"Unpolished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Father wills it, but presumptuously seeking to know how it is, and why it is. If it be unfair to pronounce on the unfinished and incompleted works of man; if the painter, or sculptor, or artificer, would shrink from having his labours judged of when in a rough, unpolished, immatured state; how much more so with the works of God? How we should honour Him by a simple, confiding, unreserved submission to His will,—contented patiently to wait the fulfilment of this "hereafter" promise, when all the lights and shadows in ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... instincts that were quite free from vanity. Her natural kindliness gave her the charm of good-breeding, and this settled her in the estimation of Mrs. Lawrence. She might have possessed all the virtues in the calendar, but an inharmonious, unpolished turn or act would have tabooed her. We generally ascribe this grace to life-long culture, or a certain inheritance of blood, but it occasionally springs from ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... troubled about anything. I merely referred to enjoyments derived from various sources, open alike to rich and poor. There are Marahs hidden in every path; no matter whether the draught is taken in jeweled goblets or unpolished gourds." ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... on physical intimacy. It is the development of soul and spirit. It polishes the manners, cultivates the voice, broadens the judgments, sharpens the wit. It makes conversation an art and discussion significant. A woman-hating man or a man-hating woman is an unpolished and half-alive creature, whether he be a mediaeval saint, or she a militant suffragette, or they both be ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... O thou unpolished shaft, why leave the quiver? O thou blunt axe, what forests canst thou hew? Untempered sword, canst thou the oppressed deliver? Go back to thine own maker's ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... marble gather Its rubbish back once more. And lie down, undistinguished, In the rough rock as before? Does the costly diamond, blazing On that crowned and queenly one, Look back with sorrowful gazing To the coarse unpolished stone? ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... the building of their city the Romans had never known any entertainments of the stage. Chance and jollity first found out those verses which they called Saturnian and Fescennine; or rather human nature, which is inclined to poetry, first produced them rude and barbarous and unpolished, as all other operations of the soul are in their beginnings before they are cultivated with art and study. However, in occasions of merriment, they were first practised; and this rough-cast, unhewn poetry was instead of stage-plays for the space of ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... form'd Minde, The hightnings of Truth, The sweetnings and shadowings of Probabilities, The falls and depths of Falshood; all which serve to perfect this Masterpiece. Now although my after-draught be rude and unpolished, and that perhaps I have touch'd it too boldly, The thoughts of so clear a Minde, being so extremely fine, That as the choisest words are too grosse, and fall short fully to expresse such sublime Notions; So it cannot be, but ...
— A Discourse of a Method for the Well Guiding of Reason - and the Discovery of Truth in the Sciences • Rene Descartes
... some men you're sure to like— Men who would greet you as a brother; One is that honest fellow, Mike, And Cockney, possibly, another; Unpolished, quick to wrath and slow, When roused, to lay aside their cholor, Yet are they types you ought to know As well as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... of love, but something finer—nothing less, indeed, than the jewel natural, uncut, unworked, unpolished, blazing out of a twofold crown that sat, yoke-like, upon their heads for all to see. Since, however, they met no one, ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... Italian during that time, and who cannot stand the climate because they are not used to it; when one sees the young ladies who return home unable to take any interest in American life, and who shut themselves away from its society, which to them is most unpolished and vapid, because they have had a European education; when one sees the hundred follies which a glimpse of Europe will put into the heads of people whom before one had had every reason to think ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... edges," she said drily. Lily slipped out last among the band of liberated work-women. She did not care to be mingled in their noisy dispersal: once in the street, she always felt an irresistible return to her old standpoint, an instinctive shrinking from all that was unpolished and promiscuous. In the days—how distant they now seemed!—when she had visited the Girls' Club with Gerty Farish, she had felt an enlightened interest in the working-classes; but that was because she looked down on them from above, from ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... simple and unpolished as it was short. Yet it impressed the mind of Morris, and its curious allegorical note appealed to his imagination. The grey moss broken by stagnant pools, lonesome and primeval; the dreary pipe of the wildfowl, the red and angry sun fronting ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... resolved to erect, in St. Petersburg, a statue of Peter the Great, which should be worthy of his renown. A French artist, M. Falconet, was engaged to execute this important work. He conceived the design of having, for a pedestal, a rugged rock, to indicate the rude and unpolished character of the people to whom the emperor had introduced so many of the arts of civilization. Immediate search was made to find a suitable rock. About eight miles from the city a huge boulder was discovered, forty-two feet long, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... course, let's do it," and we went down to the landing stage. I had never seen the water so calm; half the bay was veiled by the mountain, and opaque like unpolished steel; a little further out, the water was a purple shield, emblazoned with shimmering silver. We called a fisherman and explained what we wanted. When we got into the boat, to my astonishment, Oscar began calling the fisher boy by his name; evidently he knew him ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... counters at their card-tables. An officer, who had been removed from the Portuguese settlements in India to serve in Brazil, suspected that these stones were diamonds, and sent a few to Portugal. The jewellers of Lisbon, having never seen a diamond in its unpolished state, laughed at the idea of such rude pebbles being of any value, and so the inquiry was for some time dropped. But the Dutch consul at Lisbon managed to procure one of the stones, and sent it to Holland, then almost the only country in Europe where ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... perpendicular rocks, which have breasted the storms for ages; gentle slopes, swelling away until their summits seem to dip in the blue sky; streams, cold and clear, leaping from crag to crag, and rushing down nobody knows whither. Like the country, may we not look to find the people unpolished, rugged and uneven, capable of the noblest heroism or the most infernal villainy—their lives full of lights and shadows, ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... in contrast to the faded civilian clothes they wore. Their white man's shoes were rusty and unpolished. To the unconventional eyes of the old Indian woman, their celluloid collars appeared like shining marks of civilization. Blue-Star Woman looked up from the lap of mother earth without rising. "Hinnu, hinnu!" she ejaculated in undisguised surprise. "Pray, ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... untaught, And self-assisted (save by Heaven), she sought To render each his own, and fairly save What might help others when she found a grave; By prudence taught life's troubled waves to stem, In death her memory shines, a rich, unpolished gem. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and stole Him away," as Augustine observes [*Cf. Catena Aurea]. Hilary (Comment. in Matth. cap. xxxiii) gives the mystical interpretation, saying that "by the teaching of the apostles, Christ is borne into the stony heart of the gentile; for it is hewn out by the process of teaching, unpolished and new, untenanted and open to the entrance of the fear of God. And since naught besides Him must enter into our hearts, a great stone is rolled against the door." Furthermore, as Origen says (Tract. xxxv in Matth.): "It was not written by hazard: 'Joseph wrapped ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... eighth, an ivy goblet, very precious, inlaid with gold. The ninth, a cup of fine Obriz gold. The tenth, a tumbler of aromatic agoloch (you call it lignum aloes) edged with Cyprian gold, after the Azemine make. The eleventh, a golden vine-tub of mosaic work. The twelfth, a runlet of unpolished gold, covered with a small vine of large Indian pearl of Topiarian work. Insomuch that there was not a man, however in the dumps, musty, sour-looked, or melancholic he were, not even excepting that blubbering whiner Heraclitus, had he been there, but seeing this noble convoy ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... constitution of this world remains unaltered, there will be more intellect in it than there can be education; there will be many men capable of just sensation and vivid invention, who never will have time to cultivate or polish their natural powers. And all unpolished power is in the present state of society lost; in other things as well as in the arts, but in the arts especially: nay, in nine cases out of ten, people mistake the polish for the power. Until a man has passed through a course of academy studentship, and can draw in an approved ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... which is too often overlooked. The polished gentleman of sentimental fiction has so long served as the type of smooth and conscienceless depravity that urbanity of demeanor inspires distrust in ruder minds. On the other hand, the blunt, unpolished hero of melodrama and romantic fiction has lifted brusqueness and pushfulness to a pedestal not wholly merited. Consequently, the kinship between conduct that keeps us within the law and conduct that makes civilized life worthy to be called such, deserves to be noted with emphasis. The Chinese ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Hawthorne gave, and between the two, if some allowance, also, be made for the unfavorable temper in which he wrote, it will appear, perhaps, that in the Custom House he found human nature about as it is always in an office having to do with sea business, in which naturally a rough, racy, unpolished, original, sturdy stock took a leading part, and a place was found for the retired old hulks of the profession ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... contain much that is quaint, but also much that is beautiful and true; yet they are the least poetical of his works. His 'Arcadia' is a glorious unfinished and unpolished wilderness of fancy. It is a vineyard, the scattered clusters of which are so heavy, that, like the grapes of Eshcol of old, they must be carried on a staff. Here is one of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... valuable material of the national character is to be seen. He always reminds me of the mother-of-pearl shell, rude and unpromising on the outside, but by friction exhibiting a fine interior. However it may be thought a paradox to pronounce the Frenchman unpolished, I hold to my assertion. If the whole of "jeune France" sprang on their feet and clapped their hands to the hilts of their swords, or more probably to their daggers, to avenge the desecration of the only shrine at which nine-tenths of them worship, I should still pronounce ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... inquire, what is its nature, or from what cause it is produced. In truth it lay long neglected amongst the other gross discharges of the sea; till from our luxury, it gained a name and value. To themselves it is of no use: they gather it rough, they expose it in pieces coarse and unpolished, and for it receive a price with wonder. You would however conceive it to be a liquor issuing from trees, for that in the transparent substance are often seen birds and other animals, such as at first stuck in the soft gum, and by it, as it ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... shows that the surface of unpolished glass is formed by a layer of crystals, or of sand, with the faces projecting out in all directions and at all angles. The result is, that a beam of light from the eye strikes one or more of these faces and is diverted from ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... these people are, they are far more closely drawn together to common ends and common effort than the filthy savages who ate food rotten and uncooked in the age of unpolished stone. They live in the mere opening phase of a synthesis of effort the end of which surpasses our imagination. Such intercourse and community as they have is only a dawn. We look towards the day, the day of the organized civilized world state. The first clear intimation of that conscious synthesis ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... order to defend ourselves it is just that nobody should shirk, that all should obey. Discipline does not quarrel with Revolution. Remember the armies of the first Republic—all citizens, Generals as well as soldiers, but Hoche, Kleber and the others were rough-hewn, unpolished benefactors who knew how to ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... rice by removing the coating, which contains organic salts, is another process by which is produced a food that is almost pure starch. The disease beriberi is now recognized as being due to a diet of polished rice. Where the natural unpolished rice is used this disease is both prevented and cured. In refining our sugar a similar denaturing process 'is carried on. The same is true in the grinding of corn, and in preparing a whole host ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... you could see the stars; over which of a windy night you could imagine the witches riding by, borne on the deep howling of the blast; the great beam and the gun slung to it; the heavy oaken table, unpolished, greyish oak; the window in the thick wall, set with yellowish glass; the stone floor, and the walls from which the whitewash peeled in flakes; the rude old place ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... mouths tin does not discolor, but retains a clean, unpolished tin color, yet when there is a sesquioxid of the metal formed, fillings present a grayish appearance. In the same mouth some fillings will be discolored, while others are not. As a general rule, proximal fillings ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... humble churchyard. The grave was noticeable because it was well kept, and utterly devoid of the tawdry ornamentation inseparable from such places in Italy. It was marked by a monument distinctly unique in a European country. It was a huge unpolished boulder, over which creeping green ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... advisable to expose ebonite to the light as little as possible, especially if the surface is unpolished, for under the combined action of light and air the sulphur at the surface of the ebonite rapidly oxidises, and the ebonite becomes covered with a thin but highly conducting layer of sulphurous or sulphuric acid ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... (which, by the way, I have only recently become acquainted with) I saw the Queries of your correspondent G. P. P. upon the above subject, and having some time ago had occasion to investigate it, I accumulated a mass of notes from various sources,—and these I send you, rough and unpolished as they are, in the hope that in the absence of better information, they may prove ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... with him, sitting on the rock, the day of the picnic at Kinvarra Castle. She had forgotten, or rather she had never noticed, that he was a short, thick-set, middle-aged man, that he wore mutton-chop whiskers, and that his lips were overhung by a long dark moustache. His manners were those of an unpolished and somewhat commonplace man. But while she thought of his grey eyes her heart was thrilled with gladness, and as she dreamed of his lonely life of labour and his ultimate hopes of success, all her old sorrows and fears seemed to have evaporated. Then suddenly and with the unexpectedness ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... the people, and is therefore in a more popular tone than usual: portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but many stanzas are all his own. I heard him ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... various branches of mendicancy are languishing, and Yuen Yan can have no secret store of wealth. Do not hesitate to offer a higher wage than you would as an affair of ordinary commerce, for your safety depends upon it. Having secured Yan, teach him quickly the unpolished outlines of your business and then clothing him in robes similar to your own let him take his stand within the shop and withdraw yourself to the inner chamber. None will suspect the artifice, and Yuen Yan is manifestly incapable of betraying it. Heng-cho, seeing him display himself openly, will not ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... with real or seeming simplicity, answered, "No, my Lord, I did not; but next time I tell the story I can mention the fact." As a pendant to the elder's disclaimer of "mainners" on the part of a lady of rank, I may add an authentic anecdote of a very blunt and unpolished Kincardineshire laird, expressing the same disclaimer of mainners on the part of a servant, but in a far rougher form of speech. He had been talking with a man who came to offer for his service as a butler. But the ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... Italy with an old Yankee and his daughter—he being a man, it was said, who had laid the foundation of his colossal fortune by keeping a bar-room in a mining camp in California. This last was no fiction, the cut of Mr. Sparks's beard and his unpolished manners left no doubt on the subject; and she wound up by saying that Madame d'Avrigny, whom no one could accuse of ill-nature, had been grieved at meeting this unhappy girl in very improper company, among which ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... agreed with her—there was none to be compared with him. At all events, all the other boys that used to call and bring me candy and send me flowers at about this time suffered woefully in comparison with him! I remember that. So tame they were—so crude and young and unpolished! ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... standing in his sacrificial dress, which was found at Nimrud; and it is superior to that work of art, in being of the size of life; but either its execution was originally very rude, or it must have suffered grievously by exposure, for it is now wholly rough and unpolished. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... Every remarkable object on the way was noticed, and its history, if any particular association was connected with it, minutely detailed, whenever it happened to be known. When the sun rose, many beautiful green spots and hawthorn valleys excited, even from these unpolished and illiterate peasants, warm bursts of admiration at their fragrance and beauty. In some places, the dark flowery heath clothed the mountains to the tops, from which the gray mists, lit by a flood of light, and breaking into masses before the morning breeze, began to ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... clasp, fashioned in the semblance of a boar. His eyes were blue, fierce and shining, and in his hand he held for a weapon the trunk of a young pine-tree, in which was hafted a weighty axe-head of rough unpolished stone. ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... glacial traces as are hieroglyphics to the Egyptian scholar; indeed, more so,—for he not only recognizes their presence, but reads their meaning at a glance. Above the line at which these indications cease, the edges of the rocks are sharp and angular, the surface of the mountain rough, unpolished, and absolutely devoid of all those marks resulting from glacial action. On the Alps these traces are visible to a height of nine thousand feet, and across the whole plain of Switzerland, as I have stated, one may trace the glaciers by their moraines, by the masses of rock ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... in which tradition was still so powerful; but they could scarcely have been of serious danger to Julia, if her passionate temperament had not led her to commit a much more serious imprudence. Agrippa, compared to her, was old, a simple, unpolished man of obscure origin who was frequently absent on affairs of state. In the circle which had formed about Julia there were a number of handsome, elegant, pleasing young men; among others one Sempronius Gracchus, a descendant of the famous tribunes. Julia ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... of Italy may be pronounced pretentious and disappointing. It is constructed of various kinds of unpolished marble and terra-cotta panels. A tall archway is flanked by two wings having each two smaller arches, the entablatures of which are enriched, if we must so term it, with gaudy mosaic figures, portraits and heraldic bearings, while the spans of the arches surmount pyramidal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... gold basin of beautiful design and workmanship, in which played a miniature fountain of perfumed water that filled the air with a delicate fragrance. The walls were divided into panels of polished and unpolished granite. On the unpolished panels hung paintings of scenery. The dull, gray color of the walls brought out in sharp and tasteful relief the few costly and elegant adornments of the room: a placid landscape with mountains dimly outlining the distance. A water scene ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Many small faults the peasants doubtless possess; such are inseparable from human nature. The petty jealousies always to be found where men do congregate exist here, and as long as the earth revolves they will continue to exist; but underneath the rough, unpolished exterior there is a reef of gold, far richer than the mines of South Africa will ever produce, and as immortal as the souls in which it lies so ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Both take pleasure in reading various authors and certain books which have fallen by chance into their hands, works treating of the vast regions hitherto unknown to the world, and of the Occidental lands lying almost at the Antipodes which the Spaniards recently discovered. Despite its unpolished style, the novelty of the narrative charmed them, and they besought me, as well on their own behalf as in the name of Your Holiness, to complete my writings by continuing the narrative of all that has since ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... first natural genius, aided with all the powers of polite learning, polite books, and polite company—to be dragged forth to the full glare of learned and polite observation, with all my imperfections of awkward rusticity and crude and unpolished ideas on my head—I assure you, madam, I do not dissemble when I tell you I tremble for the consequences. The novelty of a poet in my obscure situation, without any of those advantages that are reckoned necessary for that character, at least at this time of day, has raised a partial tide of ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... a noble severity and fearless independence the vices of the monks and the priestcraft of the established religion, he is always elegant, amusing, and, what pleases and surprises most in a writer of so unpolished an age, strikingly delicate and chastised. I prefer him infinitely to Chaucer. If you wish for a good specimen of Boccacio, as soon as you have finished my letter, (which will come, I suppose, by dinner-time,) send Jane up to the library for Dryden's poems, and you will find among them ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... unpolished stipes, blending above with the substance of the thick unpolished walls; the ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... that may manifest itself in the tones of Mrs. Montezuma Moggs. According to our notion of the world, as it goes, she, and such as she, deserve rather to be honored than to provoke wrath by the defects of an unpolished and unguarded manner. She has her troubles, poor woman—gnawing cares, to which, in all likelihood, yours are but as the gossamer upon the wind, or as the thistle-down floating upon the summer breeze; and if there ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... nor the way in which it was placed before them would have tempted any but the most healthy, even ravenous appetite. Mary, the only maid they could afford to keep, was more willing than able. The china and silver had certainly been washed, but they were smeared and unpolished, the cloth was wrinkled and all askew, the food ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... first articles that came to hand were the king's very handsome gold coronet, his lion-skin mantle, and a necklace of what at first sight appeared to be red pebbles. Upon closer inspection, however, the stones were pronounced by the professor to be uncut and unpolished rubies of exceptional size and beauty, but which were ruined by the roughness and size of their perforations. There were ninety-three of them in all, strung upon a thin strip of deerskin, and, had they been perfect, would have been ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... enough that Pope meant to represent kings Charles and William as so devoid of the taste which should guide royal patronage, that, in selecting such objects of their favour as Blackmore and Quarles, they showed themselves to be as uncouth and unpolished as the animal to which he likens them. But the principal motive of this inquiry is to ascertain whether there exist in their writings any record of the indignation supposed to have been expressed by Jonson and Dennis at the favour shown by majesty to their ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... fields, and about this time found a new friend in the son of a small farmer named Turnill. The two youths read together, Turnill assisting Clare with books and writing materials. He now began to "snatch a fearful joy" by scribbling on scraps of paper his unpolished rhymes. "When he was fourteen or fifteen," to use his mother's own words, "he would show me a piece of paper, printed sometimes on one side and scrawled all over on the other, and he would say, 'Mother, this is worth ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... you must remember one Peter Schlemihl, whom you now and then met at my house in former days; a long-shanked fellow, who had the credit of awkwardness because he was unpolished, and whose negligence gave him an air of habitual laziness. I loved him—you cannot have forgotten, Edward, how often, in the spring-time of our youth, he was the subject of our rhymes. Once I recollect introducing him to a poetical tea-party, where he fell asleep while I was writing, even without ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... have been a dog, though I am not aware that anyone saw the accident. An old man whom you once attended—Mr. Butters; you spoke of him, I remember—found you lying in the road, my child, quite unconscious. He is an unpolished person, but possessed of warm affections. I—I can never forget his tender solicitude about you. He brought you home in his wagon, and carried you into the house. He volunteered to go to ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... Elizabeth, was now well known and needed no further study. With the passing of the Stuarts, when the king's favour ceased to be the means of making one's fortune, a courtly education was no longer profitable. High offices under the Georges were as often as not filled by unpolished Englishmen extolled for their native flavour of bluntness and bluffness. Foreign graces were a superfluous ornament, more or less ridiculous. The majority of Englishmen were wont to prize, as Sam Johnson ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... and limestone rough hoe-blades (easily mistaken for palaeolithic implements; they are, however, much flatter); polished serpentine or jasper celts; lentoid (lentil-shaped), amygdaloid (almond-shaped), and discoid beads of cornelian, crystal, obsidian, &c., unpolished; nails of translucent quartz and obsidian (obviously imitations of metal types); hard grey pottery sickles, pottery cones of various sizes, and pottery objects like gigantic nails bent up at the ends; pottery painted with designs in black, usually geometrical ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... little episode made the disappointed applicant inveterate against the Government, for he commenced, soon afterwards, the publication of an Opposition paper, in which be exhibited the rude ability of an unpolished and half-educated man. [Footnote: C. Lindsey's 'Life of W. Lyon Mackenzie,' Vol. I., p. ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... the branch of physics, to which the object belongs, but rather awkwardness. Of course, much must be placed, in both cases, to the account of clumsy instruments; but the instrument of speech differs from others in this: it is fashioned by, as well as for, its use; and a rude, unpolished language is, therefore, an index, in two ways, of the want of eloquence among the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... to the point under discussion. A pearl, or a glass bead, may owe its pleasantness in some degree to its lustre as well as to its roundness. But a mere and simple ball of unpolished stone is enough for sculpturesque value. You may have noticed that the quatrefoil used in the Ducal Palace of Venice owes its complete loveliness in distant effect to the finishing of its cusps. The extremity of the cusp is a mere ball of Istrian marble; and consider how subtle ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... wished to preserve others from those unpolished and hasty forms of speech into which I am conscious that I have often fallen in announcing the bestowal of dignities, a kind of document which is often asked for in such haste that there seems scarce time for the mere manual labour of writing it. I have ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... first these considerations were all against my putting on my armor, in the end the instinct of eating and fighting, which is as forceful in the modern savage, under the veneer of civilization, as in our unpolished progenitors, overcame all considerations of prudence, and here I am to do battle according to my ability. I promise to strike no foul blows and not to dodge the most portentous of whacks, but to ride straight at you and hit as hard as ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... polished. His sandals were of white gazelle-hide, stitched with gold, and, by way of ornament, he had but a single armlet, and a collar, consisting of ten golden rings, depending by eyelets from a flexible band of the same material. The metal was unpolished and its lack-luster red harmonized wonderfully with the bronze throat ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... the drama to have represented them. By a singular coincidence the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than elsewhere. The two natures go to its extreme—in the one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection (hence the happiness and strength of the marriage tie), a thing unknown in distant lands, and in France especially a woman here gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obedience, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... its narrative, which contrasts with the artificial graces of later Sanscrit poetry. The poetry of Kalidasa, for instance, is ornate and beautiful, and almost scintillates with similes in every verse; the poetry of the Maha-bharara is plain and unpolished, and scarcely stoops to a simile or a figure of speech unless the simile comes naturally to the poet. The great deeds of godlike kings sometimes suggest to the poet the mighty deeds of gods; the rushing of warriors suggests the rushing of angry elephants in the echoing jungle; ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... brief space Judge Menefee felt crushed, humiliated, relegated. Second place galled him. Why had this blatant, obtrusive, unpolished man of windmills been selected by Fate instead of himself to discover the sensational apple? He could have made of the act a scene, a function, a setting for some impromptu, fanciful discourse or piece of comedy—and have retained the role of cynosure. Actually, the lady ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... obedience to your Commands, an Account of my thoughts, as to this matter, though yet immature and unpolished: What use you will please to make of them, I shall leave to ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... him carefully groomed, and his very port breathing a peculiarly grave and sober dignity. Grey locks, still plentiful, clustered about his head. His cocked hat (of the antique pattern which, early in his ministry, he had imported by the dozen from Versailles) never altered in pattern. Buckles of unpolished silver shone dully at his knee and bent ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... not satisfied with a reasonable amount. There is something lacking and this makes itself known in cravings, which demand more food than is needed to nourish. I have noticed many times that children are satisfied with less of whole wheat bread than of white bread, and that the brown unpolished rice satisfies them more quickly and completely than the polished rice. In other words, depriving the foods of their salts is one of the ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... on, with loitering steps, to the little cemetery, where lay the grave they had come to seek. They found it in a forlorn and deserted corner, but there was no trace of neglect about the grey unpolished granite of the cross that marked it. No weeds were growing around it, and no moss was gathering upon it; the lettering, telling the name, and age, and date of death, of the man who lay beneath it, was as clear ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... exceptions to this general description. A few young men had found their way hither from the distant seaports; and these were the models of fashion to their rustic companions, over whom they asserted a superiority in exterior accomplishments, which the fresh, though unpolished intellect of the sons of the forest denied them in their literary competitions. A third class, differing widely from both the former, consisted of a few young descendants of the aborigines, to whom an impracticable philanthropy was ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... remained but that the wound was mortal. The boat then returned on board and we made sail for the Mulgrave Islands. Here was another sacrifice; an innocent child of nature shot down, merely to gratify the most wanton and unprovoked cruelty, which could possibly possess the heart of man. The unpolished savage, a stranger to the more tender sympathies of the human heart, which are cultivated and enjoyed by civilized nations, nurtures in his bosom a flame of revenge, which only the blood of those who have injured him, can damp; and when years have ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... of a tasty leg, deliciously cooked, and sat in a very unpolished way listening to the curious cries, when, raising his eyes, they encountered ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... curtsey to the gem, which, unpolished as it was, cast forth strange reflections, giving her, as she afterwards explained, a "queer feel" and a sense of chill down ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... improved. To the native performers the name of histriones was given, because hister, in the Tuscan vocabulary, was the name of an actor, who did not, as formerly, throw out alternately artless and unpolished verses like the Fescennine at random, but represented medleys complete with metre, the music being regularly adjusted for the musician, and with appropriate gesticulation. Livius, who several years after, giving up medleys, was the first who ventured to ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... genius is in the right, on the contrary, to show that when correctness, nay, when perfection is demanded, he can still shine, and be himself, whatever fetters are imposed on him. But I will say no more on this head; for I am neither so unpolished as to tell you to your face how much I admire you, nor, though I have taken the liberty to vindicate Shakspeare against your criticisms, am I vain enough to think myself an adversary worthy of you. I am much ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... a melancholy picture to see this bowed-down old man; his thin, pale face shaded by a worn-out, three-cornered hat, his dirty uniform strewn with snuff; and his meagre legs encased in high-topped, unpolished boots; his only companion a greyhound, old and joyless as his master. Neither the bust of Voltaire, with its beaming, intelligent face, nor those of his friends, Lord-Marshal Keith and the Marquis ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... to look at the adjutant, directed his jerky steps down the line. He was evidently pleased at his own display of anger and walking up to the regiment wished to find a further excuse for wrath. Having snapped at an officer for an unpolished badge, at another because his line was not straight, he reached ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... came a fresh bevy of students onward from Williamstown; but they made only a transient visit, though it was still raining. These were a rough-hewn, heavy set of fellows, from the hills and woods in this neighborhood,—great unpolished bumpkins, who had grown up farmer-boys, and had little of the literary man, save green spectacles and black broadcloth (which all of them had not), talking with a broad accent, and laughing clown-like, while sheepishness ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was almost perfection in its way; but there was something of that ostentatious simplicity whereby the parvenu endeavours sometimes to escape from the vulgar glitter of his wealth. The chairs and tables were of unpolished oak, and of a rustic fashion. There were no pictures, but the walls of the dining-room were covered with majolica panels of a pale gray ground, whereon sported groups of shepherds and shepherdesses after Boucher, painted on the earthenware ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... appeared in offing; landed on Front Opposition Bench, diffusing unwonted smell of stale mussels and seaweed. Commodore looked very imposing pacing down quarter-deck towards Mace, with telescope under his arm, sou'wester pulled well over his ears, and unpolished square-toed boots rising above his knees. A blizzard outside; snow and wind; bitterly cold; but the Commodore soon made it hot all round. Fell upon JOKIM spars and sails, stem and starn. "Regularly claw-hammered him," as GEORGE HAMILTON said, drawing on naval resources ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... numerous erasures from the emigrant list had necessarily increased dissatisfaction among the Royalists, since the property of the emigrants had not been restored to its old possessors, even in those cases in which it had not been sold. It was the fashion in a certain class to ridicule the unpolished manners of the great men of the Republic compared with the manners of the nobility of the old Court. The wives of certain generals had several times committed themselves by their awkwardness. In many circles there was an affectation of treating with ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... pious German is over-laden with grief, or touched by some blessing into sudden thankfulness, and he breaks into song as he laughs from gladness or groans from pain. This directness and naturalness give Scottish ballad and German hymn their highest charm. The poetic gold, if rough and unpolished, and with no elaborate devices carved upon it, is free at least from the alloy of conceit and simulation. Modern writers might, with benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish and dexterity ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... name of Ellinor, attended me with the most affectionate solicitude during my illness;[76] she scarcely stirred from my bedside, night or day; and, indeed, when I came to the use of my senses, she was the only person whom I really liked to have near me. I knew that she was sincere; and, however unpolished her manners, and however awkward her assistance, the good-will with which it was given, made me prefer it to the most delicate and dexterous attentions which I believed to be interested. The very want of a sense ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... to scan the appearance of my new acquaintance. He was rather above the medium height, squarely and somewhat stoutly built, and had an easy and self-possessed, though rough and unpolished manner. His face, or so much of it as was visible from underneath a thick mass of reddish gray hair, denoted a firm, decided character; but there was a manly, open, honest expression about it that won your confidence in a moment. He wore a slouched hat and a suit ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... pathetic, and an attention I very much appreciated, to see how bread, pickles, cold meat, and in fact everything else on that rough table, were quietly pushed to me, one after the other, without one word being said. That was their way of showing their approval of me. It was unpolished, but ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... its genus, is perhaps the most remarkable land-shell discovered during the voyage. It differs from all other Pupinae in having an unpolished surface. It was found in the South-East Island of the Louisiade Archipelago, under dead leaves chiefly about the roots ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... amusement among unpolished nations; but in a country verging to the extremes of refinement, Painting and Music come in for a share. As these offer the feeble mind a less laborious entertainment, they at first rival Poetry, and at length supplant her; they engross all that favour once shown to her, and though but younger ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... many of them—sought to belittle his work in this wise. Why, even in later years so acute a critic as John Dennis declared that "his lines are utterly void of celestial fire," and Shaftesbury spoke of his "rude, unpolished style and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... this question a young priest is to consider more than his flock. Priests on the foreign mission live community life, in hourly contact with each other. You cannot realise the agony a man inflicts on others by coarse or unpolished manners. The toil of a priest's day is severe, but the hardest day is mere summer pastime compared with the crushing thought of having to turn home to a boorish companion. This living martyrdom reaches its most acute stage when, in society, a man is forced to witness a brother priest expose ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... occasion by the elchi was characteristic of the people he represented—that is, unadorned, unpolished, neither more nor less than the truth, such as a camel-driver might use to a muleteer; and had it not been for the ingenuity of the interpreter our Shah would neither have been addressed by his title of King of Kings, or of the Kebleh ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... straightforward, firm, though unassuming statement of his opinions; and even this took place but seldom. The recollection of this gentleman confirms the account of Sir Jonah Barrington, that—"His address was unpolished; he spoke occasionally, and never with success; and evinced no promise of that unparalleled celebrity which he ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... 'perhaps some people may be pleased to say that they do like to hear, in his own unpolished way, what Josiah Bounderby, of Coketown, has gone through. But you must confess that you were born in the lap of luxury, yourself. Come, ma'am, you know you were born in ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... came curiously to Michael's ears, for he had in his subconscious mind anticipated them. Yet his material mind regarded them as fantastic imagination due to the man's abnormal condition. The unpolished jewel had probably been given to him by a devout Moslem, who imagined that he had derived some benefit from a visit which he had paid to the saint. His subconscious mind pressed ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... been already passed, ere the father and daughter arrived at the lowest story of the building, the base of which was the solid rock, roughly carved, upon which were erected the side-walls and arches of solid but unpolished marble. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... have disappeared. Still more narrow becomes the path along which you yourself are toiling, and its turns more frequent. You have already come a distance of two leagues, and still one- third of the ascent remains unsurmounted. You are not yet in Galicia; and you still hear Castilian, coarse and unpolished, it is true, spoken in the miserable cabins placed in the sequestered nooks which you pass ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... already referred to, seemed to be the life and spirit of the band. He was a rollicking good-natured fellow, an unpolished homme du peuple, but not inadmirable in his qualities of courage and cheerfulness—the kind of man who would have cracked a joke on his death-bed and sung lustily en route to the gallows. He possessed, ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... nation, when poetry is and has been the study of men of the first natural genius, aided with all the powers of polite learning, polite books, and polite company—to be dragged forth to the full glare of learned and polite observation, with all my imperfections of awkward rusticity and crude unpolished ideas on my head—I assure you, Madam, I do not dissemble when I tell you I tremble for the consequences. The novelty of a poet in my obscure situation, without any of those advantages which are reckoned necessary for that ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... diamond (Arab. "Almas" from {Greek}, and in Hind. "Hira" and "Panna") see vols. vi. 15, i. ix. 325, and in latter correct, "Euritic," a misprint for "dioritic." I still cannot believe diamond-cutting to be an Indian art, and I must hold that it was known to the ancients. It could not have been an unpolished stone, that "Adamas notissimus" which according to Juvenal (vi. 156) Agrippa gave to his sister. Maundeville (A.D. 1322) has a long account of the mineral, "so hard that no man can polish it," and called Hamese ("Almas?"). ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... are concerned—that is to say, as a guidance in our affairs, and as a comfort and consolation in suffering and death—perhaps just as much as truth itself could, if we possessed it. Don't be hurt at its unpolished, baroque, and apparently absurd form, for you, with your education and learning, cannot imagine the roundabout ways that must be used in order to make people in their crude state understand deep truths. The various religions are only various forms in which ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... field of honor; the author's old neighbors, who exchanged with him in life the friendly nod; hands that were calloused with the axe and shovel, and Judge Temple's aged slave in narrow home—all sleeping beneath the same sward and glancing shadows are not less honored now than is the plain, unpolished slab of stone, bearing two dates,—of birth and entrance into the life ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... mineral treasure present themselves. This is rock-salt, of which cartloads may be seen moving to the railway stations or piled up in various places. This valuable mineral in no way resembles our rock-salt, and the large blocks might easily be mistaken for granite or rough unpolished marble. The appearance and mode of working one of the great mines of the country will be described hereafter; and the chief localities in which salt and petroleum are raised will be found on our geographical map. The principal salt mines are the Doftana (Prahova) ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... difference is that Tolstoy is a consummate artist, a creator, in addition to the great preacher. For Marcus Aurelius is no artist. He is merely a speaker; he delivers his message in plain tongue, unadorned, often even unpolished. Epictetus, equally simple, equally direct with Marcus Aurelius, comes, however, already adorned with a certain humor which now and then sparkles through his serious pages. Ruskin brings with him ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... did not interest himself in these things, in the wasps that left the gate as he approached—they were making papier-mache from the wood of the top bar,—in the bright poppies brushing against his drab unpolished boots, in the hue of the wheat or the white convolvulus; they ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... fail to raise Bunyan's pretensions as a poet. His muse, it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a homely one. She is "clad in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks along the level Bedfordshire roads." But if the lines are unpolished, "they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant," with the "strong thought and the knack of the skilled workman who can drive by a single blow the nail ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... His temper was impatient, especially in the last years of physical pain; he often tried to take short cuts to his ends, believing that his ends were worthy and knowing that life was short. He made many mistakes, but he retrieved them nobly. He was in some ways rough-hewn and unpolished, but he was ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... "the starch all taken out of 'em," their occupant confounded, and themselves for sale. "Abe's" old "boss" said he was "astonished," and so he had good reason to be, but everybody could see it without his saying so. His "style" couldn't win among the true and shrewd, though unpolished "boys" in coarse garments. They saw ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Englishes to touch him. Of course they cooked his geese, Koran or not. One warder does more than many Prophets in Gungapur Jail. (He! He! Quite good epigram and nice cynicality of educated man.) The degraded and unpolished fellow decoyed two little girls into empty house to steal their jewellery, and cut off fingers and noses and ears to get rings and nose-jewels and ear-drops, and left to die. Holy Fakir, gentleman of course! Pooh! and ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... out of my desk. The epigrams are wretched indeed, but they answered Stewart's purpose, better than better things. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. I never dreamt of acknowledging, either them, or the Ode to the 'Rain.' As to feeble expressions, and unpolished lines—there is the rub! Indeed, my dear sir, I do value your opinion very highly. I think your judgment in the sentiment, the imagery, the flow of a poem, decisive; at least, if it differed from my own, and if after frequent ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... relations of these people to one another may seem merely dramatic to the superficial observer, but the power of the group is in the fact that it is monumental. I could imagine it done in four different kinds of rare tropical wood, carved unpolished. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... with two queens—a good and a bad. Such action as there is lies wholly in the mouths of messengers, and the speeches are of excessive length. But even these faults are perhaps less trying to the modern reader than the inchoate and unpolished condition of the metre in the choruses, and indeed in the blank verse dialogue. Here and there, there are signs of the stateliness and poetical imagery of the "Induction"; but for the most part the decasyllables stop dead at their close and begin afresh at their beginning with a staccato ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury |
