"Gaudy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... couth I sing of love, and tune my pype Unto my plaintive pleas in verses made: Tho would I seeke for Queene-apples unrype, To give my Rosalind; and in Sommer shade Dight gaudy Girlonds was my common trade, To crowne her golden locks: but yeeres more rype, And losse of her, whose love as lyfe I wayd, Those weary ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... There were two Argus pheasants, a male and female—the male alone being decorated superbly. The Argus belongs to the same family as the peacock, but is not so gaudy in colouring, and therefore, perhaps, somewhat more pleasing. Its tail is formed chiefly by an enormous elongation of the two tail quills, and of the secondary wing feathers, no two of which are exactly the ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... just in time. The slight knoll had been left not a mile to the southwest. I heard My Lady catch breath, felt her hand find mine as we lay almost touching. Rounding the knoll there appeared a file of mounted figures; by their robes and blankets, their tufted lances and gaudy shields, yes, by the very way they sat ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... Week is a gay, gaudy, and profitable institution. During the six days of its course the city habitually maintains the atmosphere of a three-ringed circus, the bustle of a county fair, and the business ethics of the Bowery. Allured by widespread advertising and encouraged by special rates on the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... miniature green plateaus, bordered by conical hills, covered to the very summit by mimosas and huge cactuses, alive with large hordes of antelopes (the agazin), which, bounding from rock to rock, scared by their frolics the countless host of huge baboons. The valley itself, graced by the presence of gaudy-feathered and sweet-singing birds, echoed to the shrill cry of the numerous guinea-fowls, so tame, that the repeated reports of our fire-arms did not disturb them ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... Cornish people that I met with in Cornwall. The streets of Helston are a trifle larger and a trifle duller than the streets of Liskeard; the church is comparatively modern in date, and superlatively ugly in design. A miserable altar-piece, daubed in gaudy colours on the window above the communion-table, is the only approach to any attempt at embellishment in the interior. In short, the town has nothing to offer to attract the stranger, but a public festival—a sort of barbarous carnival—held there annually on the ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... and their clothing, while nearly the same as that of the Sauks, was of a darker and more sober color. They had no beads or ornaments; their leggings, moccasins, and the fringe of their hunting shirts, were less gaudy in color than those of the other party. Their moccasins were well worn, from which it was fair to infer they ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... gone home very quietly, after doing all they could to help Colonel Kent and Madame Bernard. "The Yellow Peril" chugged along at the lowest speed with all its gaudy banners torn down. Neither spoke until they passed the spot where the red touring car lay on its side in the ditch, and four or five dogs, still hungry and hopeful, wrangled over a few ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... than the rest of the Wits, and more of a Scholar. Tom thought himself as happy with a retailer of damnation in an obscure hole, as another to have gone to the devil with all the splendour of a fine equipage. 'Twas not the brightness of Caelia's eyes, nor her gaudy trappings that attracted his heart. Cupid might keep his darts to himself; Tom always carried his fire about him. If he had but a mouth, two eyes, and a nose, he never enquired after the regularity of her dress, or features. He always brought a good stomach with him, and used but little ceremony ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... as Virgil bound the Muses, to the footstool of thrones, to flatter the frail humanity thereon with the incense of divine honors. Homer's Muses, like true Americans, pay no higher honors to the diadem on the king's head than to the gaudy plumage of the peacock's tail. Young America would derive great advantages from an intimate acquaintance with Homer. He wrote in a language which gives to all the arts and sciences their technical terms. Hence, the previous study of the Greek makes the acquaintance ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... interest,—albeit using such elements with magnificent strength and skill. Let us be grateful that Hawthorne does not so covet the applause of the clever club-man or of the unconscious vulgarian, as to junket about in caravan, carrying the passions with him in gaudy cages, and feeding them with raw flesh; grateful that he never loses the archangelic light of pure, divine, dispassionate ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... that has taken the gaudy fly, felt a check and recognised that a Power had her in hand, recognised in the light-going and fair-speaking Pinckney something of adamant, a will not to be ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Sutherland, of Orkney, and of the northern Hebrides generally—though, for the purposes of the agriculturist, vegetation languishes, and wheat is never reared—are by many degrees richer in wild flowers than the fat loamy meadows of England. They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as in leaves. Little of the rare is to be detected in these meadows, save, perhaps, that in those of western Sutherland a few Alpine plants may be found at a greatly lower level than elsewhere ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... filled by an assemblage of lords and ladies, arrayed in such gorgeous apparel that it would need a far better milliner than the writer to describe it; all the colours of the rainbow were there, and the men had their share of the gaudy hues as well as the women. Hugo was quite a sight, as he sat upon a dais, at the head of the table, with his hopeful son—the hero ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... be bought. The koolitch is a sweet kind of wheaten bread, circular in form, in which there are raisins. It is ornamented with candied sugar and usually has the Easter salutation on it: "Christos vozkress"—"Christ is risen"—the whole surmounted with a large gaudy red-paper rose. The paska is made of cords, pyramidal in shape, and contains a few raisins, and, like the former, has also a paper rose inserted on the top. These are the sine qua non for the due observance of Easter, but what ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... me with the elite if passion is what they respect," Beth said. "Passion at the best—honourable passion—is but the efflorescence of a mere animal function. The passion that has no honourable object is a gaudy, unwholesome weed, rapid of growth, swift and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Moriarty stretched himself again and yawned. He looked at the illustrated poster which hung on a board beside the barrack door. It proclaimed the attractiveness of service in the British army. It moved him to no interest, because he had seen it every day since he first came to Ballymoy. The gaudy uniforms depicted on it excited no envy in his mind. His own uniform was of sober colouring, but it taught him all he wanted to know about the discomfort of such clothes in hot weather. His eyes wandered from the poster and remained fixed for some ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... no different from all other small town business districts. The Gem Theater vied with the Star and the Orpheum in lavish display of gaudy posters advertising pictures that were "coming to-morrow," and in two weeks of observation the investigators learned what sort of moving pictures Delafield demanded, or, at least what sort it got. They took note of the ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... a rest was made, and again where some animal went out of the beaten path. Bits of the Indians' finery, too, were noted every once in a while—a bit of gaudy bead trimming, a discarded moccasin or ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... to a quarrel; but being in, Bear 't that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... and the cab was still moving more slowly over the rough surface of partly paved streets, and by single rows of new houses standing at different angles to each other in fields covered with ash-heaps and brick-kilns. Here and there the gaudy lights of a drug-store, and the forerunner of suburban civilization, shone from the end of a new block of houses, and the rubber cape of an occasional policeman showed in the light of the lamp-post that he hugged ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... Sometimes they were permitted to pass in their wares only through a window in the outer part of the fort. A beaver skin was the regular standard of value, and in return for their skins the savages received all manner of gaudy trinkets and also useful merchandise, chiefly knives, hatchets, guns, ammunition, and blankets. But before the end of the eighteenth century the activity of the Nor'westers had forced the Hudson's Bay Company out of its aristocratic slothfulness. The ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... Where scarcely a second before she had been on the outer fringe of the crowd, she now appeared to be in the very center of it. Women were pushing up behind her, women who wore shawls as she did, only the shawls were mostly of gaudy colors; and men pushed up behind her, mostly men of swarthy countenance, who wore circlets of gold in their ears; and, brushing her skirts, seeking vantage points, ragged, ill-clad children wriggled and wormed their way deeper into the press. It was a crowd composed ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... been represented by the poet, even though the sceptical spirit of his contemporaries should have deterred him from giving it out for real; and the real ignominious martyrdom of this betrayed and abandoned heroine would have agitated us more deeply than the gaudy and rose-coloured one which, in contradiction to history, Schiller has invented for her. Shakspeare's picture, though partial from national prejudice, still possesses much more historical truth and profundity. However, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... harmonize better with the curves and style of furniture than do the geometrical designs of the Caucasian rugs. Savonnerie and Aubusson rugs may also be used, if chosen with care, and the plain carpets and rugs mentioned later are a far better choice than gaudy Orientals of modern make, or ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... reckless kind—more famous along the Pecos and Rio Grande than more really desperate men. His attire proclaimed a vanity seldom seen in any Westerner except of that unusual brand, yet it was neither gaudy or showy. ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... self-respect is well worth the cost and labour of the mission. The Officers told me that they meet with but little success in the case of those women who are in their bloom and earning great incomes. It can scarcely be otherwise, for what has the Army to offer them in place of their gaudy, glittering life of ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... and intricate a pattern. If it was cloudy, still, glancing over the cornfields, just as you turned partly round to look, there seemed a brilliant streak of sunshine across them. This was a broad band of charlock: its light yellow is so gaudy and glaring in the mass that as it first catches the eye it seems as if the land were lit up by the sun. After it the buttercups appear of a quiet colour, like dead gold ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... the shrill summons of the mother; and the mother herself, by a suggestive circumstance which might have afforded matter of thought to a more experienced observer than Archie, wrapped in a shawl nearly identical with Kirstie's, but a thought more gaudy and conspicuously newer. At the sight, Kirstie grew more tall - Kirstie showed her classical profile, nose in air and nostril spread, the pure blood came in her cheek evenly in ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shines with gaudy pride, By flowery vale and mountain side, And shepherds waste the sunny hours By cooling streams, and bushy bowers; While I, a victim to despair, Avoid the sun's offensive glare, And in sequester'd wilds deplore The ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... found himself in front of an old-fashioned brick building standing almost significantly in the shadow of the Tombs. He paused for a moment to wonder at the enormous gaudy sign, "Levy & Whitcher's Law Offices," running across the front and side of the edifice, which impressed him with a sense of its vulgarity. The door creaked as Covington opened it and passed on into the dingy offices—even dingier than the nature of the business done ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... governor, was very scantily furnished: a few old chairs, a couple of tables, and the walls whitewashed and decorated with prints of the Virgin Mary and his excellency's patron saint. The house of the priests, which adjoined the cathedral, was in much better repair, and more gaudy in the inside. ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... are skis and toboggans, butter scoops and log chairs from the underworld, rose-coloured mittens, clothes' rollers, foxes' skins. And here are horse-dealers and drovers mingling with drunken folk from up the valley. Jews there are, too, anxious to palm off a gaudy watch or so, for all there is no money in the town. And the watches come from that country up in the Alps, where Bocklin—did not come from; where nothing and ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... pretty little boys and girls. Around, Across, along, the gardens' shrubby maze, They walk, they sit, they stand. What crowds press on, Eager to mount the stairs, eager to catch First vacant bench or chair in long room plac'd. Here prig with prig holds conference polite, And indiscriminate the gaudy beau And sloven mix. Here he, who all the week Took bearded mortals by the nose, or sat Weaving dead hairs, and whistling wretched strain, And eke the sturdy youth, whose trade it is Stout oxen to contund, with gold-bound hat And silken stocking strut. The red arm'd belle Here shows her ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... sends forth hundreds of winged, wind-blown seeds, like the thistle, it spreads itself over wide fields, and is more mischievous than a more noxious growth, such as the deadly nightshade, which only drops an occasional berry into the earth. So a common cheap chintz or carpet, with a poor, gaudy, motiveless design, carries a bad style into thousands of homes wherever our commerce extends; disgracing us, while it corrupts the taste ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... gilding; her belfry and stern-galleries and elaborate lanterns had flashed in the sun with gold; and her fighting-tops and the war-pavesse about her waist had been gay with painted coats and scutcheons. To her sails had been stitched gaudy ramping lions of scarlet saye, and from her mainyard, now dipping in the water, had hung the broad two-tailed pennant with the Virgin ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... later, the young man with the gaudy waistcoats had become the leading Conservative orator of the campaign against the Liberals on their Corn Law policy and so great was the impression produced by his speeches that in 1852, when the Derby ministry was formed, he was ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the mute sacrifice upbraid the priest! He knows him not his executioner. Oh, she has decked his ruin with her love, Led him in golden bands to gaudy slaughter, And made perdition pleasing: She has left him The blank of what he was. I tell thee, eunuch, she has quite unmanned him. Can any Roman see, and know him now, Thus altered from the lord of half mankind, Unbent, unsinewed, made a woman's toy, Shrunk from ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... followed Mary Ann through the shop into the house, and was ushered into the sitting-room, or parlour as it was called. The room was like Mary Ann's dress—full of all sorts of bright colours and gaudy ornaments of poor quality. ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... to think by day, when broad awake in my sad English prison, and among my crazy peers, how this nightly umbrageous French solitude of mine, so many miles and years away, is now but a common, bare, wide grassy plain, overlooked by a gaudy, beflagged grand-stand. It is Sunday, let us say—and for all I know a great race may be going on—all Paris is there, rich and poor. Little red-legged soldiers, big blue-legged gendarmes, keep the course clear; the sun shines, the tricolour waves, the gay, familiar ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... hand of the Lady Lorraine. And day after day They turned sadly away; For the Lady Lorraine continued to say, Decidedly, certainly, stubbornly, "Nay!" She cared not for wreaths of laurel or bay, Their titles or rent rolls or uniforms gay, Their medals or ribbons or gaudy display, Their splendid equipment, demeanor, or bearing; She observed not their manners, nor what they were wearing; Their marvellous exploits for her had no charms: Their prowess in tourney, their valor at arms; ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... forth, come forth, one hour of night, When flowers are fresh and stars are bright, Were worth an age of gaudy day; Then, Rosalie, fly, fly ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Satan's spirit crouch to fear? Shall he who shook the pillars of God's reign Drop from his unnerved arm the hostile spear? Madness! The very thought would make me fain To tear the spanglets from yon gaudy plain, And hurl them at their Maker!—Fix'd as Fate I am his foe!—Yea, though his pride should deign To soothe mine ire with half his regal state, Still would I burn with ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... Pennsylvania, the tasty and happy combination called 'Dr. Bulger's Electric Liver Cure,' the same being a sort of electric light for shady livers, so to speak. I made my headquarters at Scranton, and, while there, my hair was shortened and my chin smoothed in a neat but gaudy barber shop, presided over by my friend Spaghetti here, and my equally valued friend ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... three was fantastically arrayed as a cannibal chief, in brown fleshings, with cuffs upon his ankles, gaudy decorations about his neck, and huge rings ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... red vehicles that held all sorts of odds and ends. In the rear of the ponies followed the camels; great, long-legged creatures that grunted at every stride as if they were indignant at being kept up so late. Gaudy band wagons, the cook's outfit and a heterogeneous assortment of vehicles came next, all of them moving slowly up the hill while the drivers dozed in ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... There was always a racket overhead, a fight or a fall or a bumping. One more or less hardly mattered. He was thinking of his own weakness. Would she feel parting with him? Children as a rule were easily consoled. A new and gaudy toy would make them forget anything. And appositely to this thought, the little one's mind was also full of a marvellous engine she had seen the last time she had been taken into London—one which wound up with a key and ran a great ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... "You had better ask Wallace." My difficulty is, why are caterpillars sometimes so beautifully and artistically coloured? Seeing that many are coloured to escape danger, I can hardly attribute their bright colour in other cases to mere physical conditions. Bates says the most gaudy caterpillar he ever saw in Amazonia (of a Sphinx) was conspicuous at the distance of yards from its black and red colouring whilst feeding on large green leaves. If anyone objected to male butterflies having been made beautiful by sexual selection, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... They dress comfortably. They adapt themselves to the season,—neither shivering in winter, nor perspiring in summer. They do not toil after a "fashionable appearance." They expend more on warm stockings than on gold rings; and prefer healthy, good bedding, to gaudy window-curtains. Their chairs are solid, not gimcrack. They will bear sitting upon, though ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... There was something vulgar in his friend which he had not observed before. But perhaps it was only the result of living in London amid the bustle and competition of the Press. The old personal charm was still there under this new gaudy manner. And, after all, Gallaher had lived, he had seen the world. Little Chandler looked at ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... and groping with her hands held out before her as if she were blind, was a woman. Her gown was the tawdry half-dress of the dance-halls, and the wrap over her bare shoulders was a gaudy imitation in colors of the Spanish mantilla. Her head was without covering, and her hair, which was luxuriant, hung in disorder over her face. One glance at the eyes, fixed and staring, assured Lidgerwood instantly that he had to do with one who was ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... difficult questions. There were, for instance, the zealous preachers Conrad Waldhauser and Mili[vc] of Krom[ve][vr]i[vz]e, who were causing such a stir. These two worthies were holding forth in the churches against the luxury and immorality of the time, with such effect that well-known, great and gaudy sinners were moved to acts of public repentance and women to cast off their jewellery and to dress themselves in sober fashion. All this was very beautiful and edifying, but it was not likely to last, and what with the ill-will of the Pope and ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... search on Toby's part to find the tent wherein the skeleton and his wife exhibited their contrasting figures, for the pictures which hung outside were so gaudy, and of such an unusually large size, that they commanded ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... strangeness that assails one unless familiarity has taken the edge off one's perceptions. Though not the case with all the fine churches and cathedrals of Normandy, yet with an unpleasantly large proportion—unfortunately including the magnificent Church of St Ouen at Rouen—there is beyond the gaudy tinsel that crowds the altars, an untidiness that detracts from the sense of reverence that stately Norman or Gothic does not fail to inspire. In the north transept of St Ouen, some of the walls and pillars have at various times been made to bear large printed notices which have been pasted down, ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... work this hitherto gaudy maiden came out as plain as a Quakeress, and hastened to the Methodist prayer meeting. Seeing her thus evidently taught of the Holy Spirit, they took hold of her case with new courage as she bowed with them crying for mercy. The prayers of the early Methodists were something wonderful, and ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... been at "Red Chimneys" little more than a week, but already the influence of her taste could be seen in the household. Some of the more gaudy and heavy ornaments, which had been provided by a professional decorator, had been removed, and their places filled by palms, or large plain bowls of ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... the Judge, bearing the marks of protracted travel, entered, conducting between them a single impish boy, who stared with sullen, pessimistic eyes at the gaudy tree. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... from afar at these and a hundred similar things, lo! there came by us a gaudy, strapping quean of arrogant mien, and after whom a hundred eyes were turned; some made obeisance, as if in worship of her, a few put something in her hand. I could not make out what she was, and so I enquired. "Oh," said my friend, "she is one whose entire dowry is ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... footlights,' continued the dismal man, 'is like sitting at a grand court show, and admiring the silken dresses of the gaudy throng; to be behind them is to be the people who make that finery, uncared for and unknown, and left to sink or swim, to starve or live, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... a garden-bed on which there grew, Low down amid gay grass, a violet, With flame of poppy flickering over it, And many gaudy spikes and blossoms new, Round which the wind with amorous whispers blew. There came a maid, gold-haired and lithe and strong, With limbs whereof the delicate perfumed flesh Was like a babe's. She broke the flowering mesh Of flaunting weeds, and plucked the modest bloom To wear ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... bands, reminding one of the division of sexes in a country meeting-house. We often came upon an immense body of drakes sitting upon the edge of an ice-floe, looking very much like a regiment of hussars at a distance drawn up in line of battle. The duck is not so gaudy as her husband. She is quite contented in a full suit of mottled brown and olive gray, presenting a texture on the back somewhat similar to the canvas-back species of Chesapeake Bay. About half-past ten o'clock in the evening, Toolooah ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... rare, respect being had to the person who wore it, who, they tell me, is the daughter of Black George, your worship's gamekeeper, whose sufferings, I should have opined, might have taught him more wit, than to dress forth his wenches in such gaudy apparel. She created so much confusion in the congregation, that if Squire Allworthy had not silenced it, it would have interrupted the service: for I was once about to stop in the middle of the first lesson. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... This was a polite way of begging for a contribution towards the expenses of some music in the Saint's honour, so we gave him whatever it may have been, and his messenger departed: well satisfied. At six o'clock in the evening we went to the church—close at hand—a very gaudy place, hung all over with festoons and bright draperies, and filled, from the altar to the main door, with women, all seated. They wear no bonnets here, simply a long white veil—the 'mezzero;' and it was the most gauzy, ethereal-looking audience ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... indiscretions and innumerable boyish jokes—and I saw nothing left of his former self, but the old tendency to vulgar smartness in his dress. The man was a wreck; but his clothes and his jewellery—in cruel mockery of the change in him—were as gay and as gaudy ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... Sometimes, instead of these brilliant hues, there is the most delicate shading of pearly greys and nameless silver tints, such tints as might be imagined were the clouds like feathers, the art of which is to let the under hue shine through the upper layer of the plumage. Though not so gaudy or at first so striking, these pearl-greys, and silvers, and delicate interweaving of tints are really as wonderful, being graduated and laid on with a touch no camel's hair can approach. Sometimes, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... understand why artists and moralists paint Temptation invariably in gaudy scarlet and jewels, tinted cheeks, and laughing hair. If she were always like that, morality would be gloriously triumphant; for she would attract nobody. The true Temptation of this world and flesh wears grey rags, dishevelled hair, and an ashen cheek. Any expert will ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... will actually allow him to do wrong, if He can only thereby secure the man's invaluable services. Be sure that every motive which comes not from the single eye; every motive which springs from self; is by its very essence unheroic, let it look as gaudy or as beneficent as ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... blanket—the serape—is a national institution; It is wider than a Scotch plaid, and nearly as long, with a slit in the middle; and it is woven in the same gaudy Oriental patterns which are to be seen on the prayer-carpets of Turkey and Palestine to this day. It is worn as a cloak, with the end flung over the left shoulder, like the Spanish capa, and muffling ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... amusement that tempt the loiterer at every step; the tea-drinking parties out on the porticoes, the gambling saloons, the dancing pavilions, the cafes, the confectioneries, with their gay throngs of customers, their gaudy colors, their music, and sounds of joy and revelry. A little farther on we come to a stand of carriages, and near by a gate and a large garden. For thirty kopecks apiece we procure tickets of admission. This is the Vauxhall of ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... one canvas, a foot high and two feet wide, tacked over a piece of board. It was a gaudy representation of an island wrought with pathetic lack of skill. There was a conical peak at the left end smeared with a slash of purple, and over it a very red and very round sun. The land sloped away from the peak to the other end of the island, and was lost in a white streak extending seaward, ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... chrysanthemums, auriculas, geraniums, and many others, to be exposed to the influence of cold, frosty nights, as when the "fell destroyer" commences to exert its power all plants touched by it rapidly decay. Gladioli will now be clothed in the full glory of their gaudy, but handsome dress; they are comparatively easy to manage in well-drained spots, and being such continuous bloomers, at least three or four or even half a dozen should be in every small garden. In winter they must be covered by about six inches of litter; but in cold ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... or two he resignedly took his belongings, and dropping into the wet and dirty boat with Bauda, he lifted an umbrella over his gaudy cap and disappeared in ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... impersonation, if it came to the knowledge of the one most intimately concerned, as it was almost sure to do, would doubtless be regarded as an unpardonable liberty. As she swayed gently back and forth in the gaudy rocking-chair, she thought of confessing everything to the Princess and asking her assistance; but pondering on this, she saw that it was staking everything on one throw of the dice. If the Princess refused, then ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... the centre of the specimens, where its bulk is greatest, and is often beautifully tinged at its thinner edges by the iron with which the stone is impregnated. It is not rare to find some of the better preserved fossils colored in a style that reminds one of the more gaudy fishes of the tropics. We see the body of the ichthyolite, with its finely arranged scales, of a pure snow-white. Along the edges, where the original substance of the bone, combining with the oxide of the matrix, has formed a phosphate of iron, there runs a delicately ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellow'd to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... every marry there's always a place for her here with us. A pretty girl in a pretty frock is mighty handy to wait table." Again the wideflung hands of the proprietor of the Silver Moon Tavern embraced in their gesture the shiny tables, booths, chromium-trimmed chairs, and the gaudy juke box ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... drawings and publications of the Sixties. When J. and I now allowed ourselves an afternoon out, it was to wander from Holywell Street to Mile End Road, from Piccadilly to Holborn, searching the booksellers' barrows and shops for the unsightly, gaudy, badly-bound volumes that contained the illustrations of the Sixties—illustrations ranked amongst the finest ever made. Our bookshelves that are still filled with them represent one of the most animated ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... himself—that would be saying too much—but to make some changes in his appearance. He had arrayed himself in a long overcoat, shiny with grease and wear, and falling below his knees; in place of his elegant satin cravat he had knotted a gaudy silk neckerchief about his throat; his boots were worn, and out of shape; and his hat would have been treated with contempt even by a dealer in old clothes. Of the prosperous Fortunat, so favorably known round about the Place ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... banging of drums and all that. It was a great scene, let me tell you, with the tumbled vegetation, glaringly colored as if a scene painter had gone crazy. There were the flashing birds—blood-colored and orange scarlet and yellow, gold and green. Butterflies, too,—great gaudy things that looked like moving flowers. And the noise and chatterings and whistlings in the trees of birds and insects. There were flowers and fruits, and eatings and speech-makings. As far as I could gather, the chief ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... his shroud swatheth mortals each hour, Yet little we reck of what's hanging us o'er; O would on the world that ye laid not such stress, That its baubles ye lov'd not, so gaudy and poor; O where are the friends we were wont to caress, And where are the lov'd ones who dwelt on our floor? They have drank of the goblet of death's bitterness, And have gone to the deep, to return never more; Their mansions ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... simplicity and beauty are considered as rivals. But simple is not synonymous with ugly, any more than sumptuous, stylish and costly are synonymous with beautiful. Our eyes are wounded by the crying spectacle of gaudy ornament, venal art and senseless and graceless luxury. Wealth coupled with bad taste sometimes makes us regret that so much money is in circulation to provoke the creation of such a prodigality of horrors. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... they were upstairs in the drawing-room, and Ellen had turned the gas up. The room was well furnished in a certain gaudy style, which included a good deal of gilt and plate glass. Evidently, however, it had not been tidied since the Tiger had left it, for there on the table were cards thrown this way and that amidst an array ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... and listless, and on the roof-ridges storks were dying. Over the branches of the trees, whose leaves were as thin as though we had had a six months' drought, the toucans and Martian parrots hung limp and fashionless like gaudy rags, and in the courtyard ground the corn-rats came up from their tunnels in the scorching earth to die, squeaking in scores ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... worse: and if two or three faces can be rendered happy and contented, by a trifling improvement of outward appearance, I cannot help thinking that the object is very cheaply purchased, even at the expense of a smart gown, or a gaudy riband. There is a great deal of very unnecessary cant about the over- dressing of the common people. There is not a manufacturer or tradesman in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... complete, and presently a trumpeter in gaudy uniform arose by the editor, ready to blow the signal of commencement promptly at his order. Straightway the stir of the people and the hum of their conversation died away. Every face near-by, and every ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of evening a bevy of ladies approached through the dark groves of citron trees, so gaily dressed in silks of the brightest dyes of yellow, blue, and scarlet, that no bouquet of flowers could have been more gaudy. They were attended by numerous slaves, and the head servant politely requested me to withdraw during the interview. Thus turned out of my tent, I was compelled to patience and solitude beneath a ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... pleasure, as it has already shone in the 'Poet's Corner' of the 'Crusher' as the gifted effusion of the talented Manager of the Excelsior Mill, otherwise known to our delighted readers as 'Outcrop.'" The Green Springs "Arcadian" was no less fanciful in imagery: "Messrs. —— and Co. send us a gaudy green-and-yellow, parrot-colored volume, which is supposed to contain the first callow 'cheepings' and 'peepings' of Californian songsters. From the flavor of the specimens before us we should say that the nest had been disturbed ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... notice, of the first day of the year as a "gaudy-day"—of New-Year's tides in any way—was thought by Urian Oakes to savor strongly of superstitious reverence for the heathen god Janus; the Pilgrims made no note of their first New-Year's Day in the New World, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... is but too evident that there is a great and increasing decline among the best reformed churches. Many of the Protestant ministry, especially of the prelatic order, are posting back to Rome; and the growing ritualism, with its gaudy and splendid "attire of a harlot," which characterizes others, plainly indicates their tendency in the same direction. And even those other denominations, which are not yet prepared to adopt that "blasphemous hierarchy," are visibly departing from the soundness in doctrine and ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... the Mall is a beautiful lawn, called the Green, covering fifteen acres, and terminated on the northwest by a hill, on the summit of which is placed a gaudy building in which ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... voice, he uttered a vow of vengeance, the words of which were unintelligible to the settlers, though the meaning could easily be guessed from his looks and gestures. Then he hung his battle-axe to his gaudy belt, and pointing his hand at Rodolph, he retired slowly and majestically like a lion discomfited but not subdued, to seek his people and to upbraid them ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... Boulogne to Paris, and from Paris to Baden, their idleness, their ill-health, and their ennui. "In the morning of youth," and when seen along with whole troops of their companions, these flowers look gaudy and brilliant enough; but there is no object more dismal than one of them alone, and in its autumnal, or seedy state. My friend, Captain Popjoy, is one who has arrived at this condition, and whom everybody knows by his title of Father Pop. A ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... we drawn aloft—that is, to the realm of the clouds: on these do we set our gaudy puppets, and then call them Gods ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... that passed out of Leicester that Tuesday morning behind the royal Duke, and in soldiery fitness, man for man, its like was not in England. But it was a peculiar march, withal. No flourish of trumpets heralded the advance; no gaudy costumes clothed the attending Knights. The bugles were hushed, save where necessary to convey an order; the banners were bound in sable; upon every man was the badge of mourning; Richard himself was clad in black, and the trappings of his ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... was a faithful rendering of the Indian pappoose, whittled out of a chunk of wood, with two staring glass beads for eyes, and strapped to a board the way Indian babies are, under a coverlet of very gaudy blue. It was a marvellous doll baby, and its nurse was mighty proud of it. She didn't let it go when she went to bed. It slept with her, and got up to play with her as soon as the first ray of daylight peeped in over the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... sweet and sleepy drawls of protest his matutinal ringings were wont to call forth when Dorothy had been a gay and frivolous debutante. The enforced quiet of her mother's prolonged illness, and the sojourn in the retirement of a hill sanitarium, had made of her a very different creature from the gaudy little night-bird of yore. The experiences through which she had passed, their anxiety and pain, had left her nature sweetened and deepened; had given her new sympathies and understandings. Now her laugh was just as clear—but its ring of ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... the next street, the carriage standing at the door is just as rich, but its panelling is more gaudy—more striking in colour are the horses—more glitter—more profusion about the silver harness mountings. Though the livery has more eclat, there seems to be less distance between the social status of the groom and that of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... than flatteringly, and I have done so because I believe the time has fully come when woman should be a woman, and not a mere gaudy appendage to man; when her soul should wake up from its long lethargy and put on the habiliments of wisdom and usefulness; when she should live to a grander purpose than she has done, and should make her power ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... tables supported the crowds of beggars that thronged their gates. Of social life they had little; they were gloomy, lonely, and sullenly indifferent. In their stables stood herds of mules and hung stores of gaudy trappings, but these were used only a few times each year to convey the owners in proper dignity to ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... were very sleepy performances, except for a tendency to jumble up metaphors, that kept the audience from the Folly just awake enough to watch for them. The hearer was proud who could repeat by heart such phrases as "let us not, beloved brethren, as gaudy insects, flutter out life's little day, bound to the chariot wheels of vanity, whirling in the vortex of dissipation, until at length we lie moaning over the bitter dregs of the intoxicating draught." Some of these became household proverbs at "the Folly," under the title of "Rigdum Funnidoses," ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dragons draw her thirling car From Latmus' mount up to the gloomy sky Where, crowned with blazing light and majesty, She proudly sits) more overrules the flood Than she the hearts of those that near her stood. Even as, when gaudy nymphs pursue the chase, Wretched Ixion's shaggy footed race, Incensed with savage heat, gallop amain From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain. So ran the people forth to gaze upon her, And all that viewed her were enamoured on her. And ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... brilliant lifeboat—this gaudy, butterfly-like thing of red, white, and blue—to the field of battle, let me observe that the boats of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution have several characteristic qualities, to which reference shall be made hereafter, and that they are of various sizes. [A full and graphic account of ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... shorten his long suffering with thy good works. Florence,[15] while yet she was confined within the ancient boundary which still contains the bell that summons her to prayer, abided in peace, for she was chaste and sober. She had no trinkets of chains then, no head-tires, no gaudy sandals, no girdles more worth looking at than the wearers. Fathers were not then afraid of having daughters, for fear they should want dowries too great, and husbands before their time. Families were in ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... innumerable, as was to have been expected. Japanese toys much brighter, the dolls relieved in gold and gaudy colors, absolutely saucy. The application of the natural and mechanical forces in their toys cannot fail to determine the taste of the ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... self-surrender. It was not a new thing even among the Jews to use the worldly promises of their exoteric religion as symbols for inner spiritual revolutions; and the change of heart involved in genuine Christianity was not a fresh excitation of gaudy hopes, nor a new sort of utilitarian, temporary austerity. It was an emptying of the will, in respect to all human desires, so that a perfect charity and contemplative justice, falling like the Father's gifts ungrudgingly ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... fiord, also, Fred Temple, to his inexpressible joy, found a mighty river in which were hundreds of salmon that had never yet been tempted by the angler with gaudy fly, though they had been sometimes wooed by the natives with a bunch of worms on a clumsy cod-hook. Thus both Fred and Hans found themselves in an earthly paradise. The number of splendid salmon that were caught here in a couple of weeks was wonderful; not to mention the risks ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... up into his women's apartments, looking with but little regret, I dare say, round those cheerless nuptial chambers with all their gaudy fittings; the fine looking-glasses, in which poor Rosey's little person had been reflected; the silken curtains under which he had lain by the poor child's side, wakeful and lonely. Here he found his child's nurse, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dress, Designed, in ev'ry view, to prepossess. 'Twas NEGLIGENCE, so requisite to please And fascinate, with airy, careless ease, According to the taste which I pursue, That made her charms so exquisite to view. No gaudy tinsel: all was flowing light; Though not superb, yet pleasing to the sight; A neckerchief, where much should be concealed, Was made so narrow,—beauties half revealed; Beneath is shade—what words can ne'er express; And Reynold saw enough the rest to guess. No more I say; the ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... winds, All things well and proper; Trailer, red and white, Dark and wily dropper. Midges true to fling Made of plover hackle, With a gaudy wing, And a ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr |
