"Prosaical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more moved than he could understand. But the wind, dashed with ice-cold rain, blew them closer to one another. He could feel the warmth of her arm against his. It was difficult to seem prosaic and casual. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... was of a more prosaic disposition, "how it is that it's always much jollier having a feed when you ought not to than at the proper time. For instance, eating this pork-pie at a table, with knife and fork and a plate, wouldn't be a quarter the fun it is having it like we're ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... the application of this romance in real life. I must return to the more prosaic generalizations of conservation and its relation to the products of cultivation ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... things in a man's career are not always marked by some sharp convulsion. The youth does not necessarily marry the girl whom he happens to fish out of a mill-pond: his future life may be far more definitely shaped for him at a prosaic dinner-table, where he fancies he is only thinking of the wines. We are indeed but as children seated on the shore, watching the ripples that come on to our feet; and while the ripples unceasingly repeat themselves, and while the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... Alexander the Great that which is common, popular, realistic prevailed in politics and literature. The heroic and ideal-poetic declined and was made an object of satire in the mimus. "The trivial, prosaic, and libertine taste of the Macedonian princes of Egypt and Syria at last reigned alone in enslaved Greece." Then, under different forms and names, nothing remained but mimes, realistic representation of common life.[2030] The Olympian gods and Homeric heroes were burlesqued ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... realizing the sophistications and corruptions of European society, and so he welcomed her. But I believe he avoided speaking to her. She may have been hurt, or she may have been amused; or neither. Yet, after all, this contretemps was for him, I felt, but a prosaic substitute for something richer. A similar situation in Naples, say, taken at close range, might have ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... with a start to find a Swiss waiter placing tea upon the table. He felt like rubbing his eyes. He had been dragged rudely back from the Syrian desert to the prosaic ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... probably maintain that, even if Toulon had been held harmoniously by all the troops which the imagination of Pitt and Dundas conjured up, nevertheless the genius and daring of the little Corsican would have prevailed. This view is tenable; but the prosaic mind, which notes the venturesome extension of Bonaparte's batteries in November-December, until they presented their right flanks to the cliffs and their rear to the open sea, though at too high a level to be cannonaded, will probably ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... valiant—certainly not more cheerful and hopeful men, and therefore they care no more for it than they do for an opera or a pantomime, if as much. Whereupon the poets get disgusted with the same hard-hearted prosaic world—which is trying to get its living like an industrious animal as it is—and demand homage—for what? For making a noise, pleasant or otherwise? For not being as other men are? For pleading "the eccentricities of genius" as an excuse for sitting like naughty children in the middle of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... appeared in our time—he who has given us a look into his heart in A Window in Thrums and in that beautiful tribute to his mother, Margaret Ogilvie. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton by the arch-versifier Pope. The Revolution of 1688 was glorious, but unlike the Puritan Revolution which it followed, and in the political sphere partly ratified, it was profoundly prosaic. Spiritual religion, the source of Puritan grandeur and of the poetry of Milton, was almost extinct; there was not much more of it among the Nonconformists, who had now become to a great extent mere Whigs, ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... prosaic life than this of Kew or Windsor, cannot be imagined. Rain or shine, the king rode every day for hours; poked his red face into hundreds of cottages round about, and showed that shovel hat and Windsor ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I think," said Patty, with an air of satisfaction at this prosaic settlement of the subject. "Oh, papa, you're the only one I'm going to miss very much, you ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... could have dispensed with the painful acquisitions of labor, and been content with the spontaneous growth of an uncultivated soil, that man was Mr. Choate. And yet who ever worked harder than he? what plodding chronicler, what prosaic Dryasdust ever went through a greater amount of drudgery than he? His very industry had the intense and impassioned character which belonged to his whole temperament and organization. He toiled with a fiery earnestness and a concentration ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... old. Her screens, never good at best, were hardly more than filters. Through the hull, through the drive lattice, the viciously distorted Cth environment seeped into the ship turning prosaic shapes of controls and instruments into writhing masses of obscene horror that sent extensions wiggling off into nothingness at eye-aching angles. A spaceman could take this—knowing it wasn't real—but ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... to Mr. Joseph Gillott's pen manufactory it is a very interesting show place, but is practical and prosaic compared with the art electro-plate establishment I have just now referred to. Those, however, who like to see processes, and something going on quickly from stage to stage, find Mr. Gillott's factory a place of almost fascinating interest. They can, indeed, observe the steel pen emerge from its ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... talk of a dreamer—of a rapt, romantic lunatic. I do dream. I will dream now and then; and if she has inspired romance into my prosaic composition, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... forms of literature. The great writers commonly use all types of images in their description and narration. If we are not able to employ the images they used, many of their most beautiful pictures are likely to be to us but so many words suggesting prosaic ideas. ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... the Jacobite Insurrection of 1715, which will appeal strongly to the great number of admirers of historical fiction. The story is splendidly told, the magic circle which the author draws about the reader compelling a complete forgetfulness of prosaic ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the dock, whither Shag had already made his way, coming in a more prosaic trolley car from The Haven, and soon they were ready to row down the inlet ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... fact the ferry isn't a boat at all. It is more like a house or a street car or a park full of pretty benches. It doesn't sail, it only plies, plies between two given points at stated intervals, and could anything be more dull. Nothing is more prosaic than a ferry unless ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... state beyond Death—a state which to him is misty and unreal in his own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the substantial comforts dear to the family man—then he accepts the words in their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks of Devachan as a delusion in his own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore, on the threshold of Devachan to put this question of "illusion" in ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... Bombarnac! Nothing will happen either to you or me. Wait a bit, I promise you a journey, the most prosaic, the most homely, the flattest—flat as the steppes of Kara Koum, which the Grand Transasiatic traverses in Turkestan, and the plains of the desert of Gobi it ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... of much legend. One popular story is that this orchard formed the subject of a bequest to "St. John's College," and that the testator, being an Oxford man, was held by the Courts to have intended to benefit the College in his own University. As a matter of prosaic fact, the orchard originally belonged to Merton College, Oxford, being part of the original gift of their founder, Walter de Merton, and it was acquired by St. John's College by exchange in the early years of ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... which, after all, is much more rational than the more recent contention of sundry modern Orators of the Human Race that 'the mines belong to the miners'! But after it had talked itself hoarse, the Assembly had to descend to the prosaic business of legislation, and in dealing with the mines, as in dealing with other matters, it made a muddle of the laws which existed before it met, and left this muddle to be resolved into a new order of things legal, under ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of that advantage I could be sure my second Eliza was less dramatic than my first, and that my first "Cassy," that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy of the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the National prosaic and placid (I could already be "down" on a placid Cassy;) just as on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with the desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Defoe, be made subservient to that display of character in which Addison had shown himself a master, and let them become steps in the development of a love-plot, and the novel—the novel of the last century, at any rate—is fully formed. As was the self-contented, and therefore uncreative and prosaic, thought of the age, which produced the novel, such the novel itself continued to be. Man, comfortable and acquiescent, wished to amuse himself by a reflex of the life which he no longer aspired to transcend. He wanted to enjoy himself twice over—in act and ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... again. It is easy to wander into by-paths when the main road is prosaic, and the study of a body of men before an attack—the men who fear and don't show it, the men who fear and try not to show it, the men who don't care a hang what happens—cannot but grip the observer who has eyes to see. Almost does he forget his own allotted part ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... of these little ones should perish." A Christian Church which took seriously its vocation to go before the Lord and to prepare His ways would be effectively and vigorously concerned with problems so prosaic as the rate of infantile mortality and the allied questions of housing and sanitation, with the insistence that the conditions of life among the poorer classes of the community shall be such as make decent living possible, and with ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... purpose hereafter to give numerous examples of this kind of ideal landscape. Of true and noble landscape, as such, I am aware of no instances except where least they might have been expected, among the sea-bred Venetians. Ghirlandajo shows keen, though prosaic, sense of nature in that view of Venice behind an Adoration of Magi in the Uffizii, but he at last walled himself up among gilded entablatures. Masaccio indeed has given one grand example in the fresco of the Tribute Money, but its ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... the Court Journal office, smoking a morning cigarette and looking over files. Like all ingrainedly idle men, he was very fond of lounging and chatting in places where other people were doing work. But one would have thought that, even in the prosaic England of his day, he might have found ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of five years over a country village generally brings but little change in the existing conditions, but even in this prosaic atmosphere of easy going methods and action, the calendar marks some days and events ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... dream-fairyland, to see a horseman galloping straight toward her. If not the white knight, then—For some seconds she stared, awakening slowly; and smiled at length at her childish fancy. It was only a cowboy, doubtless, riding upon his own prosaic business. And yet—She became gradually aware of something unusual, something disquieting in the manner of the man's approach. The horse was leaping under the spurs; the rider sat upright and alert in the ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... science of that day was wholly inadequate to the theme. But Vergil could hardly realize this, since both Stoics and Epicureans had adopted the theory of the exploding winds. The real trouble with the theme is its hopelessly prosaic ugliness. Lucretius, by his imaginative power, had apparently deceived him into thinking that any fragment of science might be treated poetically. In his master the "flaring atom streams" had attained the sublimity of a Platonic vision, and the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Yorkshire possessions. I can imagine his eye glancing down on a far more thrilling scene than the green three-sided courtyard enclosed by a crumbling grey wall, though to him the buildings, the men, and every detail that filled the great space, were no doubt quite prosaic. It did not thrill him to see a man-at-arms cleaning weapons, when the man and his clothes, and even the sword, were as modern and everyday as the soldier's wife and child that we can see ourselves, but how much would we not give for a half-an-hour of his vision, ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the voice cried, passionately. "To be looked upon as 'dead,' to be near to the rascal who smiles to think that I am in my grave.... And everything so dull and prosaic on the surface! Yes, I have friends who will aid me in the business. Some day I may be able to thank you face to face, to tell you how I managed to see your plot. ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... services in Christ Church, and enjoyed visiting points of interest on the lake and in the village. That a souvenir of the visit might be preserved the Archbishop and the Bishop were photographed together on the front porch of Fernleigh. Apparently some prosaic adviser had represented to the Archbishop that his usual costume would make him undesirably conspicuous in America, for during his tour of this country the Primate of all England abandoned the picturesque every-day ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... narrative; the one is an embodiment,—the other a substance; the one transcribes the actual by the personal,—the other is a return to the simplest originality; the one exalts its subjects by poetic freedom,—the other adheres to prosaic plainness. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... at each other, he told me that he had just cleared 100o, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation. ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... edition is the final one. There are traces in Beddoes' letters of unpublished compositions which may still come to light. What has happened, one would like to know, to The Ivory Gate, that 'volume of prosaic poetry and poetical prose,' which Beddoes talked of publishing in 1837? Only a few fine stanzas from it have ever appeared. And, as Mr. Gosse himself tells us, the variations in Death's Jest Book alone would warrant the publication of a variorum edition of that ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Bulwer-Lytton's odd way of narrating them. Lord Lytton, without any comment, provides us with curious material for the verification of his grandfather's narrative. He prints, here and there, letters from entirely prosaic persons which tally, often to a surprising degree, with the extravagant statements of Bulwer-Lytton. To quote a single instance, of a very remarkable character, Bulwer-Lytton describes the effect his scholarship produced, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the day after their wedding, nor for some time afterwards. His father's avarice condemned him to the most grinding poverty, but he could not bring himself to spoil the honeymoon by beginning his wife's commercial education and prosaic apprenticeship to his laborious craft. So it came to pass that housekeeping, no less than working expenses, ate up the thousand francs, his whole fortune. For four months David gave no thought to the future, ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... life is becoming too prosaic," she said, "since you dreadfully clever people began to discover a reason for everything. Lady Fulda's beauty and goodness would have been enough to convince any man at one time that she is a saint indeed, and privileged to heal the sick and converse with angels; ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... have not caught your name— "you really are too deliciously prosaic. Stay here for a month, and then tell me if you think Dorothea— I mean Miss Heath— plain. No, I won't say any more. You must find out for yourself. But now, about the rules. I don't mean the printed rules. We have, I assure ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... miserable. And if people insist that honor is dearer than life itself, what they really mean is that existence and well-being are as nothing compared with other people's opinions. Of course, this may be only an exaggerated way of stating the prosaic truth that reputation, that is, the opinion others have of us, is indispensable if we are to make any progress in the world; but I shall come back to that presently. When we see that almost everything men devote their lives to attain, sparing no effort and ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... The present life, which is the first stage of the immortal mind, abounds in the materials of poetry, and it is the highest office of the bard, to detect this divine element among the grosser pleasures and labors of our earthly being. The present life is not wholly prosaic, precise, tame, and finite. To the gifted eye it abounds ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... resembles that agent of disruption in following a curiously wayward path. Curtis was piloted into an elevator by an affable negro, was conducted to 605, which, of course, lay on the sixth floor, and was plunged forthwith into the prosaic business of consigning a good deal of soiled linen ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... with Zwinglius the doctrine of trans-substantiation, and to every argument of his rational opponent answered by laying his sturdy finger on the words, "This is my body." The most powerful Church of Christendom bases itself upon this prosaic reading of a ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... the last perfect wreath. Although the toast to the bridal pair had been officially proposed, Bagger took occasion to offer his congratulations in a second encomium of love and matrimony; which gave a solid, prosaic man opportunity for the witty remark and hearty wish that so distinguished a practical office-holder as Counsellor Bagger would carry his fine theories upon matrimony into practice. The toast was drunk with enthusiasm, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... madly about, and dashing to the ground in their fright great shreds of dusty cobwebs that must have been centuries old. Nobody minded that, however; it seemed just the sort of place where millions could really be found in these prosaic days! ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... came to an end in October 1796; and it may astonish some wise people, accustomed to regard Scott as a rather humdrum and prosaic person, who escaped the scandals so often associated with the memory of men of letters from sheer want of temptation, to hear that one of his most intimate friends of his own age at the time 'shuddered at the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... his "Aventures d'un Gentilhomme Breton aux Iles Philippines," describes (Chapter V.) a feast, at which he had, while on a visit to the Tinguianes, to drink human brains mixed with basi. Whatever De La Gironiere says must be received with considerable caution; but Pickering, a prosaic and matter-of-fact Britisher, speaking of the Formosan savages, says that "they mixed the brains of their enemies with wine." ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... period of experimentation, when the proper material and limits of literary forms were being determined, oftentimes by means of false starts and grandiose failures. In particular, many efforts were made to give prolonged poetical treatment to many subjects essentially prosaic, for example to systems of theological or scientific thought, or to the geography of all England. 6. It continued to be largely influenced by the literature of Italy, and to a less degree by those of France and Spain. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... enjoyed every privilege of a sound classical education, Vondel had still to begin a course of study when more than twenty-six years of age; and, while the Dutch poet told the price of homely stockings to prosaic burghers, the writer of Paradise Lost was speaking the language of Torquato Tasso in the country enraptured by the first sight ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... nursery to romp with the children, whilst the rest dispersed in different directions. At luncheon all met again, and there was much merry-making over the tansy cakes—very foolish, no doubt, but to me at least very delightful, and perhaps a wise practice, at times, even for the most prosaic. In the afternoon the Colonel took me for a drive to a charmingly picturesque village in the Chilterns, whence we did not set out on our way ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... was overpowered by another sensation; she had been thinking of the day, now so near, when the old stage would drive up to Mrs. Taft's pasture-gate, and her small trunk and trap would be carried down on Hank's back and tumbled in, and she would go back alone to duty and the prosaic life of a New ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... constant and prosaic the other forces—gravity, cohesion, chemical affinity, and capillary attraction—seem when compared with this force of forces, electricity! How deep and prolonged it slumbers at one time, how terribly active and threatening at another, bellowing through the heavens ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... along in her progresses, the people, whose applause she courted, remained cold and silent. The temper of the age, in fact, was changing and isolating her as it changed. Her own England, the England which had grown up around her, serious, moral, prosaic, shrank coldly from this child of earth, and the renascence, brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous, irreligious. She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it, and now that they were gone she ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... characters in his novels? Must a dramatist necessarily go about armed to the teeth with crisp dialogue? May not a poet be allowed to lay aside his singing-robes and put on a conventional dress-suit when he dines out? Why is it not permissible in him to be as prosaic and tiresome as the rest of the company? He ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... unfairly so, for when revivals were not in the air that ugly little chapel was served very faithfully by a spiritually-minded minister, who hurled himself all the year round against the obduracy of the people. Ishmael had a quick movement of withdrawal as his mother led him in through the prosaic yellow-grained doors, but it availed him nothing. Another moment and he was being ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... drinks of them never desires to leave Bucarest. What its retentive properties may have been in former times we are not able to say, but we can quite imagine any person who ventures to drink of the water being incapable of leaving the city for ever afterwards. However, the prosaic authorities are not greatly impressed by their national poetry in this instance. The river is being 'canalised,' or confined within stone embankments, and there is a plentiful supply of apa dulce from another source, which exercises no controlling influence whatever upon the movements of the ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... ministry, Addington, we have seen, was fully alive to his merits, and pressed his claims on Pitt, who himself was quite awake to the charm of Burns's poetry. The Premier, it is said, "pushed the bottle on to Dundas, and did nothing,"—to Dundas, too practical and too prosaic to waste a thought on poets and poetry. Latterly this neglect of him by public men preyed on the spirit of Burns, and was seldom absent from his thoughts. It added force, no doubt, to the rapture with which he, like all the younger poets of the time, hailed the ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... sensation which we observe in that which is without sensation. The whole system of symbols in nature which fills our treasury of words and penetrates, in a {132} thousandfold way, our scientific and popular, our poetical and prosaic speech, our thoughts and feelings, bears witness to the fact that that which is without sensation is also a preparatory step to sensation, and feeling both active and passive springs from it. However, a preparatory step, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... of genius. But he makes his man cry out for the greatest bliss and the greatest imaginable glory to be bestowed upon the judge who pronounces the sentence. And this is merely exaggeration. One takes pleasure in rebuking the false ecstasy by a word thus prim and prosaic. The poet intended to impose upon us, and he fails; we "withdraw our attention," as Dr. Johnson did when the conversation became foolish. In truth we do more, for we resent exaggeration if we care for our English language. For exaggeration writes ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... education to relegate these ideas into the limbo of exploded fantasies. And the people won't be comfortable without them. You take away the poetry, which is an essential element in the Gaelic character, and you make the people prosaic and critical, which is the worst thing possible for them. Thiggin-thu? But I beg your pardon. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... which had struggled for existence among the boots and medicine bottles of his dressing-room shelves. There was in Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes. She liked to think of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague diffusion of refinement and good taste. She was fond of pictures and flowers, and of sentimental ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... here is interest, not sympathy, for sympathy with actual suffering, be the object good or bad, is in its nature painful; an obvious reason why so few in the more prosaic world have the virtue ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... something bitterly suggestive in our knowledge of this fact. Whilst pensions and honours and popular applause were being showered upon the inventors of the balloon, Watt was labouring unnoticed at his improvements of the steam-engine—a very prosaic affair compared with the gilded globe which Montgolfier had caused to rise from earth amidst the acclamations of a hundred thousand spectators, but one which had before it a somewhat different history to that of the more startling invention. England, when it remembers ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... the moon. He paused a little, panting in the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels, moving a few yards along it. And as he did so a thunderbolt struck his soul. A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed indifferent face, and a prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of buttons, blocked his way. Michael had no mind to wonder whether this solid astonished man, with the brown moustache and the nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship. He merely let his mind float in an endless felicity about the man. He thought ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... occasionally in a certain shortcoming as regards verite vraie, absolute artistic truth to nature. Those who would range Balzac in point of such artistic veracity on a level with poetical and universal realists like Shakespeare and Dante, or prosaic and particular realists like Thackeray and Fielding, seem not only to be utterly wrong but to pay their idol the worst of all compliments, that of ignoring his own special qualifications. The province ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... spare our readers the prosaic incidents of D'Artagnan's journey, which terminated on the morning of the third day within sight of Pierrefonds. D'Artagnan came by the way of Nanteuil-le-Hardouin and Crepy. At a distance he perceived the Castle of Louis ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... advertisement line. George Robins, a hero in his day, is surely not yet quite forgotten; and though he were, doubtless his works will be restored to notice by future philosophers who will perhaps find in them the true spirit of the nineteenth century. Advertisements, more prosaic than his, however, bring us into the very heart of life and business, and contain a world of interest. Suppose that the dirty broadside you pick up in the dingy inn's soiled room contains the annual announcement of the reassembling of the school in which you spent your own years of schoolboy ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... first song are a brief paraphrase of the many stanzas of the original Ritual Song, which so touches the necessary acts of the planter as to lift them above a merely prosaic level. ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... swayed by what is usual and proper." Schleiermacher admired in it that "highest wisdom and profoundest religion" which lead people to "yield to the rhythm of fellowship and friendship, and to disturb no harmony of love." In more prosaic diction, the upshot of its teaching was the surrender to momentary feelings, quite divorced from Laws or Things. The only morality is "full Humanity;" "Nature alone is worthy of honor, and sound health alone ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... lovers interested me so much that I gradually edged nearer to them. The species seldom objects to the proximity of a stout little man with a prosaic pipe in his mouth and a pair of light blue eyes, handicapped by spectacles, that seem always to be looking for a sail on the horizon. In fact, I never attract any attention anywhere, unless my wife is along, and then I am only too proud ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... cannon; and the population had, at an early hour, poured into the streets of the place, with that determined zeal in the cause of merriment, which ordinarily makes preconcerted joy so dull an amusement. The chosen orator of the day had exhibited his eloquence, in a sort of prosaic monody in praise of the dead hero, and had sufficiently manifested his loyalty, by laying the glory, not only of that sacrifice, but all that had been reaped by so many thousands of his brave companions also, most humbly at the ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I kept thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering passengers. I almost wished I were with them again. But my dreams took me elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... view more particularly the poems he wrote in the year 1795, while still 'hugging the shore of philosophy'. Take for example 'The Veiled Image at Sais', which tells in rather prosaic pentameters of an ardent young truth-seeker who is escorted by an Egyptian hierophant to a veiled statue and told that whoso lifts the veil shall see the Truth. At the same time he is warned that the veil must not be lifted ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... has been converted into a family burial-place. The name on one of the monuments is Crawfurd; the other bore no inscription. It is impossible not to feel that these good people, whoever they may be, had no business to thrust their prosaic bones into a spot that belongs to the world, and where their presence jars with the emotions, be they sad or gay, which the pilgrim brings thither. They shut us out from our own precincts, too,—from that inalienable possession ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in the still early hours, while all the world sleeps, hunting through column after column for those missing figures which will turn a respected alderman into a felon, I understand that it is not such a prosaic ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a change is the extreme possibility. The probability is of something less lucid and more prosaic; of a discussion of diplomatists; of patched arrangements. But even under these circumstances the whole Eastern European situation is so fluid and little controlled by any plain necessity, that there will be enormous scope for any individual statesman ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... year 1760, published, by the house of B. Mecom in Boston, a 72 page brochure entitled "The Rudiments of Latin Prosody with a Dissertation on Letters and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic and Prosaic Composition, collected from some of ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... and again I almost succeeded in screwing up my courage to the point of mentioning college to him,—never quite; his manner, though kind and calm, somehow strengthened my suspicion that I had been judged and found wanting, and doomed to "business": galley slavery, I deemed it, humdrum, prosaic, degrading! When I thought of it at night I experienced almost a frenzy of self-pity. My father couldn't intend to do that, just because my monthly reports hadn't always been what he thought they ought to be! Gene Hollister's were no better, if as good, and he was going to Princeton. Was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Phares, and it will count. You're a bona-fide farmer. You'll have our little place a record farm when I get back. You're a brick, Phares!" For the first time in months he felt a genuine affection for his preacher cousin. Preaching, prosaic ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... embellishment is out of the question. The hero puts on his clothes, or refreshes himself with food and wine, or he yokes his steed, takes a journey, and in the evening preparation is made for his repose. To give relief to subjects prosaic as these without seeming unreasonably tumid is extremely difficult. Mr. Pope much abridges some of them, and others he omits; but neither of these liberties was compatible with the nature of my undertaking. These, therefore, and many similar to these, have been new-modeled; ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... More comparatively prosaic courses included walling in the grass with concrete; the Great Wall of China was the only work of man visible from the moon; were Americans to let backward China best them? A concrete wall only a mile high and half a mile ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... and unction thereby, there will be gain in clearness. It is possible to express in the drab tones of morality the profound insights which have made religion the great guide to happiness; and even the man who deems himself irreligious may, if he takes to heart these more prosaic counsels, find something of the peace that has been the ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... for poetry, for romance, for day-dreaming, and the transition from the attic-window to the prosaic realities of house and school-room work was like a sudden awakening. I was destined before leaving the place to have a still more violent awakening to the reality that underlies appearances. Nature in these ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... advantage because it does at least recognize that the mass makes decisions that are not spontaneously born in the breast of every member. But the Oversoul as presiding genius in corporate behavior is a superfluous mystery if we fix our attention upon the machine. The machine is a quite prosaic reality. It consists of human beings who wear clothes and live in houses, who can be named and described. They perform all the duties usually assigned to ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the end of one's forty days is not complete knowledge, but only a clear indication of the road. The joy is in that, and also the sorrow. It is the direction given to the will, orders to be so carefully obeyed. This is the greatest discovery of all. Words do not reveal it. It is absolutely prosaic, though it is eternal beauty. But what I have written does not reflect it even faintly as it seems to me. Read Hello this afternoon. The freedom of the dunes this morning seemed to extend more than is usual. Later I read ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... strange peoples, fearsome beasts—all the excitement and scurry of the lives of the twentieth century ancients that have been denied us in these dull days of peace and prosaic prosperity—all, all lay beyond thirty, the invisible barrier between the stupid, commercial present and ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mystic marriage itself. Raphael's grace of line and suave space-filling shapes are mainly what we think of; the rest we call convention. We are become literal and exacting, addicted to the pedantry of the prescriptive, if not of the prosaic. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... to survey the outstanding features of the story, and, discounting in his absence the pathetic sincerity of the narrator, he had formed the opinion that there was nothing in the account which was not susceptible of an ordinary prosaic explanation. ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... in an hour or two's fishing whenever the opportunity offered. It was this practice that led to an occurrence which was destined to culminate in an adventure so startling and extraordinary as to be scarcely credible in these prosaic twentieth- ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... and most firmly established, they are assailed every day by hard hands and stout hearts; and their position resembles that of some of the picturesque ruins of Italy, which are constantly being torn away to build prosaic modern shops ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was not to be argued out of her exalted mood by such prosaic reasoning. She exclaimed at his sluggish imagination, reiterated her faith in the insinuating count's assurances, and was only withheld from sending her brother down for a spy-glass by the reflection that she could not remember reading of its employment by any maiden ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... treasures of ripening corn; in vain did the pale barley and the silvery oats wave their luxuriant growth against the dark background of the woods; all these fairylike effects of summer suggested only prosaic and misanthropic reflections in Julien's mind. He thought of the tricks, the envy and hatred that the possession of these little squares of ground brought forth among their rapacious owners. The prolific exuberance of forest vegetation was an exemplification of the ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... of dynasties that have passed away. But later one learns not only that there are great and nourishing monasteries in the south, but that even in Peking one may often step through an archway into courtyards of which the prosaic streets outside give no hint and find there refreshment for the eye and soul, flower gardens and well-kept shrines tended by pious and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... which art is to represent, must be worthy of artistic representation; otherwise we obtain only a bad unity, since a content not capable of artistic treatment is made to take on an artistic form, and a matter prosaic in itself is forced into a form quite opposed to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... BON MOT, he had left Marguerite surrounded by a crowd of admirers of all ages, all anxious and willing to help her to forget that somewhere in the spacious reception rooms, there was a long, lazy being who had been fool enough to suppose that the cleverest woman in Europe would settle down to the prosaic bonds of ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... might come. I read a missionary story "founded on fact" the other day, and the things that happened in that story on these lines were most remarkable. They do not happen here. Practical missionary life is an unexciting thing. It is not sparkling all over with incident. It is very prosaic at times. ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... not silly if we take the right view. We must sit together in order to get into harmony. We further these conditions by sitting in subdued light with fingers touching. Song adds still more to this concert of thought. Nothing is really silly or prosaic—all depends upon the ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... found, another skeleton, carrying a bag of Coins and some ornaments of this Temple of Isis. David listened to Michael Angelo's account with strange interest, for it seemed to him as though the fabled characters of Bulwer's story were endowed with actual reality by Michael Angelo's prosaic statements. ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... on the outspread wings of memory occasionally loves to soar o'er the dull, prosaic present, far away into the haunted, dream-land of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... we have always had a sympathy with the Cambridge mathematician who has been so much abused. He said, "After all, 'Paradise Lost' proves nothing"; and various persons of poetical tastes and temperament have been very severe on the prosaic observation. Yet, "after all," he was right: Milton professed to prove something; he was too profound a critic—rather, he had too profound an instinct of those eternal principles of art which criticism tries to state—not to know that on such a subject ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Barrie suddenly, in the manner of her old self. Nevertheless, she descended and advertised her return to the prosaic world by closing the door loudly in less than ten minutes ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... almost prosaic themes is the greater part of the Excursion occupied. Yet the poem is far from being composed throughout in a prosaic spirit. "Of its bones is coral made;" its arguments and theories have lain long in Wordsworth's mind, and have accreted to themselves a ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... the drawing-room, a basket of socks and stockings at her elbow, her thoughts working as busily as her needle. This girl had reduced the prosaic necessity of darning to a fine art; and since Evelyn's efforts in that direction bore an odd resemblance to ill-constructed lattice windows, Honor had taken pity on the maltreated garments very ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... of a keen desire for knowledge, which his more prosaic seniors were in the habit of misconstruing, deeming it to arise, as they said, from an insatiable and impertinent curiosity combined with an inherent love of mischief. Be that as it may, this desire for ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... old stumps, part of the meadow cut close with a scythe, and part growing up as if the owner knew the price of hay. Then there are flowerbeds, where grow clusters of poppies and hollyhocks (purple, and scarlet, and white), prosaic gooseberry-bushes, plain Yankee pieplant (from which the English make tarts), rue and sweet marjoram, with patches of fennel, sage, thyme and catnip, all lined off with boxwood, making me think of my grandmother's garden ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... are so prosaic. I feel as if I could go on for ever writing. Don't you think you have seen worse verses printed, not in a ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... striking root along the coast, by somewhat prosaic but fruitful industry, and were growing in population with rapid strides, two other movements were in progress. To the south, the English, French and Dutch, though often in rivalry with one another, combined to break in on the monopoly of the Spaniards. They turned the maxim that "there is no ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ceremonial: the unusual hours of its celebration, the mystery of night in close groves lit by the stars temporarily unsettled life from its prosaic, arduous journey toward the inevitable, blind termination. It moved the thoughts into unwonted fantasy, the heart to new, unguessed possibilities. For that night established values, life-long habits, negations, prudence, were ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that the great emotional scenes of history, one of which is coming along almost immediately, always begin in this prosaic way Shakespeare tries to conceal the fact, but there can be little doubt that Romeo and Juliet edged into their balcony scene with a few remarks on the ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... mean," pouted Mrs. Jones. "I was trying to give expression to the inspiration excited by this lovely scene in the form of poesy, but you have spoilt it all with your prosaic comparison." ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... had embrowned the old gallery pictures; but Daubigny, looking at nature with a more literal eye than Corot, ran a gamut of color greater than he. It was Daubigny who said of Corot, in envious admiration: "He puts nothing on the canvas, and everything is there." His own more prosaic nature took delight in enregistering a greater number of facts. Floating quietly down the rivers of France in a house-boat, he diligently reproduced the sedgy banks, the low-lying distances the poplars and clumps of trees lining the shore, and reflected in the waters. He painted the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... the prosaic report of a Coroner's Inquest," pursued YORICK. "Sensibility would probably have 'skipped' the sordid circumstance. 'FREDERICK MARTIN, aged seventy-two, a well-known Violinist, and Professor of Music, formerly a member of the orchestra of the Italian Opera at Her Majesty's and Covent ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... Wriothesley, triumphant in her schemes, chatted gaily with Mr. Cottrell, who was Sybarite enough to know that the discussion of the fish salad that he was then engaged upon, accompanied by the prattle of a pretty woman and irreproachable champagne, was about as near Elysium as a man of his years and prosaic temperament could expect to arrive at. He had had some conversation with his hostess on the way home. They had both arrived at the conclusion, from what they had seen in the theatre, that, even if everything was not yet settled, it would be before the ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... and graces, to hang out along the fence like any ordinary hired girl, jabberin' with anybody that went along the road," said his mother incisively. He knew that she didn't like her new neighbors, so this did not surprise nor greatly pain him. Neither did the prosaic facts that were now first made plain to him. His divinity was a Mrs. Burroughs, whose husband was conducting a series of mining operations, and prospecting with a gang of men on the Casket Ridge. As his duty required his continual presence there, Mrs. Burroughs was forced to forego the civilized ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... evolution in literary art, as in physical nature, we see the futility of a strict and rigid classification into precisely defined genera and species. All that it is needful for us to remark now is that the Short-story has limitless possibilities: it may be as realistic as the most prosaic novel, or as fantastic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... sympathy. In her woman's heart she guessed the cause of his trouble, and while she had been afraid of him when he appeared suddenly as the Indian warrior yet she liked him better in that part than as she now saw him. Then he was majestic, now he was prosaic, and it seemed to her that his ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Poe's supremacy is founded. The reason of that supremacy must be sought in the fact that, after all, Poe was a poet, and that he had the informing imagination of a poet, even tho it was only the more prosaic side of the faculty divine which he chose to employ in ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... growing out of, the real. If the first found Beauty, the end of art, in the plastic repose of sculpture, and the second in the mysterious cadences of music, the poetry of the twentieth century finds its ideal in life, in the creative evolution of being, even in the mere things, the 'prosaic' pariahs of previous poetry, on which our shaping wills are wreaked. We know it in poets unlike one another but yet more unlike their predecessors, from D'Annunzio and Dehmel and Claudel to our Georgian experimenters in the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Castellanos (b. 1522? in the Spanish province of Seville). This work is largely epic in character; and, with its 150,000 lines, it is the longest poem in the Spanish language. Though for the most part prosaic and inexact, yet it has some passages of high poetic worth, and it throws much light on the lives of the early colonists. The first three parts of the poem, under the title of Elegias de varones ilustres de Indias (the first part only was published in 1589), occupies all ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... freedom, though free, would be fettered still. A man whose sense of beauty was lost would be as in a desert in the paradise of God. A lost sense of freedom meant a slavish mind, and a lost sense of beauty meant a prosaic mind, no matter how free the man, nor how beautiful his environment. So men had lost the sense of their sonship. They did not know their royal descent, their kinship with the Father, and therefore they did not act as became sons. ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... consequence changes also. I remember when I was a boy wishing—like many other boys—to go to sea. I wanted to join the Navy. It was not, I am sure, that I was so very anxious to defend my country. No, there was a much simpler and more prosaic motive than that. The ships of those days with their complex rigging suggested a perfect paradise of CLIMBING, and I know that it was the thought of THAT which influenced me. To be able to climb indefinitely among those ropes and spars! How delightful! Of course I ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... in daily contact with Katenka (who during those two years had been wearing long dresses, and was growing prettier every day), the possibility of his falling in love with her never seemed to enter his head. Whether this proceeded from the fact that the prosaic recollections of childhood were still too fresh in his memory, or whether from the aversion which very young people feel for everything domestic, or whether from the common human weakness which, at a first encounter with anything fair ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... money and a list of articles with the help of which she hoped to effect a disguise for her father that would enable him to leave the district. It was a very prosaic service, Dick thought, but he ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... his death, Gerard de Lairesse, a popular painter, now forgotten, wrote of Rembrandt—"In his efforts to attain a yellow manner, Rembrandt merely achieved an effect of rottenness.... The vulgar and prosaic aspects of a subject were the only ones he was capable of ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... of Prose.— The eighteenth century was an age of prose in two senses. In the first place, it was a prosaic age; and, in the second place, better prose than poetry was produced by its writers. One remarkable fact may also be noted about the chief prose-writers of this century— and that is, that they were, most of them, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... ribbon of the Legion of Honor, was fat and burly, as beseems a fashionable physician, with a patriarchal air, his hair thick and long, a prominent brow, the frame of a hard worker, and the calm expression of a philosopher. This somewhat prosaic personality set off his more ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... in Haran." This bit of prosaic information becomes suggestive by the emphasis of one word: "And Terah died in Haran." This was not his birthplace, but here he ended his days, and that for a reason over which it is worth our while to pause. "And Terah died in Haran." What of that? All people have died somewhere, who have ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... without reserve his fancies, his wit, his wisdom; he makes you a present of all that the painful or the happy years have brought him. The writer makes his reader heir in full. Men of letters are a peculiar class. They are never commonplace or prosaic—at least those of them that mankind care for. They are airy, wise, gloomy, melodious spirits. They give us the language we speak, they furnish the subjects of our best talk. They are full of generous ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... own age prosaic are those who see only its costume. And that is what makes it prosaic—that we have not faith enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented to posterity in. The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is that of Van Dyck's time, or Caesar's. I have seen ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell |
