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More "High-flown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sergius, and we fear lest he fly his imagination too high. It is true the period was still roseate with knighterrantry; men wore armor, and did battle behind shields; women were objects of devotion; conversation between lovers was in the style of high-flown courtesy, chary on one side, energized on the other by calls on the Saints to witness vows and declarations which no Saint, however dubious his reputation, could have listened to, much less excused; yet it were not well to overlook one or two qualifications. The usages ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... had an extraordinary admiration of this lady, notwithstanding she was a violent Whig. In answer to her high-flown speeches for Liberty, he addressed to her the following Epigram, of which I presume to offer ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... one of the inexperienced ones who borrow notions of "fashionable life" from the novels got in a library, taking their high-flown contents for gospel, and religiously believing that lords and ladies live upon stilts, speak, eat, move, breathe, by the rules of good-breeding only? Are you under the delusion—too many are—that the days of dukes and duchesses are ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... ventured on the following day, finding her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of yesterday, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to his attentions; that she could even endure some high-flown compliments; that a young woman placed in her situation had a right to expect all sort of civil things said to her; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, short of insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as most young women: but that—a ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fine and high-flown; but I am ashamed of my father, at any rate. I'd rather not have Horatia Cunningham come here and laugh at my mother behind her ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... These high-flown maxims astonished Louis de Camors. In his youthful simplicity he had an infinite respect for the men who had governed his country in her darkest hour; not more that they had given up power as poor as when they assumed it, than that they left ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... Cynthia and Joyce turned and looked long and incredulously into each other's eyes. They might have made, on this occasion, a number of high-flown and appropriate remarks, the tenor of which would be easy to imagine. Certainly the time for it was ripe, and beyond a doubt they felt them! But, as a matter of fact, they indulged in nothing of the sort. Instead, Joyce suddenly ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... big words in the dictionary, with your high-flown language," warned Bandy-legs in mock severity. "But I get your meaning, all the same, and I also agree with your noble sentiments. Sure we're expecting to stand up for Obed and his pets; and we're likewise intending to make ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... autocratic tyranny, which the presentiment of its speedy end had driven into madness, the bewitching strains of the new Hebrew lyre resounded through Lithuania. They came from Micah Joseph Lebensohn, the son of "Adam" Lebensohn, author of high-flown Hebrew odes [1]—a contemplative Jewish youth, suffering from tuberculosis and Weltschmerz. He began his poetic career in 1840 by a Hebrew adaptation of the second book of Virgil's Aeneid [2] but soon turned to Jewish motifs. In the musical rhymes of the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... us in his preface that his province is to write an anglers' guide without embellishment. It would have been well if he had adhered to this plan. After some pages of high-flown periods he informs us that twenty-six years ago fly-fishing was in its infancy, being scarcely known in America, and but little practiced in England. If he had asserted that fly-fishing was scarcely known among his "green hills" at that period, and but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... against our liberties? The Massachusetts legislature protested; the people of Connecticut meditated resistance. A convention was held at Middletown in December, at which two thirds of the towns in the state were represented, and the best method of overruling Congress was discussed. Much high-flown eloquence was wasted, but the convention broke up without deciding upon any course of action. The matter had become so serious that wise men changed their minds, and disapproved of proceedings calculated to throw ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... have the ceremonious Lisbon lover Lemos, the high-flown Castilian of fearful presence and a lion's heart, however threadbare his capa[128], the starving gentleman who makes a tost[a]o ( 5d.) last a month and dines off a turnip and a crust of bread, another—a sixteenth century Porthos—who imagines himself a grand ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... Barbara on Lord Carford's arm. The quarrel between them seemed past and they were talking merrily together. On the sight of her the Duke left me and ran forward. By an adroit movement he thrust Carford aside and began to ply the lady with most extravagant and high-flown compliments, displaying an excess of devotion which witnessed more admiration than respect. She had treated me as a boy, but she did not tell him that he was a boy, although he was younger than I; she listened with heightened colour and sparkling eyes. I glanced at Carford and found, ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... a cold way of expressing gratitude and considered the sentiment high-flown. The young man was no adept, she suspected, at graceful courtesies. But she was too great an admirer of youth not to excuse some little lack of polish. Gamelin was a handsome fellow, and that was merit ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... picked up a novel in a friend's house, and found that it was her own St. Clair. On recalling herself to the publisher's memory, she received the handsome remuneration of—four copies of her own work! The book, a foolish, high-flown story, a long way after Werther, had some success in Dublin, and brought its author—literary ladies being comparatively few at that period—a certain ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... domum profecturus sum. That's rather high-flown, but I understand it perfectly, though any other man might cudgel his brains over it. That means in Danish: There is come profecto a lot of ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... the high-flown Gaelic phrases, Scotty flew to Hamish, and his indulgent chum put aside the book and told him the story, and why the MacDonalds hated the name of Orange. Scotty went back to the fire, his cheeks aflame with excitement. Hereafter he would fight everything and ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... should be dying out before the later; that Lord Jeffrey, the old king of critics, should pass beyond the sound of reviews; and Wordsworth, after this spring, be seen no more among the Cumberland hills and dales; and Jane Porter, whose innocent high-flown romances had been the delight of the young reading world more than fifty years before, should end her days, a cheerful old lady, in the prosaic town ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... old soldier to-night by describing scenes that carry me back to the grand era of my life. I believe I was born to be a soldier; and my old campaigns stand out in memory like sun-lighted mountain-tops. Forgive such high-flown talk—I know it's not like me—but I've had to-night some of my old battle excitement. I never thought to feel it again. We'll hear the rest of your story to-morrow. I outrank you all, by age at least; and ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... letters of what he was doing, and did their utmost to dissuade him, but he was as infatuated as a young lover of two and twenty. Finding that these friends disapproved, he dropped away from them, and they, being bored with his egotism and high-flown ideas, were not sorry to let him do so. Of course, he said nothing about his speculations—indeed, he hardly knew that anything done in so good a cause could be called speculation. At Battersby, when his father urged him to look out for a next presentation, and ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... enquiries after Miss Monimia. She was very ill, but Sibylla hoped she would soon be well enough to attend upon her father. Mr Percy Marvale made a multitude of quotations from some of his own melodramas apropos to the occasion, and Sibylla replied in the same high-flown style. It was evident they were quite used to such incidents in the Surrey, and I left them to entertain each other. On the doctor's arrival, he pronounced it improper to remove Mr Smith after his system had undergone such a shock; and the same ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... address of welcome by some high city or state official, a response to the address of welcome by some one else high in authority, and so on, during which the visitors are told of the many privileges they may enjoy, "the keys of the town" are handed over to them, and a good deal of high-flown oratory is indulged in. We suppose that the people in attendance at this meeting are so well acquainted with Washington that those preliminaries are unnecessary, and I have been informed by the members of the local committee that we can dispense ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... than to share his lot, however humble. To be her noble soldier, her hero Percy's bride, would be her heaven, and neither gold nor grandeur nor princely mansion could tempt her from his side, and she would welcome the grave if he proved false to her. It was all the high-flown, emotional, melodramatic trash to be expected of an ill-balanced girl whose pretty head was stuffed with the romance of the country post-office type, and Davies sighed heavily as ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... It was the new things, the unfamiliar contours, that were most apparent, that seemed to thrust upon his consciousness the city's gigantic, self-centered indifference. Yet it was just that quality that he had loved most in London. She had let him alone. She had been—he recalled the high-flown phrase of his youth—the supremely indifferent friend! Perhaps, he thought to himself, when one is fifty, one cares less to be "let alone"; less for indifference as the supreme ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and good naturedly informed him that his position of Quartermaster General in the old army did not entitle him to a field command and that Lee's rank as field commander was higher, he replied in a letter which became the text of his champions. Its high-flown language and bombastic claims showed only too plainly that a consuming ambition had destroyed all sense of proportion in ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... newfangled trifles, and even forced some of them upon his host. It is further alleged that under the malign influence of Peleg and several glasses of aguardiente, the Commander lost somewhat of his decorum, and behaved in a manner unseemly for one in his position, reciting high-flown Spanish poetry, and even piping in a thin, high voice divers madrigals and heathen canzonets of an amorous complexion; chiefly in regard to a "little one" who was his, the Commander's, "soul"! These ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the ablest of the five "studies," at least in its opening, is the school-story of "The Stolen Treasure," which, with a high-flown name, and a most melodramatic and commonplace ending, shows yet great power in the delineation and grouping of characters. The young school-girls are as real as those of Charlotte Bronte; and although the typical maidenly desperado is present,—lying and cheating with such hopeless obviousness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... The sayings of Ovid, 'Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor,' 'Nitimur in velitum semper. cupimusque negata,' are a more correct expression of the facts of human consciousness and conduct than the high-flown praises of Confucius. 7. But Tsze-sze adopts the dicta of his grandfather without questioning them, and gives them forth in his own style at the commencement of the fourth part of his Treatise. 'When we have intelligence ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... says) was cut out by the Turks, or to affect deafness or blindness, or any other infirmity of the organs. But though the embroidery of his conversation was different, the groundwork was the same, and the high-flown and ornate compliments with which the gallant knight of the sixteenth century inter-larded his conversation, were as much the offspring of egotism and self-conceit, as the jargon of the ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... no unworthy thought ever found utterance upon his lips; that no vulgar instinct ever showed itself in his conduct; that he was essentially to the very core of his heart a gentleman; that without any high-flown affectation of chivalry he was as chivalrous as Bayard; that without any languid airs and graces of the modern aesthetic school he was a man of the highest and broadest culture; and that—oh, rara avis among ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... 'Some high-flown pamphlets, I suppose:— All scribbled in the worst of times, To palliate his friend Oxford's crimes; To praise Queen Anne, nay more, defend her, As never favouring the Pretender: Or libels yet concealed from sight, Against the court to show his spite: ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Ennobling as the idea was, it had been narrowed by the refusal of the gentlemen to extend the rules of chivalry beyond their own order, and they were, therefore, ready to exercise cruelty upon those who were not gentlemen, whilst proffering the most high-flown compliments to those who were. In France, too, this broad distinction of ranks told upon the military strength of the crown. The fighting force of the French king was his feudal array of armour-protected cavalry, composed entirely of gentlemen, and ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... of his high-flown language, Mr. Mortimer gave the children an impression that he and his wife were honestly sorry to part with them. And when the supper—protracted by his various arts to the semblance of a banquet of ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Ben Zoof had mounted his hobby-horse, and was indulging in high-flown praises about his beloved eighteenth arrondissement, the captain had remarked gravely, "Do you know, Ben Zoof, that Montmartre only requires a matter of some thirteen thousand feet to make it as high as ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... care to be a sound Latin, an elegant Grecian, and to suppress emotion without outward sign after the manner of the Godwin school. This was the more notable, as the girl really derived from the Enfields, whose high-flown romantic temper I wish I could find space to illustrate. She was but seven years old when Alfred Austin remarked and fell in love with her; and the union thus early prepared was singularly full. Where the husband and wife differed, and they did ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a duke nor an archbishop, but a humble member of the lower automobiling classes, the high-flown title ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... and these letters are charming from their simplicity and naivete; what she says bears the stamp of plain truth, her admiration has nothing high-flown in it, and her style is never wanting in the sobriety which ought always to accompany truth, in order to make it ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the Queen. As one is an early specimen of his manner of writing on philosophy, so this is a specimen of what was equally characteristic of him—his political and historical writing. It is, in form, necessarily a panegyric, as high-flown and adulatory as such performances in those days were bound to be. But it is not only flattery. It fixes with true discrimination on the points in Elizabeth's character and reign which were really subjects of admiration and homage. Thus of her unquailing ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... endeavoured to convince me that I might lose more than I gained, even though I should get more money by going elsewhere. "It is for you," said he, "to think whether our names on your title-page are not worth more to you than the increased payment." This seemed to me to savour of that high-flown doctrine of the contempt of money which I have never admired. I did think much of Messrs. Longman's name, but I liked it best at ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... Mount Street relations. Eliza was a source of continual irritation, and the Westbrook family did its best, by interference and suggestion, to refrigerate the poet's feelings for his wife. On the other hand he found among the Boinville set exactly that high-flown, enthusiastic, sentimental atmosphere which suited his idealizing temper. Two extracts from a letter written to Hogg upon the 16th of March, 1814, speak more eloquently than any analysis, and will place before the reader the antagonism which had sprung up in Shelley's mind between his own ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... considerations, which she had before believed of importance, now seemed trivial and inept. She wondered how she could have been blinded for so long. She bitterly reproached herself for her high-flown scruples, which now savoured of unwholesome affectation; but for these, she might not only have been a happy wife, but she might, also, have proved the means of conferring happiness upon another, and he a dearly ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... be a certain preliminary," said Crosby; "one would take him to a wine-shop and treat him to a measure of wine, and then, after a little high-flown conversation, one would put the desired sum in his hand and wish him good-day. It is a roundabout way of performing a simple transaction, but in the East all ways ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... Extols in high-flown language the merits of the minister who in the early and troublous days of Theodoric's reign conciliated the wavering affections of the suspicious Sicilians[215], governed them so justly that not even they (addicted as they are, according to Cicero, to grumbling) could ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... action, I am going to start even by getting rid once for all (so far as we are here concerned) of that famous but misleading old distinction between genius and talent. It is really a distinction without a difference. I suppose there is probably no subject under heaven on which so much high-flown stuff and nonsense has been talked and written as upon this well-known and much-debated hair-splitting discrimination. It is just like that other great distinction between fancy and imagination, about which poets and essayists discoursed ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... myself to be free of the trouble for which you have been treating me. It seems too good to be true, yet I feel satisfied that I am more of a man than ever before in my life. I have not the time nor ability to thank you in the high-flown language peculiar to testimonial writers, but suffice it to ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... 7th of May, a month after Danton's death, Robespierre delivered a long speech before the Convention, a speech that marks his apogee. It was a high-flown rhapsody on civic morality and purism. Voltaire and the Encyclopedists were bitterly attacked; Jean Jacques Rousseau was deified. The State should adopt his religious attitude, his universal church of nature. ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... put one's talent in a napkin; not think small beer of oneself &c (vanity) 880. Adj. dignified; stately; proud, proud-crested; lordly, baronial; lofty- minded; highsouled, high-minded, high-mettled^, high-handed, high- plumed, high-flown, high-toned. haughty lofty, high, mighty, swollen, puffed up, flushed, blown; vainglorious; purse-proud, fine; proud as a peacock, proud as Lucifer; bloated with pride. supercilious, disdainful, bumptious, magisterial, imperious, high and mighty, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... in Virginia, illustrated the life and history of his native state in the novels, The Virginia Comedians (1854), and The Wearing of the Gray, a tale of the Civil War, and more formally in an excellent History of the State. His style was somewhat high-flown. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 'She's a little high-flown,' observed Fustov, who had apparently regained his self-possession completely. 'All girls are like that... at first. I repeat, everything will be all right to-morrow. Meanwhile, good-bye. I'm tired, and ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Paardeberg, Canadians felt themselves a part of the moving scene. Perhaps the part taken by their own small force was seen out of perspective; but with all due discount for the patriotic exaggeration of Canadian newspaper correspondents and for the generosity of Lord Roberts's high-flown praise, the people of Canada believed that they had good reason to feel more than proud of their representatives on the veldts of Africa. After Zand River and Doornkop, Paardeberg and Mafeking, it was plain that the Canadian soldier could hold his own on the field of battle. ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... substitute. Pray, let us have no more religions. On the contrary, our first duty is to be as irreligious as possible—to believe in as little as we can, to trust in nobody but ourselves, to hope for nothing but the actual, to get rid of all high-flown notions of human beings and their destiny, and, above all, to avoid as poison the ideal, ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... He resisted Cromwell till it became a question which of the two should die, and the lot was as likely to have fallen to him as to his rival. He would have murdered Elizabeth with the forms of law or without, but Elizabeth was the hope of all that he most detested. He was no dreamer, no high-flown enthusiast, but he was a man of clear eye and hard heart, who had a purpose in his life which he pursued with unflagging energy. Living as he did in revolutionary times, his hand was never slow to strike when an enemy was in his power; yet in general when Gardiner struck, he stooped, like ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... because nature had humanely given those tails as a protection against flies. The Grandisonian manners are not to be taken as a picture of contemporary fashion. Richardson was unacquainted with aristocratic habits, and his high-flown love scenes were purely ideal. When he goes into high life, said Chesterfield, "he mistakes the modes." Not long before Sir Charles was making his formal and courtly addresses to Miss Byron, Walpole had written to George ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... that chivalrous devotion should decrease when women lay so little claim to it. Miss Edgeworth needed to decry sentimental and high-flown feelings,—the Miss Edgeworth of to-day would need ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... into the past, Sam would be more forbearing in pronouncing verdicts on his brethren, worsted in the effort to express what was inherent in their minds; would not decide quite so dogmatically, that all a man had to do was to be sound and diligent, and keep himself far apart from high-flown rubbish, like a common-sense, sober-minded Englishman. And Sam came to be less feverishly anxious about his own monopoly of public esteem; less nettled at art-criticism; perhaps less vivacious in his talents and well-doing, but more ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... high-flown style, and is fond of verbal substantives. "Now there is an invention of machinery for the alleviation of the peasants," he says; "there is no difficulty for them in that." When he is asked what he lives for, he replies, "To pass the time." I always look ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... some dire intent lowering in his eyes. To the amusement of all, and to my increased consternation, he drew forth a volume of the "Wild Irish Girl," (which he had brought to return to Lady C——k) and, reading, with his deep, emphatic voice, one of the most high-flown of its passages, he paused, and patting the page with his forefinger, with the look of Hamlet addressing Polonius, he said, "Little girl, why did you write such nonsense? And where did you get all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... forgotten her high destination, in the meridian of her glory. We have but little sympathy or patience for those who treat her as a mere Rosy Melindi—who are always fishing for pretty complements—who are satisfied by the gossamer of Romance, and who can be allured by the verbosity of high-flown words, rich in language, but poor and barren in sentiment. Beset, as she has been, by the intellectual vulgar, the selfish, the designing, the cunning, the hidden, and the artful—no wonder she has sometimes folded her wings in despair, and forgotten ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... solemnly even, "and I counsel you, Miriam, in turn, to seek your draughts of soul from our pure 'wells of English undefiled,' rather than such high-flown fancies and maudlin streams as flow from the pen of this accomplished Hebrew. There is a little too much of the Jeremiah and Isaiah style about such extracts as I have seen, to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... a platform in the presence of assembled parents and friends, and, in best jacket, white gloves, and carefully curled hair, with a circular bow to the company and the then prescribed waving of alternate arms, delivered a high-flown rhymed address ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... understand any thing of these high-flown sentiments, niece; you have all that glory to yourself: I would teach you a little plain sense, and not have you so wise as ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the transaction. But she was shocked at my carelessness, and justly angry with me for placing myself in a position, which, but for her interference, might have become a very disgraceful one. Either her mother told her, or Rachel heard what passed—I can't say which. She took her own romantic, high-flown view of the matter. I was "heartless"; I was "dishonourable"; I had "no principle"; there was "no knowing what I might do next"—in short, she said some of the severest things to me which I had ever heard from a young lady's lips. The breach between us lasted ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... he is certainly no stickler for high-flown notions. I should be right glad if we understood each other. And how ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... who have read the high-flown manifestoes of the Sinn Fein party will be concerned to look around for the result of the proposal which they have been preaching for the last three years, and if they find nothing but a ridiculous mouse in the matter of achievement ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... knew the hardness of the life, they reasoned that it "helped toughen a youngster, and make a man of him." To them, Sara's ideas were foolish and high-flown, their notion of a "gentleman" being too often associated with city "lubbers" who came down to spy out the land—and sea—in their ridiculous knickerbockers and helmets, and who did not know a jib from a spanker, or had any idea when a sailor spoke of the ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... And, much to Clemence's astonishment, the gallant Philemon W. Strain, editor, came out with a glowing account of the whole affair in the next issue of the Clarion, in a three column article, headed "Ruth, the Village Child," complimenting the young schoolmistress in such high-flown terms, that a rival editor, who read it, thought that she must be of a literary turn, and wrote to her to solicit contributions to his paper, and another authority in a neighboring village, wanted to write her life, and was only pacified by being allowed to dedicate a poem to ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... day the Spanish crew of the Cristobal Colon were released and sent on shore; and, this done, all tension between the Spaniards and the English was immediately relaxed, the Spaniards, with their high-flown ideas of chivalry, vying with each other in showing the utmost cordiality and attention to their whilom enemies; so that, on the whole, George and his officers, to say nothing of the men, were given a fairly pleasant time during their sojourn at Panama, in return for which they, among other ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... visit a sister who lived in their neighborhood. The elder Huntington said something of the rapid growth of New York, of its new high buildings. His English was curiously interspersed with a bookish phraseology that seemed to be traceable to the high-flown advertisements of his department in the newspapers. I veered the conversation from the architectural changes that had come over New York to ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... the elation with which I announced my success to Gladys Todd. It was magnified by the month of disappointment, and to her I felt that I owed a debt. Though I had come to look with irony on her high-flown expressions of faith in me, I realized that the fear of her equally high-flown scorn had more than once kept me from abandoning my project. With pride I enclosed in my letter my account of the funeral of Mr. Weinberg, though I refrained from marring the trophy with an explanation ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... Blind's little book is written with admirable good taste and judgment, and with notable self-restraint. It does not weary the reader with critical discursiveness, nor with attempts to search out high-flown meanings and recondite oracles in the plain 'yea' and 'nay' of life. It is a graceful and unpretentious little biography, and tells all that need be told concerning one of the greatest writers of the time. It is a deeply interesting if not fascinating woman whom Miss ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... an old man, and with advancing age came a disposition to leave the task of governing to others, and to weary of Confucius' high-flown lectures. He ceased "to use" Confucius, as the Chinese historians say, and the Sage was therefore indignant, and ready to accept any offer which might come from any quarter. While in this humor he received an invitation from ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... my place will not please God, I cannot please him at all. Why then should I try, if my way of trying is of no use? Why should I try to be honest, sober, and useful, if that is not true religion?—if what God wants of me is not virtue, but a certain high-flown religiousness which I cannot feel or even understand?'—and so they grow weary in well-doing, and careless about the plain duties of morality. They become careless, likewise, about the plain duties of religion; ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... of this Congress was curiously plain and uninteresting. With the exception of J. L. M. Curry of Alabama and Barksdale of Mississippi there was not a man among them of constructive ability as a statesman. Foote of Tennessee was noted for his high-flown English, his endless harangues and his elaborate historical illustrations. Had his ability been equal to the intensity of his hatred for Davis he would have been a dangerous man to the administration. James Lyons ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... the engagement which are published in this morning's papers. I am glad to find that France possesses at least one man who tells the truth, and who can address his fellow-citizens in plain language. The credulity of the Parisians, and their love of high-flown bombast, amount to a disease, which, if this city is not to sink into a species of Baden Baden, must be stamped out. Mr. O'Sullivan recently published an account of his expedition to the Prussian headquarters in the Electeur Libre. Because he said ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... umbrella up and down. Harriet had saturated her mind with the fiction of penny weeklies, and owed to this training all manner of awkward affectations which she took to be the most becoming manifestations of a susceptible heart. At times she would express herself in phrases of the most absurdly high-flown kind, and lately she had got into the habit of heaving profound sighs between her sentences. Julian was not blind to the meaning of all this. His active employments during the past week had kept his thoughts from ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... except for money." The doctrine is, of course, perfectly outrageous, and specially calculated to shock people who like to keep it for their private use, instead of proclaiming it in public. But it is a good expression of that huge contempt for the foppery of high-flown sentiment which, as is not uncommon with Johnson, passes into something which would be cynical if it were not half-humorous. In this case it implies also the contempt of the professional for the amateur. Johnson despised gentlemen ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... was much of Guli Springett, whom I have seen sundry times, and think high-flown, in spight of her levelling Principles and demure Carriage. The Youth is bewitched with her, I think; what has a Woman to do with Logique? My Belief is, he might as well hope to marry the Moon as to win Mistress Springett's Hand; however, his ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... wanted energy." There is therefore nothing to be said. The public gazes astonished: the hasty limners sketch her features, Charlotte not disapproving: the men of law proceed with their formalities. The doom is Death as a murderess. To her Advocate she gives thanks; in gentle phrase, in high-flown classical spirit. To the Priest they send her she gives thanks; but needs not any shriving, any ghostly or other ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... and though the description undoubtedly partook of George's usual high-flown couleur-de-rose style, the manor being only a manor provided the owner sacrificed his interest in Swillingford by driving off its poachers, and the river being only a river when the tiny Swill was swollen into one, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... his father in the butchering business; and that, being only a boy, he didn't have to do full-grown butchering, but only slaughtering calves. Also, that whenever he killed a calf he made a high-flown speech over it. This supposition rests upon the testimony of a man who wasn't there at the time; a man who got it from a man who could have been there, but did not say whether he was nor not; and neither of them thought to mention it for decades, and decades, and decades, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... together—he is likely to be of great service both to the cause and to the Committee, and is publicly as well as personally a very valuable acquisition to our party on every account. He came up (as they all do who have not been in the country before) with some high-flown notions of the sixth form at Harrow or Eton, &c.; but Col. Napier and I set him to rights on those points, which is absolutely necessary to prevent disgust, or perhaps return; but now we can set our shoulders soberly to the wheel, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Alice, and the exaggerated imitation of human beings: a really moral person must have balance as well as sympathy, else he sees things out of proportion. These examples make evident that we are not to seek for anything very patently high-flown in the stories for children; it is life in all its phases that gives the material, but it must be true life: not false or sentimental or trivial life: this will rule out the "pretty" stories for children written by trivial people in ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... use to talk to Flora," said Ethel; "she would say it was high-flown and visionary. Oh! she wants it for the bazaar's own sake, and that is one ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... that there existed at Paris a coterie of fashionable women who pretended to the most exalted refinement both of feeling and expression, and that these were waited upon and worshiped by a set of nobles and litterateurs, who used towards them a peculiar strain of high-flown, pedantic gallantry. These ladies adopted fictitious names for themselves and gave enigmatical ones to the commonest things. They lavished upon each other the most tender appellations, as though in contrast to the frigid tone in which the Platonism of the Hotel required them to ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... as hard in Umbria. Renan saw the gentle cadence of the landscape—violet hills, the silver gauze of water, oliveyards all of a green mist; read the Fioretti and the dolorous ecstasies of Perugino's Sebastian, and straightway adapted the high-flown parallel worked out in detail by Giotto. Umbria for him was the Galilee of Italy, and Francis son of Bernard an avatar of Christ. But Renan was apt to allow his emotions to ride him. Another dazzling contrast, which has recently exercised another dextrous ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... all very pretty and very high-flown," said the countess, with a contemptuous laugh; "but you will find a few thousand pounds a very comfortable matter in a few ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... Boltby. "He will have his price, Sir Harry," said the lawyer. Then Sir Harry's eyes were opened, and so excellent did this mode of escape seem to him that he was ready to pay almost any price for the article. He saw it at a glance. Emily had high-flown notions, and would not yield; he feared that she would not yield, let Cousin George's delinquencies be shown to be as black as Styx. But if Cousin George could be made to give her up,—then Emily must yield; and, ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... volunteers. They regarded as brutal tyranny the tax on tea, considered in England as a mild expedient for raising needed revenue for defense in the colonies. The men of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, meeting in September, 1774, had declared in high-flown terms that the proposed tax came from a parricide who held a dagger at their bosoms and that those who resisted him would earn praises to eternity. From nearly every colony came similar utterances, and flaming resentment ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... discussions was the discovery that there were at least four distinct shades among the Peelites. 'Newcastle stands nearly alone, if not quite, in the rather high-flown idea that we are to create and lead a great, virtuous, powerful intelligent party, neither the actual conservative nor the actual liberal party but a new one. Apart from these witcheries, Graham was ready ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... nature, you will understand how much of the effect of any composition upon the human mind depends upon the printing, upon the placing of the points, even upon the position of the sentences on the page. A grand, high-flown, and sentimental climax ought always to conclude at the bottom of a page. It will look ridiculous, if it ends four or five lines down from the top of the next page. Somehow there is a feeling as of the difference between ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... even to call this a nefarious bargain. To the careless seigneur it would probably be very much a matter of course. The ransom offered—six thousand francs—was as good as if she had been a prince. The ladies at home might be indignant, but what was their foolish fancy for a high-flown girl in comparison with these substantial crowns in his pocket; and to be free from the responsibility of guarding her would be an advantage too. And if her own party did not stir on her behalf, why should he? A most pertinent question. Cauchon, on the other hand, could assure ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... meer ceremonies exist in form only, and have in them no substance at all; but, being imposed by the laws of custom, become essential to good-breeding, from those high-flown compliments paid to the Eastern monarchs, and which pass between Chinese mandarines, to those coarser ceremonials in use between English ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... perform when asked by his accomplished friend Lawes: but he is already {120} the man who was later to denounce "court amours, Mix'd dance and wanton masque"; and if he writes a mask himself it will be to take the old "high-flown commonplace" of the magic power of chastity and give it an entirely new seriousness and beauty. The notion of Mr. Newbolt that there were two Miltons, one before and the other after the Civil War, and that the one was "sincerely ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... irrepressible tendency to fine writing is associated with the greater number of them. Give a clever young medical student a book about aural or dental surgery to review, and the chances are ten to one that the criticism will be little else than a high-flown grandiloquent treatise on the wonders of the creation. A regular "literary hack" will do the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Our turn for sport, my reverend lad. And then, O'Mulligan—oh then, When mounted on our nags again, You, on your high-flown Rosinante, Bedizened out, like Show-Gallantee (Glitter great from substance scanty);— While I, Bob Fudge, Esquire, shall ride Your faithful Sancho, by your side; Then—talk of tilts and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to reconcile the various conflicting authorities contesting for supremacy in his soul, Walter threw himself into a severe spell of blues. He was not conscious of the contrast between the world of his high-flown fancy and the earthy environment of his home-life. The sympathetic care which he should have received after his illness had not ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... Theo's been so troublesome! And he wants to take us down on the third of next month. He will explain to you the why of it all; perhaps you'll understand better than I could. Such high-flown notions don't appeal to me a bit. I think Theo is rather like that silly man in the Middle Ages who was always trying to fight windmills, or sheep, or something; and there really ought to be a law to prevent people who want to go about being unselfish to everybody from ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... disagreeable; on which theory, laws must be confessed to have been in all ages somewhat of a failure. He seems to have been, like his master, an impudent light-hearted fellow, who took life easily enough, laughed at patriotism, and all other high-flown notions, boasted that the world was his country, and was no doubt excellent after-dinner company for the great king. Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of a darker and more melancholic temperament; and while Theodorus contented ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... their comrades of the office or the workshop without having a red sash, an embroidered cap, and magisterial gestures! Others will bury themselves in official papers, trying, with the best of wills, to make head or tail of them. They will indite laws and issue high-flown worded decrees that nobody will take the trouble to carry out—because ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... right, Mapela the Wise One," answered the king, kindly overlooking—or perhaps not noticing—the rather lame and impotent conclusion of the induna's high-flown speech. "Yes; perhaps thou art right," (this rather regretfully). "But there is no reason why I should not at once show myself to my wives; and, by the bones of my royal father, I will! There be those among them who of late have shown a tendency to make light of my words and ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... being Bastard-Royal and important to conciliate, Friedrich has in a high-flown way assigned the Schloss of Budischau for quarters, an excellent superbly magnificent mansion in the neighborhood of Trebitsch, "nothing like it to be seen except in theatres, on the Drop-scene of The Enchanted Island;" ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... kept with us during the whole walk. He congratulated me upon my appointment, in terms of rapture; his ecstacies are excited so readily, from the excessive warmth of his disposition, and its proneness to admire and wonder, that my new situation was a subject to awaken an enthusiasm the most high-flown. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... vices turned upon it. Hence the golden mean is eminently a Greek conception, a leading idea of the Hellenic race. The Greek hated a thing overdone, a gaudy ornament, a proud title, a fulsome compliment, a high-flown speech, a wordy peroration. Nothing too much was the inscription over the lintel of the national sanctuary at Delphi. It is the surpassing grace of Greek art of the best period, that in it there shines out the highest power, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... Dacre took up the tale. "I've considered myself free ever since we separated, after only six weeks together. Any man would. It was nothing but a passing fancy. Heaven knows why I was fool enough to marry her, except that I had high-flown ideas of honour in those days, and I got drawn in. She never regarded it as binding, so why in thunder should I?" He spoke indignantly, as one who had the right ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... of his correspondence, Mr. Tollmidge must have possessed one great merit as a letter-writer—the merit of brevity. He will weary nobody's patience, if he is allowed to have a hearing. Let him, therefore, be permitted, in his own high-flown way, to ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... everybody laughed uproariously, while Serafina said to de Sigognac that she for one did not admire their taste, and Isabelle silently looked her disgust. The baron meantime was more and more charmed with this sweet, dainty young girl, and though he was too shy to address any high-flown compliments to her, according to the fashion of the day, his eyes spoke eloquently for him. She was not at all displeased at his ardent glances, and smiled radiantly and encouragingly upon him, thereby unconsciously making poor Matamore, who was secretly enamoured of her, desperately unhappy, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... these rebels; these are the men whom you adopt as your friends; it is with them that you dine at la Rapee, so that the general of the national guard is obliged to gallop about for two hours to receive your orders before he can find you, and you seek in vain to conceal your embarrassment by high-flown phrases. You seek in vain to conceal this banquet given to assassins beneath the pretext of a banquet in honour of liberty. But these subterfuges are no longer available; the moment is urgent, and you will no longer deceive the sections, the army, or the eighty-three departments. Those who rule ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... are connected with old Russell[93], my father's clerk. He was a little man but possessed of a consequential manner sufficient for a giant. A shoemaker by trade, his real element was in the church. His conversation was embellished by high-flown grandiloquence, and he invariably walked upon the heels of his boots. This latter peculiarity, as may well be imagined, was the cause of a most comical effect whenever he had occasion to leave his seat and clatter down the aisle of the ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... a little too high-flown to Mr. Lusignan. "There," said he, "see on what a straw her mind turns. So, but for that, you would have done the right ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... nullify or to tamper with copyright was in effect to prevent an author from having any commodity to sell, and so to do him the most serious injury possible. And for another thing, Diderot had equity and common sense enough to see that no high-flown nonsense about the dignity of letters and the spiritual power could touch the fact that a book is a piece of marketable ware, and that the men who deal in such wares have as much claim to be protected in their contracts as those who ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Quack! Quack! You must think we are slack! You talk too polite altogether; We've had quite enough of your high-flown stuff, And we know, you are birds ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... is talking about. These high-flown lectures and discussions have filled all their heads with nonsense. It will have to be rooted out when they come to face the world. No use to oppose her now. Nothing but experience will teach her. She must just be humoured for the present. They have all run a little wild in their notions. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... we were all smoking and exchanging compliments in the high-flown, stilted Samoan style, there entered the house a strapping young warrior, carrying a wickerwork cage, in which were two of the rare and famous Manu Mea (red-bird) of Samoa—the Didunculus or tooth-billed pigeon. These were the property of the young chief commanding the rebel troops, ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... Chesterton some years ago quoted from a magazine article on American elections a sentence which said: 'A little sound common-sense often goes further with an audience of American working men than much high-flown argument. A speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board, won hundreds of votes for his side at the last Presidential election.'[22] The 'sound common-sense' consisted, not, as Mr. Chesterton pretended to believe, in the presentation of the hammering ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... Society, after all your high-flown talk about it, is only a vulgar murder club," I ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... that he ought to have fought. Esther observed that he had shewn more true courage in listening to reason, and M. d'O—— said he was strongly of his daughter's opinion; however, Mdlle. Casanova, after airing her high-flown ideas, began to sulk ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... hand in hand they walked toward the house, ceremonious beyond naturalness in acting out the spirit summoned by a woman steeped in the essences of high-flown books. "The trumpet," she said when they heard Margaret's dinner horn, and not even Tom, who could have recalled many a rakish bout of a Saturday night and many an unholy laugh in church of a Sunday, dared to smile at her. "You've caught ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... and replied, "Oh, Mr. Coventry, this is too high-flown. Let us both return thanks to the Almighty, who has preserved us, and, in the next place, to Mr. Little: we should both be dead but for him." Then, before he could reply, she turned to Little, and said, beseechingly, "Mr. Coventry has been ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... present organisation of labour in India can hardly be said to justify the title it assumed, and in answer to a deputation which waited on the Governor, Sir George Lloyd expressed a legitimate desire for more information than was contained in its high-flown address as to the status of these unions, their method of formation, their constitution, their system of ballot and election, and the actual experience in the several trades of those who claimed to ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... would seem that you have somehow blundered through long years, preserving always the ignorance of a child, and the blindness of a child. I cannot understand how this is possible; nor can I keep from smiling at your high-flown notions; and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... did not fare much better. The assemblage, roused now, jolly and merciless, was not disposed to give quarter; and his obtuseness in dawdling over such high-flown notions as that population, not property, formed the basis of representative government, reaped him a harvest of boos and groans. This was not what the diggers had come out to hear. And they were as direct as children in their demand for the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... you've no business in this world, Caudle; you have such high-flown notions. Why, isn't the man as rich as the bank? And as for his being a usurer,—isn't it all the better for those who come after him? I'm sure it's well there's some people in the world who save money, seeing the stupid ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... the Greek Drama are admired and even enthusiastically praised by literary judges whose verdict we shall not presume to dispute. To translation, however, the choric odes hardly lend themselves. Their dithyrambic character, their high-flown language, strained metaphors, tortuous constructions, and frequent, perhaps studied, obscurity, render it almost impossible to reproduce them in the forms of our poetry. Nor perhaps when they are strictly analysed will much be found, in many of them at least, of the material ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... comedy of modern sentiment might have the charm of novelty to the Baron; Valerie had made up her mind as to her scheme; and we may say the trial of her power that she made this morning answered her highest expectations. Thanks to her manoeuvres, sentimental, high-flown, and romantic, Valerie, without committing herself to any promises, obtained for her husband the appointment as deputy head of the office and the Cross of the ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... taught and spoken, as in Bavaria and Austria, each town still keeps its own patois, and the people fall back on it as soon as they are among themselves. When Maria Theresa went to the Burgtheater to announce to the people of Vienna the birth of a son and heir, she did not address them in high-flown literary German. She bent forward from her box, and called out: "Hoerts! der Leopold hot an Bueba": "Hear! Leopold has a boy." In German comedies, characters from Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna are constantly introduced speaking their own local dialects. In Bavaria, Styria, and the Tyrol, much ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... necessary to put a message like this into high-flown language, to swear absolute devotion and deathless consecration. In love and friendship, small, steady payments on a gold basis are better than immense promissory notes. Nor, indeed, is it always necessary to put the message into words at ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... education; and his favorite reading was in Amadis of Gaul. That romance appeared during the boy's earliest childhood, and Spain was now devouring its high-flown rhapsodies with rapture. The peculiar admixture of mystical piety, Catholic enthusiasm, and chivalrous passion, which distinguishes Amadis, exactly corresponded to the spirit of the Spaniards at an epoch when they had terminated their age-long struggle with the Moors, and were combining ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... doubt glad, poor headlong soul, to find himself a gentleman and Christian again, for the time being,—admires Hanover and Berlin very much; and looks upon Sophie Charlotte in particular as the pink of women. Something between an earthly Queen and a divine Egeria; "Serena" he calls her; and, in his high-flown fashion, is very laudatory. "The most beautiful Princess of her time," says he,—meaning one of the most beautiful: her features are extremely regular, and full of vivacity; copious dark hair, blue eyes, complexion excellently fair;—"not ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... real life, as Jonson understood it, he has simply no capacity; and in his rare attempts at humour, succeeds only in being at once dull and dirty. His stage is generally occupied with dignified lords and ladies, professing the most chivalrous sentiments, which are occasionally too high-flown and overstrained to be thoroughly effective, but which are yet uttered with sufficient sincerity. They are not mere hollow pretences, consciously adopted to conceal base motives; but one feels the want of an occasional ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... put it down to my weak nerves or not, but I believe there is some deep political intrigue going on around me, and that for some reason that passes my understanding my life is aimed at by the conspirators. It sounds high-flown and absurd, but consider the facts! Why should a thief try to break in at a bedroom window, where there could be no hope of any plunder, and why should he come with a long knife in ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... such as rich jewelry, broaches, ear-rings, necklaces set with diamonds, pearls, &c. sometimes made into a paper parcel, at others in a small neat red morocco case, in which is stuck a bill of parcels, giving a high-flown description of the articles, and with an extravagant price. Proceeding nearly in the same way as the money-droppers with the dupe, the finder proposes, as he is rather short of steeven,{1} to swap{2}his share for a comparatively small part of the value ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... neither a duke nor an archbishop, but a humble member of the lower automobiling classes, the high-flown title ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... all went well, and the President, who accompanied the commando in person, succeeded in reducing a mountain stronghold, which, in his high-flown way, he called a "glorious victory" over ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... to Maimonides' memory in many instances produced most extravagant poetry. The following high-flown lines, outraging the canons of good taste recognized in Hebrew poetry, are supposed to ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... your words grow dangerous. High-flown romantic fancies ill-beseem Your age and wisdom. 'Tis a statesman's virtue, To guard his country's safety by what means 220 It best may be protected—come what will Of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... branches of the practical joker's art. It was well known that Malachi had an undying hatred for words of four syllables and over, and the use of them was always sufficient to forfeit any good opinions he might have previously entertained concerning the user. "I hate them high-flown words," he would say—"I got a book at home that I could get them out of if I wanted them; but I don't." The book referred to was a very dilapidated dictionary. Malachi's hatred for high-flown words was only equalled by his aversion ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... failure. And, much to Clemence's astonishment, the gallant Philemon W. Strain, editor, came out with a glowing account of the whole affair in the next issue of the Clarion, in a three column article, headed "Ruth, the Village Child," complimenting the young schoolmistress in such high-flown terms, that a rival editor, who read it, thought that she must be of a literary turn, and wrote to her to solicit contributions to his paper, and another authority in a neighboring village, wanted to write her life, and was ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... lately been imported to fill the combined offices of War-Minister and Commander-in-Chief. This, and, indeed, the whole of the recent internal policy, leaves very little doubt of the source whence emanate these high-flown ideas. It cannot be better expressed than as a politique d'ostentation, which is, if we may compare small things with great, eminently French. The oscillation of French and Russian influence, and the amicable manner in which their delegates ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... Zoof had mounted his hobby-horse, and was indulging in high-flown praises about his beloved eighteenth arrondissement, the captain had remarked gravely, "Do you know, Ben Zoof, that Montmartre only requires a matter of some thirteen thousand feet to make it as ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... much of Guli Springett, whom I have seen sundry times, and think high-flown, in spight of her levelling Principles and demure Carriage. The Youth is bewitched with her, I think; what has a Woman to do with Logique? My Belief is, he might as well hope to marry the Moon as to win Mistress Springett's Hand; however, his Self-opinion is considerable. He chode ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... clergy of Rome and the monks of the East. The edifying example of the Anician family was soon imitated by the rest of the nobility: the Bassi, the Paullini, the Gracchi, embraced the Christian religion; and "the luminaries of the world, the venerable assembly of Catos (such are the high-flown expressions of Prudentius) were impatient to strip themselves of their pontifical garment; to cast the skin of the old serpent; to assume the snowy robes of baptismal innocence, and to humble the pride of the consular fasces before tombs of the martyrs." [21] The citizens, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... he favoured her with a tender pressure of the fingers and an elaborate and high-flown speech of welcome, both of which were inexpressibly disagreeable to her. But here Lady Bellamy intervened, and skilfully forced him into a conversation with her, in ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... the hardness of the life, they reasoned that it "helped toughen a youngster, and make a man of him." To them, Sara's ideas were foolish and high-flown, their notion of a "gentleman" being too often associated with city "lubbers" who came down to spy out the land—and sea—in their ridiculous knickerbockers and helmets, and who did not know a jib from a spanker, or had any idea when a sailor spoke of the "hull" of his vessel, that he referred ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... him and never speaks to me. I don't care if he be ten times Duke of Omnium; he can't be more than a gentleman, and as such I am his equal." And then, having thus given vent to his feelings in somewhat high-flown language, he walked forth and trudged away along the road ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... Stinson, had grown up to manhood with no fixed purpose in life. As a boy he was quick at learning, and obtained a fair education, which, as he grew older, he was at much pains to display by using very high-flown language, which often bordered upon the flowery and sublime. I believe in their younger days Aunt Lucinda used to allow "it fairly turned her stomach to hear the fellow talk." He was a dashing, showy follow when young, ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... family Julia was the fairest flower. As Sir Henry made her acquaintance, and her character unfolded itself, he acknowledged that few could study it without deriving advantage; few without loving her to adoration. That character it would be hard to describe without our description appearing high-flown and exaggerated. It bore an impress of loftiness, totally removed from pride; a moral superiority, which impressed all. With this was united an innate purity, that seemed her birthright; a purity that could not for an instant be doubted. If the libertine ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... hasty limners sketch her features, Charlotte not disapproving; the men of law proceed with their formalities. The doom is Death as a murderess. To her Advocate she gives thanks; in gentle phrase, in high-flown classical spirit. To the Priest they send her she gives thanks; but needs not any shriving, or ghostly or other aid ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... pompous and formal statement is framed so as to please the mother. The writer does not say much about himself; but he knows that his wife is longing to hear of her darlings, and he tells her the news in his high-flown manner. He was not often apart from the lady whom he loved so well; but I am glad that they were sometimes separated, since the separations give us the delicate and tender letters every phrase of which tells a long story of love and confidence and mutual pride. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... functions: he, therefore, appointed or agreed upon the appointment of somebody else to act as his substitute. This was, in nine cases out of ten, the eminently unromantic cavalier servitude of fact. The high-flown, complimentary language, the profound bowing and hand-kissing of the period, combined to mystify strangers as to its real significance. Sometimes, when there was really a lover in the question, the ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... to Mrs Amy's skill in draping and posing, the white wigs and cotton-flannel robes were classically correct and graceful, though sundry modern additions somewhat marred the effect, while adding point to the showman's learned remarks. Mr Laurie was Professor Owlsdark in cap and gown; and, after a high-flown introduction, he proceeded to exhibit and explain his marbles. The first figure was a stately Minerva; but a second glance produced a laugh, for the words 'Women's Rights' adorned her shield, a scroll bearing the motto 'Vote early and often' hung from the beak of the ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... the cause and to the Committee, and is publicly as well as personally a very valuable acquisition to our party on every account. He came up (as they all do who have not been in the country before) with some high-flown notions of the sixth form at Harrow or Eton, &c.; but Col. Napier and I set him to rights on those points, which is absolutely necessary to prevent disgust, or perhaps return; but now we can set our shoulders soberly to the wheel, without ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Outside the drama[317] it was about the first division of literature to proclaim boldly the refusal to consider anything human as alien from human literary interest. But, as nearly always happens, it had exaggerated its protests, and become sordid, merely in revolt from the high-flown non-sordidness of previous romance. Lesage took the principle and rejected the application. He dared, practically for the first time, to take the average man of unheroic stamp, the homme sensuel moyen of a later French phrase, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... him to abandon the colony and return home. His lieutenant, Luis Vaez de Torres, separated from him, discovered and passed the Torres Straits, a feat of excellent seamanship. Quiros returned to America. His high-flown descriptions of his discovery did not help him much, for the king simply ignored him, and his reports were buried in the archives. Quiros died in poverty and bitterness, and the only traces of his travels are the names Espiritu Santo, Bay San Iago ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... a red sash, an embroidered cap, and magisterial gestures! Others will bury themselves in official papers, trying, with the best of wills, to make head or tail of them. They will indite laws and issue high-flown worded decrees that nobody will take the trouble to carry ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... to lunch with me, Doctor von Kammacher, you must not have high-flown notions, like Mr. Ritter," said Miss Burns halting in front of a ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... would) to heed her neither by word or look, bearing all her scorns and revilings patiently, making no answer, and enduring all her tyranny to the uttermost. All of which fine conceits were but the most arrant folly and quickly brought to nothing, as you shall hear. For even now as I sat with these high-flown notions buzzing in my head, I started to her ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... deeply gratified an old soldier to-night by describing scenes that carry me back to the grand era of my life. I believe I was born to be a soldier; and my old campaigns stand out in memory like sun-lighted mountain-tops. Forgive such high-flown talk—I know it's not like me—but I've had to-night some of my old battle excitement. I never thought to feel it again. We'll hear the rest of your story to-morrow. I outrank you all, by age at least; and ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... was accustomed to the high-flown compliments of polite society, but she could not doubt the sincerity of this man, who had no place in a world where idle flattery was the small coin of talk. She blushed slightly and changed the subject, and as he talked, less and less haltingly, of the traditions of Nevis, she watched his eyes, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... good naturedly informed him that his position of Quartermaster General in the old army did not entitle him to a field command and that Lee's rank as field commander was higher, he replied in a letter which became the text of his champions. Its high-flown language and bombastic claims showed only too plainly that a consuming ambition had destroyed all sense of proportion ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... waiting with a calm look until we came near enough to take her kind hand. She was a beautiful old woman, with clear eyes and a lovely quietness and genuineness of manner; there was not a trace of anything pretentious about her, or high-flown, as Mrs. Todd would say comprehensively. Beauty in age is rare enough in women who have spent their lives in the hard work of a farmhouse; but autumn-like and withered as this woman may have looked, her features had kept, ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... associated with the greater number of them. Give a clever young medical student a book about aural or dental surgery to review, and the chances are ten to one that the criticism will be little else than a high-flown grandiloquent treatise on the wonders of the creation. A regular "literary hack" will do the thing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... moistened with quick-springing tears. She smiled, and her face looked to Theo like the face of an angel; though he was impatient of the motive, he adored her for it. And she gave her head a little toss, as if to shake off this undue emotion. "I need not talk any high-flown nonsense about such a simple duty, need I?" she said, once more with a soft laugh. Instead of making the most of her pathetic position, she would always ignore the claims she had upon sympathy. Her simple duty,—that ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... specimens of his correspondence, Mr. Tollmidge must have possessed one great merit as a letter-writer—the merit of brevity. He will weary nobody's patience, if he is allowed to have a hearing. Let him, therefore, be permitted, in his own high-flown way, ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... not a Beato Angelico, it was not his own fault. I hope with all my heart that Mr. Hudson will do the fine things he talks about, but he must bear in mind the history of dear Mr. Schafgans as a warning against high-flown pretensions. One fine day this poor young man fell in love with a Roman model, though she had never sat to him, I believe, for she was a buxom, bold-faced, high-colored creature, and he painted none but pale, sickly women. He offered to marry her, and she looked at him ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... of the ridiculous to a higher degree than the new rulers of the English country. At the same time with their chivalrous literature, they had a mocking one. They did not wait for Cervantes to begin laughing; these variable and many-sided beings sneered at high-flown sentiments and experienced them too. They sang the Song of Roland, and read with delight a romance in which the great emperor is represented strutting about before his barons, his crown on his head and his sword in his hand, asking the queen if he is not the most admirable prince in the world.[203] ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... stranger—this possible adventuress? Lyon looked very solemn over this proposal from his wife. He hesitated for a moment; but her large, clear, honest eyes were fixed full upon him, waiting for his reply. Could he refuse her request? Did he not owe everything to her, and to that very high-flown spirit of generosity which was not only a fault (if it were a fault) of Sybil, but a trait ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... delicate marriage question, though he couldn't help showing that he held Pen rather cheap. In fact, he had a perhaps just contempt for Mr. Pen's high-flown sentimentality; his own weakness, as he thought, not lying that way. "I knew it wouldn't do, Miss Foth," said he, nodding his little head. "Couldn't do. Didn't like to put my hand into the bag, but knew it couldn't ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... down, Like other brethren of his gown. For party he would scarce have bled: I say no more—because he's dead. What writings has he left behind? I hear, they're of a different kind; A few in verse; but most in prose— Some high-flown pamphlets, I suppose;— All scribbled in the worst of times, To palliate his friend Oxford's crimes, To praise Queen Anne, nay more, defend her, As never fav'ring the Pretender; Or libels yet conceal'd from sight, Against the court to show his spite; Perhaps ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... All the high-flown adjectives he had employed in his parting speech in the Students' Union, when he paid his enthusiastic tribute to the Grand Republic, now kept recurring to him, and in this moment the paradox seemed cruel. The Grand Republic, what ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... heroine, answers her ardent lover Mirando in high-flown Spanish phrase, which, when summed up in plain English prose, means that she cannot listen to his wooing, because she is so hungry—which, in view of the fact that she has not tasted food for weeks, seems to us ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... face of an old friend. If you were then of an observant nature, you will understand how much of the effect of any composition upon the human mind depends upon the printing, upon the placing of the points, even upon the position of the sentences on the page. A grand, high-flown, and sentimental climax ought always to conclude at the bottom of a page. It will look ridiculous, if it ends four or five lines down from the top of the next page. Somehow there is a feeling as of the difference ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... little laugh. "Oh, she was very ridiculous and high-flown, as you may imagine. But, as I told her, I am directly responsible to her mother for any friendships she may make out here, and I am not disposed to take any risks. We all know what Mrs. Bathurst can be like if she ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... 'maternal dame,' on domestic cares intent, hath confided to her offspring the recreation of your highness." The gay creature dropt him a curtsey, and fled to tell Mrs. Dodd the substance of "the sweet letter the dear high-flown Thing ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... eruption, and sores covering all parts of the body, are submitted to the patient's horrified inspection. Frightened by the hideous pictures before him, and at the same time soothed and charmed by the high-flown encomiums which the quack pronounces on his particular "non-mercurial mode of treatment," the patient becomes anxious to submit himself to the process. The quack is equally ready to take the case in hand, and the only ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... in Mrs. Evelegh's dining-room, the old lady and I, behind the folding doors. At three precisely Dr. Fortescue-Langley walked in. I had difficulty in restraining Lady Georgina from falling upon him prematurely. He talked a lot of high-flown nonsense to Mrs. Evelegh and Elsie about the influences of the planets, and the seventy-five emanations, and the eternal wisdom of the East, and the medical efficacy of sub-conscious suggestion. Excellent ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... said firmly, solemnly even, "and I counsel you, Miriam, in turn, to seek your draughts of soul from our pure 'wells of English undefiled,' rather than such high-flown fancies and maudlin streams as flow from the pen of this accomplished Hebrew. There is a little too much of the Jeremiah and Isaiah style about such extracts as I have seen, to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... appointment, in terms of rapture; his ecstacies are excited so readily, from the excessive warmth of his disposition, and its proneness to admire and wonder, that my new situation was a subject to awaken an enthusiasm the most high-flown. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... be said that Norwegian politics stood the trial in the situation. To a Norwegian, that which followed may appear as a powerful and magnificent achievement. Outsiders can content themselves by stating that the high-flown Radical politics of the last 20 years ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... of the appointed day the guests began to arrive, some by water, some on horseback, Colonel Verney meeting each arrival with a stately bow and a high-flown speech of welcome, and handing him on to the hall where stood Sir Charles Carew and the ladies ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... was Crowdy,—Crowdy, whose high-flown ideas hardly tallied with the stern realities of his life. Crowdy was the leader of those who had once held firmly by Protection. Crowdy had been staunchly true to his party since he had a party, though it had been said of him that the adventures ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... sharply, being seized with an ugly fit of coughing, that forced him to halt and lean on his staff for a while. When he recovered we walked on together after the geese, he talking all the way in high-flown sentences that were Greek to me, and I stealing a look every now and then at his olive face, and half inclined to take ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of them. It was the new things, the unfamiliar contours, that were most apparent, that seemed to thrust upon his consciousness the city's gigantic, self-centered indifference. Yet it was just that quality that he had loved most in London. She had let him alone. She had been—he recalled the high-flown phrase of his youth—the supremely indifferent friend! Perhaps, he thought to himself, when one is fifty, one cares less to be "let alone"; less for indifference as the supreme ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was afraid you might disapprove of my deliberation. My chief hope rests upon Miss Wyllys's good sense and the wishes of her friends, who, I think, are evidently favourable to me. She has no silly, high-flown notions; she is now of an age—three or four-and-twenty I think—to take a reasonable view of the world; and I hope she will find the sincere affection of a respectable man, whose habits and position resemble her own, sufficient ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... required for any utterances or forms of his own, and that he consequently accepts poetry as a ready-made ornament, something pretty and exotic, which is valued in proportion to its prettiness and rarity. Be the reason whatever it may, certain it is that nothing can be too artificial or high-flown to please the Italian peasantry: its tales are all of kings; princesses, fairies, knights, winged horses, marvellous jewels, and so forth; its songs are almost without exception about love, constancy, moon, stars, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... after a little, that we rather enjoyed mildly tormenting poor Herbert Spencer. He tried so hard, and looked so scared, and was so unbelievably stupid! Almost always he had to pick his orders word by word from a vast amount of high-flown, unnecessary English. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... quite sane like other men," she repeated. "It would seem that you have somehow blundered through long years, preserving always the ignorance of a child, and the blindness of a child. I cannot understand how this is possible; nor can I keep from smiling at your high-flown notions; and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... stirring in my heart and brain, When Fancy had allured my soul Into a chase as vague and far As would be his who fixt his goal In the horizon or some star— Any bewilderment that brought More near to earth my high-flown thought— The faintest glimpse of joy, less pure, Less high and heavenly, but more sure, Came welcome—and was then to me What the first flowery isle must be To vagrant birds blown out ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... a month after Danton's death, Robespierre delivered a long speech before the Convention, a speech that marks his apogee. It was a high-flown rhapsody on civic morality and purism. Voltaire and the Encyclopedists were bitterly attacked; Jean Jacques Rousseau was deified. The State should adopt his religious attitude, his universal church of nature. In that church, nature ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... looked distressed. She was a thin little woman, with an unsteady head, physically and morally speaking; full of kindness of heart, sentimentality, high-flown principles, and other bygone ladylike commodities. Her small, eager face, of a ruddy and weather-worn complexion—as if she had, at some early period of her existence, been left out all night in an east wind—was puckered up with a sense ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... the romantic Adrian; hence the poetry. On the whole the rhymes went pretty well, though there were difficulties, but with industry he got round them. Finally the sonnet, a high-flown and very absurd composition, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... of Landor's favorite topics, and his ire was rarely more quickly excited than by placing before him a specimen of high-flown sentimentality. He would put on his spectacles, exclaim, "What is this?" and, having read a few lines, would throw the book down, saying, "I have not the patience to read such stuff. It may be very fine, but I cannot understand it. It is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... could not be done at Porto Santo, where there were no ships and no money. Influence must be used; and Columbus knew that his proposals, if they were to have even a chance of being listened to, must be presented in some high-flown and elaborate form, giving reasons and offering inducements and quoting authorities. He would have to get some one to help him in that; he would have to get up some scientific facts; his brother Bartholomew could help him, and some of those disagreeable relatives-in-law ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... daily association? She knew that no unworthy thought ever found utterance upon his lips; that no vulgar instinct ever showed itself in his conduct; that he was essentially to the very core of his heart a gentleman; that without any high-flown affectation of chivalry he was as chivalrous as Bayard; that without any languid airs and graces of the modern aesthetic school he was a man of the highest and broadest culture; and that—oh, rara avis among modern scholars and young laymen—he was honestly and ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Of being admired, By ladies of gentle degree—degree, With flattery sated, High-flown and inflated, Away from the city we flee—we flee! From charms intramural To prettiness rural The sudden transition Is simply Elysian, So come, Amaryllis, Come, Chloe and Phyllis, Your slaves, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... It was very evident that the friend of Mr Bellamy expected rather to frighten Michael into a humble and contrite apology, than to find him ready and eager for the battle; for he commenced his mission by a very long and high-flown address, and assured Mr Allcraft, time after time, that nothing but the most ample and the most public amende could be received by his friend after what had taken place. Michael listened impatiently, and interrupted the speaker in the midst of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... not think small beer of oneself &c (vanity) 880. Adj. dignified; stately; proud, proud-crested; lordly, baronial; lofty- minded; highsouled, high-minded, high-mettled^, high-handed, high- plumed, high-flown, high-toned. haughty lofty, high, mighty, swollen, puffed up, flushed, blown; vainglorious; purse-proud, fine; proud as a peacock, proud as Lucifer; bloated with pride. supercilious, disdainful, bumptious, magisterial, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... bed-clothes. I was very happy to hear this—I was very happy to hear that a man, whom I really liked so well, had got the better of a passion for a woman who I knew was utterly incapable of being to him what his romantic high-flown notions required a wife to be. "If this happy result," I said to myself, "can be rendered the more sure by ridicule, that shall not be wanting. Meanwhile, I will sue for peace, and see ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... that, after Mr. Hastings has ransacked Bengal from one end to the other, and has used all the power which he derives from having every friend and every dependant of his in every office from one end of that government to the other, he has not, in all those panegyrics, those fine high-flown Eastern encomiums, got one word of refutation or one word of evidence against any charge whatever which we produce against him. Every one knows, that, in the course of criminal trials, when no evidence of alibi ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... little comedy of prying and veiling courtesies was played out, to the great amusement of the English sea-dogs. Finally, when the time agreed upon was up, the Spanish officer departed, pouring forth a stream of high-flown compliments, which Drake, who was a Spanish scholar, answered with the like. Waving each other a ceremonious adieu the two leaders were left no wiser ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... looks into the past, Sam would be more forbearing in pronouncing verdicts on his brethren, worsted in the effort to express what was inherent in their minds; would not decide quite so dogmatically, that all a man had to do was to be sound and diligent, and keep himself far apart from high-flown rubbish, like a common-sense, sober-minded Englishman. And Sam came to be less feverishly anxious about his own monopoly of public esteem; less nettled at art-criticism; perhaps less vivacious in his talents and well-doing, but more manly and serene in his triumph, as Will Locke had been ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... actors. His hopes were speedily dashed to the ground; when he finished reading the second act every actor but one had left the room, and Meyer thrust a dagger into the poet's heart by declaring that "Fiesco" was nothing but high-flown rubbish. Having, however, heard but two acts of the play, and probably stirred to compassion by Schiller's mournful countenance, the regisseur requested that the manuscript should be left with him; and the following morning the poet was compensated for the intervening ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... place will not please God, I cannot please him at all. Why then should I try, if my way of trying is of no use? Why should I try to be honest, sober, and useful, if that is not true religion?—if what God wants of me is not virtue, but a certain high-flown religiousness which I cannot feel or even understand?'—and so they grow weary in well-doing, and careless about the plain duties of morality. They become careless, likewise, about the plain duties of religion; and so they are demoralised, because they are told that justice ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... all the big words in the dictionary, with your high-flown language," warned Bandy-legs in mock severity. "But I get your meaning, all the same, and I also agree with your noble sentiments. Sure we're expecting to stand up for Obed and his pets; and we're likewise intending to make it hot for any old ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... you comferable an' all that," Brownie said, disparagingly. "But when it comes to a mate, we all know there ain't any one for you like Miss Norah—though I do say Master Jim's as handy in a sick-room as that high-flown nurse from Melbourne ever was—I'm glad to me bones she's gone!" said Brownie, in ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... difficulty of interpretation. In most cases the poet has effectually kept his secret; the search is futile, in spite of all the "scholastic labour-lost" devoted to it. Equally tantalising are the fleeting symbolisms that suggest themselves now and then. The confession sometimes made by the poet, that high-flown compliment and not true despair is intended, prepares us to accept the symbolic application where it forces itself upon us, and to feel the presence here and there of platonic or spiritual shadowings. Those who do not find pleasure in the Arcadian ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... not at all realize my romantic ideas of a hero; and one bright day the dissatisfaction which had been gradually gathering in my mind expressed itself in words. I had gone down to a lake at the bottom of the garden to indulge in high-flown meditations; and Charles Tracy stood beside one of the boats which ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... improvements; he showed us that men who wrote in Greek and Latin sometimes told lies; he showed us that ancient history might be related in such a manner as to furnish not only allusions to schoolboys, but important lessons to statesmen. From that love of theatrical effect and high-flown sentiment which had poisoned almost every other work on the same subject his book is perfectly free. But his passion for a theory as false, and far more ungenerous, led him substantially to violate truth in every page. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... have known by now, it was always a mistake to try to hustle Christina in any way. Her reply condescended neither to explanations nor defence. Written in her superior, and rather high-flown English, which she was well aware he detested, it practically ignored his epistle and took the form of an essay on the delights of travel, the charm of residence in the Northern City, the kindliness and generosity of host and hostess. She was not without ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... never invited its presence, adds to their perplexity. She was silent, and Vavasor, whose experience was scarcely so valuable as her ignorance, judged he might venture a little farther. But with all his experience in the manufacture of compliments and in high-flown poetry, he was now at a loss; he had no fine theories of love to talk from! Love was with him, at its best, the something that preceded marriage—after which, whatever boys and girls might think, and although, of course, to a beautiful wife like Hester ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... brilliant and lamentable example. This exchanges the world of sober conduct, intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland, compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitive understanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown commercialism and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... adventure his mistress pretended to be angry, and told him that he ought to have fought. Esther observed that he had shewn more true courage in listening to reason, and M. d'O—— said he was strongly of his daughter's opinion; however, Mdlle. Casanova, after airing her high-flown ideas, began to sulk with ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... my style simple and familiar. History is too often written in a high-flown manner that renders it wearisome and false. Why should we imagine historical facts to be out of the ordinary run of things and on a scale different ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... to subjoin to this high-flown paragraph, that will at all keep pace with the majesty of it. I should have left to the Gazette to wish you joy, nor have begun a new letter without more materials, if I did not fear you would be still uneasy about your nephew. I hear he has, since his parenthesis, voted again ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... one does not learn from books," the lad said. "At any rate, not from such books as I have been working at. I could do a high-flown sentence, and offer to kiss your hand and to declare that all I have is at your disposal. But if I wanted to say, 'When are we going to halt for dinner? I am feeling very peckish,' I should be ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... first, the all-important exhortation with which Christ seeks to sober a frivolous curiosity. In its primary application, the 'strait gate' may be taken to be the lowliness of the Messiah, and the consequent sharp contrast of His kingdom with Jewish high-flown and fleshly hopes. The passage to the promised royalty was not through a great portal worthy of a palace, but by a narrow, low-browed wicket, through which it took a man trouble to squeeze. For us, the narrow gate is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... pretend to understand any thing of these high-flown sentiments, niece; you have all that glory to yourself: I would teach you a little plain sense, and not have you so ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... fever; they sent for the vultures of physic—I was bled copiously—I was kept quiet in bed for six days, at the end of that time, my constitution and youth restored me. I took up one of the newspapers listlessly: Glanville's name struck me; I read the paragraph which contained it—it was a high-flown and fustian panegyric on his genius and promise. I turned to another column, it contained a long speech he had the night before made in the House ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... displayed greater ease in his presence at this second meeting. She received him placidly. There were no more of those disconcerting and high-flown forensics in her greeting. There was the winning candor of old friendship in her smile and he flushed boyishly in his frank delight. She presented him to Mrs. Stanton and that lady's modish coolness did not dampen his spirits, which had become plainly exuberant. In fact, he paid very little ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... and were not the least bit abashed at the presence of strangers. There was no polished veneer about the widow's hospitality. She did not pretend to be what she was not. She knew that she was poor and was not ashamed of it. She was perfectly natural, and indulged in no high-flown airs. ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... capital instance, was not peculiar to Hawaiian poetry. The Roman Senate bestowed divinity on its emperors by vote; the Hawaiian bard laureate, careering on his Pegasus, thought to accomplish the same end by piling Ossa on Pelion with high-flown phrases; and every loyal subject added his contribution to ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... so much pleased. The note from Miss Inches, over which he and Katy had laughed, but which was not shown to the rest, had prepared him for a visitor of rather high-flown ideas, but he did not like having Johnnie singled out as the subject of this kind of praise. However, he said to himself, "It doesn't matter. She means well, and jolly little Johnnie won't be harmed by a few ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... book which could not possibly be put on it. But he had selected quotations so adroitly that for people who had not read the book (and obviously scarcely anyone had read it) it seemed absolutely clear that the whole book was nothing but a medley of high-flown phrases, not even—as suggested by marks of interrogation—used appropriately, and that the author of the book was a person absolutely without knowledge of the subject. And all this was so wittily done that Sergey Ivanovitch would not have disowned ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... to do out of all reason, even the things which they hate to do, and to put aside what they hold most dear. Fancies unintelligible to practical people like women—thus Stella Croyle's thoughts ran—but to be taken note of very carefully. High-flown motives from a world of white angels, where no doubt they are very suitable. But men will use them as working motives here below, with the result that they wreck women's hearts and cause themselves a great deal ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... insincere, and taxed with want of generosity. But I think these reproaches are not well founded. High-flown professions of friendship and attachment constitute the language of common compliment in this country, and are never supposed to be understood in the literal acceptation of the words; and, if their acts of generosity are but very rare, we ought to ascribe that rarity, not so much to a deficiency ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... bargain. To the careless seigneur it would probably be very much a matter of course. The ransom offered—six thousand francs—was as good as if she had been a prince. The ladies at home might be indignant, but what was their foolish fancy for a high-flown girl in comparison with these substantial crowns in his pocket; and to be free from the responsibility of guarding her would be an advantage too. And if her own party did not stir on her behalf, why should he? ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... by Van Bett. He well knows that he deserves punishment, if he is found out on either side. The burgomaster, getting more and more confused, and fearing himself surrounded by spies and cheats, examines one of the strangers after the other, and is of course confounded to hear their high-flown names; at last he seizes the two Peters, but is deterred from his purpose by the two ambassadors. They are now joined by a third, the Russian General Lefort, who comes to call back his Sovereign to his own country. In the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... on Saturday," said she. "Then the Sultan and Sultana will be here to tea. They will be very proud that I am to marry a Turkish angel. But take care that you know a very pretty story, for both my parents are very fond indeed of stories. My mother likes them high-flown and moral, but my father likes them merry, so that ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... that Socrates is partly in jest and partly in earnest. He is discoursing in a high-flown vein, which may be compared to the 'dithyrambics of the Phaedrus.' They are mysteries of which he is speaking, and he professes a kind of ludicrous fear of his imaginary wisdom. When he is arguing out of Homer, about the names of Hector's ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... was, in spite of his less orthodox opinions. So she made up her mind that she would not catch Christopher's eye on the present occasion, as she usually did when anything amused her, because it was cruel to laugh at the frustration of poor Alan's high-flown plans; and then naturally she looked straight at the spot where Chris was presiding over a table, and returned his smile of perfect comprehension. It was one of Elisabeth's peculiarities that she invariably ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... extensive application. For the very point respecting which your whole school, and yourself most especially, who are such a diligent investigator of ancient instances, are in the habit of vaunting yourself and using high-flown language, namely, the mention of brave and illustrious men, and the extolling of their actions, as proceeding not from any regard to advantage, but from pure principles of honour and a love of glory, is entirely upset, when once that rule in the choice of things is established which ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... occupation of a Rajput was that of a warrior and landholder. Their high-flown titles, Bhupal (Protector of the earth), Bhupati (Lord of the earth), Bhusur (God of the earth), Bahuja (Born from the arms), indicate, Sir H. Risley says, [492] the exalted claims of the tribe. The notion ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... a book that is something like life, and I'll read it," he exclaimed impatiently; "but I can't swallow the high-flown prosings of impossibly ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... original here has a delightful pun. Gerwazy misunderstands his lord's high-flown word wassalow (vassals) as wonsalow (mustachioed champions). A long mustache was the dearest adornment of a Polish gentleman; compare Gerwazy's description of Jacek on pages 43 and 115, where wonsal is the title given him in ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... in that way about what appears to me a very patent circumstance: it is clear that he never earnestly applied himself to the solution of the riddle, or else—what is more likely, in spite of his rather high-flown estimate of his own "Reason"—that his mind, and the mind of his ancestors, never was able to go farther back in time than the Edmundsbury Monks. But they did not make the stone, nor did they dig it from the depths of the earth ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... troublesome! And he wants to take us down on the third of next month. He will explain to you the why of it all; perhaps you'll understand better than I could. Such high-flown notions don't appeal to me a bit. I think Theo is rather like that silly man in the Middle Ages who was always trying to fight windmills, or sheep, or something; and there really ought to be a law to prevent people who want to go about being unselfish to everybody from ever ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... her word; she played with power and genius. Words of passion and of pain flowed like a stream of lava from her lips; her oaths of faith and eternal constancy, her wild entreaties, her resignation, her despair, were not the high-flown, pompous phrases of the tragedian, but truth in its omnipotence. It was living passion, it was breathing agony; and, with fast-flowing tears, with the pallor of death, she told her tale of love; and in that vast saloon, glittering with jewels, filled with the high-born, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... Heaven knows what—to legalise gambling for existence to a people who delight in high play, and yet not involve us in a civil war—was a grand policy, Kearney, a very grand policy. Not that I expect a young, ardent spirit like yourself, fresh from college ambitions and high-flown hopes, will take ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... it is so sort of splendid, with the great windows, gold chairs, and fine folks. Oh, I would like to live in a castle with a father and mother like that," said Merry, who was romantic, and found the old farmhouse on the hill a sad trial to her high-flown ideas of elegance. ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... the mine. I pulled the wires with judge and jury, And the upper courts, to beat the claims Of the crippled, the widow and orphan, And made a fortune thereat. The bar association sang my praises In a high-flown resolution. And the floral tributes were many— But the rats devoured my heart And a snake made ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... expressions of welcome. To these Sheikh Abdul Qadir vouchsafed no reply beyond a grunt. The chief glanced at Shah Sowar, and that excellent comedian, assuming the ashamed look of one disgraced by his master's rudeness, at once made a long-winded and complimentary reply in the most fluent and high-flown Persian. Then, before the effect should be lost, he ordered in tea, and commenced an animated conversation with the two strangers, all parties absolutely ignoring, out of politeness, Sheikh Abdul Qadir and ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... The quarrel between them seemed past and they were talking merrily together. On the sight of her the Duke left me and ran forward. By an adroit movement he thrust Carford aside and began to ply the lady with most extravagant and high-flown compliments, displaying an excess of devotion which witnessed more admiration than respect. She had treated me as a boy, but she did not tell him that he was a boy, although he was younger than I; she listened with heightened colour and sparkling eyes. I ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... Ordinance of God. Submit your selves to every Ordinance of Man, for the Lord's Sake, says the Apostle. Where (by the way) pray take notice, he calls them Ordinances of Man; and gives you the true Notion, how far any thing can be said to be Jure Divino: which is far short of what your high-flown Assertors of the Jus Divinum wou'd carry it, and proves as strongly for a Republican Government as a Monarchical; tho' in truth it affects neither, where the very ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... think small beer of oneself &c. (vanity) 880. Adj. dignified; stately; proud, proud-crested; lordly, baronial; lofty-minded; highsouled, high-minded, high-mettled[obs3], high-handed, high-plumed, high-flown, high-toned. haughty lofty, high, mighty, swollen, puffed up, flushed, blown; vainglorious; purse-proud, fine; proud as a peacock, proud as Lucifer; bloated with pride. supercilious, disdainful, bumptious, magisterial, imperious, high and mighty, overweening, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... labour in India can hardly be said to justify the title it assumed, and in answer to a deputation which waited on the Governor, Sir George Lloyd expressed a legitimate desire for more information than was contained in its high-flown address as to the status of these unions, their method of formation, their constitution, their system of ballot and election, and the actual experience in the several trades of those who claimed to represent them. That information was not and could not be furnished, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... time that the Vicomte and I had passed in the Provencal chateau. I had the pleasant conviction that Lucille's health could, at all events, come to no harm from a residence in one of the oldest castles in France. No very lover-like reflections, the high-flown will cry. So be it. Each must love in his own way. "Air and water—air and water!" the Vicomte had cried when he saw the men at work under my directions. "You Englishmen are ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... deceased elder who had appointed a brother elder the executor of his will, declaring that the clergy "should in no way be called off from their holy ministrations nor tied down by secular troubles and business." [579:3] But the common sense of the Church revolted against such high-flown spiritualism, as in many districts where the disciples were still few and indigent, they could not afford a suitable support for all entrusted with the performance of ecclesiastical duties. Hence, before the recognition of Christianity ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... at. You had rather be Mr. Falkland's miss, than the wife of a plain downright yeoman. But I shall take care of you.—Ay, this comes of indulgence. You must be taken down, miss. You must be taught the difference between high-flown notions and realities. Mayhap you may take it a little in dudgeon or so; but never mind that. Pride always wants a little smarting. If you should be brought to shame, it is I that shall ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... House, and though the description undoubtedly partook of George's usual high-flown couleur-de-rose style, the manor being only a manor provided the owner sacrificed his interest in Swillingford by driving off its poachers, and the river being only a river when the tiny Swill was swollen into one, still Hanby House was a very nice attractive sort of ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... more necessary than ever to direct attention to this method in our times, when men hope to produce more effect on the mind with soft, tender feelings, or high-flown, puffing-up pretensions, which rather wither the heart than strengthen it, than by a plain and earnest representation of duty, which is more suited to human imperfection and to progress in goodness. To set before ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... hand of this humble champion they left a mark wherever they struck. He didn't care for that round, smooth kind of preaching which always rolls off; he liked the word to strike, mark, and abide where it fell. He had no sympathy with high-flown sermons which shut out the Cross of Jesus and those good old Gospel truths associated with that dear emblem of God's love to the world. If such a discourse were delivered in his hearing he was sure to say something about it. "Praacher brought us a lot of butterflies and fancy ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... it put as baldly as that. The alien inhabitants of Tunisia are well hated by a certain type of Frenchmen. The country has been compared to a wine-bottle that bears some high-flown label indicative of fine stuff within—the French administration—but is filled, unfortunately, with a poisonous mixture from round the corner, the ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... prevent fools from making themselves disagreeable; on which theory, laws must be confessed to have been in all ages somewhat of a failure. He seems to have been, like his master, an impudent light-hearted fellow, who took life easily enough, laughed at patriotism, and all other high-flown notions, boasted that the world was his country, and was no doubt excellent after-dinner company for the great king. Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of a darker and more melancholic temperament; and while Theodorus contented himself with preaching ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... aware, reverend sir, that the high-flown elegance of that compliment can only be equalled by its sincerity; believe me no less sincere, when I assure you on my honour, that my gratitude for your approbation bears an exact proportion to the pleasure experienced by yourself ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... he went all through that night on his mission of mercy—without enthusiasm, without high-flown notions respecting mankind, but with the simple sense of duty that was his. These people were his things—his dumb and driven beasts. In his heart there may have existed a grudge against the Almighty for placing him in a ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... favourably with the florid, exaggerated accounts of the engagement which are published in this morning's papers. I am glad to find that France possesses at least one man who tells the truth, and who can address his fellow-citizens in plain language. The credulity of the Parisians, and their love of high-flown bombast, amount to a disease, which, if this city is not to sink into a species of Baden Baden, must be stamped out. Mr. O'Sullivan recently published an account of his expedition to the Prussian headquarters in the Electeur Libre. Because ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
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