"Ungraceful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wash-basin on the ground beside her. Another almost as grotesque was a Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Breughel the Elder—a snow-scene in the wide street of a red brick, high-gabled village—soldiers, parents, children, all in the stiff, ungraceful Flemish dress of the sixteenth century, the poor little children, in square trousers and pinafores, clinging to their mothers' narrow skirts. Oddly enough, it made the story more real to me than it had ever seemed before, quite painfully and terribly so, indeed: dispoiled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... ride away, strong and rugged and ungraceful, from the head to the heel of him a man. Life had gone hard with him. She wondered whether that were the reason her heart went out to ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... a very active piece of movement. This group of curves is equal to about a two-feet length of pen-stroke, a fact which indicates an extraordinary amount of personal energy. Dickens was then writing his "Sketches by Boz," and this ungraceful elaboration of his signature was probably accompanied by a growing sense of his own capacity and power. During the time-interval between the signatures shown in Nos. 7 and 8, the first number of the "Pickwick Papers" was published—March, 1836—and Charles Dickens ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... English when one is writing under the necessity of using a vocabulary previously selected. However, if we concentrate our attention on the word-forms, we are not likely to be much injured by the ungraceful sentence-forms. This story is not long, but it should be dictated to every school class, beginning in the fourth grade, until every pupil can spell every word correctly. A high percentage is not enough, as in the case of some other studies. Any pupil ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... them ladies. Many were in character costumes, as Tyrolese peasants, Andalusian majas, Bavarian broom-girls, Wallachian boyards, Turkish sultanas, and bead-bedecked Indian belles. A greater number were disguised in the ungraceful domino, while not a few appeared in regular evening dress. Most of the ladies wore masks; some simply hid their faces behind the coquettish reboso topado, while others permitted their charms to be gazed upon. As the time passed on, and an occasional copita de vino strengthened the nerves ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... which he did not understand? Carlino thanked her. He had been on the point of falling in love with her; had greatly feared such a catastrophe. Her words, coming as they did so soon after her appearance in a certain offensive hat, with an ungraceful feather, and after some rather bourgeois expressions of admiration for that poor, tiresome devil Mendelssohn, had saved him a jamais. The two sparred gaily for some time, and, in spite of his poisoned tonsils, Carlino was in such high spirits that Noemi congratulated him on the subject of his ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... esteem; by complaisance, attentions, etc., for him. And the graceful manner of doing all these things opens the way to the heart, and facilitates, or rather insures, their effects. From your own observation, reflect what a disagreeable impression an awkward address, a slovenly figure, an ungraceful manner of speaking, whether stuttering, muttering, monotony, or drawling, an unattentive behavior, etc., make upon you, at first sight, in a stranger, and how they prejudice you against him, though for aught you ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... setting, leaving the colouring matter in a somewhat decomposed condition, to rub off by friction and wash away in the rains. The house was a stiff, formal parallelogram, resembling a man with high shoulders, appearing to be "stuck up." It had two rows of formal, short and ungraceful windows, that being a point in orthodoxy at the period of its erection. It had a tower, uncouth, and in some respects too large and others too small, if one can reconcile the contradiction; but there are anomalies of this sort in art, as well as in nature. ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... But unhappily the will is not seldom unequal to the deed: the achievement is often leagues in rear of the inspiration; the attempt at completeness is too laboured and too manifest—the feat is done but by a painful and ungraceful process. There is genius, but there is not felicity: that, one is inclined to say, is the distinguishing note of Mr. Meredith's work, in prose and verse alike. There are magnificent exceptions, of course, but they prove the rule and, broken though it be, there is no gainsaying its existence. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... young women, without very great pain. To see a machine evidently made by its Almighty Architect for a great deal of motion, and made to run on with exactness for a hundred years or more, (were due care taken to preserve it in good order,) completely deranged, because Fashion says that motion is ungraceful or unbecoming—what, in a physical point of view, can ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... wish to explain?" said the second stranger in Italian, bowing with a not ungraceful bend, and a touch of his hand to ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... burly figure came rolling in; they drew back and silenced each other.—"The Doctor!" This was the remarkable person they called Jack Doubleface. Nature had stuck a philosophic head, with finely-cut features, and a mouth brimful of finesse, on to a corpulent and ungraceful body, that yawed from side to side ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the subject. Beulah, I know very well why you took it into your wise head to be a teacher. You were unwilling to usurp what you considered my place in Uncle Guy's home and heart. You need not straighten yourself in that ungraceful way. I know perfectly well it is the truth; but I am no poor, suffering, needy innocent, that you should look after. I am well provided for, and don't intend to take one cent of Uncle Guy's money, so you might just as well have the benefit of it. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... progressed—became unpleasantly hot. Dancing was in full swing and the orchestra had just struck up the first strains of that inspiriting new dance—the latest importation from Vienna—a dreamy waltz of which dowagers strongly disapproved, deeming it licentious, indecent, and certainly ungraceful, but which the young folk delighted in, and persisted in dancing, defying the mammas ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... there often. Standing before that window, I could look across the room and see girls moving backwards and forwards among the spinning-frames, sometimes stooping, sometimes reaching up their arms, as their work required, with easy and not ungraceful movements. On the whole, it was far from being a disagreeable place to stay in. The girls were bright-looking and neat, and everything was kept clean and shining. The effect of the whole was rather ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... At times, indeed very often, he so unnaturally distorts his features, as to give to his countenance a very unpleasant expression. On such occasions, you would imagine that he was suddenly seized with some violent paroxysms of pain. He is one of the most ungraceful speakers I have ever heard address a public assemblage of persons. In addition to the awkwardness of his general manner, he 'makes mouths,' which would of themselves be sufficient to mar the agreeableness of his delivery. And his manner of speaking, and the ungracefulness of his gesticulation, ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... mariner; now we see her performing the rugged work of a farm, and again a fighter, stoutly defending her home. The fact that habit and necessity accustom her, in frontier life, to those employments which in older and more conventional communities are deemed unfitting and ungraceful for woman to engage in, makes it none the less striking and admirable, because in doing so she serves a great and useful purpose; she is thereby doing her part in forming new communities in the places that are uninhabited ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... and extremely slender; not exactly ungraceful, but he gave the impression that his arms and legs were perpetually in his way. In fact, he was a nervous man, always self-conscious, and therefore never natural nor at ease. His hair was dark auburn; and in his lower lip there was a tremulous ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... by an easy and not ungraceful transition to the Foundling Asylum of Moscow, one of the largest and most remarkable institutions of the kind in the world. In other public places throughout Europe, especially in picture-galleries and museums, the visitor is required to deliver up his walking-stick ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... his young eyes, settled this question. "The lady is asleep. See, she has dropped her book." And; in fact, the whole attitude was lax and not ungraceful. Her right hand hung down, and the domestic story, its duty done, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... train of thought. Where the thought flows on calmly, let there be grace and ease in gesture and action. Where the style is sharp and abrupt, there is propriety in quick, short, and abrupt gesticulation. Especially avoid that ungraceful sawing of the air with the arms, into which all ill-regulated fervor ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... give the requisite hardness to the alloy, and we find still fewer examples of iron and lead. They were fairly adroit workers in silver, electrum, and especially in gold. The amulets, cups, necklaces, and jewellery discovered in their tombs or in the ruins of their houses, are sometimes of a not ungraceful form. Their pottery was made by hand, and was not painted or varnished, but they often gave to it a fine lustre by means of a stone-polisher. Other peoples of uncertain origin, but who had attained a civilization as advanced as that of the Trojans, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... eyes thanked her mutely. He was as plain-looking a man as he had been a boy, more hatchet-faced than ever. He was long and lean and angular, and his positions were ungraceful. But his eyes were the eyes of Don Quixote. The eyes had appealed to Nelly as long ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... sense of words, the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to Webster in the other of the two most famous American ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... company is concerned, since it is never served at a luncheon or a dinner; but, if you insist on eating it at home or in a restaurant, to attack it with as little ferocity as possible, is perhaps the only direction to be given, since at best it is an ungraceful performance and to eat it greedily ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... little social party used to assemble under the ruinous arbor. Hepzibah—stately as ever at heart, and yielding not an inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as justifying a princess-like condescension—exhibited a not ungraceful hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage counsel—lady as she was—with the wood-sawyer, the messenger of everybody's petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner, who had studied the world at ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fool as he seemed. Newman's familiarity was never importunate; his sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance and consequently was innocent of ungraceful eagerness. His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M. de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colorless form, unpleasantly ...
— The American • Henry James
... once or twice, and then leaving it to chance; for, to secure a perfect fit, the garment will require to be tried on until there are no further alterations to be made in it. Whatever shape may be chosen, the coat should not be made too long, or it will flap and flop about in a most ungraceful manner. Fig. 58 shows a loose-fitting coat which is not smart, because it is too long, and as it rests on the horse's back, it will wrinkle up when its wearer sits down in trotting and will look ugly. If this coat was a good four inches shorter at the ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... ran stiffly, toeing slightly inward. Long hours in the saddle made them apparently awkward and really ungraceful when on ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... possessing the same unlimited privilege of forming compounds, both with prepositions and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express the richest single Greek word in a single German one, and is thus freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will content myself with one at present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles ver, zer, ent, and weg: thus reissen to rend, verreissen to rend away, zerreissen to rend to pieces, entreissen to rend off or ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... who had somewhat the look of an old fox, limped forward with a less ungraceful bow than the son, who had more of the wolf. Some greeting was mumbled, and the old man would have taken her hand to lead her to the highest place at table, but she ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said Mosey, taking a dead pine sapling from the stock of firewood under his wagon, and, of course, emphasising his address by an easy and not ungraceful clatter of the adjective used so largely by poets in denunciation of war—"we ain't goin' to travel these carrion a mile to the gate, an' most likely fine it locked when we git there. Hold on till I git my internal machine to work on the fence. Dad! Where's that ole morepoke? ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... ticket, hey? Well, I've always said I couldn't get away from much with that thing always there to identify me—but I never calculated it'd expose me to any proposals!" He laughed again—doubling up in what Pat thought a disgustingly ungraceful way. She held her head high and pushed Gyp toward the door. "We will say good-by," ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... different stamp—a middle-aged man, bald, meagre, unimpressive, but wholly respectable in bearing and apparel, and a girl, evidently his daughter, who had the look of the latter twenties, her plain dress harmonising with a subdued charm of feature and a timidity of manner not ungraceful. Whilst waiting for their meal they conversed in an undertone; their brief remarks and ejaculations told of a long morning's ramble from the seaside resort some miles away; in their quiet fashion they seemed to have enjoyed themselves, and dinner at an inn evidently struck them ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the like as shall satisfy the superhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the higher drama appeals. All these come within the scope of imaginative truth. To illustrate my third head by an example. Tieck criticises John Kemble's dressing for Macbeth in a modern Highland costume, as being ungraceful without any countervailing merit of historical exactness. I think a deeper reason for his dissatisfaction might be found in the fact, that this garb, with its purely modern and British army associations, is out of place on Fores Heath, and drags the Weird Sisters down with it from ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... chatted among themselves, and were apparently as much interested in looking at us as we were in their style, features, and attire. They all wore light-coloured "dual garments" of great width, and tight bodices. Their coiffure was carefully finished, but a part of the forehead was hidden by an ungraceful ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... had on this very day, for some unknown reason, words between them more or less unfriendly, and Tai-yue was again sitting all alone in her room, giving way to tears. Pao-yue was once more within himself quite conscience-smitten for his ungraceful remarks, and coming forward, he humbly made advances, until, at length, Tai-yue ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the word 'preposterous'. It is now no longer of any practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old use; let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity which it designated once, namely the reversing of the true order of things, the putting of the last first, and, by ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... attitude, introduced into the famous cartoon of the same subject. Before St. Paul, below, a woman is sitting—looking at him, and having her back turned to the spectator. The head-dress of this figure, which is white, is not ungraceful. I made a rude copy of it; but if I had even coloured like * * * I could not have done justice to the neck and back; which exhibited a tone of colour that seemed to unite all the warmth of Titian with all the freshness of Rubens. In the foreground ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... reading, that he was always disgusted if he heard his own writings repeated with an ill grace and accent. Accordingly, it is said, that, when he accidentally heard a potter singing a stanza of his Orlando in an incorrect and ungraceful manner, he was so incensed, that he rushed into his shop and broke several of the pots which were exposed to sale; when the potter expostulated with him for this unprovoked injury, Ariosto replied, "I indeed have broken ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... 'wanhope' for despair, hope which has so waned that now there is an entire want of it, was in use down to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of Gascoigne{129}. 'Skinker' for cupbearer, (an ungraceful word, no doubt) is used by Shakespeare and lasted ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... and clumsy as themselves. For the Bretons know and mistrust their own climate, and are too well aware that the day of a brilliant morning too often ends in weeping skies. Many wore costumes which, though quaint, were not by any means beautiful. They were heavy and ungraceful, like the people themselves: broad-brimmed hats and loose trunk hose that hung about them like sacks, something after the fashion of Turkish pantaloons; and the men wore their hair in huge manes, hanging down their backs, ugly and untidy; ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... ring-bands, six black and six greyish-white, in regular alternation. The tip is black, and the tail itself is very full or "bushy." When the 'coon-skin is made into a cap—which it often is among hunters and frontiers-men—the tail is left to hang as a drooping plume; and such a head-dress is far from ungraceful. In some "settlements" the 'coon-skin cap is quite the fashion among the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... Uncouth, Ungraceful, Unfashionable, Unladylike, Uninteresting, Unpresentable, and Ugly. She was Unpoetical, Unmusical, Unlearned, Uncultured, Unimproved, Uninformed, Unknowing, Unthinking, Unwitty and Unwise. She was Unlively, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... naked except for a breadth of fawn-skin falling from waist to instep. Their bodies were painted vermilion from brow to ankle; they carried in their hands red harvest apples, which they tossed one to another as they move lightly across the open space in a slow, springy, yet not ungraceful dance. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... grounds of the White House, and as it passed up the avenue, President Lincoln appeared in front of his mansion. The boys greeted him with a volley of stunning cheers, which the President acknowledged by a series of bows, which were not half so ungraceful as one might have expected after reading the descriptions of him ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... front of it; the ships, necessarily for the effect, but fatally for themselves, are confused, and incompletely drawn, except the little sloop, which looks paltry and like a toy; and the foreground objects are, for work of Turner, curiously ungraceful ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... not ungraceful figure, merged in that of the dog trotting closely at his heels, was the only moving object in the dreary vista of this the most desolate block in Washington. As I neared the building, I was so impressed by the surrounding stillness that I was ready to ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... more noisome and horrible still from above—and then the golden towers of the city were below. Strange and tapering and beautiful, they were. No single line was perfectly straight, nor was any form ungraceful. These towers sprang upward in clean-soaring curves toward the sky. Bridges between them were gossamerlike things that seemed lace spun out in metal. And as Tommy looked keenly and saw the jungle crowding close against the city's metal walls, the flapping of the ornithopter's ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... in the sight of blood, and smell of fire, and shortness of food and raiment, that she feared she had betrayed a stranger's wonder and admiration every time the train stopped, and the idlers of the station platform lingered about her window and silently paid their ungraceful but complimentary tribute ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... several smaller poems interspersed throughout the volume. Mr Tennyson has his "Claribels," and "Isabels," and "Adelines," and "Eleanores"—ladies with whom he frequently plays strange, though, we admit, by no means ungraceful vagaries; and Mr Patmore, as in duty bound, and following the imitative bent of his genius, must also have his Geraldine to dally with. The two following stanzas of playful namby-pambyism, are a specimen of the manner in which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... efforts gave a life and colour to his style which riveted the attention of all within the reach of his voice. Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his History of Our Own Times, says of him: "In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator, Cardinal Newman was deficient. His manner was constrained and ungraceful, and even awkward; his voice was thin and weak, his bearing was not at first impressive in any way—a gaunt emaciated figure, a sharp eagle face, and a cold meditative eye, rather repelled than attracted ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... just say, 'I love you, Mark Ratcliff,' and set me some atoning penance for my idiocy. You do not know what a curse that vile paper has been to me," and he shot the offending missive into the foolish little river and broke into vigorous and ungraceful language ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... shortened scythe:- But when these ears were green, Placed close within destruction's scope, Full little was that rustic's hope Their ripening to have seen! And, lo, a hamlet and its fane:- Let not the gazer with disdain Their architecture view; For yonder rude ungraceful shrine, And disproportioned ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... Eland is the largest (as it also is the largest of antelopes), being sometimes of the size and weight of a full-grown horse! It is an animal of rather an ungainly appearance; but its beautiful buff colour and mild disposition make up for its ungraceful shape; and it is scarcely ever out of good condition. Its home is Southern Africa, where it is still found in large herds; and its flesh affords a plentiful subsistence both to travellers and the half-savage ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... a brown spot in one, which, though a defect, takes nothing away from her beauty or expression. Her eyebrows and hair, which, by the bye, is never clean, are dark and her complexion coarse. Her expression is strongly marked, variable, and interesting; her movements in common life ungraceful, her voice loud, yet not disagreeable." This female critic seems to have been overburdened with the weight of Emma's defects, mental and physical! Elliot says: "Her person is nothing short of monstrous for ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... of caste the compatriots of the rulers should become—as Lord Lytton said—a kind of "white Brahmanas"; and it was certain that, as a matter of fact, the pride of race and the possession of western civilisation created a sense of superiority, the display of which was ungraceful and even dangerous, when not tempered by official responsibility. This feeling had been sensitive enough in the days of Lord William Bentinck, when the class referred to was small in numbers and ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... thought he deferred entirely too much to the expression of opinion on the part of the faculty, when we would have preferred that he should simply indicate his own views or desire. One characteristic of General Lee I noted then and have often recalled: I never saw him take an ungraceful posture. No matter how long or fatiguing a faculty meeting might be, he always preserved an attitude in which dignity, decorum, and grace were united. He was a very well built man, with rounded body and limbs, and ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... embroidered mantle—which had been wrought by the most skilful artist in London, and possessed even magical properties of adornment. On the present occasion, however, she owed nothing to the witchery of dress, being clad in a riding-habit of velvet which would have appeared stiff and ungraceful on any ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... they do or say the appearance of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive part is confessedly to be best learnt from masters, and we shall hardly wonder that much of his work has a certain awkwardness and stiffness in it, or that he should be regarded ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... object for their exertions; the younger children play pranks. The activity of children thus left to themselves has rarely a good result; it does not aid development, save as regards the physical advantage of general nutrition, that is, of the vegetative life. Their movements become ungraceful; they invent unseemly capers, walk with a staggering gait, fall easily, and break things. They are evidently quite unlike the free kitten, so full of grace, so fascinating in its movements, tending to perfect its action by ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... perhaps, that Holbein's Solomon's bride is so ungraceful chiefly because she is overdressed, and has too many feathers and jewels. No; a Florentine would have put any quantity of feathers and jewels on her, and yet never lost her grace. You shall see him do it, and that to a fantastic degree, ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... from Toplitz, as if by accident, he met the Princess Mary out on a hunting party. The princess was on horseback; but she rode awkwardly, and her demeanor was shy and ungraceful. She well knew the object of this casual meeting, and when the King of Rome approached to greet her, she turned pale and trembled as she felt the gaze of his large blue eyes. Her paleness did not increase her beauty, nor did her shyness contribute to make her interesting. Joseph was annoyed at ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... that De Quincey himself, after 1830, lived too little in touch with actual life to be aware that the style was becoming as unfashionable as it had always, save on very exceptional subjects, been ungraceful. Even on Wilson, who was to the manner born of riotous spirits, it often sits awkwardly; in De Quincey's case it is, to borrow Sir Walter's admirable simile in another case, like "the forced impudence of a bashful man." Grim humour he can manage admirably, and he ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... with rapid, nervous movements; energetic, never wholly ungraceful, but inclined to be restless. Her face did not betray the intelligence she possessed, as her eyes, though clear and well-shaped, were too close together. Her hawky nose was bent over a short upper lip and meaningless ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... consummate realisation and enjoyment. Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote A Summer Night. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection of a melancholy agnosticism plus asceticism into a creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings not only faithfully, but almost ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... of its own; and if you force yourself to express the naturalness (le naif) of this, in another language, observing the law of translation, which is, not to expatiate beyond the limits of the author himself; your words will be constrained, cold and ungraceful." Then he fixes the test of all good translation:—"To prove this, read me Demosthenes and Homer in Latin, Cicero and Virgil in French, and see whether they produce in you the same affections which you experience in reading ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... sculptures) exhibit a close observance of nature such as we could only expect to find among a people considerably advanced in the minor arts, and to which the elaborate and laborious, but usually clumsy and ungraceful, not to say unmeaning, productions of the savage can claim ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... be called a handsome man; he is shorter than his elder brother, but, with the exception of Prince Eugene, all the rest of them are good for nothing. The youngest, Prince Philippe, was a great madman, and died of the small-pox at Paris. He was of a very fair complexion, had an ungraceful manner, and always looked distracted. He had a nose like a hawk, a large mouth, thick lips, and hollow cheeks; in all respects I thought he was like his elder brother. The third brother, who was called the Chevalier ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... a breach of etiquette to assume any ungraceful or uncouth position, such as standing with the arms akimbo, sitting astride a chair, smoking in the presence of ladies, wearing your hat, leaning back in the chair, standing with legs crossed or feet on the chairs, leaning forward ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... always paid the most scrupulous attention to their toilette. If we were to describe her as fat, fair, and forty, we should certainly wrong her. Fair and forty she undoubtedly was, but fat she certainly was not. There was a slight tendency to embonpoint, but this was relieved by her tall and not ungraceful figure. She was what might be termed a decidedly handsome woman. The corpulent lawyer had subsided into the sleek, well-conditioned country gentleman. But there was at times a certain restlessness of the eye, and a nervous twitching at the corners ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... view" more perfect. Harry had really imagined Miss Dawson not only very beautiful, but thought she would grace any drawing-room in Europe. He now saw her hoydenish, flirty, and ungraceful, with beauty of a very unrefined style—in fact, a different person. Such is the power of contrast, and the effect of a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... pure water over them thrice from a ladle-shaped vessel of bamboo with a long handle, and then gives me a little blue towel to wipe them upon, a Votive towel with mysterious white characters upon it. Then we all ascend; I feeling very much like a clumsy barbarian in my ungraceful foreign garb. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... prevent from being attained in real life.[13] It is thus pleasantly flattered into contentment with itself—a contentment not disturbed by the occasional censure of practices which good taste condemns as ungraceful, or prudence as prejudicial to happiness. But the man of keener insight, who, instead of wrestling with the riddle of life, seeks for a time to forget it, and to place in its stead the rounded representation of activity which the novelist supplies, cannot but find the vanity ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... right names; no euphuism or transcendentalism,—the plainer and commoner the better. He tells us of his farm life, its joys and sorrows, its mirth and care, with no embellishment, with no concealment of repulsive and ungraceful features. Never having seen a nightingale, he makes no attempt to describe the fowl; but he has seen the night-hawk, at sunset, cutting the air above him, and he tells of it. Side by side with his waving corn-fields and orchard-blooms we have the barn-yard and pigsty. Nothing which was necessary ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... overwhelmed with confusion at the position in which I find myself," he remarked, after he had examined his mind for a short time. "I may meet with an ungraceful and objectionable death if I carry out your estimable instructions, but I shall certainly merit and receive a similar fate if I permit so renowned and versatile a person to leave without a fitting reception. In such matters a person can only trust to the intervention of good spirits; if, therefore, ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... rose to her feet would be a misleading description of her method. She held on to the edge of a bookshelf by the tips of her fingers and drew herself up from the floor, slowly, as it were by some mysterious unfolding process, not ungraceful. She turned on him the wide half-mischievous, half-frightened eyes of a child caught this ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... unhappily) as Marcia's pique and ill-humor had fitted into it, I could not believe that Jerry's revolt had ended matters. Even if the boy had been willing to end them (a thing of which I was not at all sure), Marcia Van Wyck was not the kind of girl to retire on this ungraceful climax, and Jerry's absence from her house on so important an occasion was nothing less than a notice to those present that he and Marcia were no longer on terms. I had had a sense of the girl's taste for conquest, and the more I thought of ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... between them, sat two young people evidently different in rank, and meeting upon no level of friendship. The young woman held in her hand a paper, which seemed the subject of their conversation. She was about four- or five-and-twenty, well grown and not ungraceful, with dark hair, dark hazel eyes, and rather large, handsome features, full of intelligence, but a little hard, and not a little regnant—as such features must be, except after prolonged influence ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... who saw Philip Rainham for the first time by nothing so much as by his ugliness. And yet few persons who knew him would have hesitated to allow to his nervous, suffering visage a certain indefinable charm. The large head set on a figure markedly ungraceful, on which the clothes seldom fitted, was shapely and refined, although the features were indefensible, even grotesque. And his mouth, with its constrained thin lips and the acrid lines about it, was unmistakably a strong one. His deep-set eyes, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... other beauty looked on another occasion—and she felt as she read like a spell-bound princess in a fairy tale, mewed up in a battlemented tower, and deprived of her legitimate share in all the pleasures of earth. She had no patience with Mary—that wild, unkempt, ungraceful creature, who could be as happy as summer days are long, racing about the hills with her bamboo alpenstock, rioting with a pack of fox-terriers, practising long losers, rowing on the lake, doing all things unbecoming ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... middle-sized bear, and little bear of nursery lore, were clumsy and heavy and bad, even in hardwood; but when they were simply stained imitations of the real thing, and ornate with wooden knobs, machine carving, and ungraceful lines, they were truly unspeakable. The bed with its fat bolster, on top of which, like Ossa on Pelion piled, stood the pillows, perhaps covered with shams which bade one "Good night" and "Good morning" in red cotton embroidery—was especially hideous as contrasted ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... Karnak, contains one most curious variety (fig. 64); the flower is inverted like a bell, and the shaft is turned upside down, the smaller end being sunk in the plinth, while the larger is fitted to the wide part of the overturned bell. This ungraceful innovation achieved no success, and is found nowhere else. Other novelties were happier, especially those which enabled the artist to introduce decorative elements taken from the flora of the country. In the earlier examples at Soleb, Sesebeh, Bubastis, and Memphis, we find a crown ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... either. His position is strained and ungraceful, looking upwards, and apparently remonstrating with the Almighty upon the destruction of the gourd, a few leaves of which are seen above him. His hands are placed together with a strange and trivial action, supposed ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... Francis became the forerunner of the artistic movement which preceded the Renaissance, the inspirer of that group of Pre-Raphaelites, awkward, grotesque in drawing though at times they were, to whom we turn to-day with a sort of piety, finding in their ungraceful saints an inner life, a moral feeling which we ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... being pleasant, is intensely uncomfortable—the suspension of respiration, indeed, quickly resolves itself into a feeling of suffocation—and the posture necessitated by the approximation of lips and lips is unfailingly a constrained and ungraceful one. Theoretically, a man kisses a woman perpendicularly, with their eyes, those "windows of the soul," synchronizing exactly. But actually, on account of the incompressibility of the nasal cartilages, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... sight of the Ghaza, after he has sojourned for a time away from his wilds. Mr. Palgrave (i. 38) describes the "Ghada" as an Euphorbia with a woody stem often 5-6 feet high and slender, flexible green twigs (?), "forming a feathery tuft, not ungraceful to the eye, while it affords some shelter to the traveller, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... coloring, a creation of the tropic sun. What thinks she, I wonder, if she thinks at all, of the pale European, paler for want of exercise and engrossing occupation, who steps out of her carriage in front of her, an ungraceful heap of poufs and frills, tottering painfully on high heels, in tight boots, her figure distorted into the shape of a Japanese sake bottle, every movement a struggle or a jerk, the clothing utterly unsuited to this or ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... "Remember that you are not to go to sleep! Now prepare to trot, and don't go too fast at first. Remember always to change from one gait to another gently, for your own sake, that you may not be thrown out of position; for your horse's, that he may not be startled, and made unruly and ungraceful. He has nerves as well as you. Now, prepare to trot! Trot! Shorten your reins, Miss Beauty! Shorten them!" and during the next minute or two, while the class trots about a third of a mile, the poor beauty hears every command in the manual addressed ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... tall as the King, but whereas he was heavily and awkwardly built, her faultless proportion made an ungraceful movement an impossibility, and the rhythmic ease of her slightest gesture expressed an unfaltering bodily energy which no sudden fatigue nor stress of long weariness could bring down. When she moved, Gilbert wished ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... were loudly beaten and a salute of muskets fired off. A large jar of rice wine, very sour but with an agreeable flavour, was then handed around, and I asked to see some of their dances. These were, like most savage performances, very dull and ungraceful affairs; the men dressing themselves absurdly like women, and the girls making themselves as stiff and ridiculous as possible. All the time six or eight large Chinese gongs were being beaten by the vigorous arms of as many young men, producing such a ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... even to a degree of eccentricity calculated to provoke a smile from the hearers. His voice was rather loud and hard, his features were inflexible, his utterance was exceedingly deliberate, and his language precise and elaborate. His motions were very slight, and, such as he had, ungraceful: for he would stand with his right arm a little raised, and the hand hanging down passively by his side for a long time together, except when a slight vertical motion appeared—he, the while, unconscious of the indication—to show that he was uttering ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... waiting for him on the path under the yew-trees, with two of his troopers on guard in the background. He had removed his coat and vest, and stood, a not ungraceful figure, in the sunshine, bending his rapier and feeling its point with his thumb. He was doing this when his eyes surprised his opponent's entrance, and, without desisting from his employment, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... bust heaved with her regular breathing, her eyes moved a little—by these evidences of life alone could I have distinguished her from some large handsome figure moulded in wax. Hortense was of middle size and stout, her form was ungraceful, her face striking, more alive and brilliant than Eulalie's, her hair was dark brown, her complexion richly coloured; there were frolic and mischief in her eye: consistency and good sense she might possess, but none of ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... fact, Hannah quite unintentionally gave the glove a scornful toss, which caused it to fall into the fireplace, and down between two oak logs, where it shrivelled instantaneously. Unfortunately science is not chivalric, and divulges the unamiable and ungraceful truth, that perverted female natures from even the lower beastly types are more implacably vindictive, more subtly malicious, more ingeniously cruel than the stronger sex; and when a woman essays to track, to capture, or ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... suppose them to be, since they are masked more closely than society ladies at the Opera ball, wear over their garments a habbarah, a sort of black taffeta sack, which fills with air and swells in the most ungraceful fashion if ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... Christopher was established as queer, and his townsfolk were disposed to let him rest at that. His pale face was remarkable for nothing except a pair of dreamy eyes which could at times give sign of inward lightnings. His hair was lank; his figure was attenuated and ungraceful; he wore his clothes awkwardly. He was commonly supposed to be sulky, and some people thought his tone of voice bumptious and insolent. He was far from being a favourite, but those who knew him best liked him ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... never place your left hand on your hip or behind you. In the first place, you thus drag your partner too much forward, which makes her look ungraceful; in the next, this attitude is never used except in casinos, and it is almost an insult to introduce ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... about her in large ungraceful folds. Every time she moved, her long chaplet of beads of coloured box-wood, loaded with crosses and copper medals, shook and trailed along the floor with a noise ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... renewing her friendship with the Pammenters' eldest girl, an apple-checked, red-haired, ungraceful, but good-natured lass of sixteen. Their voices sounded from all parts of the garden and the farm-yard, Jane's clear-throated laugh contrasting with the rougher utterance of her companion. After supper, in the falling of the dusk, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... was to our ancestors a subject of pride with which their posterity will hardly sympathise. Monmouth Square had been the name while the fortunes of the Duke of Monmouth flourished; and on the southern side towered his mansion. The front, though ungraceful, was lofty and richly adorned. The walls of the principal apartments were finely sculptured with fruit, foliage, and armorial bearings, and were hung with embroidered satin. [114] Every trace of this magnificence has long disappeared; and no aristocratical mansion is to be found in that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to obeying that, although her face turned red, she went through the evolution in a rather shy but not ungraceful manner. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... straight pleat that falls to just below the waist-line lends neither grace nor style to the figure. It is too short to give the distinction and dignity that handsome wraps with long lines almost invariably do, although they seem to add age to the form. There is a hint of youth in this ungraceful jacket to be sure, but it is not especially attractive in ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... found that poem 'easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.' Of the songs in Comus he remarks: 'they are harsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.' He could see nothing in the splendour and elevation of Gray, but 'glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments.' The passionate intensity of Donne escaped him altogether; he could only wonder how so ingenious a writer could be so absurd. Such preposterous judgments can only be accounted for by inherent ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... forceful woman. She had power. It was in her lean, high-shouldered, ungraceful figure. It was in her thin, mobile lips and her high-bridged nose with its thin, clean-cut nostrils. She impressed herself upon her environment. Standing there at the mantel, her hands clasped behind her, she was so caught up by the possibilities of the future that she succeeded ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... says vivacious Pennant, "I met again with Sir John Cutler, Grocer, in marble and on canvas. In the first he is represented standing, in a flowing wig, waved rather than curled, a laced cravat, and a furred gown, with the folds not ungraceful; in all, except where the dress is inimical to the sculptor's art, it may be called a good performance. By his portrait we may learn that this worthy wore a black wig, and was a good-looking man. He was created a baronet, November 12th, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... promise of exceeding strength when he should arrive at maturity, but strength uncoupled to any thing of weight or clumsiness. He was unusually free, even at this early period, from that heavy and ungraceful redundance of flesh which not unfrequently is the forerunner of athletic power in boys just bursting into manhood; for he was already as conspicuous for the thinness of his flanks, and the shapely hollow of his back, as for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... long, and their movements slow, yet nervous as from some internal fiery force. His hands were big and ugly, and always in ungraceful fumbling motion as though a separate soul dwelt ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... Miss Deb," interrupted Jan, tilting himself backwards over the arm of the chair in a very ungraceful fashion, and leaving his legs dangling. "Others will, if he wo—if he can't. Lionel has just been saying that as Sibylla's sisters, he shall see that ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... were out from sheer necessity, sped along with smileless faces, and frozen ulster-tails, sulking as they jerked from one icy elevation to another in the flooded slippery walk, and raising their upper lips in ungraceful curves, as their straightened curls stood out in painful stiffness, or fell in wet, clinging bits over ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... you that the very causes which preserve your temper in an external state of equability, your refinement of mind, your self-respect, your delicate reserve, your abhorrence of every thing unfeminine and ungraceful, may produce exactly the contrary effect on your feelings, and provoke internally a great deal of contempt and dislike for those whose conduct transgresses from your exalted ideas ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... girl slightly above medium height, tanned, robust, simply gowned in a gingham dress. Her hands were soiled from her recent labours in the pansy-bed, and her shoes were heavy and coarse; yet neither hands nor feet were large or ungraceful. Her head was well formed; her hair, jet black and of unusual lustre and abundance, was parted in the middle and held in an old-fashioned coil at the nape of a neck the beauty of which was revealed by the low cut of her simple ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... September in this year (1798), Bonaparte ordered to be brought to the house of Elfy Bey half a dozen Asiatic women whose beauty he had heard highly extolled. But their ungraceful obesity displeased him, and they were immediately dismissed. A few days after he fell violently in love with Madame Foures, the wife of a lieutenant of infantry. She was very pretty, and her charms were enhanced by the rarity of seeing a woman in Egypt who was calculated to please ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... at least a man and woman and three or four children. Day after blazing day I sat on rickety chairs, wash-tubs, ironing-boards, veranda railings, climbing creaking stairways, now and again descending a treacherous one in unintentional haste and ungraceful posture, burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes, hunting out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry-goods boxes hidden away behind the legitimate buildings, shouting questions into dilapidated ear-drums, delving into the past of every human being ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... natives of Port Jackson, having fallen to the low pitch of their voices, recommenced their song at the octave, which was accompanied by slow and not ungraceful motions of the body and limbs, their hands being held up in a supplicating posture, and the tone and manner of their song and gestures seemed to bespeak the good will and forbearance of their auditors. Observing that they were attentively listened to, they each selected one of our people, and placed ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... with all of us through all the ungraceful, inartistic realisms of our lives; the high poetry is ever there, the kingdom of romance is at hand; the only trouble is to find the rhymes—O! if we could only find ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... the youth was well formed, tall, not ungraceful—with features of singular intelligence, though subdued to the verge of sadness. His face was pale and thin, his eyes were a little sunken, and his air, expression, and general outside, denoted a youth of keen sensibilities, who ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... your meaning, and therefore sounds harshly. I am accustomed to speak plainly myself, and to strip of their flowery entourage the sentiments to which I listen. It may be an ungraceful habit, but it is a safe one. I am persuaded that if vice were always called by its true name, shame, misery, and ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... his legs having been broken by the fall of a charger, and inartificially set by an inexperienced surgeon. This, also, was a blemish in his deportment; and though his broad shoulders, sinewy arms, and expanded chest, betokened the strength which he often displayed, it was strength of a clumsy and ungraceful character. His language and gestures were those of one seldom used to converse with equals, more seldom still with superiors; short, abrupt, and decisive, almost to the verge of sternness. In the judgment of those who were ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... the column was turned to the east and took the road over Massanutten gap to Luray. Scarce a word was spoken on the march, as Jackson rode with me. From time to time a courier would gallop up, report, and return toward Luray. An ungraceful horseman, mounted on a sorry chestnut with a shambling gait, his huge feet with outturned toes thrust into his stirrups, and such parts of his countenance as the low visor of his shocking cap failed to conceal ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... small, hard lips, indifferent teeth (seldom exhibited), a prominent chin, a long neck; his body was of firm, not ungraceful build. Society's evening uniform does not allow a man much scope in the matter of adornments; it was plain, however, that Godwin no longer scorned the tailor and haberdasher. He wore a suit which confidently challenged the criticism of experts, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... researches in conchology were not particularly successful, for while he manfully moved about in the uncomfortable and ungraceful position peculiar to shell-seekers, he looked rather at the healthy, honest, eager little face near him than at ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... again at Perth, and on their way home some early morning frost suggested the not ungraceful verses on the icicles at Glenfarg. By a childish misconception, the little boy seems to have confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott's ideal Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... enough not to try to dismount, woman enough not to make an awkward struggle or do anything ungraceful. In her face I read an immense astonishment; fascination seemed to rivet her eyes on me, following my every movement as I shortened one stirrup for her, tightened the girths, and laid the bridle in ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... altered eye. "An ungraceful elision" of the possessive inflection, as Mason calls it. Cf. Dryden, Hind and Panther, iii.: "Affected Kindness with an ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... here no such attempt is made to ornament the cottages. We saw no smiling orchard or grove to conceal the bare log walls; and as to the little farm-houses, they are uglier still, and look so pert and ungraceful stuck upon the bank close ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... he pensive stood, infoliate Of comfortable mud, and idly stirred His tiny caudal, disproportionate But not ungraceful, while a wanton herd Of revellers the mystic lens preferred; Whereof the focus rightly they addrest; And, Phoebus being ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... you and myself that I was informed of it (as I hope) in time to prevent it; and shall ever think myself, as hereafter you will, I am sure, think yourself, infinitely obliged to Sir Charles Williams, for informing me of it. Good God! if this ungraceful and disagreeable manner of speaking had, either by your negligence or mine, become habitual to you, as in a couple of years more it would have been, what a figure would you have made in company, or in a public assembly! Who would have liked you in the one, or have attended to you ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... proscribed every title, ceremony, and phrase associated with the old system, and that, turning away with disgust from their own national precedents and traditions, they should have sought for principles of government in the writings of theorists, or aped, with ignorant and ungraceful affectation, the patriots of Athens and Rome. As little can we wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spirit should have been followed by reaction equally violent, and that confusion should speedily have engendered despotism sterner ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... &c. adj.; "unlettered Muse" [Gray]; barbarism; slang &c. 563; solecism &c. 568; mannerism &c. (affectation) 855; euphuism[obs3]; fustian &c. 577; cacophony; words that break the teeth, words that dislocate the jaw; marinism[obs3]. V. be inelegant &c. adj. Adj. inelegant, graceless, ungraceful; harsh, abrupt; dry, stiff, cramped, formal, guinde[Fr]; forced, labored; artificial, mannered, ponderous; awkward, uncourtly[obs3], unpolished; turgid &c. 577; affected, euphuistic[obs3]; barbarous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... herself, composedly awaited the commands of her master. Her former captive asked himself, wondering, if this could be the airy, laughing, winsome maiden with whom in days past he had ridden into the green forest. The billows of hair had ebbed away; the short, ungraceful, and somewhat thin remnant was meant for use in covering the head, not for luxurious beauty. All falling laces, all fluttering ribbons, all sparkling jewels were discarded from the severe simplicity of the scholastic gown; and with them had disappeared the glancing ripple that before had sunnily ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... common as going to bed; it is almost prosy. LIFE is heroism, if you like; but death is a mere cessation of business. And to make a rapid and rude exit off the stage before the prompter gives the sign is always, to say the least of it, ungraceful. Act the part out, no matter how bad the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... effect that there were seven towers in the original design—the central one, two at the west end, and one at each angle of the transepts; and this seems to be supported by the solid character of some of the piers in the transepts. Yet, despite the rather ungraceful outline of the whole building, when its mere size is realised, it gradually asserts its importance and incontrovertibly proves its right to be considered one of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... the sight of Gilbert and Christine, walking just ahead of her and Roy, could quite subdue the sparkle of her starry hopes. Nevertheless, she was not so rapt from things of earth as to be unable to notice that Christine's walk was decidedly ungraceful. ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was an instant's silence, and then Mr. Morrow made another movement. I may have been mistaken, but it affected me as the translated impulse of the desire to lay hands on the manuscript, and this led me to indulge in a quick anticipatory grab which may very well have seemed ungraceful, or even impertinent, and which at any rate left Mr. Paraday's two admirers very erect, glaring at each other while one of them held a bundle of papers well behind him. An instant later Mr. Morrow quitted me abruptly, as if he had really carried something off with him. To ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... gray velveteen cover a chest broad rather than deep, and reveal the fine, narrow loins and muscular thighs of a frame matured and hardened by labor. His hands, also, are hard and strong, but not ungraceful in form. His neck, not too short, is firmly planted, and the carriage of his head indicates patience and energy. Thick, dark hair enframes his square forehead, and straight, somewhat heavy brows. His eyes of soft dark-gray, are large, clear, and steady, and only change ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... Being. There is a pretty sober Liveliness in the Ode of Horace to Delius, where he tells him, loud Mirth, or immoderate Sorrow, Inequality of Behaviour either in Prosperity or Adversity, are alike ungraceful in Man that is born to die. Moderation in both Circumstances is peculiar to generous Minds: Men of that Sort ever taste the Gratifications of Health, and all other Advantages of Life, as if they were ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... stature, and usually are rather corpulent. In their movements on foot they are heavy and ungraceful, and they are, on the whole, a slovenly and unattractive race of men. But the instant they mount their horses they seem to be entirely changed, and surprise the spectator with the ease and elegance of their movements. Their great and distinctive peculiarity as horsemen is the power ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... can fly!" sputtered Skimmer, "The way he can fly! Why, there never was a day in his life that he could fly like a Swallow. There isn't any one more graceful on the wing than I am, if I do say so. And there isn't any one more ungraceful than Sooty." ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... years, it seems to have been considered improper, or ungraceful, or unladylike,—the reasons are nowhere satisfactorily given, but the fact remains that until recently few women ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... directly received the amends which were her due; for while he slightly and carelessly touched the hand of Isabella, on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short bow. He was a stout young man, of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy. He took out ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... decency. They can be met in but one way: by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... converse, or get some one to read to him; for if the sitter is bored the portrait will look sad. Still, if the sitter has not got an amiable expression naturally the artist is not bound to give him one, nor 'if he is essentially ungraceful' should the artist ever 'put him in a graceful attitude.' As regards landscape painting, Mr. Collier tells us that 'a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the impossibility of reproducing nature,' but that there is nothing really to ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... might, perhaps, have numbered some five and thirty years; but at a hasty glance, he would have seemed considerably younger. He was above the ordinary stature; though a gentle, and not ungraceful bend in the neck rather than the shoulders, somewhat curtailed his proper advantages of height. His frame was thin and slender, but well knit and fair proportioned. Nature had originally cast his form in an athletic mould; but ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pleasantest to thirst And hunger both, from labour, at the hour Of sweet repast; they satiate, and soon fill, Though pleasant; but thy words, with grace divine Imbued, bring to their sweetness no satiety. To whom thus Raphael answered heavenly meek. Nor are thy lips ungraceful, Sire of men, Nor tongue ineloquent; for God on thee Abundantly his gifts hath also poured Inward and outward both, his image fair: Speaking, or mute, all comeliness and grace Attends thee; and each word, each motion, forms; Nor less think we in Heaven of thee on Earth Than of our fellow-servant, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... occasion, by a Monsieur Quillebeuf, a canon of the cathedral, and a preacher of considerable popularity. He had one of the most meagre and forbidding physiognomies I ever beheld, and his beard was black and unshaven. But he preached well; fluently, and even eloquently: making a very singular, but not ungraceful, use of his left arm—and displaying at times rather a happy familiarity of manner, wholly exempt from vulgarity, and well suited to the capacities and feelings of his youthful audience. His subject was "belief in Christ Jesus;" on which he gave very excellent proofs and evidences. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and Londons, old and new; in Germany, Italy, and Japan, fathers, monarchs, mayors, editors stormed against the new dance; societies passed resolutions; police interfered; ballet-girls declared the dances immoral and ungraceful. The army of the dance went right ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... off. There is no mistaking this. Nineteen or twenty years old, homely as a mud fence; ungraceful, doltish, she sits staring out of the window and her eyes blink at the rain. A peasant from southeastern Europe, a field hand who fell into the steerage of a transatlantic liner and fell out again. Now she has a day off and she ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... impute parsimony to Sheridan, or profusion to Marlborough. It must be allowed that the turn of mind which the eulogists of Temple have dignified with the appellation of philosophical indifference, and which, however becoming it may be in an old and experienced statesman, has a somewhat ungraceful appearance in youth, might easily appear shocking to a family who were ready to fight or to suffer martyrdom for their exiled King and their persecuted church. The poor girl was exceedingly hurt and irritated ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
