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More "Grossness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to her in grace?" wept the Fairy Eglantine; "the Spark will melt away all mortal grossness, till she is light and graceful as the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... powerful, of Miss Kavanagh's former works, are exhibited in this, as well as deep thought and sound moral reflection. Every thing presented to the reader, whether thought or image, is elaborated with the finish of a Flemish painting without its grossness; the persons are nicely conceived and consistently sustained, and the principal narrative is relieved by very truthful pictures of every day life ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Homer lift his awful head, Zoilus again would start up from the dead. Envy will Merit, as its shade, pursue, But like a shadow, proves the substance true; For envied wit, like Sol eclipsed, makes known The opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too powerful beams displays, 470 It draws up vapours which obscure its rays; But even those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... the druidical priesthood, we have every where apparent proofs of their polytheism: and the grossness of their religious ideas, as represented by some writers, is very inconsistent with that divine philosophy which has been considered as a part of their character. These, however, were popular divinities ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the fur traders. They are generally of French descent, and inherit much of the gayety and lightness of heart of their ancestors, being full of anecdote and song, and ever ready for the dance. They inherit, too, a fund of civility and complaisance; and, instead of that hardness and grossness which men in laborious life are apt to indulge towards each other, they are mutually obliging and accommodating; interchanging kind offices, yielding each other assistance and comfort in every emergency, and using the familiar appellations of "cousin" and "brother" when there is in ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... found free from that grossness which is unavoidable in a strictly literal translation of the original into English; and which has rendered the splendid translations of Sir R. Burton and Mr. J. Payne quite unsuitable as the basis of a popular edition, though at the same time stamping the works as the two most perfect editions ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... wife is; thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. 953 ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... begin with a protest against the lapses and grossness of the established one, and the baby religion feeds and lives on the other until it has grown strong enough to break off and live a life of its own. Buds are being broken off all the time, but only a few live; the rest die because they lack vitality. That is why all things die—I ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Aunt Debby had been of the greatest benefit to Harry Glen. Since his parting with Rachel Bond, there had been going on in his spirit a fermentation like that with which good wine discharges itself of its grossness and impurities, and becomes clear and fine. In this process had vanished the absorbing selfishness of a much-indulged only son, and teh supercilious egotism which came as an almost necessary result of his college curriculum. This spiritual ripening received its perfecting ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... and heaven, amid choirs of angelic children, rises the mighty mother of the faith of Christ, who was Mary and is now a goddess, ecstatic yet tranquil, not yet accustomed to the skies, but far above the grossness and the incapacities of earth. Her womanhood is so complete that those for whom the meaning of her Catholic legend is lost, may hail in her ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... blossomed, physically as well as mentally, into a fuller revelation of gracious loveliness than before, sweeter and more exquisite, indeed, than anything life had yet shown to me. Moreover, having captured me, she changed; the grossness I had discerned, that which had led me to my own undoing, vanished completely as though it were transmuted into desires and emotions of a loftier kind. Some purpose, some intention, a hope immensely resolute shone out of her, and of such spiritual loveliness, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... enmity forged deadly plots to break the bond or defile its purity? Who shall record the long strife between Serpent and Seraph:—How still the Father of Lies insinuated evil into good, pride into wisdom, grossness into glory, pain into bliss, poison into passion? How the "dreadless Angel" defied, resisted, and repelled? How again and again he refined the polluted cup, exalted the debased emotion, rectified the perverted ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... remarkably intelligent and brave,—but he's gross; and grossness delays one's achievement, it takes so much time. The snake too, though wise, has a way of eating himself into stupors. If super-snake-men had had banquets they would have been too vast to describe. Each little snake family could have eaten a ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... particular danger to which I allude is French novels, French romances, and French plays. The overflowings of that cup of excitement have reached our shores. I do not say that these works contain anything coarse or gross—better if it were so: evil which comes in a form of grossness is not nearly so dangerous as that which comes veiled in gracefulness and sentiment. Subjects which are better not touched upon at all are discussed, examined, and exhibited in all the most seductive forms of imagery. You would be shocked at seeing your son in ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves a few moments' consideration. It is said, 'the grossness of the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime. It was the fashion of the age. It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no harm by it. The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none the worse for that.' Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... nature, he comes, at whatever distance, after and yet next to Shakespeare. It is a test of the greatness of Don Juan that its reputation has slowly increased and that, in spite of its supposed immoral tendency, in spite of occasional grossness and voluptuousness, it has come to be recognized as Byron's masterpiece. Don Juan will be read for its own sake, for its beauty, its humour, its faithfulness. It is a "hymn to the earth," but it is a human sequence to "its ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... choice revealed the character of the choosers, both in their hostility and admiration; for excellence hated shows what we ought to be and are not, and grossness or vice admired shows what we would fain be if we dared. It was the tragic sign that Israel had not learned the rudiments of the lesson which 'at sundry times and in divers manners' God had been teaching them. In it the nation renounced its Messianic hopes, and with its own mouth ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... upon you," ex-claimed the parson. "If evil comes of this I shall testify to the grossness of your aggression. Get you gone ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... England any thing large is called a bumper. Hence a bumping lass is a large girl of her age, and a bumpkin is a large-limbed, uncivilized rustic; the idea of grossness of size entering into the idea of a country bumpkin, as well as that of unpolished rudeness. Dr. Johnson, however, strangely enough deduces the word bumpkin from bump; but what if it should prove to be a corruption of bumbard, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... master-at-arms, was no vulgar, dirty knave. In him—to modify Burke's phrase—vice seemed, but only seemed, to lose half its seeming evil by losing all its apparent grossness. He was a neat and gentlemanly villain, and broke his biscuit with a dainty hand. There was a fine polish about his whole person, and a pliant, insinuating style in his conversation, that was, socially, quite irresistible. Save my noble captain, Jack Chase, he proved himself ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... seen a photograph of the lady, one can aver that she is graced with a diatonic figure. And, certainly the most amusing passage of "Sinfonia Domestica" is that complex of Bavarian lustihood, Bavarian grossness, Bavarian dreaminess and Bavarian good nature, the thematic group that serves as ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... had some shocks in his life. This was the greatest. He could feel his cheeks and his hands growing dully hot, and his eyes smarting; and he was suddenly animated by an almost murderous hatred and an inexpressible disgust for his father, who in the grossness of his perceptions and his notions had imagined his son to be a thief. "Loathsome beast!" ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... demanding of others in the name of the laws of the country, and even of God, that they should take part in murder. Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... but to be seen, but now when it is elegantly dressed we look upon it without shame or consciousness of evil; we grow to doat upon it—so entertaining, so graceful, so refined. When vice loses half its grossness, it loses all its deformity. Humanity used to be talked of when our friends were torn to pieces, but now there is such a philosophical perfume thrown over the whole operation, that we are irresistibly attracted. How much we owe to such men as Mr. ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... dared too far. Of all the women he had known there was no woman who would not have guessed—save her. And she had not guessed. There was the difference. She was different. He was appalled by his own grossness, awed by her clear innocence, and he gazed again at her across the gulf. The bridge ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... last upon the seat of it—whether matter was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... of the astutest men that I know has achieved a large measure of his prosperity and general contentment by behaving always as though all men were alike. Because, although of course they are not alike, the differences are too trifling to matter. He flatters each with the same assiduity and grossness, with the result that they all become his useful allies. Those that do not swallow the mixture, and resent it, he merely accuses of insincerity or false modesty; yet they are his allies too, because, although they cannot accept his methods, being ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... night—the time when a great city has most power over those that love her; the time when she lowers her voice and subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems; when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her grossness in the half-transparent night. Like some consummate temptress, she plays the mystic, clothing herself with light and darkness, skirting the intangible, hinting at the infinities, flinging out the eternal spiritual lure, so that she may better seduce the senses through the soul. And Rickman was too ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... avoiding the gorgeousness of the old masters. But it seems probable that in the celestial regions there is more, rather than less, of brilliant coloring than on earth. What can be more brilliant than the rainbow, yet what more perfectly free from earthly grossness? Nevertheless, in looking at the pictures of Schoeffer there is such a serene and spiritual charm spread over them, that one is little inclined to wish them other than they are. No artist that I have ever seen, not even Raphael, has more power of glorifying the human ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... grossness of the commercial classes, the brutality of the tired business man! We Americans are a rude folk my friend; the courtesies are absent from our manners. Now, I am a young man with tender feelings, both mental and—er, physical. ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... my complexion wear the swarthy hue of the savage; nor had my features been rendered repulsive, from the perpetual action of those fierce passions which have since assailed my soul. My physical faculties had not yet been developed to their present grossness of maturity, neither had my moral energies acquired that tone of ferocity which often renders me hideous, even in my own eyes. In a word, the milk of my nature (for, with all my impetuosity of character, I was generous-hearted ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality, and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Now, in his passionate blood, floats tow'rds the grave! The present time is ever ignorant— We lack clear vision in our self-love's maze; But Marlowe in the future will stand great, Whom this—the lowest caitiff in the world— A nothing, save in grossness, hath destroy'd. ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... beneath were the same, yet the texture of the hollows seemed different. The thin-lipped mouths were from the same mould, but George's lips were firm and muscular, while Al's were soft and loose—the lips of an ascetic turned voluptuary. There was also a sag at the corners. His flesh hinted of grossness, especially so in the eagle-like aquiline nose that must once have been like the other's, but that had lost the austerity the other's ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... the Imitation, Oportet fieri stultum. And if there is a later silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words, while accepting this last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of "nice" ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... manners of the court of Charles II. were, to the utmost, profligate and abandoned: yet in what colours have they been drawn by Hamilton? The elegance of his pencil has rendered them more seductive and dangerous, than if it had more faithfully copied the originals. From such a mingled mass of grossness of language, and of conduct, one would have turned away with disgust and abhorrence; but Hamilton was, to use the words of his admirer, Lord Orford, "superior to the indelicacy of the court," whose vices he has so agreeably depicted; and that superiority has sheltered such ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Fear and Sorrow, hence Desire and Mirth; Nor can the soul, in darkness and in chains, Assert the skies, and claim celestial birth. Nay, after death, the traces it retains Of fleshly grossness, and corporeal stains, Since much must needs by long concretion grow Inherent. Therefore are they racked with pains, And schooled in all the discipline of woe; Each pays for ancient ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... line of the mouth under the trifling upturned mustache, with its lips at the same time thin and sensual. To be fat and sensual is to appear to mitigate the latter evil with at least a pretence at good humor; to be thin and sensual is to be a devil. This man was evil, not with the grossness of a debauchee but with the thinness of the devotee. And he was an old man, too. Sixty odd years of vicious life, glossed over in the last two decades by an assumption of respectability, had swept over the gray hairs, which evoked ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,—working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the path of light that appears to be presented to only him; but even on this stranger's wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples and towers and its one great dome grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops lose their grossness in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise from the streets are fewer and are softened, and the footsteps on the pavements pass more tranquilly away. In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the shepherds play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... water to a fish. She must foregather or life loses all its savour; must entertain, be entertained, rub shoulders generally or she is lost. Henrietta Frayling suffered the accustomed fate, though to speak of rubbing shoulders in connection with her is to express oneself incorrectly to the verge of grossness. Her shoulders were of an order far too refined to rub or be rubbed. Nevertheless, after the shortest interval consistent with self-respect, such society as St. Augustin and its neighbourhood afforded found itself ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... more robust kind of fibre; now that I know he is dead, I cannot find it in my heart to wish him any such qualities. His life appears to me utterly beautiful and fragrant. He never incurred any taint of grossness from prosperity or success; he never grew indifferent or hard; and in the light of his last passage, such a failure seems the one thing worth achieving, and to carry with it a hope all alive and rich with possibilities of blessing and ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness." ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... "Rudeness and Grossness matter, and I've shown both, and already I'm sorry, and I hope she'll let me apologize. But from the selfish point of view it doesn't matter a straw. She's no more to us than the Wonham boy ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... places at last and left the room. On the street they stood for a moment, but nothing was said about another meeting. Harboro thought of inviting Peterson over to the house; but he fancied Sylvia wouldn't like it; and besides, the man's grossness was there, more patent than ever, and it ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... which her instincts urged but her wifely obedience restrained. Her influence as yet was that of a noble, fascinating woman, who softened the jars occasioned by the King's narrow and pedantic nature, and purified the Court from the grossness of the past. But in the dark days that were to come, her faith and enthusiasm breathed new force into a down-trodden people; and where all else was shattered, the King and Queen still held forth the ideal of that first and strongest of Teutonic ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... and drink too much. We can switch off a bore at once. We can retire when we are fatigued, without leaving a blank space before the others. And all this without saying anything of the higher spiritual and intellectual effect—freed from material grossness of appetite and show—which the dinner party thus attains. But you are surely joking! You, an American, and not know it! Why, it comes from Boston. Haven't you read that book, 'Jumping a Century'? It's by ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... the one great sympathetic woman of the sixteenth century; her admirers, during life and after death, were legion. She shared in the lesser evils of the century, but it cannot be said that she participated in the brutalities, grossness, or glaring immoralities of her time; her weaknesses, compared with the great debauches of the age, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... It did not matter how many sins her boys were accused of, so long as they were not stupid, or inferior. If they seemed to brook insult, she hated them. And it was only a certain gaucherie, a gawkiness on Anna's part that irritated her against the girl. Certain forms of clumsiness, grossness, made the mother's eyes glow with curious rage. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... upon the reader's mind an impression that human victims are daily cooked and served up upon the altars; that heathenish cruelties of every description are continually practised; and that these ignorant Pagans are in a state of the extremest wretchedness in consequence of the grossness of their superstitions. Be it observed, however, that all this information is given by a man who, according to his own statement, was only at one of the islands, and remained there but two weeks, sleeping every night on board his ship, and taking ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... conceived an angry horror. In her heart she did not like the Baron. Behind his impudent servility, behind the devotion which, with indelicate delicacy, he still forced on her attention, she divined the grossness of his nature. So a man may be proud of having tamed a bear, and yet sicken at his captive's odour. And above all, she had certain jealous intimations that the man was false and the deception double. True, she falsely trifled with his love; ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... consists in juggling with abstract ideas. The moment that a philosopher opposes thought to movement, I ask myself under what form he can think of a "thought," I suppose he must very poetically and very vaguely represent to himself something light and subtle which contrasts with the weight and grossness of material bodies. And thus our philosopher is punished in the sinning part; his contempt of the earthly has led him into an abuse of abstract reasoning, and this abuse has made him the dupe of ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... name, now I remember—did not consult her before he took to cocaine. Morphine is my own specialty. Victoria of course deplored it as much as any one could. No, I'm not for a minute intimating that Victoria is a Messalina. We'd all be better off if she were. It's only our grossness that finds fault with her. Your aunt is one of the most respectable women who ever lived, as 'chaste as unsunned snow—the very ice of chastity is in her!' Indeed, I've often wondered if the redoubtable Ephraim Smith himself, for all that he succeeded in marrying her, fared any better than ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... buvant avec des goujats dans un cabaret.' Johnson, perhaps, had this attack in mind when, in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 275), he thus wrote of Voltaire:—'He had been entertained by Pope at his table, when he talked with so much grossness, that Mrs. Pope was driven from the room. Pope discovered by a trick that he was a spy for the court, and never considered him as a man worthy ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... parable of "the sower" shows the care our Master took not to impart to dull ears and gross hearts 272:15 the spiritual teachings which dulness and grossness could not accept. Reading the thoughts of the people, he said: "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast 272:18 ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... emperor of the Romanof line, was a man of such extraordinary power of body and mind, such a remarkable combination of common sense, mental activity, advanced ideas, and determination to lift Russia to a high place among the nations, with cruelty, grossness, and infirmities of vice and passion, that his reign of forty-three years fills as large a place in Russian history as do the annals of all the preceding centuries, and the progress of Russia during this short period was greater than in any other epoch of three ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... their compositions, however satirical or familiar they may be, their verses are entirely free from the licentiousness which disfigures similar productions in India; and that if deficient in imagination and grace, they are equally exempt from grossness and indelicacy. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... clear gaze, a confused comprehension began to stir in him—at first only a sort of chagrin, then something more—a consciousness of his own heaviness of intellect and grossness of figure—the fatness of mind and body which had developed so rapidly within ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... irregular life sat upon Bilham and Miss Barrace that was the insidious, the delicate marvel. He was eager to concede that their relation to it was all indirect, for anything else in him would have shown the grossness of bad manners; but the indirectness was none the less consonant—THAT was striking-with a grateful enjoyment of everything that was Chad's. They spoke of him repeatedly, invoking his good name and good nature, and the worst confusion of mind for Strether was that all their mention of him was of ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... co-operated with the Girondists, now began to separate themselves again more and more widely from them. They flattered the mob. They encouraged every possible demonstration of lawless violence. They pandered to the passions of the multitude by affecting grossness and vulgarity in person, and language, and manners; by clamoring for the division of property, and for the death of the king. In tones daily increasing in boldness and efficiency, they declared the Girondists to be the friends of the monarch, and the enemies of popular liberty. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, But, being seasoned with a gracious voice Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? There is no vice so simple, but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts! How many cowards whose hearts are all as false As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins The beard of Hercules, and ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... This One, the source of human life, was placed beyond the limits of our visible universe; and in order for human life to return thither at death and to enjoy immortality, it was only necessary to refine away corporeal grossness according to the doctrines of Lao Tzu. Later on, this One came to be regarded as a fixed point of dazzling luminosity, in remote ether, around which circled for ever and ever, in the supremest glory of motion, the souls of those who ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... relationship between the soul and the body. The physical body in each incarnation is the material expression of the soul, of its moral power or weakness, of its wisdom or ignorance, of its purity or its grossness, just as one's face is, at each moment the expression of one's thought and emotion in physical matter. Every change of consciousness registers itself in matter. A man has emotions. He feels a thrill of joy and his face proclaims the fact. He becomes angry, and the change from joy to anger is registered ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... cynically selfish conduct of England toward the North in this war, whenever we have been threatened by reverses, should not be forgotten. It has been literally devilish in its grossness and meanness. Whatever wickedness the South has been guilty of was at least barefaced and bold. The South had not for years labored to build up an Abolition party in the North, as England did. For well nigh half a century has ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... go! I don't want to speak too slightingly of these verbal critics;—how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears silk ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... matter to which some allusion must be made, the grossness of the age, though here again detail is scarcely possible. The conditions of life in the sixteenth century made it difficult to draw a veil over the less pleasant side of human existence. The houses were filthy; the streets so disgusting that on days when there was no wind to disperse the mephitic ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... it, have denied its being. Is it hopeless to point out that one of the most recognizable characteristics of life is its unrecognizableness, and that the very token of its spiritual nature lies in its being beyond the grossness of our eyes? ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... style, or to lift the hero himself into that upper light where his commonest deeds are dazzling and fascinating. He had not the acumen, the weight, the learning, the logical irresistibleness of Calvin; nor had he the great human sympathies, the touch of earthiness, yet not grossness, which made Luther so dear to his countrymen, and which have imprinted a cordial geniality on the whole Lutheran Church. John Huss, though a man of learning, the Rector of a great and powerful University, though a true friend, though a man of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... compassion, to bestow on him." Though forty-eight hours had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so furious, that, observing his grossness and violence, all the members of the diplomatic corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and for the honour of our ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... man can suffer is the precise measure of his merit, and thus it was that our patriots and war-enthusiasts being incapable, by reason of their grossness and vulgarity, of suffering in a spiritual sense, were immune from the misery caused by the war and yet it was they above all others upon whose support the continuance of ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... Tuskegee Institute is largely to supply measurably well-equipped teachers for the schools—teachers able and eager to teach gardening and carpentry as well as grammar and arithmetic, teachers who seek to organize the social life of their communities upon wholesome principles, tactfully restraining grossness and unobtrusively proffering new and nobler sources of enjoyment. And so the academic studies are wrought into the ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... I feel," she remarked the next moment. "But you can read women, uncle, you've often said so, and I dare say you really know more about what I feel than I do myself." A grossness of innocence was her new assumption. "Now judging from what I do and look—that's the way to judge, isn't it, not from what I say?—what do you think my real inmost feelings are about ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... there, and I heard what they said. I am ashamed of it now, though I suppose I was only exercising a legal right. I found from their manner that an extraordinary affinity, or sympathy, entered into their attachment, which somehow took away all flavour of grossness. Their supreme desire is to be together—to share each other's emotions, and ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... essayed to initiate me in the cult of 'culture', and gave me a leaf to study, from the latter-day gospel. I learned it after a time, as I did the multiplication table. 'Culture steps in, and points out the grossness of untempered belief. It tells us the beauty of picturesque untruth; the grotesqueness of unmannerly conviction; truth and error have kissed each other in a sweet, serener sphere; this becomes that, and that ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... exclaimed the haughty Sarah, alluding to the grossness of the language attributed to her, adding, "Won't your Majesty give me leave to tell ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... and become possessed of it as a whole without perceiving that the mirror is held up to nature, that it reflects spots and blemishes which, on a survey of the vast and various orb, dwindle into natural and so comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is nihil ad rem, if it is not insincere. When Murray (May 3, 1819) ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... and terrible man he was? And Napoleon, was he aught but an abridgment of the French nation, the sublimate and "proof" essence of French character? Not one, of all the great men of history, has possessed, so far as we know, a physical constitution more perfectly representing, even in its advancing grossness, both the strength and weakness of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... guary miracle, in English a miracle play, is a kind of Interlude compiled in Cornish out of some scripture history with that grossness which accompanied the Romans' vetus comedia. For representing it they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the diameter of this inclosed plain some forty or fifty foot. The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to hear ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... confirmed by divers trials, that the root of the male peony dried, tied to the necke, doth helpe the falling sickness, and likewise the incubus, which we call the mare. The cause of both these diseases, and especially of the epilepsie from the stomach, is the grossness of the vapours, which rise and enter into the cells of the brain, and therefore the working is by extreme and subtle alternation which that simple hath." Worn as an amulet, the peony was a popular ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... or dramatic entertainments, pageants and tableaus, of varying degrees of grossness, similar to the more elaborate and polished products of the early Javanese and Peruvian drama ... one cannot help fancying must be all pieces out of the same puzzle ... I have with some pains discovered the origin of the name "Arioi." It throws a lurid light ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... This grossness in the presence of Miss Pratt was unthinkable. His mind refused to deal with so impossible a situation; he could not accept it as a fact that such words had actually been uttered in such a presence. And yet it was the truth; ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... cried in triumph, as the smile deepened on her pale face. "You're happier already! And you begin to understand me. You can hear what I am saying. Because no sin, no grossness has ever shut your ears to all but earthly sounds. Now listen to me carefully: Katje, I want you to break that silly, wicked promise I wheedled you into making. I want you to break it. You mustn't ruin your life—and James's—by marrying Frederik. It would mean ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... for mentioning in your presence a name contemptible or gross (as Jew)." Thus, for further elucidation to the enquirer after the peculiarities of language, Kie 'tkillem ma el Kaba hashak asseedi,—"He is talking with a prostitute—your pardon, Sir, for the grossness ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... G., do not you know, as well as I, that in all great cities, in your country and in mine as well as in this, a certain portion of every class of society is less moral than the rest? In some countries immorality is more refined indeed; and when manners lose their grossness, they are stripped apparently of half their vice. But suppose the fact, that women, even the unmarried, are less pure here than in Europe, remember that with us, besides the mother, there is the nurse of the family, or ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... both in the inventions and in the use of more design, better manner, and greater diligence, in their execution; and likewise that the rust of age and the rudeness and disproportion, wherewith the grossness of that time had clothed them, were swept away. But who will be bold enough to say that there was to be found at that time one who was in every way perfect, and who brought his work, whether in invention, or design, or colouring, to the standard of to-day, and contrived the sweet gradation ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... 'Eloisa' alone is sufficient to convict him of gross licentiousness." Thus, out it comes at last. Mr. Bowles does accuse Pope of "gross licentiousness," and grounds the charge upon a poem. The licentiousness is a "grand peut-etre," according to the turn of the times being. The grossness I deny. On the contrary, I do believe that such a subject never was, nor ever could be, treated by any poet with so much delicacy, mingled with, at the same time, such true and intense passion. Is the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a spontaneity, I might almost say a grossness, which always repels me a little, just because it belongs to that kind of Catholic fervour which on its figurative side will always leave me cold. But ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... its wholesome influence like living creatures; the trees, in lieu of leaves or blossoms, shed upon the ground a frosty rime that sparkled as it fell, and might have been the dust of diamonds. So it was to Tom. From cottage chimneys, smoke went streaming up high, high, as if the earth had lost its grossness, being so fair, and must not be oppressed by heavy vapour. The crust of ice on the else rippling brook was so transparent, and so thin in texture, that the lively water might of its own free will have stopped—in ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... were to him a source of entertainment only, like the scraping of a fiddle in a change-house. This outer sensibility and inner toughness set me against him; it seemed of a piece with that impudent grossness which I knew to underlie the veneer of his fine manners; and sometimes my gorge rose against him as though he were deformed—and sometimes I would draw away as though from something partly spectral. I had moments when I thought of him as of a man ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Kloster's music was certainly as beautiful as the lilies, he himself wasn't like those tragic sellers. It was only that he was so very ordinary,—a little man compact, apparently, of grossness, and the music he was making was so divine. It was that marvellous French and Russian stuff. I must play it to you, and play it to you, till you love it. It's like nothing there has ever been. It is of an exquisite youth,—untouched, fearless, quite heedless ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... the young animal in her superbly healthy body. She had been close to nature all day, the riotous passion of spring flowing free in her as in the warm earth herself. But the magic of the mystic hills had lifted her beyond the merely personal. Some sense of grossness in him for the first time seared across her brain. She started up, and her face told ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... canting trash about your love for the Saviour! I might have known that one of your kind could not rise above the grossness in you. I hope you will be as miserable and as unhappy as I am.... ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... grasp at any friendly straw. And Rutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort of straw. The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish. He could tolerate Hollister's mutilated countenance because he had grown accustomed to horrible sights,—not because he had any particular sympathy for a crippled, mutilated man's misfortune, or any understanding of such a man's ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the stranger: "not at all, it may be. There is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am taken off my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in my sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of the actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may be, this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state of being, with a dim pleasure, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Greek example, it strays on dangerous ground, unless Nature is the model. The Italians of the Seventeenth Century, tired of forever imitating and copying, lost all their refinement in the effort to originate. Grossness, sensuality took the place of fine purity in border designs. Inflation, so to speak, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... it. Musicians do not trust alone to notes for moods. Their light shines only through a glass darkly. But in some other sphere, in some happier time, in a world where gross wants shall have disappeared, and therefore the grossness of words shall be no longer necessary, where hunger and thirst and cold and care and passion have no more admittance, and only love and faith and hope and admiration and aspiration, shall crave utterance, in that blessed ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... to reproduce his grossness and trivialities? All that he thought, at that hour, was even noble, though he could not clothe it otherwise than in the language of a brutal farce. Presently he bade me call the doctor; and when that officer had come in, raised himself a little up in his bed, pointed first to himself and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for wealth has worn out much of its grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors certainly conceived of money as able to confer a distinct gratification in itself, not considered simply as a symbol of wealth. The old poets, when they introduce a miser, make him address his gold as his mistress; as something to be seen, felt, and hugged; as ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the stupidity of the American mass and more particularly with the grossness (as he sees it) of New ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... uncharitable to conclude that the pretended saint was as bold a sinner as ever paid infamous courtship to religion, and as such was studiously to be avoided. I turned my attention from him to Tomkins. There was no grossness about him, no brutality, no abominable vice. In the hour of my defeat and desertion, he had extended to me his sympathy, and, more in sorrow than in anger, I am convinced he voted for my expulsion from the church when he found that his vote, and twenty added to it, would not have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... present this lengthy play before the King and Court at Coimbra on occasion of the birth of the King's daughter Maria. There is no action in the play, and King Manuel would perhaps have yawned at these shepherds' quarrels, relieved not at all by the parvo's wit or the hermit's grossness and only occasionally by a touch of lyric poetry; but perhaps these simple scenes were welcome to the growing artificiality of the Court. For us the beautiful cossante Um amigo que eu havia stands out like a single orange gleaming from a dark-foliaged tree. The interest lies in the customs of the ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... and living there for the vulgar and unmanly purpose of self-indulgence or paltry avarice. Those absentees have their reward in profligate sons, and foreignized daughters, in giving them manners ridiculous to the people of the Continent, and disgusting to their countrymen—morals adopting the grossness of continental life, and general habits rendered utterly unfit for a return to their country, and, of course, for any rational and meritorious conduct, until they sink into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... further observe that the bringing of lions, serpents, palm-trees, rustic shepherds, and banished noblemen together in the Forest of Arden, is a strange piece of geographical license, which certain critics have not failed to make merry withal. Perhaps they did not see that the very grossness of the thing proves it to have been designed. The Poet keeps his geography true enough whenever he has cause to do so. He knew, at all events, that lions did not roam at large in France. By this irregular combination of actual things, he informs the whole with ideal effect, giving to this ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... one of the most eminent of the ancient fathers describes the music of the flutes, sackbuts, and psalteries of the temple worship as only befitting the childhood of the Church. "It was," says he, "permitted to the Jews, as sacrifice was, for the heaviness and grossness of their souls. God condescended to their weakness, because they were lately drawn off from idols; but now, instead of instruments, we may use our own bodies to ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... business of names; but I rejoice in the pleasure I reaped by what I did, while I took to myself the name of Anubis." When he had said this, he went his way. But now she began to come to the sense of the grossness of what she had done, and rent her garments, and told her husband of the horrid nature of this wicked contrivance, and prayed him not to neglect to assist her in this case. So he discovered the fact to the emperor; whereupon ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... on the Magi's altars glowed Spake to his soul in symbols and expressed The immortal purity that without rest Strives with the mortal grossness whose abode Is in the heart. Their symboled fire showed One Whose spirit on the altar of the world Burns ceaselessly,—where, if all vice be hurled, It shall be purged with fire that shall atone,— Christ's love the flame, man's sin th' ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... contrary, prepared with ardor for the fight. Their enthusiasm was intense. Those barbarians, with their half-nakedness, their grossness, their ferocity, their ignorance, and their impiety, were revolting. They committed murder and devastation like dolts. They left their dead on the field, without burial. They engaged in battle without consulting priest or augur. It was ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... succession of drunken and dissolute czarinas, which aped the corruption of Versailles more consummately than its refinement. The age was that of Louis XV, of Lord Sandwich, of Augustus the Strong: in it even a Burke had persuaded himself that "vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." The reader of Bayle and Brantome had been introduced to a bizarre sort of morality; her "spiritual father," Voltaire, was the author of La Pucelle and Jacques le Fataliste proceeded from the same pen as the University ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... utter a word of shame. Desdemona cannot even bring herself to speak the coarse word with which her husband taunts her; she cannot make herself believe that there are women in the world who could stoop-to such grossness.[L] ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... who bestowed not her hand on the Duc de Montausier until he had served as many years in seeking it as Jacob had served to gain that of Rachel, and until she had passed her thirtieth year (in order that his passion should become as purified from all grossness, as was the language spoken among the circle in which she lived), receiving with dignified reserve the finely painted flowers and poems to illustrate them, which formed the celebrated Guirlande de Julie, presented to her by ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... is as real as Richard Savage, with whom he is contemporary, and it must be admitted that he is a more presentable personage. What a jolly philosophy is his about the delights of beggary! It has all the humor of Rabelais with no touch of the Touraine grossness. It has something of the wisdom of Aurelius, only clad in homespun instead of the purple. The philosophy of contentment was never more merrily nor more whimsically expressed. A synod of sages could not formulate a scheme in praise of poverty more impressive than the contagious ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the age of Charles II. to that of Aristophanes—'which called its own grossness polite.' How bitterly he decries the stale poems of the time as 'a heap of senseless ribaldry;' how truly he shows that licentiousness weakens as well as depraves the judgment. 'When Satyrs are brought to court,' he observes, 'no wonder the Graces ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... in speech, and brutally regardless of the feelings of others. Governed, like most women, solely by her feelings, Lady Devine had at first been prodigal of her affection to the man she believed to be her injured son. But his rash acts of selfishness, his habits of grossness and self-indulgence, gradually disgusted her. For some time she—poor woman—fought against this feeling, endeavouring to overcome her instincts of distaste, and arguing with herself that to permit a detestation of her unfortunate ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... protest against the lapses and grossness of the established one, and the baby religion feeds and lives on the other until it has grown strong enough to break off and live a life of its own. Buds are being broken off all the time, but only a few live; the rest die because they ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Naturalness is the sign and the test of perfect love. It is the sign of it, for, when love can show itself natural and true, one may conclude that it is purified of its unavowable imperfections or defects, of its alloy of wretched and petty passions, its grossness, its chimerical notions, that it has become strong and healthy and vigorous. It is the ordeal of it, for to show itself natural, to be always true, without shrinking, it must have all the lovable qualities, and have them without ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... dried, tied to the necke, doth helpe the falling sickness, and likewise the incubus, which we call the mare. The cause of both these diseases, and especially of the epilepsie from the stomach, is the grossness of the vapours, which rise and enter into the cells of the brain, and therefore the working is by extreme and subtle alternation which that simple hath." Worn as an amulet, the peony was a ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than to lose my images of suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks. I make no apology to the spiritually minded, to whom this statement must be a revelation of grossness. I am content to tell the truth as well as I am able. I do not even need to console myself with the reflection that what is dross to the dreamy ascetic may be gold to the psychologist. The fact is that I ate, even as a delicate child, with considerable relish; ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... I sat imagining the scene. I saw myself suddenly rising ('sudden Ianthe rose') from the prone body and all circumjacent grossness—rising, through clouds and darkness, to some delightsome plane of the inner world. A dozen yards in front of me, beside a graceful tree, would stand 'the only.' We would gaze at each other, with ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... other feeling but a sickly sense of pain—show the deepest insight into human nature, and into the effects of those refinements in depravity, by which it has been good-naturedly asserted that 'vice loses half its evil in losing all its grossness.'" In the death of the Countess, again, he speaks thus of two of the subordinate characters:—"We would particularly refer to the captious, petulant self-sufficiency of the apothecary, whose face and figure are constructed on exact physiognomical ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... animal strength developed a living passion for tyranny and grossness. We have seen it evidenced in the orgies that have reddened ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... much that has instructed and delighted our predecessors, are, nevertheless, but ill adapted in their original form for general perusal. Among these may be reckoned some works of fiction, the excellencies of which are often obscured by a grossness of style not uncommon at the time when they were composed, but which justly excludes them from family-reading in the present day. Such works would be acceptable if freed from objectionable passages; and in undertaking to accomplish this reform, ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... maintained with much precision; he has a pride in having his clothes of excellent materials, and, notwithstanding the seeming grossness of his appearance, there is still discernible that neatness and propriety of person which is almost inherent in an Englishman. He enjoys great consequence and consideration along the road; has frequent conferences with the village housewives, who look upon him as a man of great ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... pig is remarkably intelligent and brave,—but he's gross; and grossness delays one's achievement, it takes so much time. The snake too, though wise, has a way of eating himself into stupors. If super-snake-men had had banquets they would have been too vast to describe. Each little snake family could have eaten a herd ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... her in grace?" wept the Fairy Eglantine; "the Spark will melt away all mortal grossness, till she is light and graceful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... manner I invited thee. As for the reproaches thou hast laid upon Mundus, I value not the business of names; but I rejoice in the pleasure I reaped by what I did, while I took to myself the name of Anubis." When he had said this, he went his way. But now she began to come to the sense of the grossness of what she had done, and rent her garments, and told her husband of the horrid nature of this wicked contrivance, and prayed him not to neglect to assist her in this case. So he discovered the fact to the emperor; whereupon Tiberius inquired into ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... evil designs—I believed, without a doubt, that he had passed the boundaries of propriety in his intercourse with her; but I believed not that she had fallen! No! I had an instinctive confidence in her purity, that rendered it apparently impossible that she should lapse into the grossness of illicit love. What, then, was my fear? That she did love him, though, struggling with the tendency of her heart, she had not yielded in the struggle. I believed that his grace, beauty, and accomplishments—his persevering attention—his similar tastes—had ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... more reason why an artist should have nothing to do with domesticities. But look here, you are wrong as regards me. If ever I marry, amico mio, my wife shall learn to make more than a theoretical distinction between what is art and what is grossness. If ever I have children, they shall from the first he taught a natural morality, and not the conventional. If I can afford good casts of noble statues, they shall stand freely about my house. When I read aloud, by the fire side, there shall be no skipping or ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... actuality. To Browning himself that problem presented itself in a form which tasked far more severely the resources of poetic imagination, in proportion as actuality bodied itself forth to his alert senses in more despotic grossness and strength. Shelley is commonly thought to have evaded this task altogether,—building his dream-world of cloud and cavern loveliness remote from anything we know. It is Browning, the most "actual" of poets, who insisted, half a century ago, on the "practicality" ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... We met either in some public place or at my hotel, where I entertained him as freely as I might without appearing to be prompted by charity. He seemed always hungry, and this was his nearest approach to human grossness. I made a point of asking no impertinent questions, but, each time we met, I ventured to make some respectful allusion to the magnum opus, to inquire, as it were, as to its health and progress. "We are getting on, with the Lord's help," he would ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... about singing and collecting his pence: to such theatrical processions in collegiate bodies, Warton attributes the custom, still existing at Eton, of going ad montem.[132] But this was a tame mummery, compared with the grossness elsewhere allowed in burlesquing religious ceremonies. The English, more particularly after the Reformation, seem not to have polluted the churches with such abuses. The relish for the Saturnalia was ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... wholesome influence like living creatures; the trees, in lieu of leaves or blossoms, shed upon the ground a frosty rime that sparkled as it fell, and might have been the dust of diamonds. So it was to Tom. From cottage chimneys, smoke went streaming up high, high, as if the earth had lost its grossness, being so fair, and must not be oppressed by heavy vapour. The crust of ice on the else rippling brook was so transparent, and so thin in texture, that the lively water might of its own free will have stopped—in Tom's glad mind it had—to look upon the lovely morning. And lest the sun should ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... in French, was first approved by the Cabinet Ministers, and then delivered as a State paper to the courts of Europe. The style and manner are praised by Beaumarchais himself, who, in his private quarrel, attempted a reply; but he flatters me, by ascribing the memoir to Lord Stormont; and the grossness of his invective betrays the loss of temper and of wit; he acknowledged, Oeuv. de Beaumarchais, iii. 299, 355, that le style ne seroit pas sans grace, ni la logique sans justesse, &c. if the facts were true which he undertakes to disprove. For these facts ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... me, an occasion to abase myself—" He broke off, conscious of a grossness of allusion that seemed, on a closer approach, the real obstacle to full expression. But the moments were flying, and for his self-esteem's sake he must find some way of making her share the burden ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... whole of the nurse's speech is admirable: its naive and striking picture of conjugal affection goes far to redeem the grossness ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... lions, serpents, palm-trees, rustic shepherds, and banished noblemen together in the Forest of Arden, is a strange piece of geographical license, which certain critics have not failed to make merry withal. Perhaps they did not see that the very grossness of the thing proves it to have been designed. The Poet keeps his geography true enough whenever he has cause to do so. He knew, at all events, that lions did not roam at large in France. By this irregular ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... that matters were much improved, both in the inventions and in the use of more design, better manner, and greater diligence, in their execution; and likewise that the rust of age and the rudeness and disproportion, wherewith the grossness of that time had clothed them, were swept away. But who will be bold enough to say that there was to be found at that time one who was in every way perfect, and who brought his work, whether in invention, or design, or colouring, to the standard of to-day, and contrived the sweet gradation of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... human life with an eye of strict attention, that the abstract image of womanhood, in. its loveliness, its delicacy, and its modesty, nowhere makes itself more impressive or more advantageously felt than in the humblest cottages, because it is there brought into immediate juxtaposition with the grossness of manners, and the careless license of language incident to the fathers and brothers of the house. And this is more especially true in a nation of unaffected sexual gallantry, [Endnote: 14] such as the English and the Gothic races in general; since, under the immunity which their women enjoy from ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... but you must write more yet. What say you to a series of poems in your own original way, steeped from end to end in Scottish superstition, but purified from its grossness by your own genius and taste? Do write me soon. I have a good mind to come and commence shepherd beside you, and aid you in making a yearly pastoral Gazette in prose and verse for our ain native Lowlands. The thing ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... were indistinguishably blended. This One, the source of human life, was placed beyond the limits of our visible universe; and in order for human life to return thither at death and to enjoy immortality, it was only necessary to refine away corporeal grossness according to the doctrines of Lao Tzu. Later on, this One came to be regarded as a fixed point of dazzling luminosity, in remote ether, around which circled for ever and ever, in the supremest glory of motion, the souls of those who ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... an abridgment of the French nation, the sublimate and "proof" essence of French character? Not one, of all the great men of history, has possessed, so far as we know, a physical constitution more perfectly representing, even in its advancing grossness, both the strength and weakness of the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... enemies—blinding them, and cutting off their feet and hands, and inflicting on them the most degrading of mutilations—might lead one to suppose they were of Eastern origin, were not such practices traceable to the Northmen. These practices imply a grossness of mind that is much at war with the common notion of the gentleness and cultivation of the Norman nobles. They were noted for their craft, their spirit of intrigue, and their readiness to get possession of the property of others by any and all means. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... now, and she laid her hand on his arm to stop him. He looked down at the slender gloved hand on his arm, feeling as if a giant had grasped him; then he raised his eyes to her face, flushing a purplish red as he remembered his grossness. It seemed monstrous in the presence of this girl-advocate. Her face was like silver; her eyes seemed pools ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... his merciless exposure of profanity masquerading in the habiliments of religion, was part of the life-work and mission of this great poet. He had been born, it is recognised, not only to sing the loves and joys and sorrows of his fellow men and women, but to purge their lives of grossness, and their religion of the filth of hypocrisy and cant. Let it be admitted, that he himself went 'a kennin wrang.' What argument is there? We do not deny the divine mission of Samson because of Delilah. Surely that giant's life was a wasted one, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Rowley's fancy. On the other hand, the martyrdom of St. Winifred and St. Hugh is an abject tragic failure; an abortive attempt at cheap terror and jingling pity, followed up by doggrel farce of intolerable grossness. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... she escaped actual outrage and injury in his house and hers, it was not because she did not provoke him, for there was nothing in his wife which Gervase hated so heartily, resented so keenly, as her refraining from contradicting him. But below the grossness and sin of the poor lout and caitiff there was a fund of sullen, latent manliness and kindness, which held him back from insulting the defenceless woman—for all her pride and purity—who was his wife, just as it had held ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... And it must be owned that from this first sight of life, as the common populations live it, his soul revolted. Delicately nurtured, finely bred, his sensibility accentuated by the prickings of that thorn in the flesh which was so intimate a part of his otherwise noble heritage, the grossness and brutality of much which most boys of his age have already learnt to take for granted affected him to the point of loathing. And more especially did he loathe the last picture presented to him on the outskirts of the common. At the door of a gaudily-painted van, somewhat ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... are just like living men, except that they have no noses. When they first arrive in the mansions of the blest, they are laid out to dry on a sort of gridiron over a slow fire in order to purge away the grossness of the body and make them ethereal and light, as spirits should be. Yet, oddly enough, though they have no noses they cannot enter the realms of bliss unless their noses were pierced in their lifetime. For these savages bore holes in their ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better; those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides, and where this poet seems to have gathered his comick dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the ears of the present age than any other authour equally remote, ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... withdrawn; thus circumstances of horror may be safely touched in verbal description, and for a time dwelt upon by the mind, as often by Homer and Spenser, (by the latter frequently with too much grossness, as in the description of the combat of the Red-Cross Knight with Errour,) which could not for a moment be regarded or tolerated in their reality, or on canvas; and besides this mellowing and softening operation on those it retains, the conceptive faculty has the power of letting ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... Debby had been of the greatest benefit to Harry Glen. Since his parting with Rachel Bond, there had been going on in his spirit a fermentation like that with which good wine discharges itself of its grossness and impurities, and becomes clear and fine. In this process had vanished the absorbing selfishness of a much-indulged only son, and teh supercilious egotism which came as an almost necessary result of his college curriculum. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... pictures, for his mind was vigorous to a degree; a power that throws down the gauntlet, as it were, with a confidence that disdains any disguise or fear of criticism: a confidence the more manifest in the defects, particularly of grossness and anachronism, bringing them out strongly palpable and conspicuous by a more vivid colouring, more determined opposition of dark and light,—as if he should say, behold, I dare. And this power has the usual charm of all power; it commands respect, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... Gondremark, besides, she had conceived an angry horror. In her heart she did not like the Baron. Behind his impudent servility, behind the devotion which, with indelicate delicacy, he still forced on her attention, she divined the grossness of his nature. So a man may be proud of having tamed a bear, and yet sicken at his captive's odour. And above all, she had certain jealous intimations that the man was false and the deception double. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it is proper to remark, were made in a country where the art of pleasing was refined only to extract the grossness of vice. He did not go back to nature, or his ruling appetite disturbed the operations of reason, else he would not have drawn ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... not from nature. How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms! To spare the grossness of the names, and to do the thing yet more severely, is to draw a full face and to make the nose and cheeks stand out, and yet not to employ any depth of shadowing. This is the mystery of that noble trade, which yet no master ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... from her own lips, as she told it when she came back. Yes, she went away—I will make that plain enough. It was after a quarrel with Johannes over some little grossness of no consequence that she walked forth from the house and down towards the spruit. It was between afternoon and evening, and she sought a quiet place to sit and prey on her heart. There was a pool that summer, ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... chimney smokes about our world to-day, and the sound of the weeping of children who toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdened women, the noise of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures and all the ugly grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, with the utter change in our lives. As I look back into the past I see a vast exultant dust of house-breaking and removal rise up into the clear air that followed the hour of the green vapors, I live again the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... hard, with clean ambitions, yet he was hungry. He could not understand it. No doubt an empty stomach inclines a man to much logic and the splitting of straws. There comes with an empty stomach less of grossness and more of abstract reason, and an exaltation which may be all impractical, but which ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... competence, had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would have been a dangerous resolution, anywhere in the world; it was fatal, in New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen; they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor takes to farming, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... his knowledge of the boy Trenchard was led to fear that if he were leniently dealt with now, tomorrow, when, sober, he came to realize the grossness of the thing he had done and the unlikelihood of its being forgiven him, there was no saying but that to protect himself he might betray Wilding's share in the plot that was being hatched. That in itself would be bad enough; but there might be worse, for he could scarcely ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... bundling of the Welsh, and the hand-fasting in some parts of Scotland, are derived. The conversation which took place between the Empress Julia and the wife of a Caledonian chief, as related by Xiphilin, certainly evinces a grossness and indelicacy in the amours of the British ladies, if true; but it appears to be a reply where wit and reproof were more aimed at than truth. The case of the Empress Cartismandua shows the nice feeling of the Britons as to the propriety of female conduct. The respect of the Germans ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... well," he told her, nodding again in his solemn, weighty fashion; "everybody that amounts to anything has this fever of unrest. Back home we used to stack the wheat to let it sweat and harden. You're going through that. It takes the grossness out ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... earthiness—never an agreeable trait, and one to which probably is due the depreciation of Courbet that is so popular even among appreciative critics. It is easy to characterize Courbet as brutal and material, but what is easy is generally not exact. What one glibly stigmatizes as brutality and grossness may, after all, be something of a particularly strong savor, enjoyed by the painter himself with a gusto too sterling and instinctive to be justifiably neglected, much less contemned. The first ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... explanation that the springing of it on the professors was due to an error or misunderstanding. But that the attempt should have been made, and in a manner that argued so total a lack of any sense of its grossness and crudity, is a significant warning of the extent to which the notions underlying it have ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... holdeth the queen in deep disfavor," he said, "for that he, having been sent by Janus on some embassy of marriage for the child Zarla, came into the Chamber of Counts of the Kingdom—not many days since—and with much grossness of speech would have discussed the matter at length in that presence; which we, of her household—she being in the first grief of her young widowhood—prevented, through members of the Queen's ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... superficialities of her. There still remains the princess herself below these wonderful externals. There still remains the woman herself. Woman, any woman, is marvelous enough, Covington. When you think of all they stand for, the fineness of them compared with our man grossness, that wonderful power of creation in them, their exquisite delicacy, combined with the big-souled capacity for sacrifice and suffering that dwarfs any of our petty burdens into insignificance—God knows, a man should bow his knee before the least of them. ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... grays, avoiding the gorgeousness of the old masters. But it seems probable that in the celestial regions there is more, rather than less, of brilliant coloring than on earth. What can be more brilliant than the rainbow, yet what more perfectly free from earthly grossness? Nevertheless, in looking at the pictures of Schoeffer there is such a serene and spiritual charm spread over them, that one is little inclined to wish them other than they are. No artist that I have ever seen, not even Raphael, has ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fervent sentence of the author of the Imitation, Oportet fieri stultum. And if there is a later silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words, while accepting this last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of "nice" to ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... texture of the hollows seemed different. The thin-lipped mouths were from the same mould, but George's lips were firm and muscular, while Al's were soft and loose—the lips of an ascetic turned voluptuary. There was also a sag at the corners. His flesh hinted of grossness, especially so in the eagle-like aquiline nose that must once have been like the other's, but that had lost the austerity ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... draws, in shrinking haste, From sin that passeth helpless by; The weak antennae of whose taste From touch of alien grossness fly— Shall, banished to the outer waste, Never in ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... vices are held to be grossly criminal in the lower ranks, because manifestly ruinous to their temporal interests: but in the higher, they are represented as "losing half their evil by losing all their grossness," as flowing naturally from great prosperity, from the excess of gaiety and good humour; and they are accordingly "regarded with but a small degree of disapprobation, and censured very slightly or not at all[85]."—"Non meus hic sermo est." These are the remarks of authors, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... had determined his start in the morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as he might say, less hard. He could have lived in such a place; but it wasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiled anywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehow make shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home—left, that is, to itself—wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible as what was just round them, though doubtless in less ample masses. As he took in moreover ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... influence in Europe, had it been true to the message in virtue of which it had grown rich and powerful, it would have protested unceasingly against this reign of violence. It was not a great moral influence. The grossness and illiteracy of the people, the appalling immorality of the clergy and monks and nuns, and this almost entire failure to apply Christian or ordinary human principles to the worst feature of the life of Europe, are terrible offsets to the little good it achieved. ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... least, styled the worldly kingdom that was in their hands, the kingdom of Christ, and so they became worldly and not true Christians. Then human inventions and novelties, both in doctrine and worship, crowded fast into the church; a door opened thereunto, by the grossness and carnality that appeared then among the generality of Christians, who had long since left the guidance of God's meek and heavenly spirit, and given themselves up to superstition, will-worship, and voluntary humility. And as superstition is blind, so it is heady and furious, for all ...
— A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers • William Penn
... regard which, as a master, I may condescend, from compassion, to bestow on him." Though forty-eight hours had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so furious, that, observing his grossness and violence, all the members of the diplomatic corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and for the honour of our nation ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... respect for her exalted rank, nor a sense of the high responsibility attached to the character of a guardian, with which circumstances invested him, had proved sufficient to restrain him from freedoms of behaviour towards her, which no reasonable allowance for the comparative grossness of the age can reduce within the limits of propriety or decorum. We learn that, on some occasions at least, she endeavoured to repel his presumption by such expedients as her youthful inexperience suggested; ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... is taken to Auerbach's Cellar, where four jolly companions are assembled for a drinking-bout. He is simply disgusted with the grossness and vulgarity of it all. He is too old—so the Devil concludes—for the role he is playing and must have his youth renewed. So they repair to an old witch, who gives Faust an elixir that makes him young again. The scene ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... determinate disposition in matter, both as to local distance and as to other conditions, in order to produce its effect. Therefore as local distance hinders the effect of a heavenly body (for the sun has not the same effect in heat in Dacia as in Ethiopia); so the grossness of matter, its low or high temperature or other such disposition, can hinder the effect ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... play, into a prominent and moving character. There can be no question but that Boito ("Tobia Gorria" is but an anagramatic nom de plume of Arrigo Boito) was highly successful in remodeling the tragedy for operatic purposes, but he did not palliate its moral grossness or succeed in inviting our compassionate feelings for anyone entitled to them. The only personages who in this opera escape disaster are a pair of lovers, whose sufferings, as depicted or inferred, cannot be said to have refined the guilt ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... for example, a man might hope to become a poet or a sculptor by feeding upon the flesh or bones of a Shakespeare or a Michael Angelo. Only mind can know and receive mind, and it is really difficult to comprehend the grossness of soul which suggests to man the idea that by feasting on the flesh and blood of his God he may hope ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... absurdity, nay, the enormity of the position in all its grossness. And my excuse for these pages must be this: that though the story itself is nothing, it has yet had such odd and unforeseen consequences and adventures that the tale of them may possess some interest. ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... was his being left to perceive how little it charmed her that he should come down to Gardencourt. She was already liable to the incursions of one suitor at this place, and though it might be pleasant to be appreciated in opposite quarters there was a kind of grossness in entertaining two such passionate pleaders at once, even in a case where the entertainment should consist of dismissing them. She made no reply to Mr. Goodwood; but at the end of three days she wrote to Lord Warburton, and the letter belongs to ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... life, for only one has been recorded. It was ingeniously said of VAUCANSON, that he was as much an automaton as any which he made. HOGARTH and SWIFT, who looked on the circles of society with eyes of inspiration, were absent in company; but their grossness and asperity did not prevent the one from being the greatest of comic painters, nor the other as much a creator of manners in his way. Genius, even in society, is pursuing its own operations, and it would cease to be itself were it always to ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... struggling rank in all the manlier provinces of the mind, in science, poetry, and philosophy; he was the prince of scorners. The splenetic pleasantry which stimulates the wearied tastes of high life; the grossness which half concealed captivates the loose, without offence to their feeble decorum; and the easy brilliancy which throws what colours it will on the darker features of its purpose; made Voltaire, the very genius of France. But under this smooth ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... a true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality. It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physique of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one's self, that we alone can prevent ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... impurity; uncleanness &c (filth) 653; immodesty; grossness &c adj.; indelicacy, indecency; impudicity^; obscenity, ribaldry, Fescennine, smut, bawdry^, double entente, equivoque [Fr.]. concupiscence, lust, carnality, flesh, salacity; pruriency, lechery, lasciviency^, lubricity; Sadism, sapphism^. incontinence, intrigue, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and thick, threw back the light from the flaming torches as though even those universal rays could not penetrate such grossness. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... mysterious iniquity in a dangerous relation to himself and began to lose his head. What he really wanted was to have his existence left intact, for his own cherishing and pride. It was a moral aspiration, but in his alarm the native grossness of his nature came clattering out like a devil out of a trap. He would blow the gaff, split, give away the whole show, he would back up honest people, kiss the book, say what he thought, let all the world know . . . and when he paused to draw breath, all around him was silent and still. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that nearly resembles a man. What shall be thought of his assertion, that before the time of Dryden there was no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts, and "that words too familiar or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet?" It might with more show of reason be affirmed, that in proportion as our writers have adopted such a system as ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... consciousness, which Tiberius had not, that there were personal wrongs to be avenged as well as political ideas to be realised. To a narrow mind the vendetta is simply an act of justice; to an intellectual hater such as Gracchus it is also a work of reason. The folly of crime but exaggerates its grossness, and the hatred for the criminal is merged in an exalting and inspiring contempt. Yet the man thus attuned to passion was, what every great orator must be, a painful student of the most delicate of arts. The language of the successful demagogue seldom becomes the study ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... and Court at Coimbra on occasion of the birth of the King's daughter Maria. There is no action in the play, and King Manuel would perhaps have yawned at these shepherds' quarrels, relieved not at all by the parvo's wit or the hermit's grossness and only occasionally by a touch of lyric poetry; but perhaps these simple scenes were welcome to the growing artificiality of the Court. For us the beautiful cossante Um amigo que eu havia stands out like a single orange ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... opposite him a flower he has plucked or hopes to pluck. He drugs himself deliberately. Half the time when he should be soaring in his thoughts, he descends of deliberate intent. Instead of his flower, he makes his woman the partner of his grossness." ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Mr. Casaubon that evening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea's charm, in all which Will joined, but with a difference. No sooner did Naumann mention any detail of Dorothea's beauty, than Will got exasperated at his presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary words, and what business had he to talk of her lips? She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women were. Will could not say just what he thought, but he became irritable. And yet, when after ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... she thought herself too lofty. They both were late in coming to maturity, and psychical ripeness was much behind even the physical. Miriam was exceedingly sensitive, as her mother had always been. The slightest grossness made her recoil almost in anguish. Her brothers were brutal, but never coarse in speech. The men did all the discussing of farm matters outside. But, perhaps, because of the continual business of birth and of begetting which goes on upon every farm, Miriam was the more ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... style of wit that is peculiar to himself. It is Gaulish, tinged with the wit of a limb of the law and with jovial grossness. When the vote upon the bill against universal suffrage was about to be taken some member of the majority, whose name I have forgotten, went ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... within reach of their senses, that seemed so directly to receive their offerings and prayers, that became so dearly familiar from long associations. The bulk of the Chaldean nation for a long time remained Turanian, and the materialistic grossness of the original Shumiro-Accadian religion greatly fostered its idolatrous tendencies. The old belief in the talismanic virtues of all images (see p. 162) continued to assert itself, and was easily transferred to those representing the divinities of the later ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... standard of "good manners and decorum"? In such matters there is always growth and change of opinion. Sir Walter Scott makes mention of an elderly lady, who, reading over again certain books she had deemed in her youth to be of a most harmless kind, was shocked at their exceeding grossness. She had unconsciously moved on with the civilising and refining influences of her time. And the question of morality in relation to the drama is confessedly very difficult to deal with. "It must be something almost of a scandalous ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... could buy, political power and luxury; and in these directions his whole resources were expended. The elections, once pure, became matters of annual bargain between himself and his supporters. The once hardy, abstemious mode of living degenerated into grossness ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... orthodoxy a hair's breadth higher or lower than I had done; and attacked, with a virulence that shewed I was totally blind to the lameness of my own cause, the socinianizing clergy, who dared subscribe in defiance of the grossness of their heresy, and the Calvinists, who had the impudence to understand the articles in the sense in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... thoroughly disgusted with Vendome, who, high as he was in station, displayed a shameless grossness of manner which was more than the pious churchman could endure. The conduct of the affair was therefore left to the interpreter, whose delicacy was not disturbed by the duke's behavior, and who managed to ingratiate himself fully in the good graces ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... Those are only book-rooms by courtesy, and never can satisfy any one who has breathed the sacred air. It is a rich and strong spirit, not only filling the room, but pouring out from the door and possessing the hall, redeeming an opposite dining-room from grossness, and a more distant drawing-room from frivolity, and even lending a goodly flavour to bedrooms on upper floors. It is distilled from curious old duodecimos packed on high shelves out of sight, and blows over folios, with large clasps, that once stood in monastery libraries, and gathers ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... the adjective by which I can best describe Doctor Florret and all his attributes. He was a large man, but not too large—just the size one would select for the head-master of an important middle-class school; stout, not fat, suggesting comfort, not grossness. His hands were white and well shaped. On the left he wore a fine diamond ring, but it shone rather than sparkled. He spoke of commonplace things in a voice that lent dignity even to the weather. His face, which was clean-shaven, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of external vice, just in proportion to its grossness, incapacitates us for perceiving what is true or loving what is good. By vice is not meant crime such as exposes us to punishment by the law of the land, but sins against the laws of God, that bring their own punishment with them, by defacing the ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... Expurgated of much grossness and profanity, the discursive talk, in this hiding place of criminals, may be partially reproduced as follows. The chief ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... had omitted. The MSS. of Sicilian and Tuscan songs, dating from the fifteenth century and earlier, yield a fair proportion of decidedly obscene compositions. Yet the fact stated above is integrally correct. When acclimatised in the large towns, the rustic Muse not unfrequently assumes a garb of grossness. At home, among the fields and on the mountains, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... daisies, and thousands of other flowers—or the girls named after them. Samuel Baker says there are no broken hearts in Africa. Why should there be when individuals are so similar that if a man loses his girl he can easily find another just like her in color, face, rotundity, and grossness? A civilized lover would mourn the loss of his bride—though he were offered his choice of the beauties of Baltimore—because it would be absolutely impossible to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... mind an impression that human victims are daily cooked and served up upon the altars; that heathenish cruelties of every description are continually practised; and that these ignorant Pagans are in a state of the extremest wretchedness in consequence of the grossness of their superstitions. Be it observed, however, that all this information is given by a man who, according to his own statement, was only at one of the islands, and remained there but two weeks, sleeping every night on board his ship, and taking little kid-glove ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Peguy or Plato himself to break the head of Anatole France or Bertrand Russell, but he will not trouble Carlyle. And besides finding him empty, the new age is quite aware of his positive defects. It cannot away with his peasant morality—moralizing rather—his provincialism, and the grossness of his method. From the beginning to the end of his works there is neither pure thought nor pure feeling—nothing but a point of view which is now perceived to be ridiculously plebeian. Nevertheless, Carlyle had one positive gift that the younger ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... done. For I know that I might have bin a good man. The good lay in me—it only wanted drawing out." He remembered the elevating effect of his love for Mavis, how through all the time of his belief in her purity he had tried to purify himself, to purge away all the grossness and sensualness that, as he vainly fancied, made him unworthy to be the mate of so immaculate a creature; but he was not allowed to continue the purifying process; her horrible revelation ended it—knocked the sense out of it, made it preposterously absurd. "If ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... much capital in that body and those engines (he had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick's favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now. It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed—the sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... occasional essays. He plunged from his heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. His spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he piled on the paragraphs and columns. He seemed, Laura said, to take a pleasure in seeing how much he could pile ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... to throw her into such uncongenial guidance, amidst all the manifold temptations of the corrupt city,—to have suffered her to be seen and to be ensnared by those gallants ever on the watch for defenceless beauty; and to contrast with their elegance of mien and fatal flatteries the grossness of the companions selected for her, and the unloving discomfort of the home into which she had been thrown. But now that St. John had appeared, that Helen's heart and fancy were steeled alike against more dangerous temptation, the object to be ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... times were the opportunity he found for the display of his abounding energies. They were healthy times, healthy for mind and body. To watch his activities was to marvel that he still retained the grossness of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... said the Princess. "My consenting to know and to spend a friendly hour with you here is sufficient answer. I have not found the slightest fault with your manners. I have seen no suspicion of 'grossness' about you." ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... not her hand on the Duc de Montausier until he had served as many years in seeking it as Jacob had served to gain that of Rachel, and until she had passed her thirtieth year (in order that his passion should become as purified from all grossness, as was the language spoken among the circle in which she lived), receiving with dignified reserve the finely painted flowers and poems to illustrate them, which formed the celebrated Guirlande de Julie, presented to ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... avarice. Those absentees have their reward in profligate sons, and foreignized daughters, in giving them manners ridiculous to the people of the Continent, and disgusting to their countrymen—morals adopting the grossness of continental life, and general habits rendered utterly unfit for a return to their country, and, of course, for any rational and meritorious conduct, until they sink into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the tranquil grossness of the virtuous stay-at-home, he was accustomed to calculate the dates of his voyages by the age of his eight children. "This one was on returning from the Philippines.... This other one after I was in the coast trade in the Gulf ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... loved his garden"—that is the epitaph I would have put on his monument, because it gives one a far clearer sense of his goodness and explains it better than any amount of sonorous Latinities. How could he be anything but good since he loved a garden—that divine filter that filters all the grossness out of us, and leaves us, each time we have been in it, clearer, ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... acquirements. With respect to the former, man shares them, though in a higher degree, with the brute creation;—but morals are altogether peculiar to higher intelligences. To man, in particular, the value of moral discipline is beyond calculation:—For, however much the present ignorance and grossness of men's minds may deceive them in weighing their respective worth, yet it would be easy to shew, that the knowledge and practice of but one additional truth in morals, are of more real value to a child, than a whole lifetime ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... certainly as beautiful as the lilies, he himself wasn't like those tragic sellers. It was only that he was so very ordinary,—a little man compact, apparently, of grossness, and the music he was making was so divine. It was that marvellous French and Russian stuff. I must play it to you, and play it to you, till you love it. It's like nothing there has ever been. It is of an exquisite youth,—untouched, fearless, quite heedless of tradition, going its own way straight ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... habits, the paleness of the young minister's cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and more than all, to the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was cause enough that the world was not worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with characteristic ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of man according to his present estate, as far as it is known; which I do not to shew any universality of sense or knowledge, and much less to make a satire of reprehension in respect of wants and errors, but partly because cogitations new had need of some grossness and inculcation to make them perceived; and chiefly to the end that for the time to come (upon the account and state now made and cast up) it may appear what increase this new manner of use and administration of the stock (if it be once planted) shall bring with it hereafter; ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... safety by setting up a taboo on the whole subject of sex. It is time that we freed our minds from the artificial and perverted attitude toward this dominant impulse; time to rescue the word "sex" from its implications of grossness and sensuousness, and to recognize the instinct in its true light as one of the necessary and holy forces of life, a force capable of causing great damage, but also holding infinite possibilities for ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... is still deceived with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, But, being seasoned with a gracious voice Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? There is no vice so simple, but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts! How many cowards whose hearts are all as false As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins The beard of Hercules, and frowning Mars; Who, inward searched, have livers white as milk? And these ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... delineation, the style, at once elegant and powerful, of Miss Kavanagh's former works, are exhibited in this, as well as deep thought and sound moral reflection. Every thing presented to the reader, whether thought or image, is elaborated with the finish of a Flemish painting without its grossness; the persons are nicely conceived and consistently sustained, and the principal narrative is relieved by very truthful pictures of every day ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... one can study the facts connected with fire and light as the Deity in the various countries in which this worship prevailed, without perceiving the change it gradually underwent during later ages, and the grossness of the ideas which became connected with it as compared with an earlier age when mankind "had no temples, but worshipped in the open air, on ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... stretched out, but not to strike; the Breeches, in modest simplicity, depend at ease, and now at last have a graceful flow; the Waistcoat hides no evil passion, no riotous desire; hunger or thirst now dwells not in it. Thus all is purged from the grossness of sense, from the carking cares and foul vices of the World; and rides there, on its Clothes-horse; as, on a Pegasus, might some skyey Messenger, or purified Apparition, visiting our ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... villain of the piece, pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all tears and desperation, upon the stage; and we were dismayed to behold the injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the scenes. All the shabbiness of the theatre was perfectly apparent to us; we saw the grossness of the painting and the unreality of the properties. And yet I cannot say that the play lost one whit of its charm for me, or that the working of the machinery and its inevitable clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There was so much truth and beauty in the playing, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Michele in the Piazza Padella of Florence, and in Ognissanti; and tombs and adornments in many places for the doors of churches, wherein they have certain figures for corbels to support the roof, so rude and vile, so misshapen, and of such a grossness of manner, that it appears impossible ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... the character; he found it on the stage, and a favorite with a considerable part of the play-goers. It was, however, as he found it, a very coarse character, rude as well as gross in speech, and given to practical joking. He relieved it of all the rudeness, if not of all the grossness, and reformed the joking altogether; but he also filled the Fool's jesting with sententious satire, and while preserving the low-comedy style of the character, brought it into keeping with a lofty and even a ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... dwellings there is no love of home. The common house is a mere lodging and feeding place. Society is sought elsewhere, pleasure elsewhere; and for the young and easily impressible there is the strongest inducement to those modes of dissipation in which vice conceals its grossness behind fair exteriors and under attractive forms. On the other hand, the well-ordered house affords to its inmates the repose, comfort, and enjoyment which they crave and need, and for those whose characters are in the process of formation may neutralize ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... delectable history of Reynard the Fox. Newly corrected and purged, from all grossness in phrase and matter. London, by T.Ilive, for Edward ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... alas! his sun is set!—I must, write in the third person!—one other quality which commands admiration; an habitual delicacy in his conversation, evidencing that cheerfulness and wit might exist without ribaldry, grossness, or profanation. He neither violated decorum himself, nor tolerated it in others. I have been present when a trespasser of the looser class, has received, a rebuke, I might say a castigation, well deserved, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... character has its audacities (contrary to the modifications of aesthetics), our language possesses a proverbial chastity, which, even in its farthest wanderings, genius comprehends and respects. Tact and taste suffice to him who consults them to escape grossness of language. The delicacy of the allusions leaves their images in a transparent mist; the very elasticity of the equivocation furnishes a refuge for the thought which ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... blaze, which held all the earth and the heavens suspended in flames for a moment, Garth suddenly saw revealed a crouching figure, and a hideous, distorted face no more than six feet from his own. In the blinding glare it was outlined with a horrid clearness; in its grossness and bestial hatred, less human ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... full weight of their complaints and reproaches; every voice was against him, and even his brethren of the French academy, departing from their accustomed indulgence upon such matters, openly reprimanded him for the grossness of his flattery; the poor abbe attempted to justify himself by protesting that he knew nothing of the hateful couplet, and that Favart alone was the guilty person upon whom they should expend their anger. "I am always," cried he, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... the two nymphs, who had first appeared to Edwin, and since attended him with the extremest officiousness, endeavoured by every artful blandishment to engage his attention, and rivet his partiality. They exerted themselves to suppress the grossness, inelegance and sensuality to which they had commonly been habituated, and to cover the looseness of the passions with the veil of simplicity, delicacy, and softness. As the music ceased, the master of the spectacle came forth from his retreat. But his figure was no longer that ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... there is little sense of awe and mystery. In harmony with the realistic instincts of the nation, everything is dramatically, very humanly conceived; at times, indeed, the personages of the Nativity scenes quite lose their sacred character, and the treatment degenerates into grossness. At its best, however, the French Noel has a gaiety and a grace, joined to a genuine, if not very deep, piety, that are extremely charming. Reading these rustic songs, we are carried in imagination to French countrysides; ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Fielding. Sterne's indecent suggestion is also followed in the hints at the possible occasion of the Original's aversion to women. Asimilar censure could be spoken regarding the adventure in the tavern,[77] where the author hesitates on the edge of grossness. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... sweetness and wonders. And he knew that the melody that beat through it was but a murmur of the great essence calling to him; the essence that was fragrance, that was light, that was music; the essence that sometimes showed through the grossness of things and that he himself had striven to capture as it flashed here and there for those in whom burned an intenser spark of itself than was allotted to the generality of men—for the bard, the painter, the seer—towards whom it leapt as flame leaps to flame, yet who saw it but as the seekers ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the Magi's altars glowed Spake to his soul in symbols and expressed The immortal purity that without rest Strives with the mortal grossness whose abode Is in the heart. Their symboled fire showed One Whose spirit on the altar of the world Burns ceaselessly,—where, if all vice be hurled, It shall be purged with fire that shall atone,— Christ's love the flame, man's ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... can describe the sights of beauty that awaited him? All spectacles that could enchant the eye, all melodies that could ravish the ear, were collected together, in infinite variety. Nothing that was exquisite upon earth was unrepresented; but the grossness and the imperfection which will cleave to every thing earthly, was left out. It was the very palace of delights. And nothing faded here—the flowers were ever-blooming, and if picked, were instantly replaced by fairer blossoms. Delicious fruit, ever ripe, but ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... result. Not that I value military virtues the less by being of this opinion; on the contrary, I am the more convinced of their excellence. Burke has unguardedly said, 'that vice loses half its malignity by losing its grossness'; but public virtue ceases to be useful when it sickens at the calamities of necessary war. The moment that nations become confident of security, they give way to corruption. The evils and dangers of war seem as requisite for the preservation ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... refuge from the petty vexations of her work. He talked to her of the relations between his friends in Paris and the fair ladies they admired. The life he described had a charm, an easy gaiety, in which was no grossness. Weaving into his own recollections the adventures of Mimi and Rodolphe, of Musette and the rest of them, he poured into Mildred's ears a story of poverty made picturesque by song and laughter, of ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.' To this I reply; that a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar—(which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological materials)—will not differ from the language of ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... mission fulfilled, his victory won and his fame blown about the world despite the malice of enemies and cabals of critics. As the outcome of his stormy life we have music clothed in a new body, animated with a new spirit. He has lifted art out of its vulgarity and grossness. The future will prize him as we to-day prize ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... as its shade, pursue; But, like a shadow, proves the substance true: For envy'd wit, like Sol eclips'd, makes known Th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too pow'rful beams displays, It draws up vapour, which obscures its rays; But ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... in the Grenzboten, in which justice is done him with that impartiality and moderation in respect to which a competent German is unequalled among critics. Among Dumas's dramas, the writer regards Caligula as the best in spite of its grossness. In all the excesses, indecencies, improbabilities, and lawlessness of his romances, there is the trace of splendid talent. It is doubtful whether this talent could have been developed by industry and an earnest love of art into a higher sphere of power. Finally, the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mental fabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebody else. It inspires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as it informs his ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... digested, though they are very nourishing: weak stomachs had better avoid them. Meat pies and puddings cannot be recommended, but strong stomachs may sustain but little inconvenience from them. It is a confined mode of cookery, and the meat therefore is not at all purified of its grossness. When meat pies and puddings are used, they should be moderately seasoned. Baking meat, instead of roasting it, is a worse manner of dressing it, from the closeness of the oven, and the great variety of things ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... fleshly love, are merely different phases of one and the same passion, Wagner had learnt when he came to create "Tristan." And in "Tristan" we commence with a fleshly love, as intense as that Tannhaeuser knew; but by reason of its own energy, its own excess, it rises to a spiritual love as free from grossness as any dreamed of by Elizabeth or Wolfram, and far surpassing theirs in exaltation. This change he depicted in a way as simple as it was marvellous, so that as we watch the drama and listen to the music we experience ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... many parts of England any thing large is called a bumper. Hence a bumping lass is a large girl of her age, and a bumpkin is a large-limbed, uncivilized rustic; the idea of grossness of size entering into the idea of a country bumpkin, as well as that of unpolished rudeness. Dr. Johnson, however, strangely enough deduces the word bumpkin from bump; but what if it should prove ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... goujats dans un cabaret.' Johnson, perhaps, had this attack in mind when, in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 275), he thus wrote of Voltaire:—'He had been entertained by Pope at his table, when he talked with so much grossness, that Mrs. Pope was driven from the room. Pope discovered by a trick that he was a spy for the court, and never considered him as a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... coarseness is the result of the age and not personal predilection, completely ignoring the work of men like Sir Philip Sidney and Spenser, indeed practically all the pre-Shakespearean writers, in whom none of this so-called grossness exists. Shakespeare wrote sculduddery because he liked it, and for no other reason; his sensuality is the measure of his vitality. These liars pretend similarly that because Rabelais had a humanistic reason for much of his ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... sensibly by slipping out an oath; but that appeared to me as the surest symptom of their distinction, (tho' I am since informed that swearing is perfectly unfashionable.) Their finery, however, threw a veil over any grossness in their conversation. My daughters seemed to regard their superior accomplishments with envy; and what appeared amiss was ascribed to tip-top quality breeding. But the condescension of the ladies was still superior ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... amore, the soprano becomes an alto whose notes are, as it were, surrounded with a nimbus by being doubled in the upper octave by a flute; and the aria becomes worthy of its new purpose, not by losing a grossness which it never possessed, but by gaining the richness which distinguishes the perfect work from the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... anyways take his pleasure of thee; for the bigness of thy belly holdeth him off from going in unto thee and the fatness of thy thighs hindereth him from coming at thy slit. What goodness is there in thy grossness, and what courtesy or pleasantness in thy coarseness? Fat flesh is fit for naught but the flasher, nor is there one point therein that pleadeth for praise. If one joke with thee, thou art angry; if one sport with thee, thou art sulky; if thou sleep, thou snorest if thou walk, thou lollest ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... and a disgrace to our civilization. We have murderers by the thousand and thieves by the million, of all kinds and sizes; we have what we tenderly call "immorality," from the "errors of youth" to the sodden grossness of old age; married, single, and mixed. We have all the old kinds of wickedness and a lot of new ones, until one marvels at the purity and power of human nature, that it should carry so much disease and still grow ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... stupid, or inferior. If they seemed to brook insult, she hated them. And it was only a certain gaucherie, a gawkiness on Anna's part that irritated her against the girl. Certain forms of clumsiness, grossness, made the mother's eyes glow with curious rage. Otherwise ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... of cutting into the stone ceased to be practised and relief carving became general, grossness of idea seems to have survived in many rural parishes. One specimen is to be seen in the churchyard of Stanstead in Kent, and ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... lends to his steps the fleetness of an antelope; he bounds forward, and is soon at her side. Into his arms she flies, and though they clasp but thin air, embrace but her resemblance, yet the doing so gives a hundred times the joy it could have done, when his spirit was clogged with the grossness of mortality, and he folded to his breast a ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... man drowning in a sea of loneliness would grasp at any friendly straw. And Rutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort of straw. The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish. He could tolerate Hollister's mutilated countenance because he had grown accustomed to horrible sights,—not because he had any particular sympathy for a crippled, mutilated man's misfortune, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... emblem. It is hardly possible to maintain this thesis in view of such passages as Mahabh. XIII. 14 and the innumerable figures in which there are both a linga and a Yoni. But it is true that in its later forms the worship is purged of all grossness and that in its earlier forms the symbol adored was often a stupa-like column or a pillar with ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... played so masterly a part in bringing to its perfection the industrial-financial-democratic scheme of life should have developed an apologetic therefor, and imposed it, with all its materialism, its narrowness, its pragmatism, its, at times, grossness and cynicism, on the mind of a society where increasingly their own followers were, by sheer energy and efficiency, acquiring ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... hands in their muck, to settle down and live my life according to their bourgeois standards, to have grossness of soft flesh replace able sinews, to submerge mentality in favor of a specious craftiness of mind which passes in the "city" for brains—well, I'm on the road. And, oh, girl, girl, I wish ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... his coming. I shall delight to study him. They're all alike, and one specimen is as good as another for that. But neither of you need expect anything,' she says, 'for the wrongs of my sisters have armoured me against the grossness of mere sex appeal.' Excuse me for getting off such things, but I'm telling you ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of the great and still potent personality of Saint Francis, which informs with his memory every detail of the buildings and rocks around you. Each legend was full of interest for her. The alembic of her mind seemed to have the secret of distilling from traditions, which in their grossness the ordinary visitor turns from with a smile of contempt, the spiritual value they once possessed for ages of faith, or at least the poetry with which the simple belief of those ages has invested them. Nobody could be more ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... impression upon my memory: 'We, at the same time,' he said, 'have our eye perfectly open to that great external improvement which has taken place, of late years, in the manners of society. There is not the same grossness of conversation. There is not the same impatience for the withdrawment of him who, asked to grace the outset of an assembled party, is compelled, at a certain step in the process of conviviality, by the obligations of professional decency, to retire ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day, What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay. As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, Something better than his dog, a little dearer than ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... we possess some optic aid which should overcome the grossness of our vision, so that we might watch the dance of atoms in the double process of making and unmaking in the living body, we should see the commonplace, lifeless things which are brought by the blood, and which we call food, caught ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
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