"Quaintness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... copy is noticed in an account of Rydal Mount which appeared in the first volume of Once a Week. Coleridge, of course, has made a number of notes in it, and in one of these he describes the translation as 'an exquisite poem, spite of its frequent and perverse quaintness and harshnesses, which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of Crabbe's impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing itself to the things, how little in the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... a sort had come meanwhile from the party at the guest table. Miss Waddington, the full-blown golden girl, had seated herself and cooed an appreciative word or two about the quaintness and difference of the Marseillaise, when her eyes clutched at the two young men in the corner, whose dress made them stand out so queerly among the lost and soiled. As Bertram looked up with his glance of recognition, her eyes caught ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... gets her occasional bits of slang from I do not know; but her little foreign staccato pronunciation gives them unusual quaintness. I laughed, and Carlotta, throwing Polyphemus off her lap, laughed too, and sidled up against me. The cat regarded us for a moment with a disgusted eye, then stretched himself as if he had quitted Carlotta of his ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... time of the Reads, three sisters. One married Dr. Post, who was a missionary to Syria, but Miss Jane and Miss Isabella lived here many years after. The house next door still has its old-time doorway, but, unfortunately, one owner in the eighties spoiled its quaintness by adding a corner tower. It was here, I think, that Dr. William Barton Rogers, first President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lived at ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... didn't hurt me a bit, it was stoppin' so quick that did all the mischief!" The humour of the story was not very brilliant, yet somehow it seemed to Escombe at that moment to be ineffably amusing, and he laughed aloud at the quaintness of the conceit. And, as he did so, the remaining yarns of the second strand parted with a little jerk that thrilled him through and through, and he hung there suspended by a single strand, but still ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and the colour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you come to understand what imaginative ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... mention by degrees and with due deliberation, when I shall have had time to assemble the necessary words. But the more I look at you the more uneasy I feel as to what my fiancee of to-morrow may be like. Almost pretty, I grant you, you are—in virtue of quaintness, delicate hands, miniature feet, but ugly, after all, and absurdly small. You look like little monkeys, like little china ornaments, like I don't know what. I begin to understand that I have arrived at this house at an ill-chosen moment. Something is going on which ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... Vienna, with her beautiful Hotel Bristol, is such an advance in modern comfort from the best of her accommodations for travellers of a few years ago that she affords an excellent example, although for every steam-heater, modern lift, and American comfort you gain, you lose a quaintness and picturesqueness, the like of which makes Europe so worth while. The whole of civilised Europe is now engaged in a flurried debate as to the propriety of remodelling its travelled portions for the benefit of ease-loving ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... and, what is of more consequence, a receptive man. I should have little hope for any one who came from a quiet talk with Mrs. Yocomb in a complacent mood or merely disposed to indulge in a few platitudes on the sweetness and quaintness of her character, and some sentimentalities in regard to Friends. If the depths of one's nature were not stirred, then I would believe that there were no depths. She is doing me much good, and giving me just the ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... own home had been built before the vogue of the bungalow. And now, when she beheld Aunt Isabel's enchanting house, the solid, substantial furnishings left behind in Cherryvale lost all their savour for her, even the old-fashioned "quaintness" of grandma's house. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... decorations. To be quaint, is really to be funny without intending it, and its claim to prettiness is its naivete, which is sometimes touching as well as amusing: this was the special characteristic of the revival in the Middle Ages. To imitate quaintness must be a mistake in art; as in life it is absurd to ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... bananas, Indian fig-trees, mangoes, and unfamiliar things the negroes call by incomprehensible names,—"sap-saps," "dhool-dhools." But there is less color, less reflection of light than in Santa Cruz; there is less quaintness; no Spanish buildings, no canary-colored arcades. All the narrow streets are gray or neutral-tinted; the ground has a dark ashen tone. Most of the dwellings are timber, resting on brick props, or elevated upon blocks of lava rock. It seems almost as if some breath ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... (Vol. ii., pp. 286. 342.).—Sir Thomas More details in his Dialoge, with his usual quaintness, the attributes and merits of many saints, male and female, highly esteemed in his day, and, amongst others, makes special mention of St. Uncumber, whose proper name, it appears, was Wylgeforte. Of these saints ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... whole of the British poets, and had committed their best passages to memory. Possessing a keen relish for the ludicrous, he had at command a store of delightful anecdote, which he gave forth with a quaintness of look and utterance, so as to render the force of the humour totally irresistible. His sarcastic wit was an object of dread to his opponents in burgh politics. His appearance was striking. Rather mal-formed, he was under the middle size; his head seemed large for his person, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... thinking of his boyish days, when he gathered nuts and wild plums in those woods; he also indulged pleasant reminiscences of later years, when, with Uncle Daniel and Tom Anderson, he attended the secret prayer-meetings. Iola rode along, conversing with Aunt Linda, amused and interested at the quaintness of her speech and the shrewdness of her intellect. To her the ride ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... of ten are drawn from distant and scattered places, are sufficient in themselves to invest the smallest hostelry with glamour. It is not of this general interest that I would now speak. Nor is it my intention at present to glance at the hotels wherein "quaintness" is specialized, whether intentionally or no. There are thousands of them; and all of them well worth the discriminating traveller's attention. Concerning some of them—as the old inns at Dives-sur-Mer and at Mont St. Michel—whole books have been written. These depend for their charm on a mingled ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Virginia, and the house was two hundred years old. He had never lived in it until he came with Elise. It was in rather shocking condition, but Elise had managed to make it habitable by getting it scrubbed very clean, and by taking out everything that was not in keeping with the oldness and quaintness. The resulting effect was bare but beautiful. There were a great many books, a few oil-portraits, mahogany sideboards and tables and four-poster beds, candles in sconces and in branched candlesticks. They ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... live near Willey Green, which place was most central for Brangwen. It was an old, quiet village on the edge of the thronged colliery-district. So that it served, in its quaintness of odd old cottages lingering in their sunny gardens, as a sort of bower or pleasaunce to the sprawling colliery-townlet of Beldover, a pleasant walk-round for the colliers on Sunday ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... been an object of ridicule to the mercurial Americans. Though far from the most finished of Irving's productions, "Knickerbocker" manifests the most original power and is the most genuinely national in its quaintness and drollery. The very tardiness and prolixity of the story are skilfully made to heighten the humorous effect. The next few years were unproductive. Upon the death of his father, Irving had become a sleeping partner in his brother's commercial house, a branch ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... are as old as I am." "You are not so dreadfully old, mamma." "No, that's the worst of it," Mrs. Dennistoun would say, and then break out into a laugh. "Look at the shadow that handkerchief makes—how fantastic it is!" she cried. She neither cared for the moon, nor for the quaintness of the shadows, nor for the lace which she was pulling into dainty folds to show its delicate pattern—for none of all these things, but for her only child, who was going from her, and to whom she had a hundred, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... monster that was emerging from a pool and advancing ponderously toward the unwilling victim with widely opened, cavernous jaws thickly set with most formidable-looking teeth. The figures were executed in rather high relief, and there was a certain quaintness and stiffness of outline in their delineation that marked them as the work of an untutored artist, yet the action of them was depicted with a spirit and vigour which proved that the sculptor, although untutored, was undoubtedly ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... look at the stock; what Greeley said to him and what he said to Greeley,—it was a perfect bit of word-sketching, spontaneous, realistic, homely, unpretentious, irresistibly comic because of the quaintness of the dialogue as reported, and because of the mental image which we formed of this large-headed, round-bellied, precocious youth, who at the age of sixteen was able for three consecutive hours to keep the conversational shuttlecock in the air with no ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... steps further would hide them and the edifice, and all that belonged to it from his sight, possibly for ever. There was something in the thought which led him to linger. The chapel had neither beauty, quaintness, nor congeniality to recommend it: the dissimilitude between the new utilitarianism of the place and the scenes of venerable Gothic art which had occupied his daylight hours could not well be exceeded. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... to recompose the Bible, the broad vulgar colloquial diction, which has been used by our theological writers, is less tolerable than the quaintness of Castalion and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... explain the marvelous popularity of Pickwick Papers. Certainly its honest fun, its merriment, its quaintness, good humor and charity appealed to every reader. More than all, it made people acquainted with a new company of characters, none of whom had ever existed, or could ever exist, and yet whose manners ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humor that is touched with cross lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men, or things, or usages; and in the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring before the tumult of new and revolutionary ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... died in 1853 he had seen the prosperity of his colony reach its zenith. It remained small. Scarcely more than three hundred members ever dwelt in the village which, in spite of its profusion of vines and flowers, lacked the informal quaintness and originality of Rapp's Economy. The Tuscarawas River furnished power for their flour mill, whose products were widely sought. There was also a woolen mill, a planing mill, a foundry, and a machine shop. The beer made by the community was famous all the country round, and for a time its pottery ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... real Christminster life. He now sought it out in an obscure and low-ceiled tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies of the place, and in brighter times would have interested him simply by its quaintness. Here he sat more or less all the day, convinced that he was at bottom a vicious character, of whom it was hopeless ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... pages visited old Canonbury Castle some years since, out of regard to the memory of Goldsmith. The apartment was still shown which the poet had inhabited, consisting of a sitting-room and small bedroom, with paneled wainscots and Gothic windows. The quaintness and quietude of the place were still attractive. It was one of the resorts of citizens on their Sunday walks, who would ascend to the top of the tower and amuse themselves with reconnoitering the city through a telescope. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... peculiar quaintness, old fashioned, perhaps, but with a grace and dignity all its own. Through the formal, stately sentences the hidden sweetness creeps like the crimson vine upon the autumn leaves. Brave hearts they had, ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... chairs, while Mademoiselle Bourde surveyed in them with complacency the results of her own superiority. Tishy was a child, but Effie was fifteen, and they were both very nice little girls, arrayed in fresh travelling dresses and deriving a quaintness from the fact that Tishy was already armed, for foreign adventures, with a smart new reticule, from which she could not be induced to part, and that Effie had her finger in her 'place' in a fat red ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... the Lay Reader. "Bibles? Why, really, Miss Flame, I couldn't countenance any sort of mock service! Even just for—for quaintness,—even for Christmas quaintness!" ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... these legends, in a few instances, the exact phrases of the narrators have been retained for the sake of their quaintness. ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... roof of a chateau or the tower of some rural church. There is little of magnificence in Swiss architecture, which never much surpasses, and is, perhaps, generally inferior to our own; but the beauty and quaintness of the sites, the great variety of the surfaces, the hill-sides, and the purity of the atmosphere, supply charms that are peculiar to the country. Vevey lay at the water-side, many hundred feet lower, and seemingly on a narrow strand, though ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... quaint and peculiar in these lines, but it is the quaintness and peculiarity of Dante. The I and my, the we and our, are traits of that direct and positive mode of expression which is one of the distinctive characteristics of his style. Do ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... place in history by the extraordinary activity of his temperament and the vigour and energy with which he threw himself into whatever work he set his hand to do. He was a consummate master of knightly exercises, delighting in tournaments, and especially in those which were marked by some touch of quaintness or fancy. He had the hereditary passion of his house for the chase. In his youthful campaigns in Scotland and in his maturer expeditions in France, he was accompanied by a little army of falconers and huntsmen, by ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... meet with a touch of his pencil, which, from its simplicity and vigor, may be called truly Dantesque. Indeed, the Castilian Muse never before ventured on so bold a flight; and, notwithstanding the deformity of the general plan, the obsolete barbarisms of the phraseology, its quaintness and pedantry, notwithstanding the cantering dactylic measure in which it is composed, and which to the ear of a foreigner can scarcely be made tolerable, the work abounds in conceptions, nay in whole episodes, of such mingled energy and beauty, as indicate genius of the ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... Note the alliteration in the lovely line, beginning "Bairn y-born." The whole of the stanza in which we find it, sounds so strangely fresh in the midst of its antiquated tones, that we can hardly help asking whether it can be only the quaintness of the expression that makes the feeling appear more real, or whether in very truth men were not in those days nearer in heart, as well as in time, to ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... Andalusian greeting. I saw a woman hanging clothes on the line outside her house; she had blue eyes and flaxen hair, a healthy red face, and a solidity of build which proved the purity of her northern blood. The houses, too, had a certain exotic quaintness; notwithstanding the universal whitewash of the South, there was about them still a northern character. They were prim and regularly built, with little plots of garden; the fences and the shutters were bright green. I almost expected ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... execution suggested by the Mocking-Bird, then the palm belongs, among our New-England songsters, to the Red Thrush, otherwise called the Mavis or Brown Thrasher. I have never heard the Mocking-Bird sing at liberty; and while the caged bird may surpass the Red Thrush in volume of voice and in quaintness of direct imitation, he gives me no such impression of depth and magnificence. I know not how to describe the voluble and fantastic notes which fall like pearls and diamonds from the beak of our Mavis, while his stately attitudes and high-born bearing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... alive, they never realize how romantic their own times are! They always look back. What kind of creature will sigh for the far-off quaintness of our days and make fun of our spelling? Those colonists who came in droves from France and Holland and England, to chase away Indians as dawn chases away the shadows of night, would have been surprised if they'd heard their times called romantic, yet how thrilling ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... lesson with which this incident closes, 'The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.' It is because of the light that it throws upon that great thought that he tells this fascinating story of Zacchaeus. I need not repeat it. We all remember it, and the quaintness and grotesqueness of part of it fix it in people's memories. We know how the rich tax gatherer, pocketing his dignity, and unable to see over the heads of the crowd, scrambled up into the branches of the sycamore ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... describes with delightful quaintness William de Beauchamp's interview with his lawyers when that noble (on the death of John Hastings, Earl of Pembroke, temp. Richard II., without issue), claimed the earl's estates under an entail, in ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... all his advantages of figure, voice, and action, we think he would have failed: if, as a preacher, he had kept within the strict bounds of pulpit-oratory, he would scarcely have been much distinguished among his Calvinistic brethren: as a mere author, he would have excited attention rather by his quaintness and affectation of an obsolete style and mode of thinking, than by any thing else. But he has contrived to jumble these several characters together in an unheard-of and unwarranted manner, and the fascination is altogether irresistible. Our Caledonian divine is equally an anomaly in religion, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the first to name Washington Irving as the most renowned distinctively American man of letters whose figure, reproduced characteristically and with simple quaintness, should decorate the Park. To a statue of Washington Irving all the gates should open, as every heart would open, in welcome. That half-humorous turn of the head and almost the twinkling eye, that brisk and ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... cushioned tops were yet apparent traces of half-effaced embroideries, wrought by fingers that for two generations had been coffin-dust. All these relics gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine of memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... general truth is there, the merits of which all the world, or the one hundredth part has examined? It is smartly said somewhere, That the priest only continues what the nurse began. But the life of the remark consists in the quaintness of the antithesis between the nurse and the priest; and owes its support much more to sound than to sense. For is it possible that children should not hear something of the common and popular opinions of their country, whether these opinions be true or false? Do they not learn the common maxims ...
— The Trial of the Witnessses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ • Thomas Sherlock
... the Jackson pendulum is powerful only at the extremes of its sweeping arc? In "Workin' Out" we discover a pastoral love-lyric which for quaintness and graphic humanness could not well be surpassed. Here the distinctive and spontaneous inventiveness of Miss Jackson's fancy is displayed with especial vividness. The rural youth, "workin' out" far from his loved Molly, enumerates the prosaic chores he can perform with ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... is unique among tales intended for children, alike for pleasant instruction, quaintness of humor, gentle pathos, and the subtlety with which lessons moral and otherwise are conveyed to children, and perhaps to their seniors ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is precisely what we have—always with a vein of the finest autobiography—a kind of select and indirect self-revelation—often with a touch of quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be allowed the word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a friend. He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies there, that generally he suggests and turns away at the right point, with a smile, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... upon a simple text reveal endless subtleties of thought. Indeed, he continued to make a fairly logical sequence of incidents out of the famous nonsense paragraph invented to confound mnemonics by its absolute irrelevancy. Miss Greenaway's charm lies in the fact that she first recognised quaintness in what had been considered merely "old fashion," and continued to infuse it with a glamour that made it appear picturesque. Had she dressed her figures in contemporary costume most probably her work would have taken ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... eagerness that seemed almost childlike Elizabeth turned over rings, chains, and brooches, scarcely listening to Alwyn's comments on the lustre of the gems or the quaintness of the fashion, the duchess disappeared for a moment, and returned ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Mrs. Emerson's, have most pleasantly and permanently fill'd my memory, I must not slight other notations of Concord. I went to the old Manse, walk'd through the ancient garden, enter'd the rooms, noted the quaintness, the unkempt grass and bushes, the little panes in the windows, the low ceilings, the spicy smell, the creepers embowering the light. Went to the Concord battle ground, which is close by, scann'd French's statue, "the Minute Man," ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... seats a prim little body, full of a severe quaintness in every quirk of dress, tilted her head toward a neighbor, and whispered, "It's that racin' ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... task. In the prose there is naturally less inequality, and here, where excellence is quite as important as in the verse, the translator's work is irreproachable. His vigilant taste seems never to have failed him in the choice of words which should keep at once all the dignity and all the quaintness of the original, while they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... seemed unusually thoughtful, so it seemed to Dick, who was delighted with the quaintness of the little attic, and declaring to himself that it was just the place he should like for himself; but he wondered a little bit at his ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... of their own experience. Judaism, to be significant to modern man or woman, can no longer afford to speak in the language of theology. Psychology and social science, history and human experience, have revealed new worlds in the domain of the spirit. The language of theology might have a certain quaintness and charm to the ears of those to whom religion is a kind of dreamy romanticism. But to those who want to find in Judaism a way of life and a higher ambition, it must address itself in the language of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... emblazoned with such appropriate mottoes as "Whalley for ever," "Hurrah for Sir John Hanmer and John Stanton, Esquire," floated in the breeze. One ingenious gentleman, elaborating the topical theme, had erected a flag which, we are told, "attracted special attention from its significance and quaintness," representing a donkey cart with two passengers on one side and a steam engine and carriages on the other, to personify "Ellesmere of yesterday," and "Ellesmere of to-day," with the philosophic addendum, "Evil communications corrupt good manners," ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... enjoyment. I felt also an interest in the scene from the consideration that these fleeting customs were posting fast into oblivion, and that this was perhaps the only family in England in which the whole of them was still punctiliously observed. There was a quaintness, too, mingled with all this revelry that gave it a peculiar zest: it was suited to the time and place; and as the old manor-house almost reeled with mirth and wassail, it seemed echoing back the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... beyond both) in the singular knack of endowing or investing known places and commonplace actions with a weird second essence and second intention. He is like Charles Lamb in his power of dropping from quaintness and almost burlesque into the most touching sentiment and emotion. Mr. Lang, in his Introduction to Poe, has noticed how Gerard resembles America's one "poet of the first order" in fashioning lines "on ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... for if my recollection serve me, it has been a manufacturing town barely one-and-twenty years - Lowell is a large, populous, thriving place. Those indications of its youth which first attract the eye, give it a quaintness and oddity of character which, to a visitor from the old country, is amusing enough. It was a very dirty winter's day, and nothing in the whole town looked old to me, except the mud, which in some parts was almost knee-deep, and might have been deposited there, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... at her sudden kiss and at the quaintness of her phrase, put his hands on her hair and began smoothing it back, scarcely touching it with his fingers. The washing had made it fine and brilliant. His heart was brimming over with happiness. Just when he was wishing ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... Dryden's high opinion of Mackenzie as a critic. But it cannot be said to be much—it is a little—more interesting as a story than Parthenissa, and it is written in a most singular lingo—not displaying the racy quaintness of Mackenzie's elder contemporary and fellow-loyalist Urquhart, but a sort of Scotified and modernised Euphuism rather terrible to peruse. A library is "a bibliotheck richly tapestried with books." Somebody possesses, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... gathered at the neck, and falling to the edge of the dress. The cloaks are gay in color—forest-green, red, bright blue; in shape something like the well-known "Shaker" cloaks. Some of the cloaks have hoods that lend an air of quaintness. Several of the girls wear bead chains, evidently the work ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... picturesque. The wording of some of the notices was brief and practical, though such a caution as 'Hug this close on the outside,' painted in large letters on a board at the water's edge, had a certain quaintness about it which amused us. We ascended the river at half-tide, when the channel is pretty clearly apparent; but at high tide the way must be difficult to find. The scenery was somewhat monotonous until we approached Kuching, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... letters, contrary to modern usage, are printed with all the peculiarities of eighteenth century orthography. It was felt that they would lose their quaintness and charm if Holbach's somewhat fantastic English were trifled with or his spelling, capitalization and ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... Medwin of the manner in which Lord Byron spent his time in Switzerland, has the raciness of his Lordship's own quaintness, somewhat diluted. The reality of the conversations I have heard questioned, but they relate in some instances to matters not generally known, to the truth of several of which I can myself bear witness; moreover they have much of the poet's peculiar modes of thinking ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... turns in my lady Katrina's speech draw me into the humour of her gentle judgments of men and things. The touches of quaintness in Angelica's dress, her folded kerchief and smooth-parted hair, seem to partake of herself, and enhance my admiration for the sweet order of her thoughts and her old-fashioned ideals of love and duty. Even ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... Literally, "you shot forth (as a branch) thought in my behalf." (The English perfect best represents this aorist.) The phrase is unmistakably pictorial, poetical. If I read it aright, it is touched with a smile of gentle pleasantry; the warm heart comes out in a not undesigned quaintness ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... materially from Lamb or Hunt or Hazlitt—who, with vivid originality of manner and expression, have less of the true novelty of thought than is generally supposed, and whose originality, at best, has an uneasy and meretricious quaintness, replete with startling effects unfounded in nature, and inducing trains of reflection which lead to no satisfactory result. The essays of Hawthorne have much of the character of Irving, with more ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... a vault; in the centre, painted in colours that have nearly faded, appears a doorway, within the threshold of which four female figures gaze wistfully upon the outer world; on either side two winged genii, their brows girt with the never-failing Etruscan serpents, but wholly free from the quaintness of early Etruscan treatment, sit cross-legged, watching, torch in hand, the gate from which no living man returns. Roughly as they are hewn, it would be difficult to surpass the stateliness of their aspect or the art with which they are ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... Then thinking it over gravely she returned with her odd intonation: "Yes, but you do see him!" I had to admit that this was the case; and I wasn't so prepared with an effective attenuation as I could have wished. She eased the situation off, however, by the charming quaintness with which she finally said: "Well, I wouldn't want him to be lonely!" This time she rose in earnest, but I persuaded her to let me keep the album to show Mr. Paraday. I assured her I'd bring it back to her myself. "Well, you'll find my address somewhere ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... Dartmouth, and of this place Johnson gave me such descriptions, that to this day the name of Dartmouth has a romantic sound in my ears, though I know now that all the marvels were Johnson's own invention, and barely founded upon the real quaintness of the place, of which he must have heard from his mother. It became the highest object of my ambition to see the captain's native city. That there must be people—shopkeepers, for instance, and a man to keep the post office—who lived there all along, was a fact that I could ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... and by the pruriency which stains his best work. Like many contemporaries he was reading old authors and turned them to account in a way which exposed him to the charge of plagiarism. He valued them for their quaintness. They enabled him to satisfy his propensity for being deliberately eccentric which made Horace Walpole call Tristram Shandy the 'dregs of nonsense,' and the learned Dr. Farmer prophesied that in twenty years it would be necessary to search antiquarian shops for a copy. Sterne's great achievement, ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... old and very beautiful little churches in Athens, "delicious little Byzantine churches," as Renan calls them. They are very peculiar, and unlike what one generally sees in Europe. They strike the observer with their quaintness and smallness, and he fancies he here sees the tiny model of that unique and splendid building, the cathedral of St. Mark at Venice. But yet it is surprizing how little we notice them at Athens. I was even told—I sincerely hope it was false—that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... effusions appeared in a local paper at Reading, Pa. Being a born poetess, her success as a writer was assured from the first, and her warmth of expression and richness of imagery, combined with a curious quaintness, the outgrowth of the deep vein of mysticism that pervades her nature, soon attracted the attention of the literati of this country, one of the most distinguished of whom, the late George D. Prentice, did not hesitate to pronounce her the most ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... (see Figs. 126 to 130) and the shakes are held in place by poles pegged onto the roof in much the same manner as we have described and called les peches for the Kanuck. This pole cabin may have an old-fashioned Dutch door which will add to its quaintness and may have but one room which will answer the many purposes of a living-room, sleeping-room, and dining-room. A lean-to at the back can ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... center was a lawn, surrounded with white posts between which black painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention was to create the illusion of a village-green. Tabs entered instantly into the spirit of the game—the littleness and childishness of the attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which glinted at him like spectacles. But there was ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... Chelsea that has arisen on the ashes of the old might well arouse the admiration even of the most exasperated foreigner. There are recently created regions in that great tract of the earth's surface known as South Kensington which in their quaintness of architectural form and braveness of red brick can defy the gloom of a civic March or November. Old London is disappearing day by day, but bits of it remain, bits dear to those familiar with them, bits worth ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... different from the effect made by that thoroughfare to-day as though five hundred and not fifty years had elapsed since the little book was printed. The picture breathed an atmosphere of calm and nameless quaintness that one finds now only in old provincial cities which have escaped the ravages ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... until he almost wishes the sea would roll in and submerge him, argues a want of confidence in their country, tantamount to a confession of failure. Had they a little more trust in the attractive qualities of their land, a little more imagination to realise that in other eyes its flatness and quaintness might be even alluring, they would accept and acknowledge the compliment by doing as little as possible to make their country's ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... will be found of such impressive though simple language that it clings long in the memory. Such is this verse of gentle quaintness over the grave of a tender Puritan blossom, the ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Giusti's political poems are written, and none of them is wanting in point and bitterness, even to a foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point and the tang of their local expressions. It was the habi the satirist, who at least loved the people's quaintness and originality—and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to demand of a poet—it was Giusti's habit to replenish his vocabulary from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his satires a racy local flavor; and though he cannot be said to ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... ordinarily those that most interested himself. To him Bible was Bible, and he now turned to the passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which the voyage of St. Paul from Judea to Rome is related. This he read with steadiness, some quaintness of pronunciation, and with a sort of breathing elasticity, whenever he came to those verses that touched particularly on ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... for vampires in the country and in crowded cities, but, as I have already remarked, they are ubiquitous. As an illustration, there is said to be a maritime town in a remote part of England, which, besides being full of quaintness (of a kind not invariably pleasant) and of foul smells, is also full of more than half-savage fishermen and idiots; idiots that often come out at dusk, and greatly alarm strangers ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... scented sheets of sermon-paper out of his little sandalwood davenport. For Arthur Berkeley was one of those curiously compounded natures which can hardly ever be perfectly serious, and which can enjoy a quaintness or a neat literary allusion even at a moment of the bitterest personal disappointment. He could solace himself for a minute for the loss of Edie by choosing a text for his Sunday's sermon with a prettily-turned epigram on his ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... and fashion. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia is a lasting monument of perverted power; where an image of extreme beauty, as that of "the shepherd boy piping as though he should never be old," peeps out once in a hundred folio pages, amidst heaps of intricate sophistry and scholastic quaintness. It is not at all like Nicholas Poussin's picture, in which he represents some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription—"I also was an Arcadian!" Perhaps the best pastoral in the language is ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... corresponds with the simplicity of its name. Plain almost to ugliness, yet not without some degree of severe dignity, stand these old barn-like structures of brick—occasionally of stone; bearing the mellowing touch of time, surrounded by a little overshadowed graveyard, they often add a peculiar quaintness and solemnity to the scene. Mrs. Gaskell has described one such in her novel Ruth, and admirers of her art should know well that her own grave lies beside the little sanctuary she pictured ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... other captions. They are merely hints, throwing casual side-lights on his likes and dislikes, and illuminating his vanity. A whimsical personage without any very definite outlines might be evolved from these fragments. I picture him as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with perhaps less quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. Like the prince of gossips, too, he somehow gets at your affections. In one place Herrick laments the threatened failure of his eyesight (quite in what would have been Pepys's manner had Pepys written verse), and in another place he ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... with himself) I must be quaint. That's all there is. It's not life that counts, it's the quaintness ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... which are being now brought about by our variously degraded forms of European white slavery. Here is one reference, I see, in my notes on that story of Cleobis and Bito; though I suppose I marked this chiefly for its quaintness, and the beautifully Christian names of the sons; but it is a good instance of the power of the King of the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... entirely eligible for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white may think. These queer little races, the black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so all the surviving ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... by art and learning in the inner man, was carried out to fulness and finished by the spirit of innovation in government. It was, no doubt, reasonable to expect that the simple organization of the primitive republics should survive the quaintness of primitive manners and of the relations of antiquity. But, instead of rising to a higher and nobler degree of animal life, this organization degenerated into a common and coarse mechanism. The zoophyte condition of the Grecian states, where each individual enjoyed an independent life, and could, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... He liked her quaintness, and one day suddenly, to his own surprise, when they were alone in the drawing-room, he kissed her, a most chaste ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... crawled as elephants, and the triumphal car discovered its want of a lid. But having pre-excited attention, we had full leisure to sharpen our eye. To these imprudent authors and actors we may apply a Spanish proverb, which has the peculiar quaintness of that people, Aviendo pregonado vino, venden vinagre: "Having cried up their wine, they sell ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... and the quaintness of it began to create in him a desire for more. "Done what, miss?" ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... favourably. The rooms were large, and low, the ceilings, walls, floors, and staircase all of oak. The diamond-lattice windows, and narrow, tortuous passages, and innumerable nooks and crannies and cupboards, created an atmosphere of combined quaintness and comfort that irresistibly appealed to the Murphys. Viewed under the searching rays of the sun, and cheered by the voices of the visitors, the interior of the house, for artistic taste and cheerfulness, would indeed be hard to beat; but, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... Holy-rood, his levees, at Theobald's, were occupied with listening to the detail of more polished, but not less sanguinary, contests. I rather suppose, that James never was himself disposed to pay particular attention to the laws of the duello; but they were defined with a quaintness and pedantry, which, bating his dislike to the subject, must have deeply interested him. The point of honour was a science, which a grown gentleman might study under suitable professors, as well as dancing, or any other modish accomplishment. Nay, it would appear, that the ingenuity ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... altar side there are also some verses, by an unknown author, in which human life is compared to "the damask rose and blossom on the tree," with other images of its vanity and shortness. There is a dash of Elizabethan vigour in the versification, mixed with a certain quaintness which points to the decadence, and the lines have been attributed to such different writers as Francis Beaumont and Francis Quarles. The figures in the monument have been "beautified" with imitations of marble and alabaster. The canopied stalls for the Canons were erected as a memorial ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... Eleanor remarked. "You have been brought up in the style of one hundred years ago, and yet, except for a certain quaintness in your speech, one would not think you very different from any girl brought up in the ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... relics of antiquity,—a loop-holed and battlemented gateway; and at various points fragments of the old Gothic stone-work, built in among more recent edifices, which themselves were old; grimness intermixed with quaintness and grotesqueness; old fragments of religious or warlike architecture mingled with queer domestic structures,—the general effect sombre, sordid, and grimy; but yet with a fascination that makes us fain to linger about such scenes, and ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... divine imaginations as in the narrowest sallies of his sectarianism, the human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses the reader. Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness of a man's affections be expressed. In the cuts you shall find faithfully parodied the quaintness and the power, the triviality and the surprising freshness of the author's fancy; there you shall find him out-stripped in ready symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible before the eyes: but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... says one of our old divines, with the quaintness characteristic of his day, 'resemble the two sons of the patriarch; Reason is the firstborn, but Faith inherits the blessing. The image is ingenious, and the antithesis striking; but nevertheless the sentiment is far from ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... High," "A Pretty Book of Pictures," "Tom Telescope," and a few others. I give abbreviated titles only, but if space permitted I mould like to quote them in full; they are remarkable no less for their curious quaintness and their clever ingenuity than for their attractiveness to both parents (who, it must not be forgotten, are more often the real buyers of children's books) and the young people for whom they were written, and they are in themselves most entertaining and amusing reading. This group of little ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... vividness these simple lines came before us, on hearing, last autumn, of the death of the warm-hearted and gifted friend whose name heads this article; for there was much in his character and genius to remind us of the gentle author of Elia. He had the latter's genial humor and quaintness; his nice and delicate perception of the beautiful and poetic; his happy, easy diction, not the result, as in the case of that of the English essayist, of slow and careful elaboration, but the natural, spontaneous language in which his conceptions ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... often deciphered with difficulty after scraping away the moss and lichen, we occasionally discover one that has the charm of quaintness, or which touches our heart or sense of humour in such a way as to tempt us to copy it ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked "Quaintest" of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's "quaintness" seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little partitions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive odor of somebody ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... series of portraits of these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses, their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their "Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister, cut short before it had well begun. ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... even carried in a wheelbarrow through the streets of Philadelphia the white paper required for the printing of his paper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. It is now called the Saturday Evening Post, and has about it a certain quaintness and originality suggestive of the great mind which gave such an impetus to the American and Canadian press of ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder, and sudden death! Happy was she? or content? No; she was moody, hysterical and devotional by turns—sometimes a zeal for good works would possess her; sometimes the old fun and quaintness would break out, and sometimes an overwhelming fit of remorse—each depending upon the accidental cause that would chance ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Arabian manner. He preserved throughout the orientation of the verses and figures of speech instead of Anglicising them. It is this, combined with his profound oriental scholarship, his fine old-world style, and the richness, variety, and quaintness of vocabulary, which has given to his original ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... struck E. F. G. so much that he introduced it into Omar Khayyam, stanza xxxiii. Professor Cowell writes, 'I well remember shewing it to FitzGerald and reading it with him in his early Persian days at Oxford in 1855. I laughed at the quaintness; but the idea seized his imagination from the first, and, like Virgil with Ennius' rough jewels, his genius detected gold where I had seen only tinsel. He has made two grand lines ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... is in this neighbourhood frequently applied to old men remarkable for shrewdness, cunning, quaintness, or eccentricity. This use of the term is evidently figurative, borrowed from its application to veteran soldiers. Cannot some of the military correspondents of "N. & Q." give ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... seems a broad stretch of mean quaintness. I had no idea London was so big. And what grimy side streets! I shudder to think of the grimy network that lies on either hand. Morgan, I feel a very ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... a too florid character. Near to our local Palace of Justice is the County Court, which is severe in its simplicity, quasi-classic in style, and decidedly plain in design. There are shops that have a certain suggestion and imitation of old-fashioned quaintness, and there are other buildings that have a tinge of the Scotch baronial hall style of architecture. Then there is the coffee-house Gothic, the pie-shop Perpendicular, the commercial Classic, the fender and fire-grate Transitional, ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... Canada, and is, I should imagine, a most praiseworthy and inoffensive captain of minor industry, but Miss Cresswell is rather interested in him," he laughed. "She found the name occurring in Canadian guide-books and was struck by its quaintness." ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... carried a basket in her hand, from which she produced a variety of objects, evidently manufactured from lava. These she arranged by her side, and examined with care, every now and then casting an impatient look toward me. There was a wildness in her eye, and a quaintness in her whole demeanor that pleased me, especially as her features were almost without a fault. So I remained where I was, studying her movements; and the idea suddenly struck me that I was occupying her usual place, and that shyness prevented her from coming nearer. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various |
