"Uncongenial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the visit extended over four or five months. After this long recess De Quincey was placed in the grammar school at Manchester, his guardians expecting that a three years' course in this school would bring him a scholarship at Oxford. However, the new environment proved wholly uncongenial, and the sensitive boy who, in spite of his shyness and his slender frame, possessed grit in abundance, and who was through life more or less a law to himself, made up his mind to run away. His flight was significant. ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... return to Spain, Cervantes once more took up literature, the amusement of his youth. He became a playwright and romancer. The government gave him a small position as a tax-collector, but with such good-natured carelessness did he handle this uncongenial employ that he had repeatedly to make good from his own pocket the losses he entailed upon the government. Even this unsatisfactory labor failed the impractical author about the period of the death of King Philip II (1598). He was imprisoned ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the long-spurred hybrid varieties the Aquilegia has become exceedingly popular. Like the Nasturtium, it is particularly accommodating in character, and will thrive on poor soil and amid surroundings altogether uncongenial to many other subjects. Several of the fine varieties which have been recently introduced are, however, worthy of a place in the best of borders. Sow in February or early in March in a frame, and plant out when strong enough, or sow in June in an open border. If the season ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... thus strangely brought together again, lay a few feet from one another; the mind of each turning in the stillness of the night, to the link which had bound them, nay, which still bound them in a forced and uncongenial union. ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... fellowship, your hopes of doing exceptional work? You will sacrifice all your ambition and take up the drudgery of teaching in an uncongenial sphere for the rest ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... December, and bleak as its blasts, seemed the world then to me; there is no misanthrope like a boy disappointed; and such was I, with the warmth of me flogged out by adversity. But these thoughts are bitter enough even now, for they have not yet gone quite away; and they must be uncongenial enough to the reader; so no more of that, and let me go on ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... revelations were checked by the appearance of two of her fellow-tourists, and I seized the opportunity afforded by this interruption to depart upon my uncongenial task. ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... At that uncongenial place they had to wait a quarter of an hour, walking up and down the windy platform, where the porter abandoned himself to the contemplation of occasional rooks, and was sometimes surprised by the ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... toward me—ended in producing a separation. And, far from saving anything by Annabella's inheritance of her pin-money, he had a positive loss to put up with, in the shape of some hundreds extracted yearly from his income, as alimony to his uncongenial wife. He is said to make use of shocking language whenever my name is mentioned, and to wish that he had been carried off by the yellow fever before he ever set eyes on the ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... are not separated by artificial conventional barriers; there is more personal independence and a wider sphere for its exercise; the soul is warmed in the sunshine of a true social equality; we are not brought into the rough and disgusting contact with uncongenial persons which is such a genuine source of misery in the common intercourse of society; there is a greater variety, of employment, a more constant demand for the exertion of all the faculties, and a more exquisite pleasure in effort, from the consciousness ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... this complexity there must be limits—an endless and incongruous variety teases and revolts; the discordant effect of innumerable tints, among which some are sure to be uncongenial to each other, is always extremely irritating. There ought, then, to be a scale of color, it would seem, within whose limits the purest harmonies are to be found, and beyond which subdivisions should be no more allowed ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... on the pavement can "enjoy each other's want of conversation." No creature with a heart can jostle daily with his kind, but he wins some consciousness of kindly feeling. The very annoyances and constraints of propinquity are in their own way disciplinary, and insistent, uncongenial persons, like glaring red buoys with clanging bells, serve at least to keep us in the fairway of navigation. And in a city there are voices of cheerful exhortation always echoing in the higher air above the roar and the trampling, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... with her, and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Bompard sat evidently approving. It was almost as though the two were in league against her, just as children get in league against an adult who insists on unpleasant duties or uncongenial food. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... which formed the chief element of its success when it was first published, it must be admitted that, in the present year of grace, the Champion is hard reading. A kind of lassitude—a sense of uncongenial task-work—broods heavily over Fielding's contributions, except the one or two in which he is quickened into animation by his antagonism to Cibber; and although, with our knowledge of his after achievements, it is possible to trace some indications of his yet unrevealed powers, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... courage is visible in the hasty adaptation of the Frenchwoman to all kinds of uncongenial jobs. Almost every kind of service she has been called to render since the war began has been fundamentally uncongenial. A French doctor once remarked to me that Frenchwomen never make really good sick-nurses except when they are nursing their own people. They are too personal, too emotional, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... in the features of virtue, is mild and friendly and lambent; but the sparkles that flash from the eye of enterprising guilt, are momentary, and unrelenting, and impetuous. The gentle and the inoffensive instantly feel how uncongenial they are to their dispositions, and start back from them with aversion and horror. Such were in some measure the sensations of Imogen, upon the re-appearance of her betrayer. She turned from him with unfeigned dislike, and was reluctantly kept ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... clear, however, of any attempt to form an opinion of his own upon Arnold's life and character, while achieving a result that not only assured his own position at Oxford, but brought him well into the front rank of contemporary writers. The religious animosity at Oxford was uncongenial to Stanley, and it was only the prospect of Dr. Arnold occupying the Chair of Modern History that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... was little Alora. She was going to a foreign land with no companion but a strange and uncongenial man whom fate had imposed upon her in the guise of a parent. As they steamed out to sea and Alora sat on deck and watched the receding shores of America, she turned to her father with the first question she ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... inapt, unapt, inappropriate, improper; unsuited, unsuitable; inapplicable, not to the point; unfit, unfitting, unbefitting; unbecoming; illtimed, unseasonable, mal a propos [Fr.], inadmissible; inapposite &c (irrelevant) 10. uncongenial; ill-assorted, ill-sorted; mismatched, misjoined^, misplaced, misclassified; unaccommodating, irreducible, incommensurable, uncommensurable^; unsympathetic. out of character, out of keeping, out of proportion, out of joint, out of tune, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... there be any who come to ascertain, that the right expedient is a bare inculcation of religious instruction, disconnected, on system, from the illustrative aid of other knowledge, divested of the modification and attraction of associated ideas derived from subjects less uncongenial with the natural feelings,—they really may take the satisfaction of having ascertained one thing more, namely, that human nature has become at last so mightily changed, that it may be left to work itself right very soon, as to the affair ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... faces of the men and the shoulders of the women, on the dancer's weird antics and her flying, tattered skirts. She was obviously tired, as a poor, performing cur might be, or a bear prodded along to uncongenial buffoonery. Every time that she paused and solicited alms with her tambourine the crowd dispersed, and some of them laughed because ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... spirit must be felt. Order had to be reduced out of chaos, and some semblance of business methods must be observed. If that could be done by any one, it must be by the Chancellor. It forced him into many uncongenial spheres. Amongst these none was more out of the reach of his sympathy than the turbid stream ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... only natural that I should not be quite accustomed to the loss of my darling yet. Three or four hours were not a long time after years. But my mind dwelt so much upon the uncongenial scene in which I had left her, and I pictured it as such an overshadowed stony-hearted one, and I so longed to be near her and taking some sort of care of her, that I determined to go back in the evening only to look up at ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... preference, and thus no credit; that I go before the wind; that all this was in my character. And indeed, one thing is true,—that it is easy, too easy, to leave things undone. But, Seraphina, I begin to learn it is not always wise. If I were too old and too uncongenial for your husband, I should still have remembered that I was the Prince of that country to which you came, a visitor and a child. In that relation also there were duties, and these duties I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... arranged that after my death, should it occur, Kate is to remain with her for six months, as a final test of their ability to live happily together, and for the benefit of the schools in this city. At the end of that time, if these two well-meaning but uncongenial people decide that it is wisest to part, 'Kitty Quixote' will be sent to you, to do with as you see fit. In any case, she will be no pecuniary charge to any one; her own mother's little fortune, with such a portion of mine as is justly hers, being ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... herdsmen whom I encounter this morning, that forms quite a striking contrast to the almost childlike harmlessness and universal respect toward me observed in the disposition of the villagers. It requires no penetrating scrutiny of these fellows' countenances to ascertain that nothing could be more uncongenial to them than the state of affairs that prevents them stopping ine and looting me of everything I possess; a couple of them order me quite imperatively to make a detour from my road to avoid approaching too near their flock of sheep, and their general ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... geology. Buffon's great views on the revolutions of the earth had made a deep impression upon him, although he was to end as the declared adversary of that vulcanism which we can trace already at the bottom of Buffon's theory—naturally enough, when we think how uncongenial all violence in society and nature was to him, how he looked everywhere for slow, uninterrupted evolution. From theoretical study he had early turned to direct observation; and when his administrative functions obliged him to survey the mines of the little dukedom, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... that mind counts for nothing in marriage. A man must have congenial company, or he will fly to company that is uncongenial; he must have joy of some kind, or he will fall into despair. The company and the joy can best be supplied by the wife to the husband, and by the husband to the wife. If the woman is dull and trivial, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... sea in the Roumanian navy, and English out of a book; he would still at times pronounce the e's at the end of "there" and "here"; he was a naturalised Englishman, and he drove me into a reluctant and uncongenial patriotism by his everlasting carping at things English. Pollack would set himself to "draw him out." Heaven alone can tell how near I ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... stability of all society. Lillie is your wife. You were free to choose; and you chose her. She is the mother of your child; and, John, what that daughter is to be depends very much on the steadiness with which you fulfil your duties to the mother. I know that Lillie is a most undeveloped and uncongenial person; I know how little you have in common: but your duties are the same as if she were the best and the most congenial of wives. It is every man's duty to make the ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... lowered the shade and lighted the gas-jet. So short that in the long run she wormed first through a crowd, she was full of the genial curves that, though they bespoke three lumps in her coffee in an elevator and escalator age, had not yet reached uncongenial proportions. In fact, now, brushing with her bare forearm across her moistly pink face, she was like Flora, who, rather than fade, ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... Don Gregorio need have no fear for his ladies. Their sojourn at the hotel may be somewhat irksome, and uncongenial; still they are safe. Rough-looking and boisterous as are some of their fellow-guests, they are yet in no way rude. The most refined or sensitive lady need not fear moving in their midst. A word or gesture of insult to her would ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... but that "writing was hard work to do, and ill paid when done." But the youth was bound to take the road to Arcady. He asked for nothing better than this ill-paid craft. His passion for it, doubtless was strengthened by his physical toil and uncongenial surroundings. For one I am not surprised that much of his early verse, which is still retained in his works, breathes the spirit of Keats, though where and how this strayed singer came to study that most perfect and delicate ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... other form it is wasted, because of a false regard for social conventions. At how many calls are both parties bored! How many persons—women in particular, who have not the man's freedom in selecting associates—continue in the treadmill round of an uncongenial social circle! To escape from this may require the special exercise of will, and the incurring of criticism, but these ought to be assumed. However, in most cases, a woman may gradually escape from the distasteful circle and form new and more ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... he was sent to Chigwell School in England by his father, to have "art knocked out of him" by the uncongenial surroundings of the quiet old school where the great William Penn had been taught to read and write. He left in 1890, having won the Special Classical Prize, Oxford and Cambridge certificate Prize, besides prizes for carpentering, gymnasium, ...
— The Man In The High-Water Boots - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... beyond what he possesses himself, for the very good reason that this is all he wants to see. If there is anything on which he is in doubt, it will give him a vague sense of fear, mixed with pique; because it passes his comprehension, and therefore is uncongenial to him. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of your calling do not stand hesitating and doubting too long. Enter somewhere, no matter how hard or uncongenial the work, do it with all your might, and the effort will strengthen you and qualify you to find work that is more in accord ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... company to outspoken praise, a somewhat unusual circumstance. But now he was called back to the work that more properly belonged to an officer of Her Majesty's North West Mounted Police and his soul glowed with the satisfaction of those who, having been found faithful in uncongenial duty, are rewarded with an opportunity to do a bit of work which ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... irritation. He was wearied with the imperceptible growth of his crops, and complained that he made his eyes ache by watching their daily progress. He was not likely to excel in occupations so entirely uncongenial. The old people in the neighbourhood of Treverry speak with wonder of the fearlessness he displayed on different occasions, but shake their heads at his management as a farmer. They have no difficulty in accounting for his fortune. While he ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... that he is struggling along in uncongenial employment; that if he had his way his life would be arranged ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... one will—I shall not sleep until I read the other." Then, turning to May, she spoke aloud. "It will suit me better to be down stairs; I am so very nervous, that I am a poor nurse;" and glad to be released from a scene too uncongenial to her nature and ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... herself, and was wont to say, indifferently, that the problem was not worth a solution. For this beautiful girl of fifteen was somewhat bitter and misanthropic, a condition perhaps due to the uncongenial atmosphere in which she had been reared. She was of dark complexion and her big brown eyes held a sombre and unfathomable expression. Once she had secretly studied their reflection in a mirror, and the eyes awed and frightened ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... their effects as would bear it, and leaving others to their fate. Six men, a dog, and a cat remained to keep the fort. Towards midwinter the human part of the garrison also withdrew, and the two uncongenial quadrupeds were left alone. ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... ambition or mistaken views in the first place, and now claimed to hold me like a sold article of merchandise, for the use and control of one whose feelings, principles, and whole character are every way uncongenial with my own." ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... he had no vocation, and the irregularities of his behaviour caused scandal even in that age of cynical indulgence. It can scarcely be doubted that the schism between his practice and profession served to debase and vulgarise a genius of fine imaginative quality, while the uncongenial work of decorating choirs and painting altar-pieces limed the wings of his swift spirit with the dulness of routine that savoured of hypocrisy. Bound down to sacred subjects, he was too apt to make angels out of street-urchins, and to paint the portraits ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... confess, gave me a rather gloomy impression of Russia, and accounted in some measure for the grave and uncongenial aspect of the people. One always likes to find some bond of sympathy between himself and the inhabitants of the country through which he travels. I remember reading somewhere of a Scotchman who had occasion to visit ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... was a trial to Vaughan and Dallas. Only those whose fate it is or has been to share a study with an uncongenial companion can appreciate their feelings to the full. Three in a study is always something of a tight fit, and when the three are in a state of perpetual warfare, or, at the best, of armed truce, things become ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... expression and a sort of divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and sinks anon to the humble details of his errors and embarrassments. Uncongenial society plunged him into such dark depression that he is not ashamed to confess that he ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... crowds, or the solemn conclaves of common-place minds," of which the "obscured head will often shed forth ascending beams that can only be lost in eternity;" and of which the "mighty struggles to upheave its own weight, and that of the superincumbent mass of prejudice, envy, ignorance, folly, or uncongenial force, must ever ensure the deepest sympathy of all those who can appreciate the spirit of its qualities;" let the initiative skyward struggles towards the zenith-abysses of the inane impalpable ——, &c. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... forward flee By town, and tower, and hill, and cape, and isle, And in the middle of the green salt sea Keeps his blue waters fresh for many a mile. Mine be the Power which ever to its sway Will win the wise at once, and by degrees May into uncongenial spirits flow; Even as the great gulfstream of Florida Floats far away into the Northern Seas The lavish ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... renewing the Radical connexion from which a short time ago he evinced a disposition to keep aloof, and he has nothing left for it but to accept the post that is offered him of leading a party which, in its composition, principles, and objects, is as uncongenial as possible to his real character and disposition. For it is not a little curious that this levelling democratic faction, to whom the aristocracy are an abomination, are not only wild to have a lord for their leader, but must have that lord who is the ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... requisite to go on with. In noisome dungeons, subject to studied tortures, in abject and shifty poverty, after consummate shame, upon tremendous change of fortune, in the profoundest desolation of mind and soul, in forced companionship with all that is unlovely and uncongenial—men, persevering nobly, live on, and live through all. The mind, like water, passes through all states, till it shall be united to what it is ever seeking. The very loneliness of man here is the greatest proof, to my ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... discarded mourning for the first time, although her father had been almost two years in his quiet grave amongst the Hills; and, with her cousin, who was now indeed her only friend, if slightly uncongenial, decided ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... evenness, if it came. She wondered if Nancy Ellen would be compelled to put off her wedding and teach the home school in order that it might be taught by a Bates, as her father had demanded. She wondered if Nancy Ellen was forced to this uncongenial task, whether it would sour the wonderful sweetness developed by her courtship, and make her so provoked that she would not write or have anything to do with her. They were nearly the same age; they had shared rooms, and, until recently, beds, and whatever life brought ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... agent is half so mighty in giving the needful spur to genius? Enthusiasm kindles a new flame in the chilled soul when the ashes of disappointment have extinguished its fires; enthusiasm reinvigorates and braces the spirit that has become weary and enervated in the oppressive atmosphere of uncongenial entourage; enthusiasm is the cool, refreshing breeze of a warm climate and the blazing log of a cold. Ronald's unexhausted enthusiasm was the secret fountain whose waters nourished laurels for him ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... they had in some mysterious way constrained her, and though he was angrily, tragically, suicidally wretched, it was one kind of woe—a clean, classic woe, I will call it. He believed it shared by her in the secret of her uncongenial conjugal life. 'Ich grolle nicht,' he could say, and all that. But a year or two ago she came to Florence with Pfaffenheim on a visit to her sister. I don't know how Gerald felt, whether he tried to avoid her or tried to see her. That he saw her, however, is ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... authorities, and is apt to leave school with an unintelligent attitude towards intellectual things in general. This is the result of early drudging at a subject in which progress is very slow, and which by its nature is uncongenial. The great desideratum is a linguistic subject which shall at once inculcate a feeling for language (German Sprachgefhl), and yet be easy enough to admit of rapid progress. Nothing keeps alive the quickening zest that makes learning fruitful ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... the forecast of genius, to be revealed sooner or later, and with a further promise, in the antipathy shown for the routine of schools, and especially of the University of Cambridge,—a suffocating atmosphere for genius, equally uncongenial to Milton, Dryden, Gray, and Locke, who all, like Lord Byron, and more bitterly than he, exercised their satiric vein on it. As for the slight attraction he sometimes showed for the world in his youth—in his seventeenth year—and which the excellent ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... cease to be Paul I." Next morning the Czar despatched a courier to Vienna with a demand for the Princess, so energetically worded that refusal must have been followed by war. Accordingly, in May, 1799, Madame Royale was allowed to leave the capital which she had found so uncongenial an asylum. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... tyrannical, unscrupulous man, whose one aim in life was the destruction of every vestige of Dutch independence, Dutch self-government and Dutch influence in Africa. Those who thus maligned him applied themselves to make him unpopular and to render his task so very uncongenial and unpleasant for him that he would at last give it up of his own accord, or else become the object of such violent hatreds that the Home Government would feel compelled to recall him. Thus they would be rid of the presence of a personage possessed of a sufficient energy to oppose ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... imagined that is, we thought, Sir Jackson might—you will be writing to him, and will let him know we will use our best efforts to assist him in obtaining some position worthy of his—superior to—something that will secure him from the harassing embarrassments of an uncongenial employment.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sprung up between the two cousins, and they had not corresponded since they parted in August. The coolness dated from what Charlotte would call "the flight to Rome," and in Rome it had increased amazingly. For the companion who is merely uncongenial in the mediaeval world becomes exasperating in the classical. Charlotte, unselfish in the Forum, would have tried a sweeter temper than Lucy's, and once, in the Baths of Caracalla, they had doubted whether they ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... gave up all hope of meeting her for whose sake I had come to the ball. She was either not there, or did not wish to be recognised, even by me. The latter supposition was the more bitter of the two; and goaded by it and one or two other uncongenial thoughts, I paid frequent visits to the "refreshment-room," where wine flowed freely. A cup or two drove the one idea out of my mind; and after a while, I grew more companionable, and determined to enjoy myself like others around me. I had not danced as yet, but the wine soon got ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... friend whom he trusted, he would pour out his inmost heart; but let two or three be gathered together, above all, introduce a stranger, and he instantly became a quiet, unobtrusive listener, though never a moody or uncongenial one! ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... arrangement? The persistent question contained in itself its own answer. Only the prospect was blank—blank. The excitement of the contest was over now; the reaction had set in. She ventured to look forward; and, seeing for the first time what was before her, the long, dark, dreary level of a hopelessly uncongenial existence, reaching from here to eternity, as it seemed from her present point of view, her over-wrought nerves gave way; and, when Mrs. Orton Beg came to her a moment later, she threw herself into her arms and sobbed hysterically: ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... think it impossible in their narrow sphere and in their uncongenial circumstances to live so as to win God's favor or be blessings in the world. But there is no doubt that many of the most beautiful lives of earth, in Heaven's sight, are those that are lived in what seem the most ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... The two sisters were strongly contrasted. Louisa, as a child, was afflicted with a sensitive, almost morbid shyness and reserve, and an incapacity for enjoying the society of other children whose tastes were uncongenial with her own. The shyness passed with her childhood, but the sensitiveness and exclusiveness never quite left her. Her love of books was a passion, and she would resent an unfair criticism of a favorite author as warmly ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... he and Lord Lansdowne and the rest laboured under, of ever personally attaching a single young man, in all the excitement of that exciting time, to the leaders of the party. It was quite a delight to me, as I listened, to recall my own dislike of his style of speaking, his fishy coldness, his uncongenial and unsympathetic politeness, and his insufferable though most gentlemanly artificiality. The shape of his head (I see it now) was misery to me, and weighed down ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... having a sharp tongue, a sarcastic wit, and a shrewish temper, over which perilous traits she had no control. It is related that her sister, Mrs. Edwards, opposed the match, from a belief that the two were utterly uncongenial, and later on this came to be the accepted belief of the people at large. That Mrs. Lincoln often severely harassed her husband always has been and always will be believed. One would gladly leave the whole topic veiled ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... oppressively hot they had ever experienced. The gradations of spring, autumn, and twilight, are there scarcely known, and the sudden transition from summer to winter is as trying to the health of an European as that from day to night is uncongenial to the taste. Here, too, I repented at leisure, and amended with no small difficulty and labor, my neglect of those accomplishments to which my dear mother had so often vainly solicited my attention. The ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... strong affection for her aunt, and would naturally be inclined to gratify any wishes that she might express, even had they involved tasks uncongenial and unattractive. But the proposal that she should become an ally in the effort to lure young Haldane from his evil associations, and awaken within him pure and refined tastes, was decidedly attractive. She was peculiarly romantic in her disposition, and no rude ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... and that Emperor's mother, Agrippina, with her monstrous incest (XIV. 2). These matters, even if true of the ancient Romans in the first century of our aera, Tacitus, we may be certain, would have avoided as not coming within the scope of the historian's province, and as being altogether uncongenial to his sublime tone of elevated sentiments and high-minded refinement. But anyone conversant with the writings and temper of Bracciolini will know well that such passages, instead of being in any way distasteful, would be altogether agreeable. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... this man of volition, was his sudden marriage with a young lady who attended his first wife's funeral—struck by her angelical beauty, if we trust to his raptures. Yet this sage, who would have written so well on the choice of a wife, united himself to a character the most uncongenial to his own; cold, reserved, and most anxiously prudent in her attention to money, she was of a temper which every day grew worse by the perpetual imprudence and thoughtlessness of his own. He calls her "Prue" in fondness and reproach; ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the chamber provided for him, Ottavio Gonzaga lost not an hour or a syllable, in transcribing all he had learned from the Spanish aide-de-camp; that the state of mind and feeling of the young viceroy might be speedily laid open to the full and uncongenial investigation of his royal brother of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... method of work (and, indeed, to any intelligent critic of his finished drawings) as one of his most salient characteristics was a feature of his days of apprenticeship at Heatherley's. Delight at emancipation from uncongenial occupation was balanced by a sober ambition and a steady purpose. He lived laborious days, laying to heart the lessons of his craft, but he ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... familiar thing or duty, was material wholly, or pertained to this world alone;—there was another side to it, connected with the unseen and the gods. There were Great Gods in the Pantheon; but your early Roman had no wide-traveling imagination; and they seemed to him remote and uncongenial rather,—and quickly took on Greekishness when the Greek influence began. Minerva, vaguely imagined, assumed soon the attributes of the very concretely imagined Pallas; and so on. But he had nearer and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... missionaries live and work together, the relation is as close as that between husband and wife; but in this case the two have not chosen one another. Of course the relationship is not established for life; and the missionary who finds herself paired off with an uncongenial fellow worker may console herself by hoping that a change will come soon. That frame of mind, however, is not exactly conducive to the sort of adjustment that would make for the most effective carrying ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... remembrance should long remain merged in the stream of other imaginations; unless you are supposed chargeable with a decided indifference to divine things! Unless you are destitute of love to God you can never be so utterly uncongenial in sentiment and feeling with the psalmist, when he says, "My mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips, while I meditate upon thee in the night watches." "How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God!" When that ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... when they are harmless." And rather thoughtfully she disengaged herself from the sheltering arm of that all too sympathetic young man, and went forward, shivering a little as the hiss of the enraged adder broke out from the uncongenial mud where ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... he would not be constantly reminded of soap—to devote himself to the History of the Thebaid, when this cousin died suddenly and precipitated responsibilities upon him. In the frankness of conviviality, Moggs bewailed the uncongenial task thus thrust into his hands, and my uncle offered to lighten his burden by a partnership then and there. They even got to terms—extremely ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... "Grand Valse" he finds too unassuming. "Surely a waltz with some angelic creature must have inspired you, Moscheles, with this composition, and that the title ought to express. Titles, in fact, should pique the curiosity of the public." "A view uncongenial to me," adds Moscheles; "however, I did not discuss it.... A dinner at Rossini's is calculated for the enjoyment of a 'gourmet,' and he himself proved to be the one, for he went through the very select menu ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Aunt Ri sat by her, strange but not uncongenial watchers, each taking heart from the other's devotion. All night long Ramona slept. As Felipe watched her, he remembered his own fever, and how she had knelt by his bed and prayed there. He glanced around the room. In a niche in the mud wall was a cheap print ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... causes, of half the stagnant Christianity that chokes our churches. Men have vowed, and did not know what they were vowing, pledging themselves, in a moment of excitement, to what after years discover to them to be a hard and uncongenial course of life. They have been carried into the position of professed disciples on the top of a wave of emotion which has long since broken and retreated, leaving them stranded and motionless in a place where they have no business to be. Every community of professing Christians ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... common consent the greatest Hungarian novelist of the nineteenth century, was born at Komarom on February 19, 1825. Trained for the law, as an advocate he achieved the distinction of winning his first case. The drudgery of a lawyer's office, however, proved uncongenial to him, and fired by the success of his first play, "The Jew Boy" ("Zsido fiu"), he went to Pest, where he devoted himself to journalism, in due course becoming editor of "Eletkepek," a leading Hungarian literary periodical. At the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... chatted as only the bush-folk can (the bush-folk are only silent when in uncongenial society), "putting in" a fair amount of time writing our names on one page of an autograph album; and as strong brown hands tried their utmost to honour Christmas day with something decent in the way of writing, each man declared that he had never written so badly before, while the ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... 'Province of Jurisprudence Determined,' were celebrated, and Lord Brougham used to say: 'If John Austin had had health, neither Lyndhurst nor I should have been Chancellor.' He entered the army, and was in Sicily under Lord William Bentinck; but soon quitted an uncongenial service, and was called to the Bar. In 1819 he married Sarah, the youngest daughter of John Taylor of Norwich, {1} when they took a house in Queen Square, Westminster, close to James Mill, the historian of British India, and next door to Jeremy Bentham, whose pupil Mr. Austin was. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... coming to God's altar. Quiet waters in landscapes, with the sun reflected in their depths, asked, if better means of escape were not at hand, was there no drowning left? Ruins cried, 'Look here, and see what We are, wedded to uncongenial Time!' Animals, opposed by nature, worried one another, as a moral to them. Loves and Cupids took to flight afraid, and Martyrdom had no such torment in its ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... policy current in the society to which they belonged. The real issue was that they were at war with its mores. In that war they could not prevail so as to change the mores. They could not even realize their own plan of life in the midst of uncongenial mores. The English Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to transform the mores of their age. Many of them emigrated to uninhabited territory in order to make a society in which their ideal mores should be realized. Very many sects and parties emigrated ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... this kind; and conscious as he must have been of a high reputation among his contemporaries, he could not think that he stood in need of any University distinctions. The Editor became by degrees almost equally indifferent to what he perceived to be so uncongenial to Arthur's mind. It was however to be regretted, that he never paid the least attention to mathematical studies. That he should not prosecute them with the diligence usual at Cambridge, was of course to be expected; yet his ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... air of an Irish jig, and the tap-tap of feet as they danced on the floor. She paused, with a sense of dismay stealing over her. Her nerves were highly-strung—she was in an excited, exalted state, and the loud mirth was particularly uncongenial. She wondered if she could slip upstairs unperceived—she wondered if her old attic were still unoccupied. The door of Mother Bunch's room was wide open—bright light streamed into the passage; but Bet making a dart rushed past the door, and ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... without their thunderous low growlings of the alarming discovery, 'Somebody's been drinking MY milk!' It was a delicious repast; by far the most delicious that Bella, or John Rokesmith, or even R. Wilfer had ever made. The uncongenial oddity of its surroundings, with the two brass knobs of the iron safe of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles staring from a corner, like the eyes of some dull dragon, only made it ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... animation, the very accent almost of the disciple of the old apple-woman, the irreconcilable hater of Ministries, the voluntary servant of the poor. Miss Haldin's true and delicate humanity had been extremely shocked by the uncongenial fate of her new acquaintance, that lady companion, secretary, whatever she was. For my own part, I was pleased to discover in it one more obstacle to intimacy with Madame de S—. I had a positive abhorrence for the painted, bedizened, dead-faced, glassy-eyed Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch. I do ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... ardent feelings towards our friends know that we are often worse than cold towards those we do not fancy. We sometimes, alas, take a certain pride in our sensitiveness in this particular. We justify our hatred for uncongenial people till we have fairly faced the truth that love is the law of our being, and that we must love our neighbor. Then, though we cannot change our temperament, yet by the doing of prosaic duties, ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... a scientist, Ron," Dennis replied. "That may account for the heresy of my profound disbelief in science. I wouldn't cross the road to see a 'miracle.' The twentieth century is uncongenial to anything of that sort. Take it from me, old chap, there's a man at the back of this—not a nice man, I admit, but an ordinary human being to all outward appearances—and when we catch a glimpse of his outward appearances we shall know what ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... into Frankfort just as the calliope went screaming down Main street at the head of the circus parade. Getting rid of his disagreeable freight and his uncongenial companions as soon as possible, he elbowed his way along the crowded sidewalk, looking for some of the neighbour boys. Mr. Wheeler was standing on the Farmer's Bank corner, towering a head above ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... for all his promise and seeming strength of constitution, died when barely seven years old, and the desolate mother was left with nothing to fill her heart but the uncongenial daughter of her husband's first wife. The fact that this child, slighted as it had hitherto been, would, in the event of her uncle having passed away before her father, have been the undisputed heiress of a large portion of the wealth now at the disposal of her arrogant ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... was soon found too small for his extensive ideas. He, therefore, took a larger piece of ground in Lambeth Marsh, where he soon assembled the largest collection of British plants ever brought together into one place. But there was something uncongenial in the air of this place, which made it extremely difficult to preserve sea plants and many of the rare annuals which are adapted to an elevated situation,—an evil rendered worse every year by the increased number of buildings ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... It is true—such uncongenial interpretation—if you feel that way about it. And I remember, in my rambles along the famous thoroughfare, seeing a saturnine old fellow in a dingy black coat and slouch hat, with a sour snarl on his unprepossessing features, who made it his business, all day, to cuff and kick the little boys ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... and weary with the cotton-picking,—the captive pining in his cell,—the patient wife of the drunkard, saddened by a consciousness of the growing vileness of one so dear to her once,—the delicate spirit doomed to harsh and uncongenial surroundings,—all in such hours feel the soothings of a celestial harmony, the tenderness of more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... returned to Europe, but all too late to join in the victory of Waterloo, and it was stationed with the Army of Occupation in the north of France. In 1818, the regiment was sent to Ireland. Here for several years Sturt remained in most uncongenial surroundings, watching smugglers, seizing illicit stills, and assisting to quell a rising of the Whiteboys. It was in Ireland that the devoted John Harris, his soldier-servant, who was afterwards the companion ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... started life anew in what was then regarded as the less civilized country to the south. Several explanations have survived as to the cause of his departure, one being that his interest in the rising tide of Methodism had made him uncongenial to his Church of England relatives; in the absence of definite knowledge, however, it may safely be assumed that the impelling motive was that love of seeking out new things, of constructing a new home in the wilderness, which ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the wife of one or other—she was recommended to the stage. She was supported in the idea by all her connections, for then no one questioned the perfect respectability of the profession. She studied hard in new, though not uncongenial fields; she ventured; she tried again and again, with the "modest but indomitable pluck" of genius, and she at last won a position and a prospect of independence. In all this nobody blamed her; on the contrary, the magnates of the hour—kings, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... which might perhaps make their recital deserving of being heard beyond my own frugal fireside. Strange to say, only one of the seven is a return trip. I am afraid that the prospect of going back to rather uncongenial work must have dulled my senses. Or maybe, since I was returning over the same road after an interval of only two days, I had exhausted on the way north whatever there was of noticeable impressions to be garnered. Or ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... high-bred girl beside him, added but little to the conversation. The Countess Muhlen-Sarkey awoke only when there was a fitful attempt to break the embarrassment which held all the others. The quondam Parisian openly welcomed each stopping-place as an excuse to escape from such uncongenial companionship. In the throngs on the platforms he found both transient excitement and opportunities of stretching his cramped and restless limbs. Josef conscientiously attended him on these brief excursions, ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... court. The King declared that he had unwillingly persecuted the separatists only because his affairs had been in such a state that he could not venture to disoblige the established clergy. The established clergy protested that they had borne a part in severity uncongenial to their feelings only from deference to the authority of the King. The King got together a collection of stories about rectors and vicars who had by threats of prosecution wrung money out of Protestant Dissenters. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of these, either from inherited passion or evil education, have deliberately and of free choice entered upon a life of shame; but the great majority do so under the stress of temptation; sometimes because of poverty or chafing against uncongenial employment, with meager wages. They are told that in the profession of prostitution, they can, if they are lucky, make more in a single night than they could by ...
— From the Ball-Room to Hell • T. A. Faulkner
... many ways before the visions of that night became reality. For many and various were the difficulties which Layard had to contend with during the following months as well as during his second expedition in 1848. The material hardships of perpetual camping out in an uncongenial climate, without any of the simplest conveniences of life, and the fevers and sickness repeatedly brought on by exposure to winter rains and summer heat, should perhaps be counted among the least of them, for they had their compensations. Not so the ignorant and ill-natured opposition, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... in these uncongenial surroundings for a space of time that seemed like an eternity to a lad of fourteen; to be forced to remain with these unsympathetic companions for the next four or five years, with no one to turn to and without a home, meant desolation as complete ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... I contrast the sweet, unbroken quiet of the home I now enjoy with the uncongenial one I was ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... of an hour after the departure of Alvaros, Don Hermoso sat plunged in a deep and somewhat anxious reverie. He scarcely knew whether he was more pleased or annoyed at what had just happened: for, on the one hand, he was at last rid of a distinctly uncongenial acquaintance, which had been almost thrust upon him in the first instance, and which had proved ever more uncongenial and unwelcome with the lapse of time; while, on the other hand, he fully recognised ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... her mother when a child"—an accent of infinite tenderness here came to his voice. "These woods and this shore and this lonely barn of ours, all robbed of what once made it a palace to me and mine, were, I fancied, uncongenial to her spirit, and I sent her to the Lowlands. She came back, educated, as they call it—I think she brought back as good a heart as she took away, but singularly little tolerance sometimes for the life in the castle of Doom. It has been always the town for her these six months, always the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... him to rejoin himself in the practice of the law. Thanking his father for his thoughtfulness, Lanier justified his own course in these earnest words: "My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways — I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances and ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... clear that the virgin, as well as the widow, was given considerable liberty in making up her own mind as to the choice of a life mate, and any general conclusions that colonial women were practically forced into uncongenial marriages by the command of parents has no documentary evidence whatever. For instance, Eliza Pinckney wrote in reply to her father's inquiry about her ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... call Shelley the Sussex poet, but he wrote no Sussex poems, and a singularly uncongenial father (for the cursing of whom and the King the boy was famous at Eton) made him glad to avoid the county when he was older. It was, however, to a Sussex lady, Miss Hitchener of Hurstpierpoint, that Shelley, when in ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... insisted on a fire being kept in my room, and no lessons. And if I wished to see any of my friends I might do so, and on no account was I to be allowed to fret or be disturbed in mind. I couldn't help feeling half sorry for Miss Henniker being charged with all these uncongenial tasks; but Stonebridge House depended a great deal on what the doctor said of it, and so she had to ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... pick you and me up like that, out of these surroundings, congenial and pleasant, and set us down where we had no thought of going, and never would have gone of our own choice, and we sing as we are picked up, and keep on singing where we find ourselves amidst the uncongenial perhaps, the strange, the unprecedented and hard,—if He were free to control like that these days, there would be a present-day Pentecost beside which the Acts-Pentecost was but the beginnings of the throbbings ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... regret that his sympathy with that deep vein of poetical imagination which underlies all our 'steaks and sirloins' should have been intercepted by this detestable lay-figure. The poetical humorist must be allowed a certain license in dealing with facts; and poor Hawthorne, in the uncongenial atmosphere of the Liverpool Custom-house, had doubtless much to suffer from a thick-skinned generation. His characteristic shyness made it a hard task for him to penetrate through our outer rind—which, to say the truth, is often elephantine ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... it should be no longer feasible to keep them. Escovedo shared in the sentiments and entered fully into the schemes of his chief. The plot, the secret enterprise, was the great cause of the advent of Don John in the uncongenial clime of Flanders. It had been, therefore, highly important, in his estimation, to set, as soon as possible, about the accomplishment of this important business. He accordingly entered into correspondence with Antonio Perez, the King's most confidential Secretary of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... town, and to our Christian growth. At present we go to church. We listen to a good choir, we go home again, we have a pleasant Sunday-school, we are all comfortable and well clothed here; we enjoy our services, we are not disturbed by the sight of disagreeable or uncongenial people. But is that Christianity? Where do the service and the self-denial and the working for men's souls come in? Ah, my dear brothers and sisters, what is this church really doing for the salvation of men in this place? Is it Christianity to have a comfortable church and ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... away from them in the exercises," he said in effect, "because it would have been useless (as well as cruel) to force you to labour on a subject so uncongenial to you; and for the same reason I have decided that it is to be a tale of adventure, in which the heroine need be little more than a beautiful sack of coals which your cavalier carries about with him on his left shoulder. I am afraid we must have her to that extent, Thomas, but I am not ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... completion, for the style is not that of Giorgione's last works. Rather must we conclude that, like the "Aeneas and Evander," and several other pictures yet to be mentioned, Giorgione stopped short at his work, unwilling to labour at an uncongenial task (as, perhaps, in the present case), or from some feeling of dissatisfaction at the result, nay, even despair of ever ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... an afternoon call paid at the vicarage. Of all houses in the Garden Home Sabre most dreaded and feared the vicarage. He paid this call, with shuddering, in pursuance of his endeavour to do with Mabel things that gave her pleasure. (And in the most uncongenial of them, as this call at the vicarage, he used to think, characteristically, "After all, I haven't got the decency to do what she's specially ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... condemn me to his company, please let us have Mafuta again, for Wilkins and I are like two uncongenial stones, and he acts as lime to ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... Yesterdays—to the schoolmates of her Yesterdays. The world in which she now lived and labored was forgotten. Forgotten were the worries and troubles of her grown up life—forgotten the trials and disappointments—forgotten the new friends, the uncongenial acquaintances, the cruel knowledge, the heartless business—forgotten everything of the present—all, all, was lost in a golden mist of the ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... was like the life of the cloister, cut short before it had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a crisis, which is neither spleen nor disgust, but combines all the symptoms of both. When a human being is transplanted into an uncongenial soil, to lead a starved, stunted existence, there is always a little discomfort over the transition. Then, gradually, if nothing removes him from his surroundings, he grows accustomed to them, and adapts himself to the vacuity which grows upon him and renders ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... conversations will often diverge, whether we wish it or not), and broke short off to make sudden inquiries after old friends; how this naturally led them to talk of new friends and new scenes, until they began to forecast their eyes a little into the future; and how, on feeling that this was an uncongenial theme under present circumstances, they reverted again to the past, and by a peculiar train of conversation—to retrace which were utterly impossible—they invariably arrived at old times again. Having in course of the evening pretty well exhausted their powers, both mental ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... occupied it under protest, and preserving the most stately gravity and silence. They evidently felt that their magnificent outward adornments were exhibited in a very unworthy locality, and among a very uncongenial company. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... support the tragedy of his death, nor had she Bessie's engrossing preoccupations with herself, her looks, her fancies, her love affairs. Bernard at George Boult's little branch shop in the country town of Ingleby, chained body and soul to the heavy drudgery of uncongenial occupation, thought of his father only with rage and resentment. ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... he didn't wonder at it, and, finding the subject uncongenial, turned the conversation on to worthier subjects. Miss Garland's taste, it seemed, lay in the direction of hospital nursing, or some other occupation beneficial to mankind at large. Simple and demure, she filled the simpler ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... This was the only perceptible difference wrought by the little vexations and troubles incident to her position. She had found some bitter drops in the golden goblet which the prince in his love pressed to her lips—drops which were uncongenial to lips accustomed to the ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... And that implacable man, not content with forcing an uncongenial marriage upon this helpless damsel, requires that you immediately resign your high post in the king's service, and live upon the pittance he settles upon you as his ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... letters, however, has not seemingly regretted the inability of Byron to trammel his muse with the uncongenial fetters of Pope's metre, and has certainly never quarrelled with Tom Moore for not assuming the manners and diction of the revered ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... had heard something of Truesdale's intended departure for the Orient. "He finds Chicago uncongenial, ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... Tumult and coldness make uncongenial neighbors. The man, all passion, and the woman, who has no answering spark, grope toward each other through devious ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... range of other plants, a continuation of much of the work he had been doing at Little Silver. The move to Chico, Cal., resulted in a great loss to his breeding work. Some of his material was left at Little Silver, much of it died in the uncongenial climate at Chico, and other promising plants were lost in the long shipment across the continent, both going ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... Milton, in whose soul Puritan austerity was as yet only contending with the more genial currents of humanity, had a far greater than average susceptibility to the charm of woman. Even at the later date of Paradise Lost, voluptuous thoughts, as Mr. Hallam has observed, are not uncongenial to him. And at an earlier age his poems, candidly pure from the lascivious inuendoes of his contemporaries, have preserved the record of the rapid impression of the momentary passage of beauty upon his susceptible mind. Once, at twenty, he was set ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the uncongenial tasks of the officers of the association has been the answering of the many attacks made in Eastern papers on the position of women in Colorado, though this becomes far less trying when it is remembered that in ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... consequence was that in the windings of his imagination the squire found himself perpetually turning in a vicious circle; but since the exercise concerned Mrs. Goddard and her welfare it was not uncongenial. He founded all his vague hopes upon one expression she had used. When in making his proposal he had spoken of her as being a widow, she had said, "Would to God that I were!" She had said it with such vehemence that he had felt sure that if she had indeed been a widow ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... made numerous journeys of inspection to Whitford, to Malvern, and to London, and these seemed to make him the more content with Stoneborough. Sir Matthew Fleet had evidently chilled him, and as he found his own few remaining relations uncongenial, he became the more ready to find a resting-place in the gray old town, the scene of his school life, beside the friend of his youth, and the children of her, for whose sake he had never sought a home of his own. Though he ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... heartened him to hope that their friendship—since it was to be no more—might prove a survival, or rather a veritable renaissance, of the beautiful old Greek spirit in such matters. And, though the blind chance that mismanaged the world had chained them to uncongenial, though certainly well-meaning, persons, this was no logical reason why he and Patricia should be deprived of the pleasures of intellectual intercourse. Their souls were ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... marvellously; but without love and its joy she could not live, in any real sense. In uncongenial society, her whole mental faculty had frozen; when love came, her mental world, like a garden in the spring sunshine, blossomed and budded. When she lost me, the Present vanished, or went by her like an ocean ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... essays which expressed to perfection his acid and embittered talent—perhaps a casual meeting at a northern country-house, where the lady had found the man of letters her only resource amid a crowd of uncongenial nonentities—had shown them their natural compatibility. Both were in a secret revolt against circumstance and their own lives; but whereas the reasons for the man's attitude—his jealousies, defeats, and ambitions—were ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an end to my fury. Then, as my anger cooled, little by little, "Eumolpus," I said, "rather than have you entertain designs of such a nature, I would even prefer to have you spouting poetry! I am hot-tempered and you are lecherous; see how uncongenial two such dispositions must be! Take me for a maniac, humor my malady: in other words, get out quick!" Taken completely aback by this onslaught, Eumolpus crossed the threshold of the room without stopping to ask the reason for my wrath, and immediately slammed ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... In these uncongenial circumstances the new apprentice worked for four months as he had never believed it possible he could work. He was annoyed both at the extent and the variety of his tasks, the work of an A.B. being gratuitously included ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... of our ignorance, great possibilities lie undeveloped in nearly all men. Self-expression is smothered in uncongenial toil. Parents and teachers, groping in the dark, have long been training natural-born artists to become mechanics, natural-born business men to become musicians, and boys and girls with great aptitudes for agriculture and horticulture to become college professors, lawyers, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... declared, "the only useful thing I have ever done in my life is to rescue Cicely from uncongenial surroundings, and provide her with all she needs for her musical studies. To help bring out a great genius gives ME some little sense of importance, you see! In myself I ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... interesting person in the wrong place. He has taken the wrong turning—into your company. Do unto him as you would he might do unto you. Direct him aright—that is to say, out of it! Remember, we are all bores in certain uncongenial social climates: all stars in our own particular milky way. So, remember, don't be cruel—as a rule—to the Irrelevant Person; but just smile your best at him, and whisper: 'We were not born for ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... fastidious, and had to school himself to become able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships. We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first edition of "Monadnoc" "with heart of cat and eyes of bug," disappears in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... toil, you must marry wealth. Your father is well satisfied that whoever allies himself to this Jocelyn family may soon have them all on his hands to support. We decline the risk of burdening ourselves with these unknown, uncongenial people. Is there anything unreasonable in that? Because you are fascinated by a pretty face, of which there are thousands in this city, must we be forced into intimate associations with people that are wholly distasteful to us? This would be a poor return for having shielded ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... in his arm-pit, his face cut to ribbons, and with pieces of casting sticking to his back through the carrying away of a crane, cavil against the idea of being taken into the township where the doctor was, lest his old woman, unused to a town life, should find the surroundings uncongenial. This in a broken, muttered whisper, twelve hours after the accident had happened, during which time every new arrival had been called upon to witness the peculiar ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... "scrap" had entirely left us, for Bennett and I had before us one of the most uncongenial tasks that an officer can have. The news has to be broken by someone when a wife is suddenly made a widow, and the task is generally taken on by the dead man's platoon commander, who sends back home his letters and papers. There ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... uncongenial surroundings and without communication from home, reduced her to a state of pitiable depression. The world did not want her. Even her newly-found wealth could not make her welcome in her own home. Dick, of course, would be consoled by Dora; and the marriage arranged by the miser would take place ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... man who accepts in the course of a day fifteen or twenty suggestions that he is ill, has gone a considerable part of the way towards actual illness. Similarly, when we thoughtlessly commiserate with a friend on the difficulty of his daily work, or represent it as irksome and uncongenial, we make it a little harder for him to accomplish, and thereby slightly ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... the law of success that one's pursuit must be congenial if he is to excel. On the contrary, however, lassitude can not be condoned if we find ourselves engaged in uncongenial employment. No kind of work, to the man who possesses dominion over his feelings and his faculties, is painful but proceeds with pleasure when once the habit ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... of such patrician birth have in common with a Mrs. Mortlock or a Mrs. Dredge? Alas! however, Miss Slowcum was poor—she was very poor, and she was a great deal too genteel to work. The terms at Penelope Mansion were by no means high, and in order to live she was obliged to put up with uncongenial company. She was a very tall and angular person—her face was long and thin, her eyes small, her mouth undecided, but in her heart of hearts she was by no means wanting in good nature; and when, the night ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... sadly. The gallant bands that have from time to time gone forth to a bloodless campaign in the icy north, have always managed to keep their Christmas right joyously. Certainly they could not complain of uncongenial skies or unseasonable temperatures; while, so far as snow and ice are necessary to thorough enjoyment, the supply in the Arctic regions is on a scale sufficient to satisfy the most ardent admirer ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... kept on friendly terms with a Jesuit, partly because the Pope had expelled them, partly because Frederick the Great had patronised them; but his chief object was to have someone to dispute with. Perhaps also he wished to show his freedom from prejudice, for he did not like the uncongenial man. ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... visited Spain, and in 1800 Portugal, and laid the foundations of his thorough knowledge of the history and literature of the Peninsula. Between these two periods of foreign travel he had attempted the study of law, which proved entirely uncongenial; and in 1803 he settled at Greta Hall, Keswick, to which neighbourhood the Coleridges had also come. Here he set himself to a course of indefatigable literary toil which only ended with his life. Thalaba had appeared in 1801, and there followed Madoc (1805), The ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... at last of seeing me between her paws, suddenly let me escape. Before I had been working a month at my uncongenial trade Big Rapids was favored by a visit from a Universalist woman minister, the Reverend Marianna Thompson, who came there to preach. Her sermon was delivered on Sunday morning, and I was, I think, ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... been asked to the Priory to meet Angela, to whom it was now a comfort and pleasure to talk of her treasure, so much less lost to her than in the uncongenial surroundings threatened at Coalham. And the invitation, followed by the proposal, came at a not unpropitious moment. A railway company, after much surveying, much disputing, and many heartburnings, ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... known to him and by no means uncongenial; but Saltash the saint, not only beloved, but reverenced and enshrined as such, as something beyond his comprehension! How on earth had he managed to ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... Gaines has just telephoned. It's most unfortunate," Mr. Langhope grumbled. He too was already beginning to chafe at the uncongenial exile of Hanaford, and he shared his daughter's desire to despatch ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... is equal to the most uncongenial temperaments, to the most unfavorable circumstances; and its glory is to transform a curse into blessing, and show to men and angels of ages yet to come, that "where sin abounded, there ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... the lowlanders would be angry at the attitude of sympathy with his old friends which he must assume. In a spirit of self-sacrifice, therefore, he made ready to exchange his comfortable exile for one more uncongenial and of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of his career in the world were unromantic to the last degree. His father's poverty forced him to give up the hope of a learned life, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a small grocer in a country village, in whose employment, surely uncongenial enough for such a spirit, he spent five and a half years, selling butter, herrings, potato-brandy and the like, and occupying his spare moments in tidying out the little shop. Even in such circumstances his passion ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie |
