"Tinsel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... though thy sounding song be roughly set? Parnassus' self is rough! Give thou the thought, The golden ore, the gems that few forget; In time the tinsel jewel will be wrought.... Stand thou alone and fixed as destiny; An imaged god that lifts above all hate, Stand thou serene and satisfied with fate. Stand thou as stands that lightning-riven tree That lords the cloven clouds ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... And what in it is not purely mechanistic nevertheless completes the picture of the world as it appears to one who has seen the man-machine in all its comedy. The stage pictures, the trumpery little fair, the tinsel and pathetic finery of the crowds, the dancing of the human ephemeridae a moment before the snow begins to fall, are stained marvelously deeply by the music. The score has the colors of crudely dyed, faded bunting. It has ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... rest. At last, it was enough for the proprietors to suggest anything for the people to negative it, whether it were good or bad. They not only avowed their natural right to do as they pleased, but deemed it due to their self-respect not to do what was pleasing to their tinsel sovereigns in London. And finally, when Colleton, one of the sovereigns in question, tried to declare martial law in the colony, on the plea of danger from Indians or Spanish, the indomitable freemen treated him as their brethren at Albemarle ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... respect—that "it is particularly happy in the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek". No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his compound epithets, as 'golden-tressed', 'tinsel-slippered', 'coral-paven', 'flowry-kirtled', 'violet-embroidered', 'vermeil-tinctured', are themselves poems in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside these are Sylvester's "opal-coloured morn", Drayton's "silver-sanded shore", and perhaps ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... earth-shaking Neptune's mace, And Tethys' grave, majestic pace, By hoary Nereus' wrinkled look, And the Carpathian wizard's hook (Proteus) By scaly Triton's winding shell, And old soothsaying Glaucus; spell, By Leucothea's lovely hands, And her son who rules the strands, By Thetis' tinsel-slippered feet, And the songs of ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... and we proceeded on our quixotic search for a topi not entirely hideous. Half an hour later we came out of the shop, the shopman more obsequious than ever, not only wearing topis, but laden with boxes of Turkish Delight, ostrich-feather fans, tinsel scarves, and a string of pink beads which he swore were coral, but I greatly doubt it. We had an uneasy feeling as we bought the things that perhaps we were foolish virgins, but before the afternoon was very old we were sure of it. You wouldn't believe how heavy Turkish Delight becomes ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... Nereus wrincled look, And the Carpathian wisards hook, By scaly Tritons winding shell, And old sooth-saying Glaucus spell, By Leucothea's lovely hands, And her son that rules the strands, By Thetis tinsel-slipper'd feet, And the Songs of Sirens sweet, By dead Parthenope's dear tomb, And fair Ligea's golden comb, 880 Wherwith she sits on diamond rocks Sleeking her soft alluring locks, By all the Nymphs that nightly dance Upon thy streams with wily glance, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... radiance of silver lamps and myriads of tapers, enshrined in garlands of roses, veiled in clouds of incense, the statue in its niche lent a charm to the gaudy ornaments of the high altar, and all the tinsel draperies extending from column to column along the aisle. On the right a star of light was visible in the miraculous bath-room, with its dim frescoes and ancient pillars; the nuns flitted behind the lattice ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... dressed than your friends, but I will venture to say that I saw none neater or more elegant: which praise I ascribe to the taste of Mrs. Temple and my mantuamaker; for, after having declared that I would not have any foil or tinsel about me, they fixed upon the dress ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... superior minds if I say that all this seemed to him an insuperable impediment to his making up to Verena. His scruples were doubtless begotten of a false pride, a sentiment in which there was a thread of moral tinsel, as there was in the Southern idea of chivalry; but he felt ashamed of his own poverty, the positive flatness of his situation, when he thought of the gilded nimbus that surrounded the protegee of Mrs. Burrage. This shame was possible ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... stage dress, rushed into the country, and passed the night weeping by the wayside. (Ah! how they have calumniated the love of Louis XV.'s time!) She was so unused to see the sunrise, that she hailed it with one of her finest songs. Her attitude, quite as much as her tinsel, drew the peasants about her; amazed at her gestures, her voice, her beauty, they took her for an angel, and dropped on their knees around her. If Voltaire had not existed we might have thought it a new miracle. I don't know if God gave ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... innocence is? Ask the average clergyman to describe innocence to you, and when he gets through, think a bit, take off the tinsel words with which he has decked out his graven image, and you'll find what? Ignorance enshrined. Every clergy the world has seen has enshrined ignorance, and ignorance has no single virtue that a sound ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... vendors. Their prayer, however, is heeded by all; and a gay scene enough it is,—especially at night, when the great cups filled with lard are lighted, and the shadows dance on the crowd, and the light flashes on the tinsel-covered festoons that sway with the wind, and illuminates the great booth, while the smoke rises from the great caldrons which flank it on either side, and the cooks, all in white, ladle out the dripping frittelle into large polished platters, and laugh and joke, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... 1829 an authoritative edition, revised and arranged by chapters, appeared. It created a tremendous stir. Saint-Simon had been merciless, from King down to lady's maid, in depicting the daily life of a famous Court. He had stripped it of all its tinsel and pretension, and laid the ragged framework bare. "He wrote like the Devil for posterity!" exclaimed Chateaubriand. But the work at once became universally read and quoted, both in France and England. Macaulay made frequent use of it in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... the other with diversion. At last the Colonel, slower of foot than the rest, arrived on the scene, just as the pride of his heart, the old King Chanticleer of the yard, made his exit, draped in a royal red paper robe and a species of tinsel crown, out of which his red face looked most ludicrous as he came halting and stupefied, haying evidently been driven up in a corner and pinched rather hard; but close behind him, chuckling forth his terror and flapping his wings, came the pert ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shoes, and articles of unknown name and purpose, and for a moment he hesitated. Hands in his pockets, he looked first at Mother McNeil and then at a little lame boy on the floor beside an open trunk, out of which he was taking gaily-colored ornaments and untangling yards of tinsel; and then he looked at Frances, who, with a big apron over her black dress, with its soft white collar open at the throat, was holding a pile of ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher
... bonnet, a thin packet of real letters, and the famous champagne cork. She kisses the letters, but she does not blub over them. She strokes the dress, and waggles her head over the certificates and presses the bonnet to her cheeks, and rubs the tinsel of the cork carefully with her apron. She is a tremulous old 'un; yet she exults, for she owns all these things, and also the penny flag on her breast. She puts them away in the drawer, the scarf over them, the lavender on the scarf. Her air of triumph well becomes her. She lifts the ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... of wild beasts, which, by the bye, are frequently found much more worthy of admiration than the real beasts themselves; listening to the jokes of the merry-andrews from the platforms in front of the temporary theatres, or admiring the splendid tinsel dresses of the performers who thronged the stages in the intervals of the entertainments; and in this manner, occasionally gazing and occasionally listening, I passed through the town till I came in front of a large edifice looking full upon the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... and the mourning habit she had worn ever since her husband's death, were made matters of reproach to her. But though Mina had been born a tiller of the earth, he had died a grandee of Spain, ennobled yet more by his patriotism and great qualities than he could be by the tinsel of a title; the character of the countess was that of a high-minded and virtuous woman; and as to the accusation of being a santarona, or affectedly pious, it was no less unjust than malicious. Here is Captain Widdrington's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... use it a million times a day, if he have occasion to speak of respectable men and women that often; for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one. He never tires of it; it always has a fine sound to him. There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul. If he had been in Palestine in the early times, we should have had no references to 'much people' out of him. No, he would have said 'the beauty and the chivalry of Galilee' assembled to hear the Sermon on the Mount. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mankind, especially innocent, loving, and gentle mankind, to say nothing of tender, enthusiastic, love-blinded womankind, are to some extent deceived by the false ring of that which is not metal, and the falser glitter of a tinsel ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... now entering upon the age that is capable of framing your whole life, and why not reconcile yourself to the belief, that the world, which is dazzling you with its gaudy show, is false and delusive. It is a tinsel glitter, Josephine, the wreck of the innocent and good, turn your back on it for my sake if not for ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... often casts made up in the humour of the moment, and never used at all, accumulate upon him so rapidly that he is glad to find some enthusiastic boatman to bestow them upon. It is needless to add, that a gift of this kind is usually very much appreciated by the recipient. Tinsel is a very useful adjunct to a fly, and should always be employed in those used in loch-fishing. If variety is wanted in colouring, the least tip of Berlin or pig's wool of the desired shade will be found very effective. Get your flies dressed on ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... Helvetia Exchange," with the white cross and plumed hat of Switzerland. One street is all Chinese, with shiny-haired women, and little mandarins with long cues of braided red silk. The babies seem to be dressed in imitation of the idol in the temple; their tight caps have the same tinsel and trimmings, and the resemblance their little dry faces bear to it is ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... of equal force, Yet, at some weapons, men have still the worse. Why should not then we women act alone? Or whence are men so necessary grown? Our's are so old, they are as good as none. Some who have tried them, if you'll take their oaths, Swear they're as arrant tinsel as their clothes. Imagine us but what we represent, And we could e'en give you as good content. Our faces, shapes,—all's better then you see, And for the rest, they want as much as we. Oh, would the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... he had ever heard, or that the speaker ever reached before or after. He said he thought a speech of Webster's delivered during the war or soon after it, probably the speech on the currency, superior to his speech in reply to Hayne, and altogether free from the tinsel of his later speeches. The speech of Pinkney on the Missouri question, which he heard, he thought the ablest ever delivered in the senate. For the intellect of Calhoun he had the highest respect and admiration, ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... difficult place, and filled it well; but the court of the Second Empire was all spangles and tinsel. It was composed of men and women all more or less adventurers. It was the court of the nouveaux riches and of a mushroom aristocracy. There were prizes to be won and pleasures to be enjoyed, and it was "like as it was in the days of Noe, ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... Desert obtrudes again—tricked out as a Nautch girl in veils of purple, saffron, gold-tinsel, and grass-green. She postures shamelessly before the delighted tourists with woven skeins of homeward-flying pelicans, fringes of wild duck, black spotted on crimson, and cheap jewellery of opal clouds. ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... acquirements. It consists in the development of the triune man—body, soul and spirit—in their divine harmony. Without a cultivation of the spirit in harmony with its immortal destiny, all that this world calls culture is but the gilded tinsel that bedecks the putrefaction of death. The truly cultured man is developed in harmony with the laws of his being. This being is compound, having a fleshly and a spiritual side. Hence, to cultivate one to the neglect of the other is to disproportion ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... caught each day a deeper note in the hoarse complaints of those same men—a note no less ominous than was that newer, hoarser one of the swollen river—nevertheless were duly thankful that the leaden sky had at least a tinsel lining. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... Yet this is at times absolutely necessary to ensure success. The best patterns for various times of the year are—For February, March, and April, big Shannon Blue Fly, the Black Goldfinch, the Jock Scot, and the Yellow Lahobber; for May, June, and July, Purple Mixture, tinsel bodied Green Parrot, purple bodied Green Parrot, Silver and Blue Doctors, Purple Widgeon, Orange and Grouse, and Thunder and Lightning. Towards the end of the season here, as elsewhere, strange fancy patterns will frequently prove ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... unnoticed before her. It must be described, that is to say, ennobled. A scene in the guard-house, a popular uprising, the fish-market, the galleys, the wine-shop, the poule au pot of Henri Quatre, are treasure-trove in her eyes. She seizes upon this canaille, washes it clean, and sews her tinsel and spangles over its villainies; purpureus assuitur pannus. Her object seems to be to deliver patents of nobility to all these roturiers of the drama; and each of these patents under the great ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... the Christmas tree party in the Town Hall, and she had heartened Miss Molly through the long lonely hours they had spent in trimming it; but as the tiny handful of forlorn celebrants gathered about the tall tree, glittering in all the tinsel finery which was left over from the days when the big hall had rung to the laughter of a hundred children and as many more young people, even Miss Abigail felt a catch in her throat as she quavered through "King Willyum was ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... consequences of vice will allow, at the same time that I exhibit those adventures and entertaining scenes which disguise the dismal path, and make the road to ruin pleasing. They meet here with a true prospect of things, the tinsel splendour of sensual pleasure, and that dreadful price men pay for it—shameful death. I hope it may be of use in correcting the errors of juvenile tempers devoted to their passions, with whom sometimes danger ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... of the fellows covered with gold-tinsel who repeat in unknown language the pater-nosters to which no one listens. It is enough to make one burst with laughing, and, if I had not my cabbages to plant, I would go myself now and again and entertain myself at these masquerades ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... many more gents called for their money. There's Mr. Flanker, the whipmaker, and Mr. Smokem, from the cigar-shop, and Trotter, the bootmaker, and—yes, sir, there's a young man from Mr. Tinsel, the jeweller: and, oh! a load more of 'em, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... to the principal shops, where the two girls held whispered consultations over lace mantillas, which they had at once determined to adopt, and bought the gorgeous paper fans, covered with brilliant pictures of bull-fighters in suits of silver tinsel; and from these open stores he led them to a dingy little shop, where there was old silver and precious hand-painted fans of mother-of-pearl that had been pawned by families who had risked and lost all in some revolution; and then to another shop, ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... to her breast a satin-striped box, in which beneath paper lace and tinsel was the most delicious candy; a whole box full all but a few bites, as Alene had said; while the latter leaned over the wall calling more good-byes, and Prince kept up a continuous barking that said so plainly, once you understood his language, ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... of pleasure and vice, after the Restoration, the actors, long starved and crestfallen, brushed up their plumes and burnished their tinsel. Killigrew, that clever buffoon of the Court, opened a new theatre in Drury Lane in 1663, with a play of Beaumont and Fletcher's; and Davenant (supposed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son) opened the little theatre, long disused, in Salisbury ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... hamely fare we dine. Wear hodden gray and a' that, Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A man's a man, for a' that! For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that; The honest man, though e'er sae poor, Is king o' ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... them, and the sails were made to hoist up and down, and his yachts sailed remarkably well and could beat any of those opposed to them. Then he made little theatres capitally, and painted the scenes and cut out the characters, and stuck tinsel on to them; and if not as good as a real play, they afforded a vast amount of amusement. These talents, however, were not ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... example. Nothing can be more ludicrous than the contrast exhibited between two families of this description; the one living in the dignified splendour, and with the liberal hospitality, that wealth can command; the other in a stile of tinsel show, without the real appropriate distinctions belonging to rank and fortune. They are lavish, but not liberal, often sacrificing independence to support dissipation, and betraying the dearest interests of society for the sake of personal vanity, and gratifying what is significantly termed ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... side, Delia had now come to the swift decision natural to her age and character. Anna was unworthy. She had been tried and found wanting. Gold had been offered to her, and she had chosen tinsel. It was not surprising that the Palmers should be preferred to herself, but that any one related to the Professor, able to see and know him, should be capable of turning aside and neglecting him for others, was a thing she could neither understand nor bear with patience. ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... No gilt or tinsel taints the dress Of him who holds the natal power, No weighty helmet's fastenings press On brow that shares Columbia's dower, No blaring trumpets mark the step Of him with mind on peace intent, And so—HATS OFF! Here comes the State, A modest ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... account of his selling their relatives to the native Portuguese who frequent his country. Katema is a tall man, about forty years of age, and his head was ornamented with a helmet of beads and feathers. He had on a snuff-brown coat, with a broad band of tinsel down the arms, and carried in his hand a large tail made of the caudal extremities of a number of gnus. This has charms attached to it, and he continued waving it in front of himself all the time we were there. He seemed in good spirits, laughing heartily several times. This is ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... which a noted San Francisco millionaire distracted his rare moments of reflection in his gorgeous palace on the hills. Here they could at least be once more in the country they loved, albeit of a milder and less heroic type, and a little degraded by the overlapping tinsel and ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... of Eternity and of God in the minds of those to whom they had nothing to offer in return. A threat of death yesterday, misery, starvation and squalor! all the hideousness of a destroying anarchy, that had nothing to give save a national fete, a tinsel goddess, some shallow laughter and momentary intoxication, a travesty of clothes and of religion and a dance on the ashes ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... his vivid lines assume The garb and dignity of ancient Rome.— Let college verse-men trite conceits express, Trick'd out in splendid shreds of Virgil's dress; From playful Ovid cull the tinsel phrase, And vapid notions hitch in pilfer'd lays: Then with mosaick art the piece combine, And boast the glitter of each dulcet line: Johnson adventur'd boldly to transfuse His vigorous sense into the Latian muse; Aspir'd to shine by unreflected light, And with a Roman's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... shops were up and cross-barred. As the first tazia, a gorgeous erection ten feet high, was borne aloft on the shoulders of a score of stout men into the semi-darkness of the Gully of the Horsemen, a brickbat crashed through its talc and tinsel sides. ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... costume of pale gray and lavender, with a tall headdress of wire covered with white gauze and tinsel. ...
— The Belles of Canterbury - A Chaucer Tale Out of School • Anna Bird Stewart
... again next December); the dining-room floor is thick with fallen needles; the gay little candles are burnt down to a small gutter of wax in the tin holders. The floor sparkles here and there with the fragments of tinsel balls or popcorn chains that were injudiciously hung within leap of puppy or grasp of urchin. And so you see him, the diligent parent, brooding with a tender mournfulness and sniffing the faint whiff of that fine Christmas tree odour—balsam and burning candles and fist-warmed ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... but they, also, were of the night, gaudily bedecked in tinsel and glittering finery that would have been fustian by day to the least discriminating eye. Respectability was not abroad in Ascalon by night. With the last gleam of day it ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... holding up my hands. "He does not believe he is a great stupid!" But Nino was not angry at all. He busied himself a little with his costume, which was laid out on the piano, with the sword and the tinsel collar and all the rest ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... tinsel group broke through the crowd, and wheeling round their path, the foremost of them daringly approached the nobleman, and looking full into his disdainful face, exclaimed, "Tradest thou, too, for kisses? Ha, ha! life is short,—the witch is outwitched ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... an old church in a large town ten miles from here to-day with Sergeant Hodge. There were the usual tinsel things and red baize and sham flowers. Sergeant Hodge much impressed. He said after we emerged: "You know, sir, it's very fine indeed. It puts me in mind of a bazaar." This was in all good faith, and was intended as a great compliment to the church! We are having lots of rain, ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... of which he had seen so imperfectly once before by the flash of his own pistol in the darkness. Upon this occasion, however, the whole figure was stamped out with intense sharpness against the darkness, and Barnaby beheld, as clear as day, a great burly man, clad in a tawdry tinsel coat, with a cocked hat with gold braid upon his head. His legs, with petticoat breeches and cased in great leathern sea-boots pulled up to his knees, stood planted wide apart as though to brace against the slant of the deck. The face our hero beheld to be as white as dough, with fishy ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... ardent spirit most like Benvenuto Cellini both in pen and tongue and person. Our dear Mr. Bennoch was the providence of his later years. They tell me that that powerful work has entirely stopped the sale of Moore's Life, which, all tinsel and tawdry rags, might have been written by a court newsman or a court milliner. I wonder whether they will print the other six volumes; for the four out they have given Mrs. Moore three thousand pounds. A bad ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... her beloved white chief should want for nothing, and now every four or five days she came to the fort laden with provisions. Smith also took Captain Newport to visit the Powhatan, and great barter was made of blue beads and tinsel ornaments for grain ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... real," suggested Nellie. "Everybody will be all make-believe. I saw lots of people getting ready, and I'm sure they will all look like Christmas-tree things, tinsel and paper ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope
... chief mastery to dissect With long and tedious havock fabled knights In battles feign'd; the better fortitude Of patience and heroick martyrdom Unsung; or to describe races and games, Or tilting furniture, imblazon'd shields, Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds, Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights At joust and tournament; then marshall'd feast Serv'd up in hall with sewers and seneshals; The skill of artifice or office mean, Not that which justly gives heroick name To person, or to poem. Me, of these Nor skill'd nor studious, higher argument Remains; ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... some gold and silver money, besides a lot of beads, trinkets, and gaudy tinsel things, such as earthly savages have been willing to ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... truth, Agnes could scarcely understand how a boy could so dislike circus life as to really want to run away from even Twomley & Sorber's Herculean Circus and Menagerie. There was a glitter and tinsel to the circus that ever ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... he does not miss the significant sayings altogether. However inconsistent they may be with the doctrine he is consciously driving at, they appeal to some sub-intellectual instinct in him that makes him stick them in, like a child sticking tinsel stars on the robe of a ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... fairer field could truly have been shown? The belle now wore a smart becoming 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 ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... shepherd race! I know them, I have led them on in fight— I saw them in the battle at Favenz. Austria will try, forsooth, to force on us A yoke we are determined not to bear! Oh, learn to feel from what a race thou'rt sprung! Cast not, for tinsel trash and idle show, The precious jewel of thy worth away. To be the chieftain of a freeborn race, Bound to thee only by their unbought love, Ready to stand—to fight—to die with thee, Be that thy pride, be that thy noblest boast! Knit to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... imposing well-kept line, composed of young men of the better class, well attired and respectable looking. These wore crape hat-bands, and green rosettes with harps in the centre. Several had broad green body scarfs, with gold tinsel shamrocks and harps intertwined. As this portion of the procession marched they attracted very considerable attention by their orderly, measured tread, and the almost soldierly precision with which they maintained the line. They numbered about four or five ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... from the bosom of the deep, with its plains, and hills, and forests, and rocks, and streams, and strange, new races of men;—these are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our Continent excels the specious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... carnage, war; The pomp and tinsel of unrighteous power; Bloated oppression in its awful hour,— ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... be his,—with liberty to him to pass them as he pleased. He knew many men who were separated from their wives, and who seemed to be as happy as their neighbours. And then he remembered how ugly Alexandrina had been this evening, wearing a great tinsel coronet full of false stones, with a cold in her head which had reddened her nose. There had, too, fallen upon her in these her married days a certain fixed dreary dowdiness. She certainly was very plain! So he said to himself, and then he went ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... down again and admired the fish. Frenchy and I lighted our pipes, and I took the little Silver Doctor from the leader. It was just the least bit frayed but still very pretty and bright, with its golden floss and silver tinsel, its gold pheasant tips, blue ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... was built for them; and on June 5, 1637, in the part of the cabin consecrated as a chapel, Father Pijart celebrated Mass. The residence was named La Conception de Notre Dame. For a wilderness church it was a marvel. At the entrance were green boughs adorned with tinsel; pictures hung on the walls; crucifixes, vessels, and ornaments of shining metal ornamented the chapel. From far and near Indians flocked to see this wondrous edifice. Best of all, a leading chief offered ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... those Authors much more than the modern Italians pretend to do. And as for the Poet himself from whom the Dreams of this Opera are taken, I must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one Verse in Virgil is worth all the Clincant or Tinsel of Tasso. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the airman drops a smoke ball directly over it or lets fall some strips of tinsel, which glitter in the sun as they slowly descend to the earth. The range to the target is apparently ascertained by those near the guns by a large telemeter, or other range finder, which is kept trained on the aeroplane, so that when the signal is made the distance to the target ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... eyes, brimful with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on the naive wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel, and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on either ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... dancers pirouetting in the midst of a public they can more surely enchant from the distance of the stage. The costumes, so many of them, came from humble costumers who let them from year to year without renewal of the tinsel or freshening of the ribbons. But those very things gave to this page of life its depth of interest, gave reality to ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... pinch of thee revives the vapor'd head, Removes the spleen, removes the qualmish fit, And gives a brisker turn to female wit, Warms in the nose, refreshes like the breeze, Glows in the herd and tickles in the sneeze. Without it, Tinsel, what would be thy lot! What, but to strut neglected and forgot! What boots it for thee to have dipt thy hand In odors wafted from Arabian land? Ah! what avails thy scented solitaire, Thy careless swing and pertly tripping air, The crimson wash that glows upon thy face, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... said, "which troubled me little at the time, but which just lately have been on my mind. The first is that I am nearly fifty, and Lady Angela is twenty-one. The second is that I came home with all the tinsel and glamour of a popular hero. Heaven knows I loathed it, but the fact remains. The King's reception, the V.C., and all that sort of thing, I suppose, accounted for it. Anyhow, I am troubled with this reflection. Lady ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... said Miss Dassonville, "as the things I've seen the children make at school, with bits of coloured stone and broken china and rags of tinsel or whatever treasures, laid out in a pattern on ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... learned of the then recent converts to Catholicism, was, as is well known, the original of Lothair in Lord Beaconsfield's famous novel. Lord Beaconsfield's portrait of him was disfigured, and indeed made ridiculous, by the gilding, or rather the tinsel, with which his essentially alien taste bedizened it; but, apart from such exaggerations, there were elements in it of unmistakable likeness, and the entertainment to which I am now referring was, apart from its peculiar sequel, like ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... scoundrel is here to make all this bustle about! But women and fools always will be fools; there is no help for that! Those that set them on have most to answer for; and most of all, Mr. Clare. He is a man that ought to know something of the world, and past being duped by gewgaws and tinsel. He seemed, too, to have some notion of things: I should not have suspected him of hallooing to a cry of mongrels without honesty or reason. But the world is all alike. Those that seem better than their ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Their wardrobe too is of the very simplest description. When they play a piece in which kings and queens appear, they borrow the gold bespangled dresses of the rich Servian women of the district to serve them as royal mantles. All they require besides is a little tinsel, some spangles and some pasteboard—and there you are! The manager, as I have said, is still but a child, but so ingenious is he that he can make moonshine out of a yellow gourd and produce thunder and lightning,—but that is a professional secret. It ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... (similar to our vestry-room) begged I would do him the honour to accept of any which might be lying upon the table. These candles are made of the purest white wax: of a spiral, or twisted, or square, or circular form; of considerable length and width. They are also decorated with fillagree work, and tinsel of various colours. Upon that which I chose, there were little rosettes made of wax. The moderate sum for which they are obtained, startles an Englishman who thinks of the high price of this article of trade in his own country. You see frequently, against the walls ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... nothing. Perhaps I shall discover some new species of antelope or some unknown plant. I may be fortunate enough to find a new waterway. That is all the reward I want. I love the sense of power and the mastery. What do you think I care for the tinsel rewards of ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... comes careering o'er his bleak domain, But comes untended by his usual train; Hail, sleet and snow-rack far behind him fly, Too weak to wade thro this petrific sky, Whose air consolidates and cuts and stings, And shakes hoar tinsel from its flickering wings. Earth heaves and cracks beneath the alighting god; He gains the pass, bestrides the roaring flood, Shoots from his nostrils one wide withering sheet Of treasured meteors on the struggling fleet; The waves conglaciate instant, fix in air, Stand like a ridge ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... coffins with the names of those gentlemen were no thicker than a sword. But I found a crown in the church itself. I borrowed it from St. Michael. He had a sword in his hand, but he did not strike. No. And there was only tinsel on the ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... year it might be wiser not to shut up her palace at all, but so far to overcome her feelings as to exhibit the superb hangings, the banners, the damask, and cloth of gold, used in the mediaeval festivals and processions, and thus outdo the modern tinsel ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... men grew tired of her, and dropped her too. It was a happy night for Belinda when Blanche went away; and her husband, with rather a blush and a sigh, said "he had been deceived in her; he had thought her endowed with many precious gifts, he feared they were mere tinsel; he thought she had been a right-thinking person, he feared she had merely made religion an amusement—she certainly had quite lost her temper to the schoolmistress, and beat Polly Rucker's knuckles cruelly." Belinda flew to his arms, there was no question about the grave or the veil any more. He ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on the terrace, he saw Kathleen and Scott—the latter carrying a butterfly net—examining the borders of white pinks with a lantern. In and out of the yellow rays swam multitudes of night moths, glittering like flakes of tinsel as the lantern light flashed on their wings; and Scott was evidently doing satisfactory execution, for every moment or two Kathleen uncorked the cyanide jar and he dumped into it from the folds of the net a ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... development as a fraud. It stigmatizes law as the machinery of injustice; it sneers at society as hollow-hearted corruption and insincerity; it brands politics as a reeking mass of rottenness, and scoffs at morality as the tinsel of sin. Its disciples are those who rail and snarl at everything that is noble and good, to whom a joke is an assault and battery, a laugh is an insult to outraged dignity, and the provocation of a smile is like passing an electric current ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... adjoining Chusan, which I touched at on my way from the latter place to Chapoo. Little information, of course, was to be gathered there on questions directly affecting trade or politics, for it is a holy spot, exclusively appropriated to temples in tinsel and bonzes in rags; but it was impossible to wander over it as I did, visiting with entire impunity its most sacred recesses, without being forcibly reminded of the fact that one, at least, of the obstacles to ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... and long earrings in their ears, carrying baskets of fruit on their arms. They passed peasant men driving donkeys or oxen, who smiled at them from under hats decorated with pompons of colored paper and tinsel. Geese ran out to hiss at them as they flew by, and hens and chickens fluttered out of their way; but Rafael had eyes only ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... of Tinsel on a rock once said to a Pebble: "You see how bright I am! I am by birth ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... characteristic is lucidness and transparency: he is never obscure, unless in the Ode to Liberty, and, perhaps, in a few passages of the Ode on the Manners. Campbell's criticism is, otherwise, worthy of this beautiful poet, whom he praises with congenial spirit. When Hazlitt speaks of the "tinsel and splendid patchwork" of Collins, "mixed with the solid, sterling ore of his genius," he speaks of a base material not to be found there. In Collins there is no tinsel or patchwork, one of his excellencies is, that the whole of every ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... personal suite. Of the royal vehicle in question Cayet gives a minute description, which we transcribe as affording an accurate idea of the taste displayed in that age in the decoration of coaches: "It was," he says, "covered with brown velvet and trimmed with silver tinsel on the outside; and within it was lined with carnation-coloured velvet, embroidered with gold and silver. The curtains were of carnation damask, and it was drawn by four gray horses." [110] These royal ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... old instinct of his race, the gentle Jew had spread a carpet. Seated on it, against no more romantic object than a blackened chimney-stack, over which some humble creeper had been trained, they both pored over one book, while a basket of common fruit, and another basket of strings of beads and tinsel scraps were ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... sat and pondered in his private study at home. His musings arraigned before him for judgment and contrast the two women who had so stormily wrought upon his new life. Esme Elliot had played with his love, had exploited it, made of it a tinsel ornament for vanity, sought, through it, to corrupt him from the hard-won honor of his calling. She had given him her lips for a lure; she had played, soul and body, the petty cheat with a high and ennobling passion. Yet, because she played within the rules by the world's measure, there was no ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... artificial flowers, all crushed, wrinkled and dirty, which had at first bedecked a lady of quality, then descended to her Abigail, and dazzled the inmates of the servants' hall. A tawdry scarf of yellow silk, trimmed with tinsel and spangles, which had seen as hard service, and boasted as honourable a transmission, was next flung over one shoulder, and fell across her person in the manner of a shoulder-belt, or baldrick. Madge then stripped off the coarse ordinary shoes, which she wore, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... sacrificed to Baal, without letting himself be disturbed by the dancing devotees or the noise of cymbals and music which issued from their enclosures. The tents and slightly-built wooden houses of the dancing girls did not tempt him. Besides their inhabitants, who in the evening tricked themselves out in tinsel finery to lure the youth of Thebes into extravagance and folly, and spent their days in sleeping till sun-down, only the gambling booths drove a brisk business; and the guard of police had much trouble to restrain the soldier, who had staked and lost all his prize money, or the sailor, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... enough. A pale partridge or woodcock wing, short red hackle legs, a peacock-herl body, and a tail—on which too much artistic skill can hardly be expended—of yellow floss silk, and gold twist or tinsel. The orange-tailed governors 'of ye shops,' as the old drug-books would say, are all 'havers;' for the proper colour is a honey yellow. The mystery of this all-conquering tail seems to be, that it represents the yellow pollen, or ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... quantity of lemon and sugar-candy he had eaten to improve his voice; and two flutes and a violoncello had pleaded severe colds. What of that? the audience were all coming. Everybody knew his part: the dresses were covered with tinsel and spangles; the white plumes looked beautiful; Mr. Evans had practised falling until he was bruised from head to foot and quite perfect; Iago was sure that, in the stabbing-scene, he should make 'a decided hit.' A self-taught deaf gentleman, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... modern woman, that saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... this, the fellow was a great dandy, spending many hours each day in greasing and arranging his long coarse hair, which he ornamented with plates of silver, bits of gaudy-colored cloth, bright feathers, and tinsel. Every hair was scrupulously plucked from his brows and eyelashes, and the lids of his eyes were painted a bright vermilion, giving to his face the expression of a demon rather than ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... weights. A little later a marriage procession would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the bride's litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the haze, while the bridegroom's bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder-cart. Then Kim would join the Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the couple a hundred sons and no daughters, as the saying is. Still more ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... hospital to another, and bestowing general sympathy, with small works, is not what wounded men want. It was very soon perceptible how the men in that hospital appreciated the solid worth of the one and the tinsel of the other. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... falling. In the west the sun was slipping down behind the hills, leaving the strong day with a rosy and radiant glamour, that faded away in eloquent tones to the grey, tinsel softness of the zenith. Out in the yard a sumach bush was aflame. Rich tiger-lilies thrust in at the sill, and lazy flies and king bees boomed in and out of the window. Something out of the sunset, out of the glorious freshness and primal majesty of the new land, diffused through the room where those ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... alternating. A few paces distant, an enormous pillar, then another, then another; seven pillars in all, down the length of the hall, sustaining the spring of the arches of the double vault, in the centre of its width. Around four of the pillars, stalls of merchants, all sparkling with glass and tinsel; around the last three, benches of oak, worn and polished by the trunk hose of the litigants, and the robes of the attorneys. Around the hall, along the lofty wall, between the doors, between the windows, between the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... the Count of Crevecoeur, "and very like one that wears a lady's favour in his hat, and thinks he must carry things with a high tone, to honour the precious remnant of silk and tinsel. Well, sir, I trust it will be no abatement of your dignity, if you answer me, how long you have been about the person of the Lady Isabelle ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... parlor houses distributed in the most fashionable parts of the city; there are the bar houses; there are the dance houses; and there are the miserable basements where this traffic is seen in its hideous deformity, divested of the gaslight glare and tinsel of the high-toned seraglios. The internal arrangements of the palatial bagnios are in many instances sumptuous, magnificent and suggestive. The walls of these seductive arsenals, too, are frequently of a color calculated to throw the most ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... the players would begone, Out of this theatre of tinsel days And lights and tawdry glamour, out to face Even the blank of night, the icy stars, The vast abysses. What the gallery-gods Could give, they well have given; but deities Inscrutabler than they annul all gifts With one gift more—the ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... was the tinsel thread, the most humorous recollection of Juergen's life. He likewise wanted to go a little way outside the door, and up the bay—that is to say, out into the world in a ship; and his mother said, like the eel breeder, "There are so many bad people—eel spearers!" But he wished ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... hastily out of the corner of my eye at Kennedy. Involuntarily his hand which held the telltale sequin had sought his waistcoat pocket, as though to hide it. Then I saw him check the action and deliberately examine the piece of tinsel ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the so-called martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The Pope shook upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still; diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... amusements of the stage rose in a superior stile of elegance, and entered something like a stable in Castle-street. Here the comedian strutted in painted rags, ornamented with tinsel: The audience raised a noisy laugh, half real and half forced, at ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... earth ever passed to his tomb through such a storm of human tears. The pageants of Alexander, Caesar, and Wellington were tinsel to this. Nor did the spirit of Napoleon, the Corsican Lieutenant of Artillery who once presided over a congress of kings whom he had conquered, look down on its ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... building, to the glories of which, to my mind so much enhanced by their complete simplicity, I only wish I had the power to do justice. But I cannot, so it is useless talking more about it. But when I compare this great work of genius to some of the tawdry buildings and tinsel ornamentation produced in these latter days by European ecclesiastical architects, I feel that even highly civilized art might learn something from the Zu-Vendi masterpieces. I can only say that the exclamation which sprang to my lips ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... mountains drip with sunset, And the brake of dun! How the hemlocks are tipped in tinsel By the ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... then I am more communicative than usual. My friends in the city and elsewhere would tell you that I never give any reasons. But what I was saying was this: that I've learnt that the world likes tinsel and glitter—just as the Sioux Indians are caught by glass beads and lengths of Turkey red calico. And I give the ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Frances Hodgson Burnett, as well as that of Miss Phelps and Mrs. Spofford, shine with a silver thread of humor, worked too intimately into the whole warp and woof to be extracted without injuring both the solid material and the tinsel. To appreciate the point and delicacy of their finest wit, you must read the whole story and grasp the entire character ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... to time in past years for future sorting—an intention that he had never carried out. From the melancholy mass of papers, faded photographs, seals, diaries, withered flowers, and such like, Jocelyn drew a little portrait, one taken on glass in the primitive days of photography, and framed with tinsel in the commonest way. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... the folding doors communicating with another parlor were suddenly thrown open, disclosing the grand achievement of the afternoon—the beautiful Christmas tree—tall, wide-spreading, glittering with lights and tinsel ornaments, gorgeous with gay colors, and every branch loaded ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... unfledged Guy Fawkes. I know nothing would give you greater joy than to put on a mask, grasp a dagger in your hand, and go to Wesley, crying, 'Villain, your secret or your life!' Dick, you're a stage hero; you're a thing of sawdust and tinsel. Come to the parlor and hear Kate play the divine songs of Mendelssohn; perhaps, night-eyed conspirator, to whirl Polly or Miss Rosa in the delirium ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... cavalry, the ordnance detachment, the engineers and the men of the Signal Corps. The officers, likewise, shook their heads. All were greatly disappointed to think that the Army had to compete with the sawdust, the tinsel, the gay music and the dash ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... at him. It could not be otherwise. It made him at once sad and angry. "Romance! I hate the word. Once I was as full of romance as a water-chestnut is of starch. I again affirm that young women should not travel alone. They think every bit of tinsel is gold, every bit of colored glass, ruby. Go home; don't bother about romance outside of books. There it is safe. The English are right. They may be snobs when they travel abroad, but they travel securely. ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... Jacob Alspaugh crossing the parade ground in more than Solomonic splendor of uniform. His inflated form bore upon it all the blue and tinsel prescribed by the Army Regulations for the raiment and insignia of a First Lietenant of Infantry, with such additions as had been suggested by his exuberant fancy. His blue broadcloth was the finest and shiniest. Buttons and bugles seemed masses of barbric gold. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Shi' were believed to be a peevish, repining race of beings, who, possessing but a scant portion of happiness, envied mankind their more complete and substantial enjoyments. They had a sort of a shadowy happiness, a tinsel grandeur, in their subterranean abodes. Many persons had been entertained in their secret retreats, where they were received into the most splendid apartments, and regaled with sumptuous banquets and delicious wines. Should a mortal, however, partake of their dainties, then he was forever doomed ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... clerks, into a sombre room, stone-floored, furnished stiffly with a row of carved chairs against the wall, lighted coldly by roof-windows of placuna, and a lamp smoking before some commercial god in his ebony and tinsel shrine. ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... wisdom in the same category. Wagner vulgarized Beethoven's symphonic methods—noticeably his powers of development. Think of utilizing that magnificent and formidable engine, the Beethoven symphonic method, to accompany a tinsel tale of garbled Norse mythology with all sorts of modern affectations and morbidities introduced! It is maddening to any student of pure, noble style. Wagner's Byzantine style has helped corrupt much ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... and thoughtfully, "put away from you this unworthy and pitiful envy. Cast it off as you do the tinsel robes and rouge of the stage with which you conceal your beauty. Be yourself again. The noble, proud, and great-hearted woman who shines without the aid of garish ornament, who is ever the queen of grace and beauty, and needs not the borrowed and ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... except the gray of his hat with its golden cord and the tinsel of his clothes. There was something malignant in his make-up and even the unimaginative Jim was affected by the presence of the Mexican, while Juarez was very uneasy, and asked Jo and Tom to allow him to move up next to the Captain. This they did, though ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... York, that it always has been? Did it not bear the same Circean cup through the halls of Nineveh and Babylon, and fling Caesars and Alexanders to the ground? Did it not wear the same seductive smile and harlot tinsel when it walked the streets of Tyre, and reclined in the decorated chambers of Egypt? And will not its votaries find now, as then, that it entices with the embrace of death and the fascination of hell? Why should they thus float upon the very rim of this great whirlpool, and not notice the groans ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... of Winter was Tom Watkins, decorated superbly as a Christmas Tree. Boughs of Norway spruce were bound upon his arms and legs and covered his body. Shining balls hung from the twigs, tinsel glistened as he passed under the lantern light, and strings of popcorn reached from his head to his feet. There was no question of his popularity among the children. Every small boy who saw him asked if he ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... who can excel the exquisite refinement of every look, and the inborn delicacy of every thought, in her of whom, if mine, I shall be as proud as I shall be fond. As to defects in the frippery and tinsel of a boarding-school education, they are very soon remedied. Remains only the last consideration,—birth. Mrs. Braefield informs me that you have assured her that, though circumstances into which as yet I have no right to inquire, have made her the ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thoroughly that I cannot hate him. I abhor him. It is you who must save me from him; it is you who must also save me my principality. Oh, they envy me, these poor people, because I am a Princess, because I dwell in the tinsel glitter of the court. Could they but know how I envy their lives, their homes, their humble ambitions! Believe me, monsieur, as yet I love no man; but that is no reason why I should link my life to that of a man to whom virtue in a woman means nothing. He caused my mother great sorrow. ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... yours, Mr Murray, I am sure of it, and I am more than grateful," answered Stella, looking up at him. "Still affection should not blind us to the faults of those we love, as in time the tinsel must wear off our idols, and disappointment, if not a painful reaction, will be ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... a large flower-pot that had served a similar purpose before, and Nora brought out from the place where it had been stored away since last Christmas a cardboard box containing a lot of glittering tinsel ornaments—globes of silvered or gilded or painted glass, birds, butterflies and stars. Some of these things had done duty three Christmases ago and although they were in some instances slightly tarnished most ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... romance that surrounded him—of which, plainly, he was not conscious. To him, romance meant the lights, the crowds, the amusements, the glitter and tinsel of the cities of the East, word of which had come to him through various channels. To her these things were no longer novel,—if they had ever been so—and so for her romance must come from the new, the unusual, the unconventional. ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... girlhood, was written in them, but only a terrible, a brutal record of spoliation and of wreckage, of plunder, and of despair. And the gaslight, striking the flat surface of the mirror, made the record glitter with a thin, cheap sparkle, like the tinsel trappings of the life whose story the mirror revealed ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again. Life would be no better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy. It was true that Dorothea wanted to know the Farebrothers better, and especially to talk ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... in Arabic means 'a star'. Steingass (Persian Dictionary) defines Kaukaba as 'a polished steel ball suspended to a long pole, and carried as an ensign before the king; a star of gold, silver, or tinsel, worn as ornament or sign of rank; a concourse of people; a royal train, retinue, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... from the Records of Norwich, re what happened there at Christ-tide 1440. "John Hadman,[72] a wealthy citizen, made disport with his neighbours and friends, and was crowned King of Christmas. He rode in state through the City, dressed forth in silks and tinsel, and preceded by twelve persons habited as the twelve months of the year. After King Christmas followed Lent, clothed in white garments, trimmed with herring skins, on horseback, the horse being decorated with trappings of oyster shells, being indicative that sadness and a holy time should ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... In this regard, faithful to the traditions of the republic, which his family had really changed from a democracy to a ploutarchy, he had the good taste to scorn the vulgar pomp of kings,—"the horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold,"—all the theatrical paraphernalia and plebeian tinsel "which dazzle the crowd and set them all agape"; but his expenditures were those of an intellectual and accomplished oligarch. He was worthy, in many respects, to be the chief of those haughty merchants ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various |
