gift for description—there is reason to think that he would have been stilted and artificial in dialogue, and altogether wanting in lightness of hand. Crabbe acquiesced in his wife's decision, and the novels were cremated without a murmur. A somewhat similar fate attended a set of Tales in ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... paper in his pocket and thoughtfully left the room. "The boy distrusts me," he soliloquized, "afraid I'll go back on any promise I make him, so he demands my offer in writing. Some more of his notions of business, Spanish style. Stilted and unnecessary. How like all of his kind he is! Ponderous in minor affairs, casual in major ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... duologue in their best stilted French ensued between him and Ammiani. It was pitched too high in a foreign tongue for Captain Gambier to descend from it, as he would fain have done, to ask the lady's name. They exchanged cards ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... learning, and continued so even after the later Emperors, by seizing the power of the State, had taken away the inspiration that comes from a love of freedom and had thus deprived the rhetorical art of practical value. The work of the schools then became highly stilted and artificial in character, and oratory then came to be cultivated largely as a fine art. [26] Men educated in these schools came to boast that they could speak with equal effectiveness on either side of any question, and the art came to ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... corrective and gives us the reverse side of the medal. Like the authors we have mentioned, he too writes of the evil days which he himself has passed through, as of a horrid nightmare from which he has just awakened; but from his letters, artificial and stilted as they are in some respects, we learn that there were still to be found those who had not ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... a different kind of magazine from any you have," replied the woman soberly, though sorely tempted to smile at the stilted, unnatural ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Elizabeth, a big white wedding-favour tied round the neck of each. To see these grave birds, none would have suspected how frequently they had been in the mince-pies that morning, though Popham had expressly ruled (in somewhat stilted language) that they should ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... alive, it moves so rapidly, that it is never so precise, so varied in its choice of words, as written material. The phraseology of written discourse sounds slightly or markedly stilted, bookish, if repeated by the tongue. This difference—though it may appear almost trifling—is apparent to everyone. Its recognition can be partly illustrated by the fact that after President Lowell and Senator Lodge ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... seen the tragedians and comedians you speak of, at least if the former are men in heavy stilted shoes, and clothes all picked out with gold bands; they have absurd head- pieces with vast open mouths, from inside which comes an enormous voice, while they take great strides which it seems to me must be dangerous in those ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... best, or third. To be 'Commended' was an honour she had ceased to hope for. She had written and re-written, and altered and corrected, until all the freshness and originality were gone, and the whole was becoming stiff and stilted, and she was incapable of seeing whether she was ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... a visiting princess to see and welcome her; yet this punctiliousness was not neglect, but Arab courtesy; and Ben Raana had talked to her of the world in general and Paris in particular, in French, which, though somewhat stilted and guttural, was curiously Parisian in wording and expression. He was one of the handsomest men she had ever seen, scarcely darker in colour than many Frenchmen of the Midi, and marvellously dignified, with his long black beard, his great, sad eyes whose overhanging line of ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... no brass band or military guard at his heels, and unostentatiously taking his seat by the side of the meanest citizen in a public conveyance; while this is the case, there still lingers in American men-of-war all the stilted etiquette and childish parade of the old-fashioned Spanish court of Madrid. Indeed, so far as the things that meet the eye are concerned, an American Commodore is by far a greater man than the President ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... is yet typical where the newer ideas, as so well grasped by Mr. Washington, are not accepted? In a class in English composition two boys, among others, had placed their written work upon the board, one having written upon 'Honor' in the most stilted language, with various historical references which meant nothing to himself or to his classmates—the whole paragraph evidently being drawn from some outside source; the other wrote upon 'My Trade—Blacksmithing'—and ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... whom—well known in England and America—Frederica Bremer, whose novels portrayed the home life of the middle class, Emelie Carlen, who idealized the fishermen and sea-faring folk of the West Coast, and Sophie von Knorring, who gave rather stilted descriptions of life in aristocratic circles. All three were very productive, and their novels count by dozens. Yet they failed to sustain the reputations their first works had won ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... single message as governor exhibited a knowledge of conditions and needs that must rank it among the ablest state-papers in the archives of the capitol. Unlike some of his predecessors, with their sentences of stilted formality, he wrote easily and with vigour. His message, however, was marred by the insincerity which shows the politician. He approved canals, but, by cunningly advising "the utmost prudence" in taking up new enterprises, he coolly disparaged the Chenango project; he shrewdly recommended ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... come, it was a bitter disappointment. It was stilted and commonplace. Netty regretted that her mother felt it necessary to absent herself from home, and she was very wretched because father was still far from well, although recovering slowly. He was in the hands of Dora Dundas, who had volunteered to nurse him; ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... not see the sign upon the gate?" he demanded angrily, in curiously stilted English. "Did you not see that trespassers are forbidden? You must go away at once! You will be prosecuted! You will be ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control and development which the child does not possess. There is no doubt that our development of charity methods has reached this pseudo-scientific and stilted stage. We have learned to condemn unthinking, ill-regulated kind-heartedness, and we take great pride in mere repression much as the stern parent tells the visitor below how admirably he is rearing the child, who is hysterically ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... suppress her fear, she walked, not sideways as always, but erect, her chest thrown out, which gave her figure a droll, stilted air of importance. Her shoes made a knocking sound on the ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... lists did not represent the relative scholarship of the Jew and herself. He knew more German than she. It was this feeling that prompted her to write him a note which brought an answer in formal and stilted English. ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... unreadable, and many of the blemishes in Byron's poetry are inseparable from the romantic style; they are to be found in Scott's metrical tales, which have much redundancy and some weak versification; while his chiefs and warriors often talk a stilted chivalrous language which would now be discarded as theatrical. Byron's personages have the high tragic accent and costume; yet one must admit that they have also a fierce vitality; and as for the crimes and passions of his Turkish pashas and Greek ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... lost its shaft, but as there is no trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the corbel table of a form common in Portugal but rare elsewhere, where each ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... and enjoying nature which belonged to few in his sophisticated age; it is unfortunate he should have spent his working hours in rendering the fruit of country rambles freshly observed into a cold and stilted diction. It suited the eighteenth century reader well, for not understanding nature herself he was naturally obliged ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... sometimes supply without extra charge; and now, half-awed, half-contemptuous, but wholly interested, he looked out upon the ordered English landscape wrapped in its Sunday peace, while I watched the wonder grow upon his face. Why were the cars so short and stilted? Why had every other freight-car a tarpaulin drawn over it? What wages would an engineer get now? Where was the swarming population of England he had read so much about? What was the rank of all those men on tricycles along the roads? When were we due at Plymouth ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... inclined to lack the broad outlook of one who is interested in many things; he acquires a jargon of his own; his mind runs in the narrow channel to which that jargon corresponds; the language he uses becomes stilted and dead. There is no tonic in the truths he tries to proclaim, no relevance to the rest of knowledge. In other words, what he has to say may be scientifically valuable, but he fails to convey it ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... chasm which her coquetry had already bridged, he paid her the quick, reckless, boyish compliment she invited—a little flowery, perhaps, possibly a trifle stilted, but very Southern; and she shrugged like a spoiled court beauty, nose uptilted, and swept him with a glance ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... death-bed moments of the girl he has ruined, the scene has a great moving power. Allowing for differences of taste and time, the vogue of the Novel in Richardson's day can easily be understood, and through all the stiffness, the stilted effect of manner and speech, and the stifling conventions of the entourage, a sweet and charming young woman in very piteous distress emerges to live in affectionate memory. After all, no poor ideal of womanhood is pictured in Clarissa. She is one of the heroines who are unforgettable, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... not hesitate any longer. The Chief Factor went to Mr. Archibald Clavering Gunter and the Home Publishing Company, and they made a very large sale of it. I never cared for the book however; it seemed stilted and amateurish, though some of its descriptions and some of its dialogues were, I think, as good as I can do; so, eventually, in the middle nineties, I asked Mr. Gunter to sell me back the rights in the book and give me control of it. This he did. I thereupon withdrew it from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that so many stories which are supposedly designed for children, make use of big and stilted words, complicated ideas, and tedious, long-winded explanations. Mother can read them so quickly by herself and then preserve the pith and point of them in her own manner of recounting. There is practically no limit to ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... to all invitations, there came only polite, stilted little letters of regret, in the children's round script. "Mother would d'rather we shouldn't go to a sin-gul party until we are young ladies!" Ellen would say cheerfully, if cross-examined on the subject, leaving it to the more tactful Joanna to add, ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... had been presented, some one told Miss Fenler that Mrs. Marvin wished to see her, and what had begun in a stilted manner, became ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... his work Cavalcanti shows many of the stilted mannerisms which were common to the troubadours; but such expressions as "to her, every virtue bows," and "the mind of man cannot soar so high, nor is it sufficiently purified by divine grace to understand and appreciate all her perfections," point the way toward a greater sincerity. His ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... were all smoking and exchanging compliments in the high-flown, stilted Samoan style, there entered the house a strapping young warrior, carrying a wickerwork cage, in which were two of the rare and famous Manu Mea (red-bird) of Samoa—the Didunculus or tooth-billed pigeon. These were the property of the young chief commanding ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... impossible not to admire the poem, though it is stilted and not to the present taste. The description of Britain as it now is and as it ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... you would be." Mazie, grown suddenly a bit stiff and stilted, was obviously trying to be very polite and "grown up." "There must be an awful lot to do here. Mother says she don't see ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... dashing haughty Tybalt of a brother; a wicked poor cousin, a pretty maid, and a fierce buccaneer. These people might pass three hours very well on the stage, and interest the audience hugely; but the author fails in filling up the outlines. His language is absurdly stilted, frequently careless; the reader or spectator hears a number of loud speeches, but scarce a dozen lines that seem to belong ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me, sir, to express my gratitude—" and so on through the stilted compliment of the day. Assurances from both sides over at last, and the chaise discharged, the one walked briskly down the unpaved street toward the Eagle, and the other entered quietly the bare and business-like room from whose window, last February, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... vividness of Webster's, the oratorical character of Macaulay's, the ruggedness of Carlyle's, the poetical beauty of Emerson's, the humor of Irving's, and the brilliancy of Holmes's—the last lines from whom are purposely stilted, as we ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... New York and London in his queer stilted way. He had been a fireman on board ship, a teacher of jiujitsu, a juggler, a quack dentist, Heaven knows what else. Driven by the conscientious inquisitiveness of his race, he had endured hardships, contempt and rough treatment with the smiling patience inculcated in the Japanese ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... her favourite's delinquency, it was not to be in his well-known handwriting and accompanied by his penitent tears and written caresses, but to be laid before her with all the formality of parchment and sealingwax, in the stilted diplomatic jargon of those "highly-mighty, very learned, wise, and very foreseeing gentlemen, my lords the States-General." Nothing could have ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... feverish impatience till the agony drew to an end, and the heroine died amid the sobs of ten thousand readers. Yet the story had power, and the central figure of Clarissa was impressive in its pathos and tragedy. The novel would still be readable if it were stripped of the stilted conversations and sentimental gush in which Richardson delighted; but that would leave precious little ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of Henry as the civilized brother I shall never forget. There was something in him to which the perfect style of the D'Orsay period appealed, and he spoke the stilted language with as much truth as he wore the cravat and the tight-waisted full-breasted coats. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Despite the stilted style and absurdly pompous descriptions, with an occasional terrible breakdown, Charlie's love of Nature, and especially of the animal creation, seems to have been most genuine. He speaks of "the wide ocean which when angry roars and clashes over the beach, but when calm crabs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... Janey, as she shot a sudden mischievous glance from the corners of her downcast eyes; "but I reckon he'll think more of me, ef he thinks I's goin' to die. I am not very happy," she resumed, in the same stilted tone as before; "an' las' night you came to me in a dream, an' tol' me you was dead. I done specks he'll cry like everything, when he reads dat," she interpolated, with a nod of triumph. "Sometimes I reckon we sha'n' never see each other no mo'; but you mus' never forget your ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... comic servant, who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of description, she slips unawares into ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... picture, and said, "I have just done it." Apelles replied, "Without your telling me, I should know it was painted quickly; I only wonder you haven't painted more such in the time." As then (for I now return from my digression), I advise to avoid stilted and bombastic language, so again do I urge to avoid a finical and petty style of speech; for tall talk is unpopular, and petty language makes no impression. And as the body ought to be not only sound ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... the formal style and stilted language of the notes, and were amazed at the information that they were to make a longer ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... quarterly. It is the first fruit of a spirited and apparently well-matured plan set on foot by students in Yale College, and heartily entered into by those of several other institutions. Its objects are clearly stilted in the well-written Prospectus and Introduction. They are briefly these:—"To record the history, promote the intellectual improvement, elevate the moral aims, liberalize the views, and unite the sympathies of Academical, Collegiate, and Professional ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... not my fault if you have had teachers of taste so rococo as to bid you find masterpieces in the tiresome stilted tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Poetry of a court, not of a people, one simple novel, one simple stanza that probes the hidden recesses of the human heart, reveals the sores of this wretched social state, denounces ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the Cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing into the House ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... the starting-point of a speculative theory, in his mind, that the late marquis had been a very amiable foreigner, with an inclination to take life easily and a sense that it was difficult for the husband of the stilted little lady by the fire to do so. But if he had taken little comfort in his wife he had taken much in his two younger children, who were after his own heart, while Madame de Bellegarde had paired ...
— The American • Henry James
... were conscious of a pleasant surprise. Against the simplicity and pathos of the old ballad Buononcini's stilted artificialities sounded tame and monotonous. When Lavinia finished applause filled the room. She had to ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... read Meredith—the novels, I mean. One of Our Conquerors, he vowed, was the finest thing ever written. He scoffed at me for liking Diana and Richard Feverel better, because they were easier. And now, nothing's bad enough for Meredith's 'stilted nonsense'—'characters without a spark of life in them'—'horrible mannerisms'—you should hear him. Except the poems—ah, except the poems! He daren't touch them. I say—do you know the 'Hymn to Colour'?" The girl's ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... unsolved in itself; for he that wants judgment in the liberty of his fancy may as well shew the want of it in its confinement." [Footnote: Preface to Four New Plays: ib. 498.] Besides, he adds in effect on the next page, so far from "confining the fancy" rhyme is apt to lead to turgid and stilted writing. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... of lace—goodness! Who are you?" asked the girl, her stilted, saleslady manner changing to amazement with ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... pedestal. [ref] escalate (increase) 35, 102, 194. take up, drag up, fish up; dredge. stand up, rise up, get up, jump up; spring to one's feet; hold oneself, hold one's head up; drawn oneself up to his full height. Adj. elevated &c. v.; stilted, attollent[obs3], rampant. Adv. on stilts, on the shoulders of, on one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... but they were by no means universally so, for a form frequently found is one in which the spring of the arch does not take place from the abacus, or upper member of the capital, but at some distance above it and when it assumes this form it is called a "stilted" arch, suggested by some authorities to have been unintentional and the result of imperfect construction or planning. ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... text was most excellent, and in this respect his operas have served as models in the traditions of the French stage from that time until now. As a musician, however, he was clever rather than deep, and the music is often monotonous and rather stilted. Nevertheless, his operas held the stage for many years after the death of their author, and occasional revivals have taken place at intervals, even after the advance in taste and musical knowledge had effectually quenched their ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... Wordsworth; in The Rape of the Lock no less than in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted conventions of the late literary epic. The Iliad is the story of a quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the immediate ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... address more than one epistle of sympathy—nearest and dearest to the deceased. Usually one letter is sufficient, but sometimes it may occur that you feel that you should also write to others. Make it as natural as possible. Avoid all stilted phrases and studied efforts at consolation. A few words is all that is necessary. If you have been on intimate terms with the family wire them your sympathy, and write a week ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... Mr. Gilmore by the same post as will take this, and have just told him the bare truth. What else could I tell him? I have said something horribly stilted about esteem and friendship, which I would have left out, only that my letter seemed to be heartless without it. He has been to me as good as a man could be; but was it my fault that I could not love him? If you knew how I tried,—how ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... pretty," murmured Lysbeth, through whose bewildered brain the stilted and meaningless words buzzed like bees in an empty hive, "though I am sure I cannot guess how you find the heart in such times as these to write poetry to fine ladies whom you ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Jesuit order,[213] against his father's passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house; and when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a "particular attention" to himself on God's part, and wrote letters of stilted good advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon became so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of his brothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... it is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett is worthy of the stilted encomium which has mopped and mowed about him. It is not a matter of opinion as to whether Mr. Crockett has or has not rivalled Sir Walter. It is a matter of absolute fact, about which no two men who are even moderately ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... the ground. He stooped down and examined her, and stood up again. Then he eyed the company of travellers with a hard cold eye, and spoke deliberately and in a low voice. His manner of speech was somewhat stilted and precise, and scarcely what might have ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... It was all very stilted, almost melodramatic, but my father was so much in earnest that I readily gave the promise he asked. With a look of relief he took a package from his pocket and handed ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... feared for his safety every moment, and at the same time to give them a clear idea of his life. Without boasting, modestly and naturally, he describes the adventures of an aviator in the great World War. It could well serve as a guide to those who are studying aviation. Although he has avoided the stilted tone of the school-master, still his accomplishments as a knight of the air must fascinate any who know aviation. For the aviators as well as their machines have accomplished wonders. They are rightly called the eyes of the army—these ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... blinded himself in these vain, silly vaporings, the result of a false training and the reading of stilted romances. The thought of studying the girl's character, of doing and being in some degree what would be agreeable to her, never occurred to him. That kind of good sense rarely does occur to the egotistical, who often fairly exasperate those whom they would ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... great composer Gluck, whose genius was destined to have such a profound influence on French music, came to Paris with his "Iphigenie en Aulide," by invitation of the Dauphiness Marie Antoinette, who had formerly been his musical pupil. The stiff and stilted works of Sully and Rameau had thus far ruled the French stage without any competition, except from the Italian operettas performed by the company of Les Bouffons, and the new school of French operatic comedy developed into form by the lively genius of Gretry. When ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... I dare to hope that—" I began in stilted gallantry, cut short by her opening eyes and smile. "Of course I like you, Mr. Renault. Can you not see that? It's a pity if you can not, as all the others tease me so about ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... later Emperors, by seizing the power of the State, had taken away the inspiration that comes from a love of freedom and had thus deprived the rhetorical art of practical value. The work of the schools then became highly stilted and artificial in character, and oratory then came to be cultivated largely as a fine art. [26] Men educated in these schools came to boast that they could speak with equal effectiveness on either side of any question, and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... and yet owned a villa and $25,000 a year income. However that may be, it was a brilliant match for the son of the slaughter-house inspector, and the wedding took place in the palace of a cardinal, the Archbishop of Bologna. As one poet wrote, in stilted Latin: ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... youth, when he was persuaded to write "Oliver Twist" in a hurry, he fell far below his own standard. I have lately read the book after many years, and while I find nearly all the comic parts admirable, some of the serious portions strike me as being so curiously stilted and bad that I can hardly bring myself to believe that Dickens touched them. An affectionate student of his books can almost always account for the bad patches in Dickens by collating the novels with the letters ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... laugh by his amusing talk, kept his blue devils at bay, sent him first copies of his books, and sympathised with his views on political matters. M. de Hanski was also much flattered by Balzac's friendship for his wife, and would finish a polite and stilted epistle by saying that he need trouble Balzac no more, as he knows his wife is at the same time writing him one of her long chattering letters. Even when, by sad mischance, two of Balzac's love-letters fell into M. de Hanski's hands, and the great writer was forced to stoop to the pretence ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... it was not a "social movement" in itself. This, however, is anticipating the future, whereas the following paper on "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" should have a chance to speak for itself. It is perhaps too late in the day to express regret for its stilted title. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Georgian London? What better companion could he have had in his scheme of investigation than Mr. Thomas Jones, recently come up from the West Country? For a vision of Corinthian London could he have done better than take up Conan Doyle's "Rodney Stone," with its vivid pictures of the stilted eccentrics who hovered about the Prince-Regent, the coffee-houses thronged with England's warriors of the land and sea, and the haunts of the hard-faced ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... of her own charms, but frankly delighted with her success. She was still dressed in the ridiculous hoops and panniers pertaining to her part, and the powdered peruke hid the charm of her own hair; the costume gave a certain stilted air to her unaffected personality, which, by this very sense of contrast, was ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... finger," says Miss Priscilla, addressing Monica, "of which he was very proud. He was at this time about fifty-three, but used to pose as a man of thirty-nine. One evening showing the ring to your mother, then quite a girl, he said to her, in his stilted way, 'This jewel has been in our family for fifty years.' 'Ah! did you buy it, Mr. Fitzgerald?' asks your mother, in her sweet innocent way. Ha, ha, ha!" laughs Miss Priscilla, "you should have seen ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... "I can not describe her any other way. She may strike you as a bit staccato and stilted sometimes; but it is natural to ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... This radical defect in the plan is not counterbalanced by any felicity in the execution. Many of the incidents are more than improbable, they are impossible. The style, likewise, is labored, and the conversations combine the two undesirable peculiarities of being both stilted and dull. The characters, female or male, are in no case successfully drawn. The inferior ones, introduced to amuse, serve only to depress the reader. The hero in the course of the tale does several absurd things; but he ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... nave, and wandered about for a few moments, noting the timbered roof, the remains of old frescoes on the walls; the tomb of a knight who lay still and stiff, his head resting on his hand. I read an epitaph or two, with the faint cry of love and grief echoing through the stilted phraseology of the tomb, and then I went back to ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... externals," he thought, "the provincial air that one might expect, although her ideas are not only provincial, but prim, obtained, no doubt, from some goody-good books that she has read in the remote region wherein she has developed so remarkably. She has some stilted ideal of womanhood which she is seeking to attain, and the more unnatural the ideal, the more attractive, no doubt, it ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... space was a flat sandy stretch, ending in a reedy marsh at the water's edge. The line of cultivation ended far to the south and north of it, though the soil was as arable as any bordering the Nile. A great number of marsh geese and a few stilted waders flew up or plunged into the water with discordant cries and flapping of wings as the presence of the young men disturbed the solitude. The sedge was wind-mown, and there were numberless prints ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... down her name for election to the Royal Academy. Her portrait of herself created such a sensation that her election became assured. She had to paint the usual formal tableau de reception, and chose Allegory, painting her "La Paix ramenant l'Abondance," which, though a somewhat stilted affair such as Academies demand, is full of charm—and is still to be seen at the Louvre. She was received into the Academy on the last day of May in 1783 in her twenty-eighth year, and thenceforward had the valuable privilege of the right to ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... considering the cheap literature which floods the English and American publics week by week and month by month. I am afraid that, when at home in Chelsea, where even the idlers read Swinburne and Lord de Tabley, I had grown accustomed to the stilted point of view, calling novelettes "trashy" and beneath an intellectual man's consideration. Well, since this particular trash forms the staple brain food in the Mercantile Marine, I must needs look into ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... affluent in "duplicates," my plan being to get a large card and then cover it with specimens of the shell, in serried ranks. I also called literature to my aid, and produced several little books containing labored descriptions of my collection, couched, so far as possible, in the stilted and formal phraseology of the conchological works to which I had access, but with occasional outbursts after a style of my own. Here is a chapter from one of them; a pen-and-ink portrait of the shell is prefixed to ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... unusually considerate of Ronnie to curb the glowing words he must have longed to pour forth. The very effort of that curbing, had reduced him to a somewhat stilted adjective. ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... straight up all over his head, and a haughtiness in his voice, in all his movements, in his every attitude which plainly showed the esteem in which he held himself. They were people who had a strict etiquette for everything, and whose feelings seemed always stilted, like their words. ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... a bit of revelation, and as he had so repeatedly impressed on me that the things were mine by right of discovery, I wrote rather a pointed note to him mentioning that he seemed to have been making rather free with my property. Promptly came back a stilted letter beginning, "Doctor Coppinger regrets" and so on, and with it the English translation of the wax-upon-talc MSS. He "quite admitted" my claim, and "trusted that the profits of publication would be a sufficient reimbursement for ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the application of its stilted jargon to the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... obvious purpose of surpassing them; in which attempt they succeed as much as a hollow hyperbole would in competition with a most fervent truth. Every tragical common-place is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase; and even the most common remark is forced and stilted. A total poverty of sentiment is dressed out with wit and acuteness. There is fancy in them, or at least a phantom of it; for they contain an example of the misapplication of every mental faculty. The authors have found out ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... to fit the exuberance of Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make yourself at home—at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... very erect, speaking with formality, with a certainly stilted, "learned by rote" manner, very different from his usual ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... Mother,' 'The Lame Lover,'—such names as that she was aware would be useless now. 'Mary Jane Walker,' if she could be very simple, would do, or 'Blanche De Veau,' if she were able to maintain throughout a somewhat high-stilted style of feminine rapture. But as she considered that she could best deal with rapid action and strange coincidences, she thought that something more startling and descriptive would better suit her purpose. After an hour's thought a name did occur to her, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... literary pretensions. The most elaborate and the best known of them is his Farewell Address, issued on his retirement from the presidency in 1796. In the composition of this he was assisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It is wise in substance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in expression. The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the United States, and his Diary, kept from 1755-85, should also be mentioned as important sources for a ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... If we consider the manner in which these lords and ladies spent their time at court, filling idle hours with compliment, love-making, veiled jibe and swift retort; if we read our Euphues again, renewing our acquaintance with its absurdly elaborated and stilted style, its tireless winding of sentences round a topic without any advance in thought, its affectation of philosophy and classical learning; if we remember that to speak euphuistically was a coveted and studiously cultivated accomplishment, and that to pun, to utter caustic jests, to let fall neat ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... so humane, so full of a brave delight in life, was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of circumstance, broke into the stilted literary world of 1742; and Murphy's Irish rhetoric is not too warm when he talks of this sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when his genius broke forth at once, with an effulgence superior to all the rays of light it had before emitted, like the sun ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... gives us the reverse side of the medal. Like the authors we have mentioned, he too writes of the evil days which he himself has passed through, as of a horrid nightmare from which he has just awakened; but from his letters, artificial and stilted as they are in some respects, we learn that there were still to be found those who had not bowed the ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... description you gave of his appearance;—a sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white neckcloth, and stilted up on his ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... discourse full of precedents, quotations, classic scenes, and historic allusions, sometimes savoring of schoolboy recitations, sophomoric and declamatory, stilted and grotesque. Yet he is in the list of wonderful men. Others thought and he was led to fancy some resemblance in his feature and person to Edmund Burke, which the portrait of Mr. Burke might actually suggest; but this resemblance ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... avoid the repetition of the same word. To find four different terms for nearly the same idea "difference," "odds," "distinction," and "contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. While it is true that the term "euphuism" has come to be applied to any stilted, antithetical style that pays more attention to the manner of expressing a thought than to its worth, we should remember that English prose style has advanced because some writers, like Lyly, emphasized the importance of artistic form. Shakespeare occasionally employs ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... in the ballroom, Lady Blakeney now took up her stand on the exquisitely decorated landing, ready to greet her guests. She had a smile and a pleasant word for all, as, in a constant stream, the elite of London fashionable society began to file past her, exchanging the elaborate greetings which the stilted mode of the ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to converse with her—in a stilted, incorrect way—on all but the most abstract of subjects. It was a fine language. I liked it, as I liked everything else about Zyobor. The upper earth seemed far away and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... perhaps suggested the extreme of accuracy in speech. But as has already been said, any degree of overnicety, of pedantic elegance, of stilted correctness, is especially irritating to a sensitive ear. Excessive biting off of syllables, flipping of the tongue, showing of the teeth, twisting of the lips, is carrying excellence to a fault. The inactive jaw, tongue, and lips must be made mobile, and in the working away of clumsiness and slovenliness ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... written by the kindly editor, and full of wholesome advice, cut like a surgeon's knife in some desperate case when it is a question whether the patient can endure the heroic treatment necessary. Haldane's stilted and unnatural tales had been projected into being by such fiery and violent means that they might almost be termed volcanic in their origin; but the fused mass which was the result, resembled scoria or cinders rather than ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... short, that appeared during that sudden outburst of first vigorous growth might bring delight into her solitary life, but not flexibility of mind or body. She stood strong and straight like some forest tree, lightning-blasted but still erect. Her dignity became a stilted manner, her social supremacy led her into affectation and sentimental over-refinements; she queened it with her foibles, after the usual fashion of those who allow their ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... anew the translator has endeavored to retain the characteristics of the style of the early chap-book versions, while evading the pompous, stilted language and Johnsonian phraseology so fashionable when ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... wherever sarcasm is required, the same depth of feeling, wherever feeling is called for, the same refusal to make a parade of feeling even where it is shown. Never trivial, never vulgar, never feeble, never stilted, never diffuse, Lockhart is one of the very best recent specimens of that class of writers of all work, which since Dryden's time has continually increased, is increasing, and does not seem likely to diminish. The growth may or may not be matter for ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... proclaim Nought of women but the shame? Quit, oh, quit, at least awhile, Perdita's too luscious smile; Wanton Worsley, stilted Daly, Heroines of each blackguard alley; Better sure record in story Such as shine their sex's glory! Herald! haste, with me proclaim Those of literary fame. Hannah More's pathetic pen, Painting high th' impassion'd ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... again lapse into sentiment, and he made himself fairly agreeable, in his somewhat stilted fashion. Ida accepted his attention with a charming unconsciousness; but she was perfectly conscious of Urania's vexation, and that gave a zest to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Swedenborg Universe, I am yet confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in a conversation once or twice in five years, if so often; and so we find or pick what we call our proper path, though it be only from stone to stone, or from island to island, in a very rude, stilted, and violent fashion. With such solitariness and frigidities, you may judge I was glad to see Clough here, with whom I had established some kind of robust working-friendship, and who had some great permanent ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... such officers were indicted while they continued to obey their paroles, and such was the logic of his argument and the force of his character that those indictments were soon after quashed. So that he penned no idle platitude; he fashioned no stilted epigrams; he spoke the earnest convictions of an honest heart when he said, "Let us have peace." [Applause.] He never tired of giving unstinted praise to worthy subordinates for the work they did. Like ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... that sounded stilted," he returned. "I explained myself poorly. It is not easy for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... it, guided ever by Fifanti's lady. And whatever we read by way of divergence, ever and anon we would come back to the stilted, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... been familiar to the entire theatre-going public, including the poorer and less educated spectators who sat farthest from the actors. Since most of the audience was grouped above the stage and at a considerable distance, the actors, in order not to appear dwarfed, were obliged to walk on stilted boots. A performer so accoutred could not move impetuously or enact a scene of violence; and this practical limitation is sufficient to account for the measured and majestic movement of Greek tragedy, and the convention ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the American school, a tendency to pose and be self-conscious, to smirk even, if the word may be permitted, especially when advancing to the footlights to receive a full measure of applause, were fatal to such sentiment as even so stilted a play could be made to yield. It was but too evident that Parthenia was at all times more concerned with the fall of her drapery than with the effect of her speeches, and that gesture, action, intonation—everything which constitutes a living individuality ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... appears that besides the composed and formal dignity of phrase which alone the public knows in published state papers and official correspondence, there is also an official language of wrath and retort not at all artificial or stilted, but quite homelike and human in ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... is the end, and because, by the events foregone, the mind is prepared for it. But these men will have nothing but fifth acts; and seem to skip, as unworthy, all the circumstances leading to them. This, however, is part of the scheme—the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime, that our teachers have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and other antihumbuggists should heartily, according to the strength that is in them, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the residents here "Transcendentalists." You may judge from the name that they must be either very good or very bad people, but they represent people of education who are a little "high stilted" in their religious views, and do not take in all the wonderful Mosaic traditions. At least, this is as near as I can explain it to you. It is the fashion to call every one who has any independent notions a Transcendentalist, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... not even give utterance to the ideas that did, not infrequently, act on his brain, nor hardly to the human tenderness which was his normal attitude towards mankind. But he did go on writing fresh ones, stilted and commonplace as they were. Mental activity was less of a burden to him than bodily activity, and he had kept himself up to that part of what he thought to ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... notwithstanding the ingenious measures he had resorted to in order to acquire more information about her, when suddenly the murmur of a human voice attracted his attention. He heard whispers, the complaining tones of a woman's voice mingled with entreaties, smothered laughter, sighs, and half-stilted exclamations of surprise; but above them all, the woman's voice prevailed. Saint-Aignan stopped to look about him; he perceived from the greatest surprise that the voices proceeded, not from the ground, but from the branches of the trees. As he glided along under the covered walk, ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hang a man," argued Hall, "because he doesn't live in accordance with our stilted notions. Professor Young says that the girl is a genius—that she has a beautiful voice. I promised that if he took up—a contribution for the family that I would ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Catholic auspices; some of its dialogue was in |144| the Tyrolese patois and racy and humorous, other parts, and particularly the speeches of Mary and Joseph—out of respect for these holy personages—had been rewritten in the eighteenth century in a very stilted and undramatic style. Some simple shepherd plays are said to be still presented in the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... execution in this particular is, for Titian, curiously small and wanting in breadth. Especially the projecting rock, with its fringe of half-bare shrubs profiled against the sky, recalls the backgrounds of the Scuola del Santo frescoes. The noble type and the stilted attitude of the St. Joseph suggest the St. Mark of the Salute. The frank note of bright scarlet in the jacket of the thick-set young shepherd, who calls up rather the downrightness of Palma than the idyllic charm of Giorgione, is to be found again in the Salute ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of the cases of flesh and blood, with the masterly pathos of designed simplicity. And Weyburn was Cuper's Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of artifice to raise emotion, loathing of the affected, the stilted, the trumpet of speech—always excepting school-exercises in the tongues, the unmasking of a Catiline, the address of a General, Athenian or other, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and pride. At the conclusion of this song the measure changes to a march, and the chorus turn to welcome the triumphant king. Agamemnon enters, and behind him the veiled and silent figure of a woman. After greeting the gods of his House, the King, in brief and stilted phrase, acknowledges the loyalty of the chorus, but hints at much that is amiss which it must be his first charge to set right. Hereupon enters Clytemnestra, and in a speech of rhetorical exaggeration tells of ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... world. As fortune would have it, too, the House was full when he spoke, and a great deal of interest was attached to the Bill that was being discussed. That was why he was so disappointed that his language, especially during the first few minutes, was so poor and stilted. He imagined, too, that he had been listened to respectfully, and even cordially, because it was his maiden speech. As a matter of fact, however, Paul had made a great impression. Something of his history was known, and his striking appearance told in his favour. Indeed, it was remarked ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... Merrill's house, the three girls and the one young man were seated around the fire, and their talk, Merrill as it had begun, was becoming minute by minute more stilted. This was largely the fault of Susan, who would not be happy until she had taken Jane upstairs and left Mr. Worthington and Cynthia together. This matter had been arranged between the sisters before supper. Susan found her opening at last, and upbraided Jane for her unfinished theme; Jane, having ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a dear!" Norah said. "I adore her stilted little expressions, such as 'busy with my needle or pen,' instead of sewing or writing, and with it all she is at heart ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... of his elaborate courtesy and his purposely stilted phrasing, the Sepoy said: "If the sapphire was argument, this was certainly conviction. The moral barrier which could withstand the assault of the first, must, unquestionably, have yielded to the insidious attack ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... who could deliver his judgment in this stilted style of pompous word-building, in such circumstances as were then existing, would have required a powdered footman in spotless plush to precede him out of a house on fire. I must confess to a little misgiving as to the authenticity of this ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... second begins with a vowel, as in eats apples, not at all, an ox, etc. On the other hand, too evident an effort to secure the proper enunciation of the sound elements should be avoided, since a stilted mode of ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... valuable ornament for songs and lyric poetry generally; but from poetry which is actually to be acted on the English stage it takes away the most indispensable of all qualities, the natural, life-like tone of real speech. Notice this in the difference between the two extracts below. Observe how stilted and artificial the first one seems; and see how the second combines the melody and dignity of poetry with the simple ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... possibly enjoy a luncheon-no matter how carefully the menu has been prepared, no matter how delightful the environment—if there are awkward lapses in the conversation; if there are moments of painful, embarrassing silence; or if the conversation is stilted, affected ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... at all, let us just point out the chief claims of the above pleasing piece of composition. In the first place, it is perfectly stilted and unnatural; the dialogue and the sentiments being artfully arranged, so as to be as strong and majestic as possible. Our dear Cat is but a poor illiterate country wench, who has come from cutting her husband's throat; and yet, see! she talks and ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... acting, a most important point is the study of elocution; and in elocution one great difficulty is the use of sufficient force to be generally heard without being unnaturally loud, and without acquiring a stilted delivery. The advice of the old actors was that you should always pitch your voice so as to be heard by the back row of the gallery—no easy task to accomplish without offending the ears of the front of the orchestra. And ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... roses—old-fashioned damask roses, streaked with red and white—which, for the sake of a Court Beauty, there besieged with her father, he carried to the house; falling, however, struck by a chance bullet, or shot perhaps by one of his own party. A few of the young Officer's verses, written in the stilted fashion of the time, and almost unreadable now, have been preserved. The lady's portrait hangs in the white drawing room at Bligh; a simpering, faded figure, with ringlets and drop-pearls, and a dress of ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... for my stilted aseptic advice and it occurred to me, suddenly, that perhaps there are many things yet undreamed of ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... who were near enough to observe the visitors closely soon began to look upon Richard and Nathan as a couple of quaint, harmless, exceedingly well-bred old gentlemen, rather provincial in appearance and a little stilted in their manners, who, before the evening was over, would, perhaps, become tired of the gayety, ask to be excused, and betake themselves to bed. All of which would be an eminently proper proceeding in view of their extreme age and general infirmities, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... is the general word for that which is less than the whole: as, the whole is equal to the sum of all its parts.... Portion is often used in a stilted way where part would be simpler and better; portion has always some suggestion of allotment or assignment: as, this is my portion; a portion of Scripture. 'Father, give me the portion of ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
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