"Pungency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it remembered that Finn and Kathleen, up till that morning, had never been at close quarters with more than one dog at a time, and had never seen more than about a dozen dogs outside their own breed altogether. The noise of barking, the pungency and variety of smells, and the crowded multiplicity of doggy personalities were at first overpowering, and Finn and his sister walked with lowered tails, quick-shifting eyes, raised hackles, and twitching skin. But ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... excited by them, are never received singly, but ever with a greater or less degree of combination. So the colours of bodies or their hardnesses occur with their figures: every smell and taste has its degree of pungency as well as its peculiar flavour: and each note in music is combined with the tone of some instrument. It appears from hence, that we can be sensible of a number of ideas at the same time, such as the whiteness, hardness, and coldness, of a snow-ball, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... made "void the Word of God by their traditions." Human nature has not altered; and we succeed by the same method in making the Gospel of none effect. We are so well accustomed to do this that we lose the point and pungency of much of our Lord's teaching. But we know that the apostles did not. We know that they presented that teaching in all its sharpness to would-be disciples. It could not be otherwise with those who for three years had been in day by day intimacy ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... it impossible to think of her in connection with those denunciations of sinners for which his discourses had been noted. Some of the sharp old church-members began to complain that his exhortations were losing their pungency. The truth was, he was preaching for Myrtle Hazard. He was getting bewitched and driven beside himself by the intoxication of his ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Rollins was more calculated to conciliate and capture the votes of hesitating, or Border-State men; that of Garfield was perhaps the most scholarly and eloquent; while that of Stevens was remarkable for its sledge-hammer pungency and characteristic brevity. ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... plainness and pungency of the old-fashioned Scottish language there was sometimes a coarseness of expression, which, although commonly repeated in the Scottish drawing-room of last century, could not now be tolerated. An example of a very plain and downright address ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... yet no adequate sense of the strength and pungency of her younger sister's spirit, but who would not in any event have hesitated to rush on an individual martyrdom that might secure some consideration for the collective family—threw herself into ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... incarnation of thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is for ever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... to buy his own snuff, it would give him no sensation. The strongest would not make him sneeze, or wring from the sensibility of his eyes the smallest tribute to its pungency. He would turn up his nose at it, or, at the best, use it as sand-dust to receipt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... investigator, is a liquor compounded of spirit and acid juices, sugar and water. The spirit, volatile and fiery, is the proper emblem of vivacity and wit; the acidity of the lemon will very aptly figure pungency of raillery, and acrimony of censure; sugar is the natural representative of luscious adulation and gentle complaisance; and water is the proper hieroglyphick of easy prattle, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... it up the door fell ajar, and a pungency of schnapps and tobacco went into his nostrils. His resolution, if he had one, vanished. He ordered one glass of schnapps; friends came in and treated him to another; he was bound to do as much for them; shilling by shilling the goose money passed into ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the sunset beyond Dursley valley was very beautiful. It often was. Venus shone out with mellow brilliance a little to the right of the church. The air was full of bush scents, and somewhere, not far from where I stood, dead brushwood was burning and diffusing abroad the aromatic pungency that fire ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... to think that he will end by being punished himself for the misdeeds of which he had accused the other. Puss's sly and artful expression, the ass-headed and important-looking judge, with the wand and costume of a high and mighty dignitary, give pungency to the story, and recall the daily scenes at the judgment-seat of the lord of Thebes. In another place we see a donkey, a lion, a crocodile, and a monkey giving an instrumental and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible. There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting shingles. Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes. Let us get up and see what is going on.—Oh,—oh,—oh! do you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... fountain, fountain pen, the picture postcard, the umbrella, and the face-powder demonstrator had not yet invaded here. Isaac Neugass, Chemist—was just that. His walls were lined in labeled jars of panacea. The pungency of valerianate of ammonia smote the entrant. He pummeled his own pills, percolated his own paregoric, prescribed for neighborhood miseries from an invariable bottle that was slow, sluggish, and malodorous in the pouring, anointed the neighborhood bruises, and extracted, always gratis, neighborhood ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... The real vice is not that it is startling, but that it is quite insupportably tame. The whole object is to keep carefully along a certain level of the expected and the commonplace; it may be low, but it must take care also to be flat. Never by any chance in it is there any of that real plebeian pungency which can be heard from the ordinary cabman in the ordinary street. We have heard of a certain standard of decorum which demands that things should be funny without being vulgar, but the standard of this ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... more about and could often get five minutes with me slyly, threw herself in my way, got it when and where she could, and had it once or twice daily. I was not loth. The excitement of two cunts and a certain pungency in the position stimulated me. I have seen the two standing side by side, each at the same moment with my spunk in them, yet neither knowing the other's condition. At times before I had washed my prick ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... from a species of vinagrilla, about the size of a billiard ball, which grows in dry and sterile soil. The natives chew it, and throw it into a wooden mortar, where it is left to ferment, some leaves of tobacco being added to give it pungency. They consume it in this form, sometimes with slices of peyote itself, in their most solemn festivities, although it dulls the intellect and induces gloomy and hurtful visions (sombras ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... of character was Mr. Nathan Gore, of Massachusetts, a handsome man with a grey beard, a straight, sharply cut nose, and a fine, penetrating eye; in his youth a successful poet whose satires made a noise in their day, and are still remembered for the pungency and wit of a few verses; then a deep student in Europe for many years, until his famous "History of Spain in America" placed him instantly at the head of American historians, and made him minister at Madrid, where he remained four years to his entire satisfaction, this being the ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... composed of all the other elements, and so are apt to warp when used in buildings on account of this superfluity of moisture, yet they can be kept to a great age without rotting, because the liquid contained within their substances has a bitter taste which by its pungency prevents the entrance of decay or of those little creatures which are destructive. Hence, buildings made of these kinds of wood last for an ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... she would be back soon; standing under the portico of the Post Office, surrounded by the flower sellers with their bunches of exuberant waratah, feathery wattle and sweet, sober-looking boronia, she let her mind travel back to Lashnagar and the acrid smoke of the green-wood fires, the pungency of the fish, the sharp tang of the salt winds pushed the heavy perfume of flowers aside. In a moment the last six weeks of mad, unhappy dreaming and hoping vanished; she saw herself back again in her own sphere ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... in rheumatic pains, particularly those of the fixed kind, and which were seated deep. In these cases I have given from ten grains to a scruple of the fresh root twice or thrice a day, made into a bolus or emulsion with unctuous and mucilaginous substances, which cover its pungency, and prevent its making any painful impression on the tongue. It generally excited a slight tingling sensation through the whole habit, and, when the patient was kept warm in bed, produced a ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... enough synthetics to give them flavor. He couldn't say that he liked what he ate, but at least it gave him the feeling of being on his own, of having made the break with his tame past as complete as possible. Earth-beef tasted too strong; Venus seaweed stew had a pungency ...
— Runaway • William Morrison
... to write epitaphs on him, as "The late Dr. Goldsmith," and several were thrown off in a playful vein, hitting off his peculiarities. The only one extant was written by Garrick, and has been preserved, very probably, by its pungency: ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... before read such a mixture of the bombastic and the burlesque? We are called upon to cry over every joke, and, for the life of us, we cannot hold our sides when the catastrophes occur. It is a salad in which the pungency of the vinegar has been wholly subdued by the oil, and the fatness of the oil destroyed by ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Horace has many passages which, if not flat, pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully liable to become so in the hands of a translator. I have accordingly on various occasions aimed at epigram and pungency when there was nothing epigrammatic or pungent in the Latin, in full confidence that any trifling additions which may be made in this way to the general sum of liveliness will be far more than compensated by the heavy outgoings which must of necessity be the lot of every translator, and more particularly ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... extract the juice; mix with it about three ounces of horse-radish, (this to give it pungency,) flavor the same with any aromatic root to suit the taste, and then let the whole boil for one hour. After cooling, tightly bottle the mixture, and within twenty-four hours it will be fit for use. The process then will be to drink it in the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... the Greek. He was something more than the Welsh Ovid: he was the Welsh Horace, and wrote light, agreeable, sportive pieces, equal to any things of the kind composed by Horace in his best moods. But he was something more: he was the Welsh Martial, and wrote pieces equal in pungency to those of the great Roman epigrammatist,—perhaps more than equal, for we never heard that any of Martial's epigrams killed anybody, whereas Ab Gwilym's piece of vituperation on Rhys Meigan—pity that poets should be so virulent—caused the Welshman ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... in his full court suit, in his letters, his anecdotes, his whims, his odd views of mankind, his caustic sneerings at the glittering world round him; an epistolary HB., turning every thing into the pleasant food of his pen and pungency. But we cannot discover any letters from him, excepting a few very trifling ones of his youth. We have letters from all sorts of persons, great lords and little, statesmen and travellers, placemen and place-hunters; and amusing enough many of them are. Walpole furnishes some sketches, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... life. He simply leaves it alone because he cannot help it; it does not attract him. He draws just that which interests him most and in the way in which it interests him; and exactly to the measure of his interest does his drawing possess vitality. Keene might have expressed with pungency his sense of certain things as being artificial and outrageous, but as long as his feelings towards them remained like that he could not express himself about them in any other way, certainly not in du Maurier's way—that is, with du ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... out of his mouth when there arose a most startling commotion in the thicket close behind them, and both men swung around like lightning, jerking up their rifles. At the same instant came an elusive whiff of pungency on ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their reward." Like so many solitaries, he experienced the joy of intense, long-continued effort in composition, and he was artist enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled from his note books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not even Lowell the "last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his translations attest. He had some ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... slides from the memory. Its agility is infinite; wherever it may be, the instant one goes to put his hand upon it, he is sure to find it or feel it somewhere else. The wit of Benedick, on the other hand, springs more from reflection, and grows with the growth of thought. With all the pungency, and nearly all the pleasantry of hers, it has less of spontaneous volubility. Hence in their skirmishes she always gets the better of him; hitting him so swiftly, and in so many spots, as to bewilder his aim. But he makes ample amends when out of her presence, trundling ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... by mixing liquid caustic ammonia with the distilled spirit of hartshorn, to increase the pungency of its odour, and to enable it to ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... for which the Arabic equivalent is chardul or khardal, and the Syriac khardalo. The same name is applied at the present day to a tree which grows freely in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, and generally throughout Palestine; the seeds of which, have an aromatic pungency, which enables them to be used instead of the ordinary mustard (Sinapis nigra); besides which, its structure presents all the essentials to sustain the illustration sought to be established in the parable, some of which are wanting or ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... crossing and selection he deepens and intensifies the scents and hues of flowers, the tastes of fruits, and so on. He pursues the same method in poetry,—that is, strives for strong light or shade, for high color, perfume, pungency, in all ways for the greatest immediate effect. In so doing he leaves the true way, the way of Nature, and, in the long run, comes far short of ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... was snell and sharp; there was an earthy aroma which suggested nothing but decaying vegetable matter, but soon it was succeeded by a pungent penetrating odour which made one wonder whence its source. This pungency remained for the remainder of the morning's ride, almost to the top of the mountain pass, some 9000 feet above sea-level, and we ascertained on our return that it proceeded from the enormous cabbages grown by the mountaineers for the markets on the ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... you will, they are ever fresh as though new minted from the brain of the poet. Being perfect, they can never droop under that satiety which arises from the perception of fault; their virtue can never be so entirely savoured as to leave no pungency of ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... sustenance under given difficulties of famine or drought. Lastly you will consider what chemical actions appear to be going on in the root, or its store; what processes there are, and elements, which give pungency to the radish, flavour to the onion, or sweetness to the liquorice; and of what service each root may be made capable under cultivation, and by proper subsequent treatment, either to animals ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... father and grandfather, which it were disgraceful in your own person to extinguish, whereas the ancestry of the state was ignoble and mean. This again is not so. Your father was a thief, [Footnote: This seems to shock Leland, who spoils the pungency of the expression, by rendering it: "Your father was like you, and therefore base and infamous." Auger remarks: "L'invective de Demosthene est fort eloquente, mais bien violente. L'amour de la patrie, contre laquelle sans doute agissait Aristodeme, peut ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... settled down regularly to his work as descriptive reporter, and the letters that he wrote to his friendly circle at home fall naturally into four groups. The first Letters from II. to V. describe with Hogarthian point, prejudice and pungency, the town and people of Boulogne. The second group, Letters VI.-XII., deal with the journey from Boulogne to Nice by way of Paris, Lyon, Nimes, and Montpellier. The third group, Letters XIII.-XXIV., is devoted to a more detailed and particular delineation of Nice ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... no illusions about these Colossi. His letter criticising the proposal to erect a colossal statue of the Pope on the Piazza of San Lorenzo is in itself a delightful piece of humour, and ridiculed the conceit with such pungency that the project was abandoned. Finally, Donatello made two busts of prophets for the Mandorla door. The commission is previous to May 1422, when it is noted that Donatello was to receive six golden florins for ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... leave for Metlaoui and the Djerid. Gafsa is losing its flavour; the novelty and pungency are gone. The same old faces, the same old bouts de conversation; quickly, indeed, does one live oneself into a place and learn, or think to learn, all its ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... little well. The next business was to melt enough of the sulphur to secure a cast of the medallion. This part of the process resulted in the production of a most appalling smell, which was not lessened in pungency when the odour of singed brown paper was added to that of melting sulphur. When the cast was cool it also was bound round with brown paper, and a compound of plaster-of-paris and water was poured over it When this had hardened, ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... the poem a tone of pleasant colloquialism. Told as it is, it becomes in part a dramatic monologue of which the dramatis persona is Robert Browning. It is full of quiet, sometimes grim, humour; of picturesque and witty touches; of pungency and irony. Its manner, the humorous telling of a tragic tale, is a little after the pattern of Carlyle. In such a setting the tragic episodes, sometimes all but heroic, sometimes almost grotesque, have all ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... black-board, a piano, and Clementi's Sonatinas, the child had made a rash adventure upon life in the company of a half-bred hawbuck; and she was already not only regretting it, but expressing her regret with point and pungency. ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eminent statesman of his day, with unbounded popularity, especially in Kentucky, where to the last he retained his hold on popular admiration and affection. His speeches on the war are more marked for pungency of satire and bitterness of invective against England than for moral wisdom. They are appeals to passions rather than to reason, of great force in their day, but of not much value to posterity. They are not read and quoted like Webster's masterpieces. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... welcomed with a sense of refreshing pungency by readers who have been cloyed by a too long succession of insipid sweetness ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... by the additions of the barman, the draught was without special bite or pungency in its passage down his throat, and Dennis was aware of his indiscretion only by an increasing glow in the pit of his stomach and a disposition to credit the barman with a degree of amiability beyond that ordinarily manifested ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... of those Friday evenings, then, when the smell of roast apples steeping in hot toddy came wafting out the portals of Malachi's pantry—a smell of such convincing pungency that even the most infrequent of frequenters having once inhaled it, would have known at the first whiff that some musical function was in order. The night was to be one ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... diversity of interest and perpetual entertainment, for the constant surprises of an unique species of wit, for happy and unexpected turns of phrase, for graphic characterisation and clever anecdote, for playfulness, pungency, irony, persiflage, there is nothing like his letters in English.' A collected edition of his works, edited by Mary Berry, under the name of her father, Robert Berry, was published in 1798 ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... an effervescence on it. The pain of heat at the upper end of the gullet, when any air is brought up from the fermenting contents of the stomach, is to be ascribed to the sympathy between these two extremities of the oesophagus rather than to the pungency of the carbonic gas, or fixed air; as the sensation in swallowing that kind of air in water is of a different kind. See Class I. 3. 1. 3. and ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the stone were clumps of small flowers. They were crimson in colour and had thick, fleshy leaves. Hastily, he snatched a handful and piled it on the fire. The smoke darkened and rose in a thick column; there was a curious pungency ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... the good stock company was imported early this morning from Ireland. All very good Shakspearian actors with a taste of a brogue to give their remarks pungency. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... cause of contest was the wrath of Flood at seeing the laurels which he had relinquished seized by a younger champion, and the daring, yet justified confidence of Grattan in his own admirable powers to win and wear them. Flood, in the bitterest pungency of political epigram, charged Grattan with having sold himself to the people, and then sold the people to the minister for prompt payment. (A vote of L50,000 had been passed to purchase an estate for Grattan.) Grattan retorted, that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... civility in conducting his friends down to their boat. But fate, in the form of Zubby, was unfavourable to them. Either that loving damsel's finger had been more effective than was at first supposed, or the pins were operating with unwonted pungency, but certain it is, that just as Mr Robinson was passing under the gateway, Master Jim awoke from his profound slumber. Feeling, although not naturally dyspeptic, that the cabbages weighed heavy on his stomach, he set up such a howl, and struck out so violently, that the lid of the basket ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... to. Rechberg plays well, and likes his game; but he is in Whist, as are all Germans, a thorough pedant. I remember an incident of his whist-life sufficiently amusing in its way, though, in relation, the reader loses what to myself is certainly the whole pungency of the story: I mean the character and nature of the person who imparted the anecdote to me, and who is about the most perfect specimen of that self-possession, which we call coolness, the age we live in ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... called her "Mademoiselle" too; could anything be more charming? Nothing save his accent itself,—a trick of the tongue, an intonation ever so slightly alien that addressed her ear just as some perfume's rich but smothered pungency might address the nose. Yes, the first stage in her apotheosis was an undoubted success. All that was needed now was her translation from black and white to colour. Well, the chariot was ready to ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... intellect, acute discrimination, clear and explicit statement, masterly arrangement of matter, an unmistakable performance of the real business of expression,—these qualities make every reader of the sermons conscious that a mind of great vigor, breadth, and pungency is brought into direct contact with his own. The almost ostentatious absence of "fine writing" only increases the effect of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... and innocent amusement, do singularly delight in treasons, executions, Sabine rapes, Tarquin outrages, conflagrations, murders, and all the other catalogues of hideous crimes, which, like cayenne in cookery, do give a pungency and flavor to the dull detail of history; while a fourth class, of more philosophic habits, do diligently pore over the musty chronicles of time, to investigate the operations of the human kind, and watch the gradual changes in men and manners, effected by the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... their heads, while above these, and drooping in many cases right down to the ground, was an inextricable maze and tangle of lianas, or "monkey rope," intertwined with which were countless festoons of flowering creepers, the mingled perfumes of which were almost overpowering in their pungency. Long pliant twigs thickly studded with needle-sharp thorns constantly protruded across the path, menacing their faces and tenaciously grappling their clothing, so that they had to halt at almost every other step to free themselves; and frequent quick rustlings among the long tangled herbage ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... from the jack rabbits," she rallied herself shakily, when she was safely hidden behind a sagebush whose pungency made her horribly afraid that she might sneeze, which would ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... do not!" Prather returned. Now a certain deference and a certain pungency of satire ran together in his tone, the mixture being nicely and pleasurably controlled. "Is it in ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... powers, the French at that time (before Cantigny and the Second Marne) had the gravest doubts. The American confidence suffused the American stereotype, gave it that power to possess consciousness, that liveliness and sensible pungency, that stimulating effect upon the will, that emotional interest as an object of desire, that congruity with the activity in hand, which James notes as characteristic of what we regard as "real." [Footnote: Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 300.] ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... during the fierce heat of the controversy which eventuated in the Disruption, of three separate pamphlets, each bearing the title, "Cracks about the Kirk, for Country Folks." Two of these pamphlets, written in "broad Scotch," were remarkable for their pungency and effective banter. Although published anonymously, it was generally known that these pamphlets owed their existence to "young Norman," and they contributed very materially to establish his growing fame as a writer and preacher. During the memorable ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... so vast an improvement on Donizetti and Bellini. His melodies are too often sadly sentimental, and any freshness with which he may have endowed them has long since faded. True, they occasionally have a terseness and pungency, a sheer brute force, which those other composers never got into their insipid tunes; while, on the other hand, Verdi rarely shows his strength without also showing a degree of vulgarity from which Bellini and Donizetti were ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... selling guano on analysis—especially among retail buyers—did not largely obtain in the early years of the trade. A good deal of this adulteration was probably caused by ignorant prejudice on the part of the farmer, to whom the pungency of its smell and its colour were too apt to be ranked as its most important properties. The variation in the quality of different kinds of guano was too often not sufficiently realised by the buyer, who not unfrequently was made to pay as high a price for guano of an inferior quality as ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... The pungency of extreme grief acts as a temporary opiate: for a short time it lulls the sufferer to insensibility, and sleep; but it is only to recruit him and awaken him to ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... wooden houses along the level earth; its scattered, treeless lakes, from which the duck rose as the train passed! Was it this mere foreignness, this likeness in difference, that made it strike so sharply, with such a pleasant pungency on Elizabeth's senses? Or was it something else—some perception of an opening future, not only for Canada but for herself, mingling with the broad light, the keen air, the lovely strangeness of ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "Beati Mortui", a Celtic note, shown so exquisitely in her "Irish Peasant Song", and one has the more obvious characteristics of poetry that, whatever its theme, is always distinguished and individual. Miss Guiney has a crisp economy of phrase, a pungency and tang, that invest her style with an unusual degree of personality. Her volumes in their order have been: "The White Sail", 1887; "A Roadside Harp", 1893; "Nine Sonnets Written at Oxford", 1895; "The Martyr's Idyl", 1899; and "Happy Ending", ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... me they see: O thou whose love hath gotten hold the foremost in the heart * Of me whose fondness is excelled by mine insanity: Fear the Compassionate in my case and some compassion show! * Love of thee makes me taste of death in bitterest pungency." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... stumbled into a chair near the foot of the table. Her bosom fluttered at the base of the throat. Half blindly she reached out her hand toward a glass of wine which stood near by, foaming and sparkling, its gem-like drops of keen pungency swimming continuously up to the surface. Her hand caught at the slender stem of the glass. Leaning upon her left arm, she half rose as though to put it to her lips. Her head moved, as though she would follow the retreating figure of the man who had thus scornfully ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... epithets of our dictionary to us now? The critics and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... assist the action of the liver and kidneys, and remove paralysis of the bladder. They are all cold, easily digested, and may be drunk at any time. They contain bicarbonate of soda, lime, and magnesia, lithia, iodine, iron, and some of them traces of the arseniate of soda, and owe their pungency to the free ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... looked out upon a bay tree, a little thing awaiting its slaughter—for shade trees might not grow too near the windows in San Francisco. It was flopping its lance-leaves against the panes; puffs of the breeze brought in a suggestion of its pungency. That magic sense, so closely united with memory—it brought back a faint impression upon her. Her very panic at this ghost of old imaginations inspired the inquiry, barbed and ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... a pint of beer may be added. Simmer for half an hour, and serve in a deep dish. The herbs to be used should be burnet, tarragon, parsley, thyme, basil, savoury, marjoram, pennyroyal, knotted marjoram, and some chives; a good handful all together. But observe to proportion the quantities to the pungency of the several sorts. Garnish with carrots, turnips, or truffles and morels, or pickles of different colours, cut small, and laid in little heaps separate. Chopped parsley, chives, and beet root may be added. If there is too much gravy for the dish, take only ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... If a man has thought sufficiently about the arduous and variously rewarded profession of literature to propose seriously to follow it for a living, he will already have said these things to himself, with more force and pungency. He may have satisfied himself that he has a necessary desire for "self-expression," which is a parlous state indeed, and the cause of much literary villainy. The truly great writer is more likely to write in the hope of expressing the hearts of others than his own. And there are other desires, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... with Swift's "Answer to the Craftsman." It may be that the title is misleading or uninviting; but there is no question that this tract may well stand by the side of the "Modest Proposal," both for force of argument and pungency of satire. In its way and within the limits of its more restricted argument it is one of the ablest pieces of writing Swift has given us on behalf of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... recognize the striking similarity—but only in so far as the external form is concerned—discoverable in those short-stories which are as abundant as they are important in every modern literature; and yet much of our delight in these brief studies from life is due to the pungency of their local flavor, whether they were written by Kjelland or by Sacher-Masoch, by Auerbach or by Daudet, by Barrie or by Bret Harte. "All can grow the flower now, for all have got the seed"; but the blossoms are rich with the strength of the soil in which ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Canning, and others, as chief contributors. Under the conduct of such men, it became at once an organ of great power, yet still not quite what was wanted. It did not seem to meet entirely the demands of the case. It had not the wit, pungency, and facility of its rival, and failed of securing so general a popularity. Its learning and gravity made it better suited to be the oracle of scholars than the organ of a party. Compared with its adversary across the Tweed, it was like a ponderous knight, cased in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Canadian, Captain de Haldimar prevailed on them to swallow a few drops of the spirit that still remained in the canteen given them by Erskine on their departure from Detroit. The genial liquid sent a kindling glow to their chilled hearts, and for a moment deadened the pungency of their anguish; and then it was that Miss de Haldimar entered briefly on the horrors she had witnessed, while Clara, with her arm encircling her waist, fixed her dim and swollen eyes, from which a tear ever ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... and, like the basis of soup at the modern hotels, forms, as it were, the stock from which all the varieties in flavor and appearance are produced by special treatment and flavoring. Of course the strength and pungency of the snuff will depend a good deal upon the richness of the tobacco originally put aside for it. About one thousand pounds of tobacco would form an ordinary batch of snuff. The duty on this would amount to about L150, and this has to be paid before the tobacco is removed from ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... out, was Southey, whose "Book of the Church" had been attacked by Charles Butler. This is one of Coleridge's most masterly experiments in dealing with material hardly possible to turn into poetry. What exquisite verse, and what variety of handling! The eighteenth-century smooth force and pungency of the main part of it ends in an anticipation of the burlesque energy of some of Mr. George Meredith's most characteristic verse. Anyone coming ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... Mrs. Leverett's reasoning, adding the pungency of her sniff. Betty's heart dropped like lead. True, she had not really ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... holding a secret, playing a part, or otherwise entering into the deepest mystery of life—which is to make a joke of it—so thoroughly as a gypsy, it follows that the being respectable has to him a raciness and drollery and pungency and point which passeth faith. It has often occurred to me, and the older I grow the more I find it true, that the real pleasure which bank presidents, moral politicians, not a few clergymen, and most other highly representative good men take in having a high character is ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... liberty than he can locate his soul. Mr. D. G. Ritchie truly says: "Many crimes have been done, and a still greater amount of nonsense talked in the name of liberty."[27] Seeley, with as much justice as pungency, asserts that some writers "teach us to call by the name of liberty whatever in politics we want," and so lead us to disguise our selfishness and cowardice in the stolen garb of moral principle.[28] At any rate, there is urgent need that before we either support or oppose any practical political ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... spikes of lavender-coloured flowers, and grey-green silvery leaves, mingles with the coarse grasses of the sandy flats, and usurping broad areas forms an aromatic carpet from which every footstep expresses a homely pungency as of marjoram and sage. The odour of the island may be specific, and therefore to be prized, yet it gladdens also because it awakens happy and all too fleeting reminiscences. English fields and hedges cannot be forgotten when one of our trees diffuses the scent of meadow-sweet, and one of the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony—these never desert her (though she wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So great is her self-possession that she holds ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... cast them out; he forgot them; and if he could not forget them he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that obviously were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. One might say in much ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... qu'ils soient naturalistes, romantiques, decadents, tout ce que vous voudrez, ca m'est egal! il s'agit pour moi d'avoir du talent, et voila tout! But, as we have seen, he has undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first he has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in Le Drageoir a Epices, we find such daring combinations as this (Camaieu Rouge)—Cette fanfare de rouge m'etourdissait; cette gamme d'une intensite furieuse, d'une violence ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... pointed out to me a kind of tea-tree, or Melaleuca, which had a short time before been recognised by a Malay as that producing the valuable cajeput oil, and on trial, the oil procured from the leaves by distillation, was found to be scarcely inferior in pungency to that of the Melaleuca cajeputi of the Moluccas. Here, too, we saw some of the playhouses of the greater bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis) and had the pleasure of witnessing the male bird playing his strange antics as he flew up ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... boat, with a boy or an old man asleep in the bottom of it. The gulls sailed high, white flakes against the illimitable blue of the heavens; the air, though it was of early spring, and in the shade had a salty pungency, was here almost languorously warm; in the motionless splendors and rich colors of the scene there was a melancholy before which Mrs. Vervain fell fitfully silent. Now and then Ferris briefly spoke, calling Miss Vervain's notice to this or that, ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... sufferings she could not well be ignorant. Lucy was a keen observer, and her epistles were filled with amusing comments on the follies that were daily committed in New York, as well as in Paris, or London. I was delighted with the delicate pungency of her satire, which, however, was totally removed from vulgar scandal. There was nothing in these letters that might not have been uttered in a drawing-room, to any but the persons concerned; and yet they were filled with a humour that rose often to wit, relieved by a tact and taste that a ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... fifteen years, but still the larger portion of the world used these lamps. All this first scene will go, in my mind at least, to that olfactory accompaniment. That was the evening smell of the room. By day it had a more subtle aroma, a closeness, a peculiar sort of faint pungency that I associate—I know not ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... anxiety was claimed. I could just see her white frock beyond the still white shrouded figure on the couch. Silvio was troubled; his piteous mewing was the only sound in the room. Deeper and denser grew the black mist and its pungency began to assail my nostrils as well as my eyes. Now the volume of smoke coming from the coffer seemed to lessen, and the smoke itself to be less dense. Across the room I saw something white move where ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... the path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken stem, dropped from some coolie's necklace. Hilda picked it up and drew in the crude, warm pungency of its smell. She closed her eyes and drifted on the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her feet. All India and all her passion was in that violent, penetrating fragrance; it brought her, as ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... thirteen years. It is an East Indian plant, rather pretty, but of rambling and untidy growth, a climber, with smooth, soft stems, ten or twelve feet long, and tough, broadly ovate leaves. It is supported much as hops are. When the berries on a spike begin to turn red they are gathered, as they lose pungency if they are allowed to ripen. They are placed on mats, and are either trodden with the feet or rubbed by the hands to separate them from the spike, after which they are cleaned by winnowing. Black pepper consists of such berries wrinkled and blackened in the process of drying, and white pepper ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... unusual in such cases, it took another and more bodeful turn. That inextinguishable laughter of his was heard no more, or at best gave place to a feeble tittering; his stories dropped from his lips with but flat pungency; and instead of performing his lady-love's 'chores' with a mirthful readiness, he went through them in a heartsick way, the while directing towards her furtive looks of supplication. The true state of matters was now obvious ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... an incalculable influence for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some pungency for dull people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the rarer utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the antidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ay, time truly works wonders. It sublimates wine; it sublimates fame; nay, is the creator thereof; it enriches and darkens our spears of the Palm; enriches and enlightens the mind; it ripens cherries and young lips; festoons old ruins, and ivies old heads; imparts a relish to old yams, and a pungency to the Ponderings of old Bardianna; of fables distills truths; and finally, smooths, levels, glosses, softens, melts, and meliorates all things. Why, my lord, round Mardi itself is all the better for its antiquity, and the more to be revered; to ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... certain fly that is a great pillager of honey, so that when the real fly comes it thinks that the flowers are bespoke, and goes on elsewhere. Some are so clever as even to overreach themselves, like the horse-radish, which gets pulled up and eaten for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself against underground enemies. If, on the other hand, they think that any insect can be of service to them, see how pretty they ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... that pervades the place, acting as an orchestral accompaniment to the chorus of human voices. Listen to it all, breathe it all, let your noses and your ears take it all in. Then let your eyes and your imagination have their turn before the pungency of rank tobacco adds to the difficulty of seeing and breathing. And so we look, and we find there are sixty human beings of both sexes and various ages in that kitchen. Some of them we know, for have we not seen ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... ginger and cloves, chewed fine, in order by the prickling sensation to drive away the demon of disease which may be clinging to their persons. In Java a popular cure for gout or rheumatism is to rub Spanish pepper into the nails of the fingers and toes of the sufferer; the pungency of the pepper is supposed to be too much for the gout or rheumatism, who accordingly departs in haste. So on the Slave Coast the mother of a sick child sometimes believes that an evil spirit has taken possession of the child's body, and in order to drive him out, she makes small ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... at harvest-time The corn is stacked; Where pies are cooked of millet and bearded-maize. Guests watch the steaming bowls And sniff the pungency of peppered herbs. The cunning cook adds slices of bird-flesh, Pigeon and yellow-heron and black-crane. They taste the badger-stew. O Soul come back to feed ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... to a by-stander, the conduct of you both appears remarkable. I could not understand, for example, just how your wife proposed to have you keep out of her sight forever and still have supper with her to-night; nor why she should desire to sup with such a reprobate as she described with unbridled pungency and disapproval." ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... us to fling the stars into the sea are not quite sure that they will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have all the comedy emotions of 'Much Ado about Nothing' or 'Northanger Abbey,' but if their actual ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton |
