"Quaintly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crayons on the wall, its crockery and cheap clocks, and with the noise of the city's night rising all about them, the two big men talked together. Joe was immensely interested. The Italian was large-hearted, open-minded, big in body and soul, and spoke quaintly, but thoughtfully. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... been sulky as a bear at the idea of coming, but something in the quaintly pathetic refinement of the poor and splendid old house pleased him, and the aroma of untouched early-Victorian prudish grace which the ancient ladies threw around them appealed to his imagination, as any complete ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So the poet somewhat quaintly sings, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... forehead and petulant boyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father's countenance might have been could one have pictured its neat features disordered by a rattling breeze. She even pushed the analogy farther, and descried in her step-son's mind a quaintly-twisted reflection of her husband's. With his bursts of door-slamming activity, his fits of bookish indolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing and his flashes of precocious irony, the boy was not unlike a boisterous embodiment ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... quaintly and beautifully reminds us of the old couvre-feu bell of the days of William the Conqueror, a custom still kept up in many of the towns and hamlets of England, and some of our own towns and cities; ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... earth enamelling, And the birds on every tree Greet this morn with melody: Hark, how yonder thrustle chants it, And her mate as proudly vants it See how every stream is dress'd By her margin with the best Of Flora's gifts; she seems glad For such brooks such flow'rs she had. All the trees are quaintly tired With green buds, of all desired; And the hawthorn every day Spreads some little show of May: See the primrose sweetly set By the much-lov'd violet, All the banks do sweetly cover, As they would invite a lover With his lass to see their dressing And ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... some, having been a great traveller, had improved himself diligently in the art of war; and, as the old chronicles quaintly relate, "he visited most of the courts of Europe, even as far as Constantinople; wherein he made such advances in the school of Mars, that his superior skill in arms was generally applauded in every country he passed through." So distinguished ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... belong; for he thinks a black-letter volume reads best in one of those venerable chambers where the light struggles through dusty lancet windows and painted glass; and that it loses half its zest, if taken away from the neighbourhood of the quaintly-carved oaken book-case and Gothic reading-desk. At his suggestion, the Squire has had the library furnished in this antique taste, and several of the windows glazed with painted glass, that they may throw a properly tempered light upon the pages ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... polite," she said to herself. And so when the servants, who took their tone from their mistress, were insolent and ordered her about, she would hold her head erect, and reply to them sometimes in a way which made them stare at her, it was so quaintly civil. ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... stuck in one corner of the mouth or twisted in the hat-band, and would never be in the way. Thus ended this alarming insurrection, which was long known by the name of The Pipe Plot, and which, it has been somewhat quaintly observed, did end, like most plots and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... from the tax-gatherer. To be sure, he might meet robbers on the way to the province of M'touga, which was his destination, but they would do no more than the kaid of his own district; they might even do less. He had been many days upon the road, and was quaintly hopeful. I could not help thinking of prosperous men one meets at home, who declare, in the intervals of a costly dinner, that the Income Tax is an imposition that justifies the strongest protest, even to the ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... the Saints, a most virtuous homily!" said the Baron; "quaintly conceived and curiously pronounced, and to a well-chosen congregation. Hark ye, Sir Gospeller! trow ye to have a fool in hand? Know I not that your sect rose by bluff Harry Tudor, merely because ye aided him to change his Kate; and wherefore should I not use ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... necessary for his honourable going thither, except only with a palfrey handsome enough for him, and finding none to his liking, he abode in concern thereof. Now there was then in the same town a young man called Ricciardo, of little family, but very rich, who still went so quaintly clad and so brave of his person that he was commonly known as Il Zima,[169] and he had long in vain loved and courted Messer Francesco's wife, who was exceeding fair and very virtuous. Now he had one of the handsomest palfreys in all Tuscany and ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that alluring picture of the South Sea house, and is followed by the reminiscences of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb was a schoolboy for seven years. These show one side of Lamb's nature—the quaintly reminiscent. Another side is revealed in "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," with its delicate irony and its playful humor, while still another phase is seen in the exquisite phantasy of "Dream Children," with its tender pathos and ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... One man behind puts his turbaned head over Simeon's shoulders, peering inquisitively at the child, as if trying to see what the old man finds so remarkable in him. Beyond, two old beggars approach with a sort of good-natured interest. They are quaintly dressed, one of them wearing a very tall cap. Such humble folk as these alone seem to have ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... That was beguiled of Demophoon; Nor Jove's son, when the charms of Iole Were shrin'd within his heart. And yet there hides No sorrowful repentance here, but mirth, Not for the fault (that doth not come to mind), But for the virtue, whose o'erruling sway And providence have wrought thus quaintly. Here The skill is look'd into, that fashioneth With such effectual working, and the good Discern'd, accruing to this upper world From that below. But fully to content Thy wishes, all that in this sphere have birth, Demands my further parle. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... the Hog's Back north and south, nearly all the cottages are old and nearly all have gardens. One perfect little building stands not far from Seale on the road to Puttenham, bowered in vines and quaintly chimneyed, with white-curtained windows opening on a low wall and stone-crop and high box borders, and, when I saw it in July, bunches of pink and white mallows glowing under an old oak door. No ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... lived in great poverty, being neglected by a monarch and a court for whose amusement he had done so much. They laughed at the jester, and let him starve. Indeed, he seems to have had few friends; and this is accounted for quaintly by Aubrey, who says: "Satirical wits disoblige whom they converse with, and consequently make to themselves many enemies, and few friends; and this was his manner ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... in the Chiesa di S. Rocco at Venice is first, in his Life of the Castelfranco painter, ascribed by Vasari to Giorgione, and then in the subsequent Life of Titian given to that master, but to a period very much too late in his career. The biographer quaintly adds: "This figure, which many have believed to be from the hand of Giorgione, is to-day the most revered object in Venice, and has received more charitable offerings in money than Titian and Giorgione together ever gained ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... dinner?" was a question which distressed more than one household that year. Indeed, it was often a question what to have for dinner, supper, or breakfast on any day. For that was the strangely unpropitious, unproductive season of 1816, quaintly known in local annals as "1800 and Froze ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... splendour of the moon—the tall trees—the infinite and harmonious peace of the whole scene,— then, shutting the lattice, she pulled the curtains across it, and taking her lit candle, went to her secluded inner sleeping- chamber, where, in the small, quaintly carved four-poster bed, furnished with ancient tapestry and lavendered linen, and covered up under a quilt embroidered three centuries back by the useful fingers of the wife of Sieur Amadis de Jocelin, she soon fell into a ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... in old "China,"—that strange, wild warble, whose quaintly blended harmonies might have been learned of moaning seas or wailing winds, so strange and grand they rose, full of that intense pathos which rises over every defect of execution; and as they sung, Zephaniah Pennel straightened ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... elaborately carved, and black as polished ebony. Flowers grew all about it,—sweet peas, mignonette, and large purple pansies—while red and white climbing roses rioted in untrained profusion over its wide sill. Above it was a quaintly built dovecote, where some of the strutting fan-tailed inhabitants were perched, swelling out their snowy breasts, and discoursing of their domestic trials in notes of dulcet melancholy; while lower down, three or four ring-doves nestled on the roof ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... house, was comparatively modern, built of stone in solid Georgian fashion, but quaintly flanked at either end by a massive, mediaeval tower, survival of the good old days when the Lovells of Fallowdene had held their own against all comers, not even excepting, in the case of one Roderic, his liege lord and master the King, the latter having conceived a not entirely unprovoked ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... or ten living novelists who are popular by merit, few have greater ability than Mr. Baring-Gould. His characters are bold and forcible figures, his wit is as ready as his figures of speech are apt. He has a powerful imagination, and is quaintly fanciful. When he describes a storm, we can see his trees breaking in the gale. So enormous and accurate is his general information that there is no trade or profession with which he does not seem familiar. So far as scientific knowledge is concerned, he is obviously better equipped ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The old chair, quaintly carven, With oaken arms outspread, Whereby, in the long gone twilights, His childish prayers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... buncher there, as they're called," he was quaintly explaining—"quite the best one in the shop, I'm told, though she's only eighteen years old. She has a record of ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... which necessitated the use of our original doorway—I was able to set this matter right, and that these two once-lonely people are about to embark upon a relationship which in their folklore is oftentimes quaintly alluded to by the words, 'They lived happily ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... we peered into a long, lovely room, gleaming with iridescent hues and sparkling with touches of gold and crystal. The bed was draped with cloudy lace through which a shimmer of pale rose-colour made itself visible, and the carpet of dark moss-green formed a perfect setting for the quaintly shaped furniture, which was all of sandal-wood inlaid with ivory. On a small table of carved ivory in the centre of the room lay a bunch of Madonna lilies tied with a finely twisted cord of gold. We murmured our admiration, and Santoris ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... people who dwelt in the Marche au Vendredi and similar places, or I really should not have understood my handsome hostess, as she offered to present me to her husband, a henpecked, gentlemanly man, who was more quaintly attired than she in the very extreme of that style of dress. I thought to myself that in France, as in England, it is the provincials who carry fashion to such an excess as to ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... curate came often to the room in the Box Street tenement; but beyond the tenants of top floor rear he did not allow the intimacy to extend—not even to embrace the quaintly love-lorn Mr. Poddle. It was now summer; the window was open to the west wind, blowing in from the sea. Most the curate came at evening, when the breeze was cool and clean, and the lights began to twinkle in the gathering shadows: then to sit at the window, describing unrealities, ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... Near the beginning of the volume is a print of the Blessed Virgin with a sword piercing her body, and surrounded by seven medallions, showing "the seven griefs." The parable of "The mote and the beam" is quaintly depicted by two men standing near together, one with an enormous log of wood, equal in length to a third of his height, projecting unsupported from his own eye, attempting to pull a small bit of straw from the eye ...
— Little Gidding and its inmates in the Time of King Charles I. - with an account of the Harmonies • J. E. Acland
... most delicate rose color, tinged with gold; the carpet, a ground of white velvet pile bestrewed with delicate roses; the furniture of delicate pink satin, with setting of quaintly carved ebony. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... I have. I will shew them to you. It has been done before. One of the very oldest documents we possess mentions a tradition of a biologist who extracted certain unspecified minerals from the earth and, as it quaintly expresses it, 'breathed into their nostrils the breath of life.' This is the only tradition from the primitive ages which we can regard as really scientific. There are later documents which specify the minerals with great precision, even to their atomic weights; but they are utterly ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... adds the chronicle, rather quaintly, of more temporal and material benefits, the Infant D. Pedro, then Regent of the kingdom, gave to his brother Henry a charter, granting him the whole of the fifth of the profits which appertained to the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... has himself declared it: hastening to communicate news which he knows will be welcome to the Paraguayan tyrant, and afterwards return to Halberger's estancia with a party of those hireling soldiers—quaintly termed cuarteleros from their living in barracks, ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... mediaeval walls with square towers which protected them upon the mountain side, following the inequalities of the ground, are still a marked feature in the landscape. It is a town of steep streets and staircases, with quaintly framed prospects, and solemn vistas opening at every turn across the lowland. One of these views might be selected for especial notice. In front, irregular buildings losing themselves in country as they ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... seems to be unexplained. Is it perhaps an error for Karabugha, the name given by the Turks and Arabs to a kind of great mangonel? This was known also in Europe as Carabaga, Calabra, etc. It is mentioned under the former name by Marino Sanudo, and under the latter, with other quaintly-named engines, by William of Tudela, as used by Simon de Montfort the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... by a master hand: the master is laid by for a season; or, as Bunyan quaintly expresses it, 'a little a to side': when raised from affliction earthly affairs absorb his attention, and he forgets his good resolves. According to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... pressed their chosen haunts, and to mark the "little people's" favorite dancing ground. "They had always fine music among themselves, and danced in a moonshiny night around or in a ring, as one may see to this day upon every common in England where mushrooms grow," quaintly says one old writer. And the Rev. Gerard Smith still further voices the belief of the people as to the nature of ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... never doubted that their lives would go on forever in just this way,—that they would always be, as her grandfather liked to put it, "shipmates," walking together, studying together, sitting as they sat now, at their simple meals, with just the same quaintly flowered dishes, the same oddly turned teapot, with its attendant cream pitcher (slightly cracked as to lip) and the sugar-bowl, with a laboring ship depicted in blue on its curved side, which was not related, even by ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... and the worshipping were independent of personal ardours: quaintly mixed with semi-paternal recollections of the little 'blue butterfly' of the days at Craye. Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard of Dudley Sowerby's pretensions to; her hand. Nesta's youthfulness cast double ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and the raft, but was delighted to meet again those with whom he had already shared so much of peril and pleasure. That they had again become his mates in such a peculiar manner, and amid such different scenes, was proof, as he quaintly expressed it, that "Truth can give the most expert fiction points, and still beat it at ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... double-flowered variety, which is handsome. The fruit of the single flowered tree is large, and of a deep red colour, and is said to be sometimes made into a preserve. In modern times this is seldom done, but it may have been common in Shakespeare's time, for Gerard says quaintly: "The fruit when it is ripe maketh most pleasant meats and banqueting dishes, as tarts and such like, the making whereof I commit to the cunning cooke, and teeth to eat them in the rich man's mouth." And ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... very strange, and was quite as much out of the perpendicular as Harris had represented it to be. The quiet air of Pisa too; the big guard-house at the gate, with only two little soldiers in it; the streets with scarcely any show of people in them; and the Arno, flowing quaintly through the centre of the town; were excellent. So, I bore no malice in my heart against Mr. Harris (remembering his good intentions), but forgave him before dinner, and went out, full of confidence, to see ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... for all that was revolutionary in his politics or economics, by reaction on two subjects—art and divorce. He had old-fashioned ideas on the family, and did not want to see divorce made easy. And he was quaintly Ruskinian in matters of art, believing that all art should appeal to ethical ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... came out. Quaintly and sweetly and with wondrous clearness it began an old, old song I first heard long ago. And as it sang, back with red electric thrill came the fine blood of youth, and beat in pulse ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... day or two over to the next settlement, he would as lief do it as not. By the merest chance I drew from a heap of rubbish in the corner of a lodge a Shaman rattle, unquestionably genuine. This Shaman rattle is a quaintly carved rattle-box, such as is used by sorcerers or medicine-men in propitiation of the evil spirit at the bedside of the dying. The one I have was not offered for sale, nor did the possessor seem to place much value on it; yet he would not budge one jot or tittle in the price he first set ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... seen. The hill, which had a slope on one side, had evidently been split, as on reaching the top I found that an almost vertical precipice was on the other side. Quantities of quartz and crystals were to be found on that hill. All over that region quaintly-shaped rocks were also to be found, some like small cubic or rectangular boxes, others not unlike inkstands, others in hollowed cylinders or spheres. Many—and those were the quaintest of all—were of a rectangular ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Eastern curios quaintly shaped and sometimes beautifully embroidered shoes are met with, such as those which have been brought over to this country from China and Eastern lands. Most of the shoes worn in the East are slipped off easily, and, like Persian and Turkish slippers, are made of red leather beautifully ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... could remember anything, whether it happened or not," he once said, quaintly, "but I am getting old, and soon I shall ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding type in woman may, needs—not tyrannically, because unconsciously—a mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she has none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must alter itself by modification or suppression, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... point of perfection,—and the table on which Robin rested the book he was reading was covered with a tapestried cloth, embroidered in many colours, dark and bright contrasted cunningly, with an effect that was soothing and restful to the eyes. In the centre there was placed a quaintly shaped jar of old brown lustre which held a full tall bunch of golden-rod and deep wine-coloured dahlias,—a posy expressing autumn with a greater sense of gain than loss. Robin was reading with exemplary patience and considerable difficulty ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... neuk, this Braehead, preserved almost as it was two hundred years ago. "Lot and his wife," mentioned by Maidie,—two quaintly cropped yew-trees,—still thrive; the burn runs as it did in her time, and sings the same quiet tune,—as much the same and as different as Now and Then. The house is full of old family relics and pictures, the sun shining on them through the small deep windows with their plate-glass; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... which she could so little imagine; however she let the subject drop as to any more words about it. She was only what the doctor called "quaintly sober," all ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... were "pearly": But which was she, brunette or blonde? Her hair, was it quaintly curly, Or as straight as a beadle's wand? That I failed to remark: it was rather dark And shadowy round ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... Street, were laid out for the convenience of markets, which in those days were placed in their center. A few of these old-time markets still remain, notably that at Second and Pine streets, its market house or central building of quaintly interesting design embracing features such as the octagonal cupola, marble lintels, sills and belt, and the elliptical and semicircular fanlights ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... landing, where I was faced by a green door with a quaintly carved electric bell in the shape of an Egyptian girl's head, a red stone in the centre of the forehead forming what appeared to be the button. Anyhow I pressed it and waited, and a moment later the door swung silently open. A small but very alert page-boy who looked like an Italian was ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... in the old quaintly spacious house with its great bowery garden, for the plausible reason that Dr. Millar could not, on the spur of the moment, find a purchaser or an available tenant. He took some credit to himself for having more breadth of view and controlling common sense than poor Mrs. Carey, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... had given place to green-clad bluffs sown thick with cottages of all sorts, from the quaintly hideous and the obviously inexpensive to the bewitchingly pretty and the pretentiously ornate —a haphazard arrangement that ran suddenly into a plot of streets linking a clutter of utilitarian buildings, all converging upon the focal point of the ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the sea-girt City of Pearl through a fairy veil of haze; the windy approach to the lovely island over the velvety soundless brown stretch of sand; the weird majesty of the giant gate of bronze; the queer, high-sloping, fantastic, quaintly gabled street, flinging down sharp shadows of aerial balconies; the flutter of coloured draperies in the sea wind, and of flags with their riddles of lettering; the pearly glimmering ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the mother of that handsome, proud-looking man. We drove through the streets, away out of the town, to the place where the fair was held. It was an odd, picturesque sight, with the gaily decorated booths, the crowds of quaintly dressed men and women, ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... still stood and waited a few moments. To Jane those moments seemed days, weeks, years, an eternity. Then he came out into the centre of the chancel, his head erect, his eyes shining, his whole bearing that of a conqueror sure of his victory. He walked down to the quaintly carved oaken screen and, passing beneath it, stood at the step. Then he signed to Jane to come ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... Adriatic, as the ceremony was quaintly termed, has been too often described to need a repetition here. Our business is rather with incidents of a private and personal nature than with descriptions of public events, and we shall pass over all that has no immediate connexion with ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... intuition, rather than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... about the world. It was intensely pale, and under its quiescence there just was a glimpse of something strange and dangerous. It was curiously alluring, though not exactly beautiful. Her hair was clustering and boyish, reaching only to the neck. It was of a strange indigo colour. She was quaintly attired in a tunic and breeches, pieced together from the square, blue-green plates of some reptile. Her small, ivory-white breasts were exposed. Her sorb was black and ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... more quaintly curled? Or looked the earth more green upon the world? Or nature's cradle more enchased and purled? When did the air so smile, the wind so chime, As quiristers of season, ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... reached my room in Manitou could I fix the bird's place in the avicular system. By consulting Coues's Key and Professor Cooke's brochure on the Birds of Colorado, I found this quaintly costumed woodpecker to be Williamson's sapsucker (Sphyrapicus thyroideus), known only in the western part of the United States from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast. I now lingered in the beautiful pine grove surrounding ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... The folds of his robe.—Ver. 267. 'Rorant pennae sinusque,' is quaintly translated by Clarke, 'his wings and the plaits of his ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... most beautiful studies of childhood—Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... Henry's own son. Hugh did not always agree with the king, and if he felt strongly that any course was bad for king and kingdom would say so roundly in direct words of reproof, but withal so reasonably and sweetly that he made "the rhinoceros harrow the valleys" after him, as his biographer quaintly puts it, glancing at Job. The counsel was not limited to celestial themes. Hugh checked his temper, softened his sentences, and got him to do good turns to churches and religious places. He unloosed the king's rather tight ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... "Oh," she said quaintly, "there was a good genie who let me in through the keyhole. I didn't meddle with anything, you know—I just looked at the beautiful room where you work. And I didn't glance, even, at the picture on the easel. The genie told me you wouldn't ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... I owe it to my grandmother. I will perhaps be pardoned if I say that all my girlhood life was spent with my Grandmother Bronson, a very small woman, weighing less than ninety pounds, small featured, always quaintly dressed in the old-fashioned Levantine silk with two breadths only in the skirt, a crossed silk handkerchief with a small white one folded neatly across her breast, a black silk apron, dainty cap made of sheer linen lawn with full ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... This quaintly attractive fragment of Keats was written while he was living in the old cathedral and college city of Winchester. "Some time since," he writes to his brother George, September, 1819, "I began a poem called 'The Eve of St. Mark,' quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... instead of like hands, as we make them. The bolts were massive enough for a donjon-keep. The small window-panes were actually inclosed in the wood of the sashes instead of being stuck to them with putty, as in our modern windows. The broad staircase was of easy ascent, and was guarded by quaintly turned and twisted balusters. The ceilings of the two rooms of state were moulded with medallion-portraits and rustic figures, such as may have been seen by many readers in the famous old Philipse house,—Washington's head-quarters,—in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 26th of December," his daughter once quaintly added to me, "he would note that the days were beginning to get longer, and cheer up, as spring was certain to follow soon and bring ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... breathing the fresh morning air, examining the leaves and the flowers with extraordinary interest. From time to time a deep, sad sigh broke from his oppressed chest; he passed his hand over his brow as if to efface the importunate images. He sat down amid the quaintly clipped boxwood which ornamented the garden in the antique fashion, called his son again to him, held him between his knees, interrogating him again, in a low voice, as he had done before; then ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... considerable and pleasing variety is obtained by treating the two storeys differently. Very great skill in carving is shown, all the posts, brackets, beams, and projecting rafters being formed into elaborate representations of animals and plants, or quaintly conceived grotesques; and the flat surfaces have frequently a shallow incised arabesque pattern intertwined with foliage. The roofs are always covered with tiles, and a curious effect is produced by enriching the hips and ridges with several courses of tiles in cement, thus making ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... tried to sell cameos carved in lava, throwing them on to the laps of the passengers as they sat in the train. Irene, who was beginning to learn Italian methods of purchase, commenced to bargain with her for a quaintly cut mascot, reducing the price asked lira by lira till at length, when the conductor blew his brass horn, she finally got it for exactly half of what was at ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... She walked to the door with him and gave him his hat, patting his arm in a final way. "You will come often to see us. We are going to be friends." Her forehead, with its neat curtains of brown hair, came something below Claude's chin, and she peered up at him with that quaintly hopeful expression, as if—as if even he might turn out wonderfully well! Certainly, nobody had ever looked at him ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... notwithstanding the deplorable state of his wardrobe. Thick, clustering curls of jet-black hair fell in tangled disorder around a forehead broad, white and smooth as that of a girl; slender and quaintly arched black eyebrows played above a pair of mischievous, dark-gray eyes that sparkled beneath the shade of long, thick, black lashes; a little turned-up nose, and red, pouting lips completed the character of a countenance full of fun, frolic, ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... democracies of Greece in all their grandeur and in all their wretchedness." Lord Byron said of the author: "His great pleasure consists in praising tyrants, abusing Plutarch, spelling oddly, and writing quaintly; and—what is strange, after all—his is the best modern history of Greece in any language." But this was penned before Thirlwall's and Grote's histories were published. Lord Macaulay says of Mitford: "Whenever ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... scene was very German, quaintly picturesque and warm- hearted. "The good people were all dressed in their best, the women in pointed caps, with many petticoats, and the men in leather breeches. Many girls were there with wreaths of flowers." A triumphal arch, a Vice-Land-Director, to whose ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... that she should be in simplest coolest white, of a character so old-fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame Roland must on the scaffold have worn something like it. This effect was enhanced by a small black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed quaintly round her bosom and now completing as by a mystic touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. Poor Strether in fact scarce knew what analogy was evoked for him as the charming woman, receiving him and making him, as she could do such things, at once familiarly and gravely welcome, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... at Sylvia. "It will be," she said, quaintly, and in English, "my 'treat,' dear friend." And then, as Sylvia shook her head decidedly—there were often these little contests of generosity between the two women—she added ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Divine source. Political science in this essay takes rank as an independent branch of philosophy, and the points which Dante seeks to establish are supported by arguments implying much historical knowledge, though quaintly scholastic in their application. The Epistles contain the same thoughts: peace, mutual respect, and obedience to a common head, the duty of the chief to his subordinates and of the governed to their lord, are urged with no less force, but in a more familiar style and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... about 40 years answered Dicky's sounding of the quaintly carved knocker. He lifted his hat with a ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... of this newly-created office, lived at the other end of the village and a little way outside it, in a low-storeyed house which had been greatly improved by Suzanne's good taste and fancy. It was surrounded by a garden with arbours and quaintly-clipped old trees and a clear, winding stream that flowed under ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... come upon an item in the expenses of the Mayor and Burgesses, of a payment to Charles Hoar, in the year 1588, for keeping a horse ready to carry to Cirencester the tidings of the arrival of the Spanish Armada. And Charles Hoar's house is with us to this day, quaintly gabled, and with over-hanging timber-framed stories, such as the Romans built here in the first century. It stands in Longsmith Street, just above the spot where forty years ago I looked down on a beautiful ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... strength as terrified his judges. He simulated madness, foamed at the mouth, and finally tore up the benches in order to attack the judges with the fragments. He was sent first to the castle of Edinburgh and afterward to the Bass (an island), "for a change of air," as the record quaintly says. Finally, he was despatched to Blackness Castle, where he remained close in ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... abreast. These were the Lord High Chancellor, in wig and robes, carrying the Great Seal of England in a red silk bag. On his right walked a gentleman carrying the golden sceptre, jewelled and quaintly worked, while he on the left carried the sword of state, point up, in a red scabbard, studded ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... exciting rivals against Dryden in the public opinion, but assailed him personally in an imitation of Horace, which he quaintly entitled, "An Allusion to the Tenth Satire." It came out anonymously about 1678, but the town was at no loss to guess that Rochester was the patron or author. Much of the satire was bestowed on Dryden, whom Rochester for ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... for such imaginings," Francis replied, "but there is a quaintly artificial air about it all. We must go and look ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of which we spoke—the plum and cherry—though the produce of much larger plants, nay, one of them of a tree which ranks among the timber-trees of our land, are not of superior, if of equal value to those which are about to engage our attention. An old writer quaintly remarks: 'It is certain that there might have been a better berry than the strawberry, but it is equally certain that there is not one;' and I suppose there are few in the present day who will be disposed to dispute this opinion, for there are few fruits, if any, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... and I saw Lee standing beside a slender figure in unbecoming dress among a group of men in blue shirts and quaintly mended jackets; also that some planks had been laid across two barrels ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... was "all of a flutter," as she said, and it took Dorothy and Jellia Jamb, the housekeeper, and two maids a long time to dress her and do up her hair and get her "rigged like a popinjay," as she quaintly expressed it. She wanted to stop and admire everything that caught her eye, and she sighed continually and declared that such finery was too good for an old country woman, and that she never thought she would have to "put on airs" at her ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... that my newly acquired knowledge enabled me to recognize—to express the matter in the terms of our system of heraldry—as the arms of a king quartered with the arms of certain princely houses or tribes. On these shelves, also, were many quaintly wrought vessels and some small square boxes, all of which were of gold—together with a score or so of small idols moulded in clay or roughly carved in stone, in which last the workmanship was so far inferior to that of the earthen-ware pots and golden vessels as to show at a glance that ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... transformed! If I have hesitated to describe the hollow-eyed cripple, the quaintly-dressed artisan's wife, a few pages ago, what shall I do with this graceful, shapely, elegantly-attired gentlewoman into whom she has been merged within these two months? In good faith she was very pretty. You and I, my dear madam, would have been quick to see that those ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... Quaintly delicate and tender are the love-songs of Brother Hans, an otherwise unknown monk of the fourteenth century. He himself tells us that he deserted his earthly mistress for the Queen of Heaven. Perhaps the dualism between earthly ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... John Eames that she would write in her journal. The reader will remember those two words;—Old Maid. And she had written them in her book, making each letter a capital, and round them she had drawn a scroll, ornamented after her own fashion, and she had added the date in quaintly formed figures,—for in such matters Lily had some little skill and a dash of fun to direct it; and she had inscribed below it an Italian motto:—"Who goes softly, goes safely;" and above her work of art she had put a heading—"As ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... some way we are meeting—our souls—in the infinite realm outside ourselves—beyond our consciousness—either sleeping or waking. Last night I dreamed a strange dream. A little girl, like one of the pictures in mother's old family photograph album, seemed to be talking with me,—dressed so quaintly in the dear old fashion of the days when mother taught the Sycamore Ridge School. She seemed to be playing with me in some way, and then she said: 'Oh, yes, I am your telephone; she knows all about it. I tell her every night as we play together.' And then ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... lightning-rods. Our street was blocked night and day with spectators, and among them were many who came from the country to see. It was a blessed relief on the second day when a thunderstorm came up and the lightning began to "go for" my house, as the historian Josephus quaintly phrases it. It cleared the galleries, so to speak. In five minutes there was not a spectator within half a mile of my place; but all the high houses about that distance away were full, windows, roof, and all. And well they ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... however, grossly unthankful to say that English country-houses lack anything when one has received delightful impressions of what they possess. What is a draughty doorway to an old Norman portal, massively arched and quaintly sculptured, across whose hollow threshold the eye of fancy may see the ghosts of monks and the shadows of abbots pass noiselessly to and fro? What is a paltry piazza to a beautiful ambulatory of the thirteenth century—a long stone gallery or cloister ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... help those other girls.' They had some low, heated language about his leaving her at such a crisis, with her gripping his arm till I bet it showed for an hour. But finally they broke and he loosened her horse's sash, as she kept quaintly calling it, and she recovered completely and said it had been but a moment's giddiness anyway, and what strength he had in those arms, and yet could use it so gently, and he said she was a brave, game little woman, and the picnic ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... robe above his bare sticks of legs—but Margarita and me. The camphor trees lose their lacquered green and turn to distant chestnut; the scarlet lily fades to a dull rose marsh flower; the lines of the temple are only quaintly-eaved rocks and ledges, and I am over seas again. I wonder if that is the reason I love this place so? But there were no geyser baths there and I had no rheumatism then! Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe—even the sciatic nerve, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... company seated round the table comprised a number of dissolute seigneurs and gallants of fashion about town—men of great wants and great extravagance, just the class so quaintly described by Charlevoix, a quarter of a century previous, as "gentlemen thoroughly versed in the most elegant and agreeable modes of spending money, but greatly at a loss ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the days when he first read it as a boy. But there were certain paragraphs that especially caught his eye and arrested his attention,—paragraphs that he read and reread, finding in them he knew not what secret delight and significance. These were the quaintly turned phrases describing the effect on the once poor Aladdin of his wonderful riches, and those descanting upon the beauty and charm of the Sultan's daughter, the ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... turnings of old Baghdad. The bazaars are mostly covered in with arched masonry, and the effect is that of a long side aisle in a very untidy and greatly secularized cathedral. From time to time glimpses of the dark-blue, star-filled sky showed through openings overhead, and sometimes a quaintly framed view ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... or rock, if yielding were the stone, The knife was straight at work or ready pin. And there, without, in thousand places lone, And in as many places graved, within, MEDORO and ANGELICA were traced, In divers cyphers quaintly interlaced. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... pride displayed Along the old stone balustrade; And ancient ladies, quaintly dight, In its pink blossoms took delight; And on the steps would make a stand To scent ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Since those quaintly simple and emphatic statements which, under the name of Froissart's Chronicles, seem to perpetuate the instinctive notion of History, as an honest and earnest, but unadorned and unelaborate narrative of military ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... gladly... but... you will understand... I am not very old," said Candeille quaintly, "I... I am only an actress... but if a young actress is ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... mumbling queer words under his breath, for he had a way of talking to himself when anything "upsot him," as he would quaintly remark. Trot always knew he was disturbed or in trouble ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... forms the east end of the island, and were in the act of getting a small pull of the weather braces, before edging away for St Jago, when the wind fell suddenly, and in half an hour it was stark calm—'una furiosa calma,' as the Spanish sailors quaintly enough ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... wondered very quaintly what he would say, when, in a few days, he heard of the failure of John Meavy & Co. for three millions of dollars. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the date of it to be somewhere about the middle of the XIVth century. The illuminations are small, but pretty and perfect; the backgrounds are generally square, diamond-wise, without gold; but there are backgrounds of solid shining gold. The subjects are rather quaintly and whimsically, than elegantly, treated. In the whole, one hundred and sixty leaves. From Romances, of all and of every kind, let us turn our eyes towards a representation of subjects intimately connected with them: ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the Vellala quarter next to the Brahmans, and we found his house was the great house of the place. The outer door opened into a large square inner courtyard. A wide verandah, supported by pillars quaintly carved, ran round it. The women's rooms, low and windowless, opened on either side; these are the rooms we rejoice to get into, and now we ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... historian of sport quaintly expressed a correct theory as to the virtue of profuse perspiration: "And when the hunters do their office on horseback and on foot, they sweat often; then if they have any evil in them it must come away in the sweating; so that he keep from cold after the heat." So does ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Sir John Dalrymple quaintly said, the two noblest animals in the world were, a Scotch Highlander and an English sailor[1105]. 'Why, Sir, (said Dr. Johnson,) I shall say nothing as to the Scotch Highlander; but as to the English Sailor, I cannot agree with you.' Sir John said, he was generous in giving away ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... he called the "tam pizness" of the morning. It was most inconvenient. He had reckoned upon another day up in town to settle his bills and sign certain papers. There were also some few stores to come, and sundry pieces of "my ironwork," as he called it quaintly, landed for repairs, had been left behind. Now he would have to hire a native boat to take all this out to the ship. It would cost five or six dollars perhaps. He had had no warning from Falk. Nothing.... He hit the table with his dumpy fist.... Der verfluchte Kerl came in ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... the persistent efforts to traverse these perilous Arctic ocean wastes. Let us go back to the oldest of the daring navigators of this frozen sea, the worthy knight Sir Martin Frobisher, and tell the story of his notable efforts to discover a Northwest Passage, "the only thing left undone," as he quaintly says, "whereby a notable mind might become ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... ready, Alfred put himself at the head of the forces which had collected at the Egbert Stone, or, as it is quaintly spelled in some of the old accounts, Ecgbyrth-stan. There is a place called Brixstan in that vicinity now, which may possibly be the same name modified and abridged by the lapse of time. Alfred moved forward toward Guthrum's camp. He went ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... caused by contiguity to earth. The lines of enquiry to which special attention was required were such as would be naturally suggested by the scientific knowledge of the hour, though they may read somewhat quaintly to-day. Would there be any change in the intensity of the magnetic force? Any change in the inclination of the magnetised needle? Would evaporation find a new law? Would solar rays increase in power? What amount of ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire. Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly's speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin given back by a bleak decaying seaport, its energy an echo of the sacred eloquence of Dublin given back flatly ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... relationship. There was a sweet disorder in her hair and more than once the wind whaffed it into my face. In walking our fingers touched once and again; greatly daring, mine slipped over hers, and so like children we went hand in hand. An old romancer tells quaintly in one of his tales how Love made himself of the party, and so it was with us that night. I found my answer at last without words. While the heavens wept our hearts sang. The wine of love ran through me in exquisite thrills. Every simple ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all creation. The love ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... somewhat dubious tradition, attributes the edifice as having belonged to Blanche de Navarre, the wife of Philippe de Valois. Again it is thought to have been a sort of royal attachment to the Abbaye de Royaumont, built near by, by Saint Louis. This quaintly charming manor of minute dimensions was a tangible, habitable abode in 1333, but for generations after appears to have fallen into desuetude. A mill grew up on the site, and again the walls of a chateau obliterated the more mundane, work-a-day mill. The Duc de Bourbon restored the whole place ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... home from the coast of China twelve times every year, desiring quaintly to be "remembered to the children," and subscribing himself "your loving husband," as calmly as if the words so long used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things, and ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... was so entirely and evenly grown over with short thick moss that it might seem cut of some strange kind of living green velvet, and here and there it was quaintly embroidered with small blossoming tufts of white alyssum, or feathers of ferns and maiden's-hair which shook and trembled to every breeze. Nothing could be lovelier than this mossy bridge, when some stray sunbeam, slanting up the gorge, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... arch roof of the aperture, and the lower arch as an arch floor, equally unnecessary and unnatural. Also, the elliptical oval is generally an unsatisfactory form, because it gives the idea of useless trouble in building it, though it occurs quaintly and pleasantly in the former windows of France: I believe it is also objectionable because it has an indeterminate, slippery look, like that of a bubble rising through a fluid. It, and all elongated forms, are still more objectionable ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... various devices, including the feathers of the Prince of Wales, adopted as the sign perhaps in the days of Prince Arthur, when the inn was built. Many of the rooms are panelled with carved oak and have quaintly moulded ceilings. It is not often that the modern tourist has a chance to rest under such a venerable roof, for it is still a comfortable hostelrie. The ancient priory of Austin Friars was ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... I saw in 1910, a number of ancient facades, most picturesque and quaintly pinnacled. There also a small botanical garden floriated most luxuriantly, and here again the Dyle reflected the mossy walls of ancient stone palaces, and there were rows of tall, wooden, carved posts standing in the stream, to which boats ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... calmly faced the seething mob in Pilate's judgment hall; the same sweet Christ who took the babes upon His knee; the same Divine Christ who, with hyssop and gall, and mingled blood and tears, passed death's dread portals on the dark brow of Calvary. The same grand figure, but quaintly dressed in words that savoured of the London slums and of the soldier's camp, and yet so hedged around with earnest love and childlike faith that all its grossest trappings fell away and left us nothing but the ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... colorless without being pallid; and the faint golden down on his cheeks and upper lip, instead of being disagreeably juvenile, really added to the pleasant dreaminess that hung like a haze over his mild young features. He was slender, he carried himself rather quaintly; but his gait was buoyant and spirited. At that season the lilacs were in bloom, and Silverthorn held a glorious plume of the pale blossoms in his hand. What the first touch of fire is to the woods in autumn, the blooming of the lilac is to the new summer—a mystery, a beauty, too exquisite ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... HERALD: "An essayist at once scholarly, human and charming is John Cowper Powys.... Almost every page carries some arresting thought, quaintly appealing ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... shows part of a very humorous and famous letter announcing the death of the raven which figures in "Barnaby Rudge." Notice the curious originality of form shown in the capital Y and R. The wording of this letter is also quaintly original, and the sensitive mind of this man again caused his nerve-muscular action—his gesture—to harmonize with his mood. Points of this kind, which the handwriting of Dickens illustrates so well, have a deeper meaning for the observant ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... and firm, roll and rock in waves, till people are sea-sick, as on board a ship; and that rocking motion (which is the most common) will often, when it is but slight, set the bells ringing in the steeples, or make the furniture, and things on shelves, jump about quaintly enough. It will make trees bend to and fro, as if a wind was blowing through them; open doors suddenly, and shut them again with a slam; make the timbers of the floors and roofs creak, as they do in a ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... and the full tide of Black sets in. It would be easier to talk to a new- made Duchess on the spur of the moment than to the Borderline folk without violating some of their conventions or hurting their feelings. The Black and the White mix very quaintly in their ways. Sometimes the White shows in spurts of fierce, childish pride—which is Pride of Race run crooked—and sometimes the Black in still fiercer abasement and humility, half heathenish customs and strange, unaccountable impulses to crime. One of these days, this people— understand ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the arbour, the Nightingale perches, while the Goldfinch flies to the Lady of the Flower. The pageant gone, the gentlewoman quits the arbour, and meets a lady in white, who, at her request, unfolds the hidden meaning of all that she has seen; "which," says Speght quaintly, "is this: They which honour the Flower, a thing fading with every blast, are such as look after beauty and worldly pleasure. But they that honour the Leaf, which abideth with the root, notwithstanding the frosts and winter storms, are they which follow Virtue and ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Bessie, rising, "I think she ought to have the prize. Please excuse me, sir,"—quaintly—"for saying ought to you and Miss Ashton, but it was not Lena's fault that she could not go on trying with the rest of us, but only because she was so very brave and unselfish in the fire. And if she improved so much in that time, she would have improved a great deal more; and I think the prize ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... charmingly laid out in parterres and walks, and not only carried to the edge of the moat, but continued beyond it till it reached a high knoll crowned with beech-trees. A crest of tall twisted chimneys, a high roof with quaintly carved gables, surmounted by many gilt vanes, may serve to complete the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... get penetration into the underlying methods of the trading class. But a lucid insight is inadvertently given by Walter Barrett (who, for sixty years, was in the mercantile trade), in his smug and conventional, but quaintly entertaining, volumes, "The Merchants of Old New York." This strong instance shows like a flashlight that while the success of the shippers was attributed to a fine category of energetic qualities, the benevolent assistance of the United States Government was, in a large measure, ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... many Mohammedan mosques. There are Hindoo temples without number—these quaintly shaped and elaborately sculptured little stone jugs crowd all the lanes. The Ganges itself and every individual drop of water in it are temples. Religion, then, is the business of Benares, just ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... could have been cited in a simile illustrating profusion. Bass quaintly stated that the "dying song" of the swan, so celebrated by poets, "exactly resembled the creaking of a rusty ale-house sign on a windy day." The remark is not so pretty as, but far more true than, that of the bard who would have us believe that ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... flights of broad steps, each flight terminating in a square landing-place, whence the ascent is continued toward the cupola. A carved balustrade, freshly painted in the lower stories, but growing dingier as we ascend, borders the staircase with its quaintly twisted and intertwined pillars, from top to bottom. Up these stairs the military boots, or perchance the gouty shoes, of many a governor have trodden as the wearers mounted to the cupola which afforded them so wide a view over their metropolis and the surrounding country. The cupola is ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... old man lay in the falling gloom, head quaintly cocked, and chin crushed down on ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... history book, but here's a bit you may like, since it's about our folks," answered Eph, turning the yellow page to look at a picture of two quaintly dressed ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... of the comrades, Robert Lovell, quaintly puts it in a letter to Holcroft, "Principle, not plan, is our object." Lovell had visited Holcroft in gaol, and one can well understand how that near view of the fate which awaited the reformer under Pitt, confirmed them in their idea of crossing the Atlantic. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... all to her presence. They came in troops, and filled the mountain tops and sides, and reached down into the valleys. She welcomed them as they approached her. In majesty she was seated upon a summer throne. It was formed of the finest woods of the forest, and quaintly fashioned by the little work-people. It was cushioned with the most delicate mosses, and wild vines had been trained up and over and around it, blending charmingly with the rustic woodwork. Above her tiny head spread a canopy of delicate twigs, twisted into fantastic ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... Majesty in this session of Parliament, have resolved to grant unto Your Majesty the sums hereinafter mentioned; and do therefore most humbly beseech Your Majesty that it may be enacted, &c.'' The use of the preamble with which acts are usually prefaced is thus quaintly set forth by Lord Coke: "The rehearsal or preamble of the statute is a good meane to find out the meaning of the statute, and, as it were, a key to open the understanding thereof'' (Co. Litt. 79a). ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... belief, but without the spiritual fervour which influences the lives of men. The chivalry of the middle ages was as dead as its religion. Men spoke of women as coarsely as they spoke of their cattle. Human nature indeed could not be entirely crushed. John Paston's wife (see p. 321), for instance, was quaintly affectionate. "I would," she once wrote to her husband, "ye were at home, if it were for your ease ... now liever than a gown, though it were of scarlet." But the system of wardship (see p. 116) made ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... little door which led into another apartment. There were tables and chairs of earth-style, quaintly old-fashioned. Food and drink were shoved through the doorslide; the necessities of life and a fair comfort of living were provided. But their questions, even as the time passed and lengthened into what on Earth might have been a week or more, remained unanswered. There was only ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... own recollections of his generals and their campaigns. We are irresistibly reminded of Lever in the style of the narration, and of that dashing creature "O'Malley" in the adventures of our own dragoon. The story of General Custer's wooing is quaintly told, and shines like a bow of promise through all the clouds of his stormy career; it is a romance by itself. Apropos of the charge which we are told won the boy general his star, we clip a bit of ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... countenance is familiar through the elaborate chisel of Roubillac; Nollekens moulded Sterne's delicate and unimpassioned but keen physiognomy, and Chantrey the lofty cranium of Scott. Who has not blessed the rude but conscientious artist who carved the head of Shakspeare preserved at Stratford? How quaintly appropriate to the old house in Nuremberg is Albert Drer's bust over the door! Our best knowledge of Alexander Hamilton's aspect is obtained from the expressive marble head of him by that ardent republican sculptor, Ceracchi. It was appropriate for Mrs. Darner, the daughter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... happiness; while even Aunt Meg roused herself occasionally from her selfish torpor and tried to brighten the tiny home. She could gladden it wonderfully when she chose, for Miss Margaret possessed many pleasing traits of character; but, alas! she seldom did choose, and, as Miss Deborah quaintly expressed it, "one had to endure innumerable showers of rain for one gleam of sunshine." Nellie had become so accustomed, however, to the invalid's whims and caprices, that she thought little, if at all, about them, and in the meantime her whole attention was engrossed ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... that in Corsica, as late as 1743, if a husband died, women threw themselves upon the widow and beat her severely. Brohier quaintly remarks that this custom obliged women to take good care ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... Twins" versifies a story told by Martin Luther in his "Table Talk," in which the saying, "Give and it shall be given unto you," is quaintly personified by the Latin words equivalent in meaning: Date, "Give," and ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning |
