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More "Humdrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the charge brought against me by certain ignoramuses—that I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... which departed from the formula, for that projection out of the world which had recently cheered him in art, had deviated and sought expression in a woman. She embodied his need to soar upward from the terrestrial humdrum. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... think it the true explanation," replied the priest placidly; "but you said that nobody could connect the four things. The true tale, of course, is something much more humdrum. Glengyle had found, or thought he had found, precious stones on his estate. Somebody had bamboozled him with those loose brilliants, saying they were found in the castle caverns. The little wheels are some diamond-cutting affair. He had to do the thing very roughly and in a small way, with ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... That she was young and pretty made matters worse. Alice Weaver always had worshipped her brother, by the law of opposites perhaps. She was as drab and respectable as Boston. All her tastes ran to humdrum monotony. But turbulent, lawless Buck, the brother whom she had brought up after the death of their mother, held her heart in the hollow of his hard, ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... bitterly; "there's the sore point. Now look here; my friend, do you think that an organization like mine is made to bend to the trivialities of a copying clerk's work? To follow the humdrum of every-day routine? To blacken paper? To become a servant?—me! with what ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... Irish canaller, Chinese coolie, Swede or Italian or Ruthenian—housed in noisome bunkhouses, often fleeced by employment agent or plundering sub-contractor, facing sudden death by reckless familiarity with dynamite or slower death by typhoid and dysentery; the men who carried on the humdrum work of every day, track-mending, ticket-punching, engine-stoking; the patient, unmurmuring payer of taxes for endless bonuses—these, too, were perhaps not least among the Railway ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... led a humdrum life for the past month. Marian and Elinor have begun to potter about in my laboratory. They come there every day for an hour to work and study, ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... she did not seem to tire of him: and he would often wonder what this lovely myth, so skilled and potent in arts wherein he was the merest bungler, could find to care for in Jurgen. For now they lived together like any other humdrum married couple, and their occasional exchange of endearments was as much a matter of course as their meals, and hardly ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... though it was. M. G. Saphir, one of the best exponents of Jewish wit, justly said: "The Jews seized the weapon of wit, since they were interdicted the use of every other sort of weapon." Whatever humdrum life during the middle ages offered them, had to submit to ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... disturbed by the growlings of the two young bulls, looked up half apathetic, half interested. They were sleepy, but they sensed a fight. It would break the monotony of the humdrum ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Muley Cow and Spot the dog were in the back pasture one day, where the Muley Cow had strayed. And as Johnnie paused to pick a few blackberries he thought what a humdrum place Pleasant Valley was, anyway, and how he would like to go off where there were real buffaloes, ...
— The Tale of the The Muley Cow - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... 'bustle! bustle!'" cried Amy. "I believe with Maggie that housekeeping and dining well are high arts, and not humdrum necessities. Webb, I need a broad, flat rock. Please provide one at once, while Johnnie gathers clean dry leaves for plates. You, Ned, can put lots of dry sticks between the stones there, and uncle Webb will ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... disappointed in her love of life. To be twenty, and not to believe in the fairies of Romance; to be twenty and, instead of the rosy dreams you've had, to see life stretching on and on before you, an endless, uninspired humdrum like mother's, darning stockings by the sitting-room fire—that is ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... States as they are in that of Britain—more it would be impossible to say—and they have produced types of daring, endurance, and shrewdness like the 'Silver Kings' of Nevada which testify to the exceptional powers always developed by the Irish in exceptional circumstances. But in the humdrum business of everyday life in the United States they suffer from defects which are the outcome of their devotion to mistaken political ideals and of their subordination of industry to politics, which are not always purely American, but are often influenced by considerations ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... of those dim but familiar ghosts, often grotesque rather than heroic, who come to us from out of the books, the daubed portraits of times nearer our own, and sit opposite us, making us laugh, and also cry, with humdrum stories and humdrum woes so very like our own. No; such ghosts the Renaissance has not left behind it. From out of it there come to us no familiars. They are all faces—those which meet us in the pages of chronicles and in the frames of pictures: they ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... was a perfect sailor, and had that dreaminess in his nature which matches with nothing but the ripple of the waves. Still, I could not hide from myself that he was a changed man since that voyage in search of health from which he had just returned. His mother talked in her humdrum way about heart disease; and his father, taking up the strain, bored us about organic lesions, till we almost wished he had a lesion himself. Severance ridiculed all this; but he grew more and more moody, and his eyes seemed to be ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... you," T.O. murmured after a while, "that places like this would be humdrum-y and commonplace? But I guess there are 'stories' everywhere. I'm beginning to find ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... tragic leap of Julie, as she sets her horse to the cliff and thunders to her death, was always in Hester's mind. It was so that she herself would like to die, spurning submission and patience, and all the humdrum virtues. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about to commence at the expense of the King. He and his wife removed to Vienna, where they remained till 1775, when they retired to Venice, Faustina's birthplace. Two years before this Dr. Burney visited them at their handsome house in the Landstrasse in Berlin, and found them a humdrum couple—Hasse groaning with the gout, and the once lovely Faustina transformed into a jolly old woman of seventy-two, with two charming daughters. As he approached the house with the Abate Taruffi, Faustina, seeing them, came down to meet them. Says the Doctor: "I was presented ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... in Switzerland. Aunt Margaret was determined that her nurselings should miss nothing that she could give them. The duty letters which she insisted on their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her as she read them—the unreasoning jealousy that ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, at anchor, with the blue and white Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... primness could not withstand the witchery of the gentleman's superb tenor voice, with its high culture and feeling; because even into that humdrum refrain he put a pathos and ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... to her room and soon left her in an unusually contented frame of mind to develop strategy for the coming party. Mrs. Allen's nerves utterly incapacitated her for the care of her household, attendance upon church, and such humdrum matters, but in view of a great occasion like a "grand crush ball," where among the luminaries of fashion she could become the refulgent centre of a constellation which her fair daughters would make around her, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... stopped short, with every ennui-darkened sense in her body "jacked" like a wild deer's senses before the sudden dazzle of sight, sound, scent that awaited her below. Before her blinking eyes she saw even the empty, humdrum hotel office turned into a blazing bower of palms and roses and electric lights. Beyond this bower a corridor opened out—more dense, more sweet, more sparkling. And across this corridor the echo ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... hear a bullet pass within an inch of her head, and have her sweet little darling frightened almost out of its wits. Well, but just think of the state of satisfaction and rejoicing that she must be in now at having escaped. Had it not been for that trial she would now have been in her ordinary humdrum condition. I quite agree with Ralph that trials are really a ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... general tendency was towards relapse. In High Germany it was even worse. In spite of all efforts of the clergy by the extension of secular schools, the laity preferred the excitement of chase and camp to the quiet humdrum of the schoolroom. Religion seemed to be regarded rather as a profession than a principle, quite right in its place, i.e. the Church and the monastery, but unsuited for active life. The wealthy land-owners, therefore, did not cease to endow religious houses or to build churches, but they ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows; Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes: "Bobolink, bobolink, Spink, spank, spink, When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Greyson was at the Hall—Herbert Greyson whom she vowed always did make a Miss Nancy of her! And so Cap had to content herself for a week with quiet mornings of needlework at her workstand, with Herbert to read to or talk with her; sober afternoon rides, attended by Herbert and Old Hurricane; and humdrum evenings at the chess board, with the same Herbert, while Major Warfield dozed in a great "sleepy hollow" of ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... of a mate, that greatest of all adventures (to the young), was made humdrum. Doubtless his mother already had selected the girl, and presently would marry him to her. ... Somehow this was the one phase of the situation that galled ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... it would take him maybe ten years to save a thousand, and here he's made it in a single morning. Think you can keep him out of speculation then? First thing you know he's thrown up his honest, humdrum position—oh, I've seen it hundreds of times—and takes to hanging round the customers' rooms down there on La Salle Street, and he makes a little, and makes a little more, and finally he is so far in that he can't pull out, and then some billionaire fellow, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... that mixture of maidenly feelings of which the discreet novelist only details a selection. It is not customary to dwell upon thoughts of vague regret at the approaching withdrawal of a universal admiration—at the future necessity for discreet and humdrum behaviour quite devoid of the excitement that lurks in a double meaning. Let it, therefore, be ours to note the outward signs of a very natural emotion. Miss Chyne noted them herself with care, and not without ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... meditative. "My faith!" he commented, with brightening eyes. "It sounds almost too good to be true! And I've been growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years standing that I had almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a bachelor. I fear my house contains little that will be of service to a young lady. Yet a room is at your disposal; the parlor-maid ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... know I don't mean that! I was thinking of your adventures. Father told me he found you living with some old friends on a big fruit-growing estate near a small town, and I supposed it had been all rather lonely and humdrum, until that quiet little game a few weeks ago made me realize that you must have seen a bit of the strenuous side down there. That would be ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... continue his comparatively humdrum order of advancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangely different and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The Palestine Exploration Fund sent him with another officer to conduct ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... not reply for a minute. She set her wine-glass down and toyed with the stem. Then she looked up at him under her eyelashes with that old daring look of hers, and repeated: "And love, Peter. But real love, not stodgy humdrum liking, Peter. I want the love that's like the hot sun, and the wide, tossing blue sea east of Suez, and the nights under the moon where the real world wakes up and doesn't go to sleep, like it does in the country in the ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... York to Rio Janeiro was without accident or any thing to vary the usual monotony. We soon settled down to the humdrum of a long voyage, reading some, not much; playing games, but never gambling; and chiefly engaged in eating our meals regularly. In crossing the equator we had the usual visit of Neptune and his wife, who, with a large razor and a bucket of soapsuds, came over the sides and shaved ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... to me, and I was able to creep up close and kneel within two feet of the hole. The main nest was twenty feet away, and this was a special exit made for the occasion—a triumphal gateway erected far away from the humdrum ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... fairly certain that it won't be a fresh herring. Of our three survivors Rupert alone was to win the coveted distinction. He grew to be a fine boy and was eaten at Hammersmith, where his plump but delicate roe gave the greatest satisfaction. It was not eaten in the ordinary humdrum way, but was thickly spread on a piece of buttered toast, generously peppered, and devoured. And when his "wish" was placed on the kitchen-range, swelled rapidly and burst with a loud report, his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... else such an exhibition would have been considered the worst taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after the pantomime at the church—for what is a modern smart wedding but a second-rate pantomime?—put them into a good humour, and made them feel that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... animal! But he always does things on the quiet; it is his nature to. He's the sort of chap that thinks for about twenty years, and then goes straight and does the one and only thing that no one else would dream of doin'. I rather fancy, for all his humdrum ways, he would be a difficult man to thwart. I'd give a good deal to know how he got over Lady Florence, though. He has precious little to recommend him ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... with alarm. What is he to do in this land of ghosts? there is no place for him. Imagine the commonplace liver of a humdrum existence being received into ghostland. He enters nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at school. The old ghosts gather ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... enthusiasm by every officer present. They gave three cheers for their gallant leader, and another rouser for the service they belonged to, which made the walls of their mess room ring again, so delighted were they at the prospect of leaving their quiet, humdrum quarters for the dash and excitement of the ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of Men and Women. The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in Too Late, with her thin, odd ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... The great Charleston secession celebration on the 17th had been held while he was on his way; the glare of its illumination was extinguished, the smoke of its bonfires had been dissipated by the fresh Atlantic breezes, and its holiday insurgents had returned to the humdrum of their routine employments. It was, therefore, in uninterrupted quiet that on the 23d of November he in company with Captain Foster made a tour of inspection to the different forts, and on the same day wrote out and transmitted to the War Department a somewhat ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... good, heavy, raw-boned lump of a Scotchman, who'll believe nothin' till he's convinced, and accept nothin' till it's proved, who'll argue with a stone wall, if he's got nobody else to dispute with, in that slow sedate humdrum way that drives everybody wild but himself, who's got an amazin' conscience, but no nerves whatever to speak of—ah, that's the man to go under water, an' crawl about by the hour among mud and wreckage without gittin' excited or makin' ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... over very carefully, and I came to the conclusion that it was not good enough. You were always a dear good chap yourself, but your prospects were not quite dashing enough for your festive Violet. I believe in a merry time even if it is a short one. But if I had really wanted to settle down in a humdrum sort of way, you are the man whom I should have chosen out of the whole batch of them. I hope what I say won't make you conceited, for one of your best points used to ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... she remains at home. Really she expects to see him come home any minute, but by conjuring up imaginary dangers she is getting ready to make his home-coming a great relief instead {499} of a mere humdrum matter. She is "shooting the chutes", getting the thrill of ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... understand. I felt the same way the first time I left our humdrum city and flew out into the bright scented world of blossoms." The little bee was silent a while, thinking of her first flight.— But then she wanted to know how the butterfly's large wings could grow in the small space of ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... cannot reasonably guard against; it is essentially one of those countries where "man's greatest enemy is man." There is ample room for double the population, and yet a million acres of virgin soil only awaiting the co-operation of husbandman and capitalist to turn it to lucrative account. A humdrum life is incompatible here with the constant emotion kept up by typhoons, shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, brigands, epidemics, devastating ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... of the manner in which he wrote The Raven is incredible, being probably one of his solemn and sombre jokes; equally incredible is Trollope's confession of his humdrum, mechanical methods of work. Doubtless he believed he was telling the whole truth, but only here and there in his Autobiography does he permit to peep out touches of light, which complete the portrait of himself. It is impossible that for the reader ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Our somewhat humdrum existence eventually came to an end about the middle of August. By this time the German offensive had finally ceased, having received its knock-out blow in the fruitless attack made against the French near Rheims on July 15th. On this occasion the French had received ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... speak of people being middle-aged and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it's only because I'm such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act as a kind of Play with Baby, and all ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... is something precarious in such a business as mine;—but I am endeavouring to make it less so from day to day, and hope very shortly to bring it into that humdrum groove which best befits a married man. Should I ask further assistance from you in doing this, perhaps you will not refuse it if I can succeed in making the matter clear to you. As it is I thank you sincerely for what you have done. I will ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... course of true love should have run smooth for them, if ever. But know you not that the gods envy no small thing, nor are angry at any humdrum happiness of common men? Know you not that the god of war spares the coward and slays the brave? That in the race for fortune Jove often trips the swiftest runners and lets the dull plodder creep past the winning post alone? Know you not that ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... impossible in a home, neither of which belong to this family. Here every law of health is violated, foresight in providing for the physical comforts of the home is wanting; little attention is given to the education of the children; no sacrifices to-day enrich to-morrow; life is a humdrum, a routine, a dread, with no exuberance, joy, or hope. In time, such a life leads to failure and gloom, to secret, then to open vice, and to a final shipwreck of the home and of the individual. In a similar yet in a less marked ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... about it. Of course, he does not like leaving you, but he says that he should like it a thousand times better than, perhaps, having to go into some humdrum ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... such matters, the ultimate magic of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... as a host, caring individually for each guest, and bringing the special qualities of each into full notice and prominence, putting the very shyest at his or her ease, making the best of the most humdrum, and never thrusting ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... to humdrum work, and barring my gold-hunting experience there was little to relieve the daily monotony of existence. I wrote an account of the gold-hunting expedition as one of a series of newspaper articles published in The ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... taken the plunge seem purposeless and immature. Either they were out of tune, or I was—and I thought, of course, that they were. What freshness could I bring to an existence of peace when my gears would not mesh with its humdrum machinery! ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... with beauty or with fortune were not always suffered to marry in this humdrum fashion. Abduction was by no means an imaginary peril. Mrs. Delany tells the story of a lady in Ireland, from whom she received the relation, who was entrapped in her uncle's house, carried off by four men in masks, and treated in the most brutal ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... almost said the excuse for—the modern rage for sensational novels. Those who read them so greedily are conscious, poor souls, of capacities in themselves of passion and action, for good and evil, for which their frivolous humdrum daily life gives no room, no vent. They know too well that human nature can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, or in flowers and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... stretched forth in their traces and followed in the snow-shoe trail. There was something imposing about it all, something that struck deep within him and roused strange thoughts. This that he saw was not the mere labour of man and beast; it was not the humdrum toil of life, not the daily slaving of living creatures for existence—for food, and drink, and a sleeping place. It had risen above that. He had seen ships and castles rise up from heaps of steel and stone; achievements of science and the handiwork of genius had interested and sometimes amazed ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... been!" said the girl. "How different from the humdrum existence of us stay-at-homes! How I should like to hear some of your adventures. They must ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... drifted. Jennie continued her work with Mrs. Bracebridge. Sebastian fixed himself firmly in his clerkship in the cigar store. George was promoted to the noble sum of three dollars, and then three-fifty. It was a narrow, humdrum life the family led. Coal, groceries, shoes, and clothing were the uppermost topics of their conversation; every one felt the stress and strain of trying to make ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... dazzle her adored patient with a tear-gem of joy or pity, or of gratitude that she lived in a time when heroic things could happen right at home and to the lowliest, even to her; sweet woes like this, that let down, for virtuous love, the barriers of humdrum convention. But Flora draws us on, she and Anna. As she touched the bell-knob Constance sprang out to welcome her, though not to ask her in—till she could have a word with her alone, the young ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... appear to have flowed in a clear and pellucid stream. I discover a thirst for the surprising and experimental, for situations, dilemmas, and emergencies, sustained by the most sublime recklessness as to consequences. Then I see a dread of sinking into humdrum—the impulse never to be at rest; deeper than all this, I find a secret dissatisfaction with myself, a vague longing to use the best that is in me to some true purpose; a desire to leave the tangled skein, and "begin all ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... I should be for ever in excitements of one kind or another. From my childhood up, my temper was of a restless and unquiet character—I was always a peevish, a fretful and discontented person. I looked with scorn and contempt upon the humdrum ways of those about me, and longed for perpetual change, and wild and stirring incidents. My passions, always fretful and excitable, were never satisfied except when I was employed in some way which enabled me to feed and keep alive ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... time after this, and in fact for most of Our sojourn here, life in the trenches was of a somewhat humdrum character. There were a few days cf activity now and then, but normally the enemy was very inoffensive so far as we were concerned. He did, however, raid the 6th Battalion one night in the right sub-sector, almost completely levelling one of their communication trenches with heavy ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... quivering with eagerness. This was like a picnic in the humdrum life of the farm hand. Except when the circus came to town, or there was a Harvest Home day, poor Felix knew little beyond the eternal grind of getting up before dawn, and working until ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... and the mind that appreciates them are alike the results of a network of subtle influences to which the Japanese are comparative strangers. It is maintained by some, and we think justly, that the lack of idealism in the Japanese mind renders the life of even the most cultivated a mechanical, humdrum affair when compared with that of Westerners. The Japanese cannot understand why our controversialists should wax so fervent over psychological, ethical, religious, and philosophical questions, failing ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... orchard again, he worked feverishly, possessed by a pleasant thrill of excitement, somewhat similar to that conceivably enlivening the humdrum existence of Captain Kidd. Dick was far from surprised when his spade struck something hard, and, his hands trembling with eagerness, he lifted out a tin box of the kind commonly used ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... song of the larks, and the plash of the waves below, and the shouts of the fishermen down there on the beach mending their nets and putting out their smacks, have all been so delightful after our humdrum round of daily life at Oxford, that I only wanted your presence here to make it all into a perfect paradise.—Why, Selah, how pretty you look in that sweet print! It suits your complexion admirably. I never saw you wear anything before ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... live as husband and wife. So she took the name of Mme. de la Garde, in order to approach, as closely as Parisian usages permit, the conditions of a real marriage. As a matter of fact, many of these unfortunate girls have one fixed idea, to be looked upon as respectable middle-class women, who lead humdrum lives of faithfulness to their husbands; women who would make excellent mothers, keepers of household accounts, and menders of household linen. This longing springs from a sentiment so laudable that society ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... her eyes, that she knew Rose thought her as hard as iron. "But what can I do?" she said. "I promised papa." She makes herself miserable, and it's no use. I wish the little wild thing would get herself well married. She's not meant for this humdrum place, and she may ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are the persons who will not gladly escape from humdrum routine by losing themselves in an exciting tale of adventure. The thrilling exploits in real life of the engineer, the explorer, the soldier of fortune, the pioneer in any field, hold us spellbound. Even more commonplace experiences ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... then Lady Glencora is so much more advanced than we are! After all, we are but humdrum people, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... Colombia and across South America, that the result of being obliged to subsist on irregular and haphazard rations was most unsatisfactory. While "roughing it" is far more enticing to the inexperienced and indiscreet explorer, I learned in Peru that the humdrum expedient of carefully preparing, months in advance, a comprehensive bill of fare sufficiently varied, wholesome, and well-balanced, is "the better part of valor," The truth is that providing an abundance of appetizing food adds very ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... sometimes hazardous combat support duty. The experience of these depot and ammunition companies provided the Marine Corps with an interesting irony. In contrast to Negroes in the other services, black marines trained for combat were never so used. Those trained for the humdrum labor tasks, however, found themselves in the thick of the fighting on Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and elsewhere, suffering combat casualties and winning combat citations for ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... every thing arranged to make her appear the queen of the fete. They had tableaux, where Rose made Lillie into marvellous pictures, which all admired and praised. They had little dances, which Lillie thought rather stupid and humdrum, because they were not en grande toilette; yet Lillie always made a great merit of putting up with her life at Springdale. A pleasant English writer has a lively paper on the advantages of being ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... looked forward to a life of simple usefulness and kindliness for her, tending the sick with that marvellous skill which seemed a special gift from Heaven; cheering, comforting, delighting old and young, by the magic of her voice and the gentle spell of her looks and ways. A quiet life, a simple, humdrum life, it might be: they had never thought of that. But now, what picture was this that the ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... all, where the sufferer is not merely a genius, but a saint; persecuted, perhaps, abroad by vulgar tradesmen and Philistine bishops, and snubbed at home by a stupid wife, who is quite unable to appreciate his magnificent projects for regenerating all heaven and earth; and only, humdrum, practical creature that she is, tries to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with her God? Fly to his help, all pious maidens, and pour into the wounded heart of the holy man the healing balm of self-conceit; cover ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... prudent hour, got up early, and went to work. In Petrograd the street-cars were running, the stores and restaurants open, theatres going, an exhibition of paintings advertised.... All the complex routine of common life-humdrum even in war-time-proceeded as usual. Nothing is so astounding as the vitality of the social organism-how it persists, feeding itself, clothing itself, amusing itself, in the face of the ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... sailor's soul—an expedition whose object it was to seek out the unusual, the curious, and the picturesque, and to capture them on the ten miles of celluloid film which we took with us, so that those who are condemned by circumstance to the humdrum life of the farm, the office, or the mill might themselves go adventuring o'nights, from the safety and comfort of red-plush seats, through the magic of the motion-picture screen. When I set out on my long journey the old whaling captain ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... have been so intensely excited by many of the statements and descriptions in the traditional account of Henry's first steps towards the conquest, which is based on contemporary records or what purports to be such, that evidence which no one would think of questioning if it related to humdrum events on the dead level of history has been vigorously assailed, and almost every event in the series called in question. The writer of history cannot narrate these events as they seem to him to have occurred without warning the reader that some element of doubt attaches to his account, and ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... papa gave us, I enjoyed the reception immensely. Oh, I'd love to be out in society," she said, with sparkling eyes, "and meet lots of people, and go to balls and receptions and all those affairs every day of my life. That's what I call living,—not this stupid, humdrum school life; and I 'll have them all, too, some day, see if I don't," she ended, with a toss of her head and a little conscious laugh. Nora knows she's pretty; that's one of the ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... Anne, and the little minx was not a little glad to take advantage of them, in order to induce her sister to see some more cheerful company. The fact is, the young hussy loved a dance or a game at cards much more than a humdrum conversation over a tea-table; and so she plied her sister day and night with hints as to the propriety of opening her house, receiving the gentry of the county, ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... from the actual world, by linking me with a world of phantoms. Those moments of exaltation which the contemplation of the Biblical past afforded us, allowing us to call ourselves the children of princes, served but to tinge with a more poignant sense of disinheritance the long humdrum stretches of our life. In very truth we were a people without a country. Surrounded by mocking foes and detractors, it was difficult for me to realize the persons of my people's heroes or the events in which ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... extraordinary things are happening. All very quiet and humdrum on the surface. Only the aeroplanes are busy, and if the sun is between you and them there are always the little black high Archie clouds following them, like vultures appearing ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... times when he is positively unfit for human society. Last week, for instance, when for three days on end we did not exchange a single word, not even at dinner, where the amenities should come on at least with the walnuts. I grant you that humdrum wears upon the spirit, that the flatness of the daily road may be a harder thing to get over than even Mr. Bunyan's hill Difficulty, but for a man to surrender himself mind and body to solitaire argues weakness. Moreover, it was a ridiculous combination of the cards that Indiman ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... unhappy relations of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a different state ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... is also great in argument. He infinitely enjoys a long humdrum, drowsy interchange of words of dispute about nothing. He considers that it strengthens the mind, consequently, he 'don't see that,' very often. Or, he would be glad to know what you mean by that. Or, he doubts that. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... himself with special gusto into the character of a heartless reprobate. He must have felt a certain piquancy in writing down the most atrocious sentiments in his own respectable parlour. He would show that the quiet humdrum old tradesman could be on paper as sprightly and audacious as the most profligate man about town. As quiet people are apt to do, he probably exaggerated the enormities which such men would openly avow; he ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... willing to take her seriously. He sketched his humdrum labors, the prizes in his way of life. "And it isn't so stupid," he ended with a laugh, "to play the game that way when once you have begun it." He added carelessly, as if to himself, "the body ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... and come from it at the end of a few years morbid, harassed, depressed; sunk in all the graces and powers that make a woman's life beautiful and distinct from a man's. The circle in many cases is so narrow that there is no room for growth. The humdrum toils, the petty cares and rude contact with hired help, sink many a charming woman into a domestic ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... felt very uncomfortable. He had been a good deal shocked, but he had a strong impulse to rush into the field as Nan's champion, though it were quite against his conscience. She had been too long in a humdrum country-town with no companion but an elderly medical man. And after a little pause he made a trifling joke about their making the best of the holiday, and the talk was changed to other subjects. The tide was strong against our heroine, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Isa's words droned on. It was, for all her commotion, a very humdrum thing that had happened ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the boarders were permanent ones and while it was a rule of the house to resent transients, they were secretly welcome because of the added zest they gave to the humdrum of everyday life. The permanent guests of Elberta Inn knew only too well all about each other and it was a relief to have outsiders to pick on in spite of the ignominy of having to sit down to meals with persons whose antecedents might ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... draft of the prospectus, and began to work hard at its revision. They had stopped at the house ere he thrust pencil and paper into his pocket. He stepped out of El Dorado let himself down, not without a jar, on to more humdrum earth. ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... platforms based on general theories, the broad vistas which it may be made to encompass, and lastly the opportunity for eloquent self-expression offered by parliamentary debates, all taken together exert a powerful attraction for the intellectualized mind. Contrast with this the prosaic humdrum work of a trade union leader, the incessant wrangling over "small" details and "petty" grievances, and the case becomes exceedingly clear. The mind of the typical intellectual is too generalized to be lured by any such alternative. He is out of patience with mere amelioration, even ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... picture trade. There was nothing of the old fashion about his style—the greasy coat and keen taste of Papa Malgras, the watching for the pictures of beginners, bought at ten francs, to be resold at fifteen, all the little humdrum comedy of the connoisseur, turning up his nose at a coveted canvas in order to depreciate it, worshipping painting in his inmost heart, and earning a meagre living by quickly and prudently turning over his petty capital. ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... up however, unfortunately, as the college years fly by, into a very exaggerated sense of your own capacities. Even the good, old, white-haired Squire, for whom you once entertained so much respect, seems to your crazy, classic fancy a very humdrum sort of personage. Frank, although as noble a fellow as ever sat a horse, is yet—you cannot help thinking—very ignorant of Euripides; even the English master at Dr. Bidlow's school, you feel sure, would balk at a dozen problems you ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... born soldier, to seek his line in diplomacy; wherein he had no sooner built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... upon the pulse of the spirit. But oh! if I had time now—time to write down the great thoughts that do throng the brain. They are there, I feel them, know them. No doubt the supreme exaltation of approaching death is the stimulus that one never experiences in the humdrum business of the day-to-day existence. Such mighty thoughts! Unintelligible, but if I had time I could spell them out, and how I could write then! I feel that the whole secret of Life is within my reach; I can almost grasp it; I seem to feel that in just another ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... and then in a different voice, exclaimed, to the astonishment of all:—"Have courage, good Stephanus! Strike! strike! Kill the tyrant!" On that same day, the hated Domitian was assassinated at Rome by a man named Stephanus. The humdrum interpretation of this "miracle" is simply that Apollonius had a foreknowledge of the intended attempt ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... aunt, Miss Sallie Prescott, with whom they made their home, and their chums, Jess and Jimsy Bancroft, had returned from the Nevada alkali wastes, the red building which engaged their attention that morning had caused a good deal of speculation in the humdrum Long Island village of Sandy Beach. In the first place, coincident with the completion of the building, a new element had been introduced into the little community by the arrival of several keen-eyed, close-mouthed ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... or two old, which its mother has secreted in the woods or in a remote field, charge upon him furiously with a wild bleat, when first discovered. After this first ebullition of fear, it usually settles down into the tame humdrum ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... the Forno-Populo (which he did not believe), his wife was far too innocent even to suspect it. She would not know evil if she saw it, he said to himself proudly; and then there was no chance that the Contessa, who loved merriment and gaiety, could long be content with anything so humdrum as his quiet life in the country. Thus it will be seen that Sir Tom had got himself innocently enough into this imbroglio. He had meant no particular harm. He had meant to be kind to a poor woman, who after all needed kindness much; and if the comic ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... devoted to his friends, a level-headed protector of the working classes, a patron of the arts in his own clearminded, unlettered way. But whatever point of view one gets at him, he spares one dullness. Will you explain to me, my dear, why picturesque rascality is so much more likable than humdrum virtue?" ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... Holmes, relapsing into his arm-chair, and putting his finger-tips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... true, is introduced; but, as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred other ways. Otherwise the tale runs on, with little exception, in that humdrum course of daily monotony, out of which some people coin materials to act, and others excuses to doze, just as their ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... hypochondria and satiety, what is better than a brisk alterative course of travels,—especially early, out-of-the-way, marvellous, legendary travels! How they freshen up the spirits! How they take you out of the humdrum yawning state you are in. See, with Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life, or note with him how already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; or go with Carpini and Rubruquis ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... received. At Atlanta, as he records above, he made friends with that chivalric champion of a resurrected South, Henry Grady; here also he obtained fugitive glimpses of a struggling and briefless lawyer, who, like Page, was interested more in books and writing than in the humdrum of professional life, and who was then engaged in putting together a brochure on Congressional Government which immediately gave him a national standing. The name of this ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the public with recreative reading. To the masses of the people—hard-worked and living humdrum lives—the novel comes as an open door to an ideal life, in the enjoyment of which one may forget, for a time, the hardships or the tedium of the real. One of the best functions of the public library is to raise this recreative reading of the community to higher and higher levels; to replace trash ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... 'the great romance is reality'; for paradox, the unexpected, is, in a reality so framed, the bare and sober truth. Hence the frequency, in our new poetry, of pieces founded deliberately upon, as Mr. McDowall points out, paradox: the breaking in of some utter surprise upon a humdrum society, as in Mr. de la Mare's Three Jolly Farmers, or Mr. Abercrombie's End of the World, or ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... in which he wrote The Raven is incredible, being probably one of his solemn and sombre jokes; equally incredible is Trollope's confession of his humdrum, mechanical methods of work. Doubtless he believed he was telling the whole truth, but only here and there in his Autobiography does he permit to peep out touches of light, which complete the portrait of himself. It is impossible that for the reader any character in fiction should ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... determined that her nurselings should miss nothing that she could give them. The duty letters which she insisted on their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her as she read them—the unreasoning jealousy that these children should have opportunities ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... Instructions were issued to wagon lines that all surplus kit and stores were to be left behind, as a strenuous time was in store for us, and all ranks responded with a will to the hard work these preparations necessitated. Drivers were elated at the prospect of a change from their humdrum existence, and their enthusiasm knew no bounds. New reinforcing batteries appeared like mushrooms during the night, and lay safely ensconced in their appointed places in readiness for the coming fray, while the neighbourhood behind the lines bristled with activity and also with new ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... seen in men who have been swung from humdrum existence to the exciting, disagreeable life of war and then back to their former life. The former task cannot be taken up or is carried on with great effort; the zest of things has disappeared, and what was so longed for while in the service seems flat and stale, especially ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... served in this sometimes hazardous combat support duty. The experience of these depot and ammunition companies provided the Marine Corps with an interesting irony. In contrast to Negroes in the other services, black marines trained for combat were never so used. Those trained for the humdrum labor tasks, however, found themselves in the thick of the fighting on Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and elsewhere, suffering combat casualties and winning ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... Mahound as much as they pleased, laughing in his sleeve at their simplicity in fancying they were still infidels. He had lions in cages, and fleet leopards trained by Orientals to run down hares and deer. In short, he relished all rarities, except the humdrum virtues. For anything singularly pretty or diabolically ugly, this was your customer. The best of him was, he was openhanded to the poor; and the next best was, he fostered the arts in earnest: whereof he now gave a signal proof. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... once more, and his thoughts reverted to his mother. Poor mother! No, great mother! The grandeur of her life's struggle filled him with a sense of awe. Strange that until that moment he had never seen the heroic side of her humdrum, commonplace existence! He must write to her, now, at once, before it was too late. His letter would trouble her, add another wrinkle to her face, but he must write; she must know that he had ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... a great misfortune to be born to a romantic history. The humdrum always think that you are lying. In real truth romance is common in life, commoner, perhaps, than the commonplace. But the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... ants that I find here are the finest flavored in the world," declared the yellow hen, "and there are plenty of them. So here I shall end my days; and I must say, Dorothy, my dear, that you are very foolish to go back into that stupid, humdrum world again." ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... great reverence, is the mood for witnessing so delicate and strong, so racial a thing. Yet this love-light, seen in the eyes of a man and wife who have been married ten years, and have settled down long ago to the humdrum of married life, seems to me a far finer manifestation of the hither mysteries, a far greater triumph. What freshness, what perpetual rejuvenation they must possess! The more one regards such a thing, the more magnificent and far-reaching it appears. No philosophical ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... continued, "that before sailing you had expressed the hope that something really exciting and adventurous would befall the party—that you were tired of the monotonous humdrum of twentieth-century existence—that you regretted the decadence of piracy, and the expunging of romance from ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... eyes, that she knew Rose thought her as hard as iron. "But what can I do?" she said. "I promised papa." She makes herself miserable, and it's no use. I wish the little wild thing would get herself well married. She's not meant for this humdrum place, and she may kick ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... But there must be always a small minority that cannot tolerate ennui; that must seek risks and daring exploits; that would rather lay down their lives, today, in some man-sized exploit, than live twenty-five years longer in the dull security of a humdrum rut. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... and thrust it into her dancer's cuff with some little murmur implying that she wishes him to keep it. To whomsoever these things happen life becomes a song. A little event of this kind lifts one out of the humdrum of material existence. I suppose the cause of our extraordinary happiness is that one is again, as it were, marching in step; one has dropped into the Great Procession and is actively doing the great Work. ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... and therefore thought it excusable to leave as soon as the sermon was over. Whether he sought to lure me on to further avowals, I know not: but, whatever was his motive, he asked me, in reply, whether I believed that he cared for the humdrum custom of church-going and whether I thought him imbecile enough to consider this as any thing more than the means by which to keep the masses in check; adding, that it was the duty of the intelligent ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... poets of Europe have merely dramatised what was in the world's heart; Mr. Gough interpreted the more sacred dramatic elements of the human heart. He abolished the old way of doing things on the platform, the didactic and the humdrum. He harnessed the dramatic element to religion. He lighted new fires of divine passion in ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... of English society, my mother's suppressed fondness for the superb burst into fruition, and the remnants of such indulgence have turned up among severest humdrum for many years; but soon she refused to permit herself even momentary extravagances. To those who will remember duty, hosts of duties appeal, and it was not long before my father and mother began to save for their children's future the money which flowed ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... their deeds, and that, instead, they are depriving us of the refreshment of our forty winks, they would show a correct understanding of the situation. If they cannot be altogether silent, they might at least give their noise another pitch, and direct it into some humdrum monotone that would not jar upon our slumbers. Do their worst, however, they cannot take from us the delicious consciousness that it will be two years before another Presidential campaign. Panoplied in that reflection, we can stand ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... course there is something precarious in such a business as mine;—but I am endeavouring to make it less so from day to day, and hope very shortly to bring it into that humdrum groove which best befits a married man. Should I ask further assistance from you in doing this, perhaps you will not refuse it if I can succeed in making the matter clear to you. As it is I thank you sincerely for what you ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... She was searching out napkins in the sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people who have no interest in ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the great English hymn-writers. At last came family worship, always impressive as conducted by him, but often the most memorable feature by far in these gatherings. It was a very simple, and may seem a very humdrum, way of spending an evening; but the homely hospitality of the household—the conversational gifts, very different in kind as these were, of himself and his brother—and, above all, his genial and benignant presence, made ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... so, quoth Wisdom, you have hired a drummer to attend you in this tour of yours through France and Italy!—Psha! said I, and do not one half of our gentry go with a humdrum compagnon du voyage the same round, and have the piper and the devil and all to pay besides? When man can extricate himself with an equivoque in such an unequal match,—he is not ill off.—But you can do something else, La Fleur? said I.—O qu'oui! he could make spatterdashes, and play a little ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... The stars shone still more brightly and beckoned anew. Vagabonds, all of them! Like the gypsies of old, but with vastly more territory to roam. The humdrum routine of his old life seemed very far behind. He wondered what Courtney Davis would say if he could see him now. Wordless happiness had come to him, and he let his thoughts wander out into the limitless expanse of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... into her engagement, regarding marriage with Roger much as though it were a stout set of palings with "No Right of Way" written across them in large letters. Outside, the waves of emotion might surge in vain, while within, she and Roger would settle down to the humdrum placidity of married life. But the dull, ceaseless ache at her heart made her sometimes question whether anything in the world could keep at bay the insistent claim ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... makes me feel as if I were chained. But I think if I had wings I should choose to be a house-swallow; and then, after I'd had my fill of wonders, I should come back to my familiar corner, and my house full of busy humdrum people, and fly low to warn them of rain, and wheel up high to show them it was good haying weather, and know what was going on in every room in the house, and every house in the village; and all ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... vice. The very interest in individuality, the spectator-attitude towards life, made men ready to treat life as one large experiment, and for such purposes vice is as important as right living even though it ultimately turns out to be as humdrum as virtue. The Italian nobles treated life in this experimental way and the novels of Bandello and others give us the results of their experiments. The Novellieri were thus the "realists" of their day and of them all Bandello was the most realistic. He ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... had not yet the direful knowledge of good and evil that comes with years; and he was so very handsome, and talked in a way that was so new to me, and was so much more charming than the well-bred converse of the humdrum county families with whom I had occasionally sojourned for a ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Lady Glencora is so much more advanced than we are! After all, we are but humdrum people, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... graze thousands of head of cattle; whose pastures breed their own cowhorses; whose cowmen, wearing still with a twist of pride the all-but-vanished regalia of their all-but-vanished calling, refuse to drop back to the humdrum status of "farm hands on a cow ranch"; even here has entered a single element powerful enough to change the old to something new. The new may be better—it is certainly more convenient—and perhaps when all is said and ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss Rachel about her jewel, I doubt if he spoke ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... that she was settled in her home once more, the spirit of work was lacking. Theodora was domestic, and she found it good to take up her household cares again, so for a month after her return she turned a deaf ear to her publisher while she and her husband revelled in their coming back to humdrum ways much as a pair of children play at housekeeping. Then Theodora's conscience asserted itself, with the discouraging result that she became undeniably cross and, over his paper of an evening, Billy watched her ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... down to the humdrum but profitable task of laying the foundations for the great metropolis of the Farther Southwest. Since then, an occasional sporadic case of triggerfingeritis has developed in El Paso, usually in an acute form; but never once since ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... emperors has to a great extent become the pastime of King Moneybags. And there is no place for ancient crusaders like Old Man Curry, so he has taken the remnants of his stable and gone back to the farm or merged into the humdrum and neutral tinted landscape which always ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... flooding light. How near the hills seemed!—just a moonlight walk along the sands, and one was there, under the old tower and the woods. The sands were dangerous, people said. There were quicksands among them, and one must know the paths. Ah! well—she smiled. Humdrum trains and cabs were good enough for ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... enthusiasts we were! What visionaries, to imagine that in such an hour of emergency a man might discover himself to be fitted for some work of national utility without that preliminary wire-pulling which was essential in humdrum times of peace! How we lingered in long queues, and stamped up and down, and sat about crowded, stuffy halls, waiting, only waiting, to be asked to do something for our country by any little guttersnipe who happened to have been jockeyed into the requisite position ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... impressions of slavery, when a lad; then the hopelessness of abject servitude and consciousness of unrequited toil had its impress on the brow of the laborer. Now cheerfulness, a spirit of industry, enterprise, and fraternal feeling replaced the stagnant humdrum of slavery. Nor was progress observable only among the freedmen. Many evidences of kindness and sympathy were shown and expressed by former owners for the moral and mental advancement of their former bondsmen, which, to a great degree, unfortunately, was counterbalanced by violence ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... peoples for whom familiarity had bred no contempt within his breast. The least of them interested him, and, too, there were those with whom he always made friends easily, and there were his hereditary enemies whose presence gave a spice to life that might otherwise have become humdrum ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tasted the delights of travel, he could not endure the thought of a quiet humdrum life in the little cave at Kyllene, and he besought the King to send him on some ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... your late treasure, who is now merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to take your arm ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... as long as posterity takes any interest in knowing about the transition of the American West from wilderness to civilization. He shared in all the work of the ranch. He took with a "frolic welcome" the humdrum of its routine as well as its excitements and dangers. He says that he does not believe that there was ever any more attractive life for a vigorous young fellow than this, and assuredly no one else has glorified it ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... weary of such attendance, but his tenderness and amiability had been his best points, and it was grievous to find them failing. Albinia would have charged the alteration on his brother officers, if they had not been a very steady and humdrum set, whose society Gilbert certainly did not prefer. She was more uneasy at finding that he sometimes saw Algernon Dusautoy, though for Lucy's sake, he always avoided bringing his ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stumbled through my schooling till I was sixteen, when I was sent off to my father's office on the Quay at Yarmouth to take charge of the books, which were an everlasting humdrum record of herrings and the various trawl fish which came in so ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... have thrown himself with special gusto into the character of a heartless reprobate. He must have felt a certain piquancy in writing down the most atrocious sentiments in his own respectable parlour. He would show that the quiet humdrum old tradesman could be on paper as sprightly and audacious as the most profligate man about town. As quiet people are apt to do, he probably exaggerated the enormities which such men would openly avow; he fancied that the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... from her nurse and her bath simultaneously and arrived, slippery with wet soap, to welcome him, Jacqueline had been the source of an uneasy fascination for her godfather. She represented, in his rather humdrum life, the element ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... to translate the printed notes to the inner sense, but even he will prefer to hear the music and will always consider this the final test. Thus it is also with verse: it must be read aloud. Lyric verse is best read in privacy or in a small congenial group. When the humdrum noise and the humdrum cares of the world have vanished, then the moment has come when one may steep one's soul in lyric beauty. One never tires of a really great lyric: like a true friend, a longer ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... afraid that I have rather fallen off in the writing line lately, but we have been leading a very pleasant but humdrum life, and the evenings have been rather busy; at present, five rowdy young subalterns profane the air with discordant music and facetious witticisms, so it is difficult to write ("Mack, you will ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... town and this people (which were all of a humdrum sort), and going out by the gate, the left side of which is made up of a church, I went a little way on the short road to San Lorenzo, but I had no intention of going far, for (as you know by this time) the night had become my day and the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... her primness could not withstand the witchery of the gentleman's superb tenor voice, with its high culture and feeling; because even into that humdrum refrain he put a pathos and longing which ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... this was accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must have been a ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... people do. But truth to tell, romance is far more common than the commonplace. There are few who have not, at one time or other of their lives, had some strange or tragic episode woven into the tissue of their every-day existence; and it would be difficult to find one person even among humdrum individuals, who, from birth to death, has experienced nothing out of ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... Roy Prescott, their aunt, Miss Sallie Prescott, with whom they made their home, and their chums, Jess and Jimsy Bancroft, had returned from the Nevada alkali wastes, the red building which engaged their attention that morning had caused a good deal of speculation in the humdrum Long Island village of Sandy Beach. In the first place, coincident with the completion of the building, a new element had been introduced into the little community by the arrival of several keen-eyed, close-mouthed men, who boarded at the local hotel and were understood to be employees ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... loved the Texan, why had she married him? Could it be that she did not even now take him seriously? Was her love so shallow a thing that it must be fanned into a flame by the winds of high adventure? He knew that the commonplaces of society bored her to extinction. Had the humdrum existence of civilization palled on her until her heart in very desperation had turned to her knight of the boundless plains. Had she deliberately planned this journey in order to be once more with the Texan? Had their meeting—their flight, even, been prearranged? Endicott ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... he of them. His depression was due to that feeling which takes possession of one before any change of place, a feeling experienced by all melancholy, dreaming people and unknown to those of energetic, sanguine temperaments, who always rejoice at any break in the humdrum of their daily existence, and welcome a change of abode with pleasure. Nejdanov was so lost in his meditations that his thoughts began quite unconsciously to take the form of words. His wandering sensations began to arrange themselves ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... mysterious trouble in his breast that at times drove him afield on venturous perambulations, or to his boat to work off by rowing his too-meditative fit. From these excursions he would return tired in body but in heart eased, and resume his humdrum life tranquilly enough; though Caleb was growing uneasy, and felt it necessary, more than once, to retire apart and "have et out," as he put it, with ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ennui. [of journalistic articles] MEGO, my eyes glaze over. Adj. wearying &c. v.; wearing; wearisome, tiresome, irksome; uninteresting, stupid, bald, devoid of interest, dry, monotonous, dull, arid, tedious, humdrum, mortal, flat; prosy, prosing; slow, soporific, somniferous. disgusting &c. v.; unenjoyed[obs3]. weary, tired &c. v.; drowsy &c. (sleepy) 683; uninterested, flagging, used up, worn out, blase, life-weary, weary of life; sick of. Adv. wearily &c. adj.; usque ad nauseam[Lat]. Phr. time hanging ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in Berne has always been the most isolated, humdrum spot on earth. People stationed here nearly died of ennui; nothing ever happened, until all Europe suddenly was plunged into the conflagration of war, and then Berne became, of necessity, the clearing house for the continent for ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... and great-grandfather's debts or mortgages. He spent about a fourth of it annually, and consequently the property was still greatly encumbered and he knew that to reside on it and clear it he would be obliged to live in a very humdrum style, or else add to the burden of debt already incurred. He preferred, remaining in the army, and being a general favourite in society, and having no near relations in Wales, it never occurred to him to spend his furloughs in his native county. He had always some distant land to ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... did not comprehend the joke; and he proceeded in his own drawling humdrum accent to assure them that the monument ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the theatre is a phantasy world. With the rising of the curtain we forget our outside life; we live the part of the hero or the heroine. To this day I always leave a theatre with a vague depression of spirits; everyday humdrum life chills me when I come out to the street. Reality is always difficult to face. The great popularity of the cinema is due to this human desire for make-believe. Cinema-going is a regression to the infantile; we return to the childish phase where the wish was all powerful. In the cinema ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... the children are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows; Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink; When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come back ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... here. "But none of us is sure of living for a month. You've shown me a glimpse of what life might be; don't let me sink back into the old, humdrum existence from a foolish sense of honor! I tell you, I should go mad! I mean to have my fling while I can get it. And I mean to have it with you, Jack—just you! I don't fear poverty. You could write some more wonderful books. I could work, too, Jack dear. I—I could teach music—or ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... herring. Of our three survivors Rupert alone was to win the coveted distinction. He grew to be a fine boy and was eaten at Hammersmith, where his plump but delicate roe gave the greatest satisfaction. It was not eaten in the ordinary humdrum way, but was thickly spread on a piece of buttered toast, generously peppered, and devoured. And when his "wish" was placed on the kitchen-range, swelled rapidly and burst with a loud report, his cup of happiness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... in a large, tranquil way he has, which is like an Indian plain full of ripe corn. "I find it curious," he said, "to compare the process which goes on here in the daily humdrum of trade about this place with that which one would see if one were far up yonder at the northward, in the appalling solitudes of the mountains, where trade has never been and will never be. Have you visited ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... blow to poor Sellers to see the work on his darling enterprise stop, and the noise and bustle and confusion that had been such refreshment to his soul, sicken and die out. It was hard to come down to humdrum ordinary life again after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... under such circumstances. I could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever, or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror, to be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less, since, although I was not exactly small of stature, and had, moreover, plenty of strength for my years, every ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... the following afternoon Mr Beveridge and Moggridge were walking leisurely down the long drive leading from the mansion of Clankwood to the gate that opened on the humdrum outer world. Finding that an inelastic matter of yards was all the tether he could hope for, Mr Beveridge thought it best to take the bull by the horns, and make a companion of this necessity. So he kept his attendant by his side, and regaled him for some time with a series of improbable ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... Then, for hypochondria and satiety, what is better than a brisk alterative course of travels,—especially early, out-of-the-way, marvellous, legendary travels! How they freshen up the spirits! How they take you out of the humdrum yawning state you are in. See, with Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life, or note with him how already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; or go with Carpini and Rubruquis ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Andrews. "Then Brown and Knight. I'll stay by the engine and send her back. Here, Tom, take your coat." In that last moment, Andrews was as calm as if he had reached the end of some commonplace, humdrum journey. ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... part in everything. But after a while he grew quiet again, and absent in manner, and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went out ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... their daily duties none of the three women had an interest in life. Over and over again they performed their humdrum tasks in the same humdrum fashion, arguing over each petty detail of the time-worn theme until he marveled they could retain a particle of zest for routine they never ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... fell upon him like a chill, for she had never written or said a word to him that might not have passed between any two college friends. Such thoughts occupied him, until finally, as often fortunately happens in our mental crises, a humdrum, domestic voice, the supper bell, called him, and leaving his garments strewn about the room, he ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... mean a very secluded and humdrum life. She will have to make home an ever-cheery place, an ideal that means hard work and self-sacrifice through lonesome years in which her nobility will be ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... experience these emotions at high pitch greater than our everyday lives can satisfy. Our lives are seldom adventurous all over; there are monotonous interludes with no melody, offering us little that is new to learn. Our love for war and sport shows that we were not built organically for humdrum. Now literature helps to make up for this deficiency in real life by providing us with adventures in which we can participate imaginatively, and from which we can derive new knowledge. If real life did supply ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the other house," cried Eugenia, "they are terrible people! I don't know what they may do over there. I am a quiet little humdrum woman; I have rigid rules and I keep them. One of them is not to have visitors in the small hours—especially clever men like you. ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... Pleasure softens pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day that shall gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a dozen comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each one as like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of compensation obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had been left with me, I should have made the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... a second in front of an archaic Apollo of no great merit—because it reminded her of the unknown; and she wished with all her might something new and swift and rushing might come into her humdrum life. ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... Cedric that you seem quite an old friend. I am afraid you will find us very quiet, homely people; but I daresay Cedric will have prepared you for that. He grumbles dreadfully, poor boy, at our old-fashioned, humdrum ways." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... unusual circumstances was beyond praise. Danger or excitement incite a sort of loyalty in any good man; but humdrum, disagreeable difficulty is ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... own part, to Hickman's whining, creeping, submissive courtship, that I now expect nothing but whine and cringe from him: and am so little moved with his nonsense, that I am frequently forced to go to my harpsichord, to keep me awake, and to silence his humdrum. Whereas Lovelace keeps up the ball with a witness, and all his address and conversation is one continual game ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... cheap clocks, always something of which one can sell many and much,—such are the objects which claim the labor of genius now. Fools grieve that Art is dead; 'lives at best only in imitation;' and that we have chanced on a godless, humdrum, steam and leather age—one of prose and dust, facts and factories. Sometimes come gasping efforts—sickly self-persuasions that all is not so bad as it seems. Mr. Slasher of the Sunday paper is quite certain that ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... An almost passionate desire welled in Rose's heart to hold on to it for him. True, she too had been a slave to the farm. Yet not so much a slave to it, she distinguished, as to Martin's absorption in its development. And of late years there had been for her, running through all the humdrum days, a satisfaction in perfecting it. In her mind now floated clearly the ideal toward which her husband was striving. She had not guessed how much it had become her own until she felt herself being drawn relentlessly ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... genius, but a saint; persecuted, perhaps, abroad by vulgar tradesmen and Philistine bishops, and snubbed at home by a stupid wife, who is quite unable to appreciate his magnificent projects for regenerating all heaven and earth; and only, humdrum, practical creature that she is, tries to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with her God? Fly to his help, all pious maidens, and pour into the wounded heart of the holy man the healing balm of self-conceit; cover his table with confidential ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... "just a great, big, brave, lovable baby, and nothing else." "Gulliver's Travels" ought to have an immense circulation should it ever be translated into the Russian language. The "Arabian Nights" appears as an unimaginative narrative of humdrum events compared with the stories in current circulation in ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... was the very humdrum one of stealing treasure that he was supposed to guard. That he was innocent there is no doubt: whatever the man was, he was no thief. The charge against him was a trumped-up one to get him out of the way. He was painfully in evidence—he talked like a windmill, and in his swaggering he had become ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... talk of being old—'tis horrid to think on. But, my dear, you should really have a little fine breeding, and not be bred up a musty, humdrum Puritan. I do hate those she-precise hypocrites, that go about in close stomachers and ruffles of Geneva print, and cannot so much as cudgel their maids without a Scripture to back them. Nobody likes ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... had so little to do and was so comparatively sure to be undisturbed that the old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent as an empty church; but this night "Number ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... maidens. To quote the substance of Goethe's criticism:[7] Amid such influences and surroundings, occupied with fads and studies of this sort, lacking all incentive from without to any important activity and confronted by the sole prospect of having to drag out a humdrum existence, men began to reflect with a sort of sullen exultation upon the possibility of departing this life at will, and to find in this thought a scant amelioration of the ills and tedium of the times. This disposition was so general that ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house—this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... to the change, that I should be perfectly happy when it was effected; but I had, somehow, miscalculated. I missed the bewitching faces of the girls I had fled from, and, for the first time in my life, I realized that the world would be a terrible humdrum sort of a place if there were ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... the humdrum ways of many contented husbands, and forget to pay the compliment, and ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the wintry moonlight as they walked, or stood before the doors straight and silent as figures of stone, causing one to conjure up romantic visions of guarded forts, sudden surprises, and daring deeds; for in these war times the humdrum life of Yankeedom has vanished, and the most prosaic feel some thrill of that excitement which stirs the Nation's heart, and makes its capital a camp of hospitals. Wandering up and down these lower halls I often heard cries from above, steps hurrying to and fro, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... work at seventy-five a month. Why, it would take him maybe ten years to save a thousand, and here he's made it in a single morning. Think you can keep him out of speculation then? First thing you know he's thrown up his honest, humdrum position—oh, I've seen it hundreds of times—and takes to hanging round the customers' rooms down there on La Salle Street, and he makes a little, and makes a little more, and finally he is so far in that he can't pull out, and then some billionaire fellow, who has the market in ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... their host, meditative. "My faith!" he commented, with brightening eyes. "It sounds almost too good to be true! And I've been growing afraid that the world was getting to be a most humdrum and uninteresting planet!... Miss Calendar, I am a widower of so many years standing that I had almost forgotten I had ever been anything but a bachelor. I fear my house contains little that will ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... child, in defiance and contempt of the statutes of all known nations. And the place where this lawless deed was to be done was not Ruritania or the hazy dominions of Prince Otto, but a commonplace, humdrum American town, not an hour and a half from his ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so bitter. And yet—like every ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... people being middle-aged and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it's only because I'm such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act as a kind of Play with Baby, and all that: ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... now on the model stand, gazing dreamily from his busy hands to his lean, intent features, it occurred to her that this day had not been a sample of their usual humdrum relations. From the very beginning of their business relations he had remained merely her employer, self-centered, darkly absorbed in his work, or, when not working, bored and often yawning. She had never come to know him ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... TIM "(short for Timon),—" I am off you see—gone like a shot. Alfred and I intended to be married in this way almost from the first; we never meant to be spliced in the humdrum way of other people; Alfred has too much spirit for that, and so have I—Dieu merci! Do you know, Alfred, who used to call you 'the dragon,' has seen so much of you during the last few months, that he begins ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the sharp discipline of waiting. He knew what it meant to be going a commonplace, humdrum, tread-mill round while the fires are burning within for something else. He knew, and forever cast a sweet soft halo over all such labor as men call drudgery, which never was such to Him because of the fine spirit breathed into it. Drudgery, commonplaceness is in the spirit, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... happening!" pouts Milly. "Stupid humdrum business! Do but think, to wed a man that dwelleth the next door, which thou hast known all thy life! Why, I would as lief not be wed ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... sheet, which you wish me to look at. Now I am so completely a gentleman, that I have sometimes a little difficulty to pass the day; but it is astonishing how idle a three weeks I have passed. If it is any comfort to you, pray delude yourself by saying that you intend "sticking to humdrum science." But I believe it just as much as if a plant were to say that, "I have been growing all my life, and, by Jove, I will stop growing." You cannot help yourself; you are not clever enough for that. You could not even remain idle, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the wooden successor of the birch-bark after Governor Simpson's general inspection of the Hudson's Bay domain. Only the rather {37} barge-like 'Mackinaw' was completely outside this venturesome class. It was a useful but humdrum cargo boat, laboriously poled along shallow, quiet waters, or rowed with lumbering sweeps; or sometimes even sailed, when it shovelled its way through the water with a very ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... grand old hedges; occasionally a peacock strutted proudly along its length, trailing its tail over the gravel, and then the final touch of picturesqueness was given to the scene, but even the approach of an ordinary humdrum human had an effect of dignity, of importance, in such old-world surroundings. It gratified Pixie's keen sense of what it dramatically termed "a situation" to place herself in this point of vantage and act the part of audience; and ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... dolt for caring a straw what they thought of him. It was a little hard, however, to think that Matthew Blackett would be going back to his beloved school and studies, while he, also a Peterite, was engaged in such a humdrum task as weighing coal at the ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... conduct of the different parts of the service, however, there was nothing humdrum, or that savoured of routine. Mr. Beecher was a remarkable reader. Delicate shades of meaning came out in the very tones of his voice, and his power of intense sympathy made it easy for him to impersonate for the time being almost any character. Had ...
— Sixty years with Plymouth Church • Stephen M. Griswold
... Alan, Jean Dwight was the boy of the V, a strong, hearty, happy young woman of fourteen, who succeeded in getting a great deal of enjoyment out of this humdrum, work-a-day world. Her rosy cheeks glowed and her brown eyes shone with health; for Jean was as full of life as a young colt, and vented her superfluous energy in climbing trees, walking fences, and running races, until ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... stands conspicuous, rearing a proud front to the world, if world could be used appropriately of so quiet, humdrum a little place. A few hundred yards off we reach the Church, Hotel de Ville and open square. In 1886, a monument to Danton was inaugurated here with much ceremony. A bronze statue represents the great tribune in ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... is all the more imminent when the characters and forms of Warfare itself are constantly changing; hence, ever new demands have to be made upon the troops themselves, and the exact bearing of each of these is not easily to be appreciated in the humdrum surroundings ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... soon grew tired of this quiet life. It seemed very stupid and humdrum when compared with Aunt Sheen's marvelous tales of the great ocean, and the strange sights and thrilling adventures that there awaited the voyager. He was larger than his brothers and sisters, his sea-going instinct was strong within him, he longed for the wonders of the great, unknown world, and ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... it is, but your very clever man never seems to care so much as your less gifted mortals for cleverness in his helpmate. Your scholars and poets and ministers of state are more often than not found assorted with exceedingly humdrum, good sort of women, and apparently like them all the better for their deficiencies. Just see how happily Racine lived with his wife, and what an angel he thought her, and yet she had never read his plays. Certainly Goethe never troubled the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for these things. That sort of aspiration is not much in their way; and it shall be a funny world, the world of their arranging, where the Irrelevant would fantastically step in to take the place of the sober humdrum ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the "every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation". Housewives with perambulators and oil-cloth shopping bags. Children on rollerskates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unbearded all summer and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... less than a year since Joyce had had that wonderful winter in Touraine with her cousin Kate, but it seemed such a long, long time ago, in looking back upon it. She had settled down into the common humdrum round of duties so completely that sometimes it seemed to her that she had never been away at all; that she must have dreamed that year into her life, or read about it as happening to some ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the sublime to the humdrum and necessary, I heave a sigh, and pull myself together, and go in to make biscuits and fry ham. But I should not forget to tell you that before I do go in, very often my looming, wonderful walls and crags weave in strange ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... dreams; with the fine, vague, beautiful thoughts that "reading" brings, and with such delicious plays of fancy as lend witchery to a high white moon, an arched blue sky, or rolling prairies-even to the tranquil town and the happenings of every day. Nothing could put magic into the humdrum life of school, and here she must struggle through another whole year of it before she might reach Colorado. That was a cloud, indeed, for one who wasn't "smart" like Beulah Crosswhite. Mathematics Missy found an inexplicable, unalloyed torture; history for all ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... should come over from Hanover and join him at Bath, which was done. Next they wanted to rescue their sister Caroline from her humdrum existence, but this was a more difficult matter. Caroline's journal gives an account of her life at this time that is instructive. Here are a ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... very uncomfortable. He had been a good deal shocked, but he had a strong impulse to rush into the field as Nan's champion, though it were quite against his conscience. She had been too long in a humdrum country-town with no companion but an elderly medical man. And after a little pause he made a trifling joke about their making the best of the holiday, and the talk was changed to other subjects. The tide was strong against our heroine, but she had ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... become commonplace to her pupils. They all know that Columbus discovered America in 1492, but when the recitation touches this fact she invests it with life and meaning and so makes it glow as a factor in the class exercise. The humdrum traditional teacher asks the question; and when the pupil drones forth the answer, "Columbus discovered America in 1492," she dismisses the whole matter with the phonographic response, "Very good." What a farce! What a travesty upon the ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... his mind. It would hardly be possible to find a more sympathetic series of illustrations than those which Frank Reynolds drew for Keble Howard's idyll of Suburbia, entitled "The Smiths of Surbiton." The author constructed out of the petty doings and humdrum habits of suburban life a charming little story of simple people, and with equal cleverness the artist built up, out of these slight materials, a series of exquisitely natural pictures, which revealed the almost incredible fact that semi-detached ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... wreckage[C] thrown upon the strand there; or possibly it would mean an isolated post out on the frontier, or down in the equally heroic field of the mountains of the South. He might leave some of you just where you are, in a commonplace, humdrum spot, as you think, when your visions had been in other fields. He might make you a seed-sower, like lonely Morrison in China, when you wanted to be a harvester like Moody. Here is the real battlefield. The fighting and agonizing are here. Not with God but with ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... parson's too old fer the work, an' that we should hev a young man with snap an' vim, like Mr. Sparks, of Leedsville. He believes the young people need to be stirred up; that they're gittin' tired of the old humdrum way, an' that the parish is goin' to the dogs. But that wasn't all. He thinks the parson isn't a fit man to be here after that disgraceful racin' scene on the river last Sunday. He sez it's an awful example to the young. ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... return home on Thursday, and I shall be able to go on with my humdrum work, and that makes ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Mr. and Mrs. Bingle stepped into a new and hitherto unsuspected world the instant they entered Pierre's. They stepped out of it at ten o'clock that night and into a very commonplace, humdrum sort of automobile and were whisked homeward by an astonished, unbelieving chauffeur. They had drunk the health of Napoleon the present, Napoleon the past, and Napoleon the future, and they had done it from cobwebby, mouldy bottles out of the uttermost ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... silver and gold, of the garden-maker. Next, representing the copper and brass, are the hedges of beech and holly. Both are commonly planted and carefully tended as borders and shelters to the less important parts of gardens; as screens also to block out the humdrum but necessary portions of the curtilage, such as the forcing-pits for early plants, minor offices, timber yards, and the like; and to shelter vegetable gardens (for which the Dutch use screens of dried reeds). ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... host, caring individually for each guest, and bringing the special qualities of each into full notice and prominence, putting the very shyest at his or her ease, making the best of the most humdrum, and never ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... passage as the following Carlos only expresses what must then have passed through Goethe's own mind: "And to marry! to marry just when life ought to come into its first full swing; to settle down to humdrum domestic life; to limit one's being, when one has not yet done with half of one's roving; has not completed half of one's conquests!" Out of Goethe's own heart, also, must have come these words of Clavigo: "She [Marie] has vanished, clean vanished ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... his expecting to escape detection. Now I am myself vain enough to cherish the hope of bequeathing something to posterity; I see no reason for resigning my right to that inventive freedom which others enjoy; and, as I have no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood—but falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true statement you are to expect—that I am a liar. This confession is, I consider, a full defence against all imputations. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... Shelley, and for two reasons, because they were themselves rebellious of heart, and because they voiced the rebellion of numerous other young enthusiasts who, disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution to bring in the promised age of happiness, were ready to cry out against the existing humdrum order of society. Both poets were sadly lacking in mental or moral balance, and finding no chance in England to wage heroic Warfare against political tyranny, as the French had done, they proceeded in rather ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... student's life, the two golden visits which she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... gayety that had once distinguished their small household had vanished with the loss of Elsa's money. Their son, and idol, had been defrauded of a rich future for which they had toiled, and life now seemed to them but an irksome round of humdrum duties, to be gotten through with as easily as possible. Over the cabin hung an air of neglect which even Samson was swift to note, and most significant of all, Elsa's knitting had fallen to the floor and become the plaything of a kitten, which evoked no ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... the Grandmother seemed to be expected, for no time was lost in procuring her former place beside the croupier. It is my opinion that though croupiers seem such ordinary, humdrum officials—men who care nothing whether the bank wins or loses—they are, in reality, anything but indifferent to the bank's losing, and are given instructions to attract players, and to keep a watch over the bank's interests; as also, that for such services, these officials are awarded ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the excitement and the results, get discontented, morose, cynical, and depreciate everything. Everything, however seemingly secular and small, is God's work for the moment, and worthy of our very best endeavour. To such, a mission house, even in its humdrum days, is a magnificent opportunity of service. In a home like mine a woman can find infinite happiness and satisfaction. It is an exhilaration of constant joy—I cannot fancy anything to surpass it ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... down, not taken on for an indefinite time at a vast expense, and never,—no never, never,—wearing lighted candles round their heads.[39] I am deeply miserable. A real house like this is insupportable, after that canvas farm wherein I was so happy. What is a humdrum dinner at half-past five, with nobody (but John) to see me eat it, compared with that soup, and the hundreds of pairs of eyes that watched its disappearance? Forgive this tear.[40] It is weak ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... Bill fairly burned with desire to go off and do something great. His soul was on fire with patriotic ardor. How could he stay quietly in Woodstock, and lead a humdrum life, when the soldiers of the tyrant were threatening all the Americans held most dear? But his friends at home did not encourage his practical patriotism. He was told that he must stay at home, and work on the farm, and get ready ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... lady, I had a mother; I loved her in my humdrum way very dearly. She promised me faithfully not to die till I should be a colonel; and she went and died before I was a commandant, even; just ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... shouted at her. But there were few interests in Mrs. Quinlan's humdrum existence, and seldom did she have an exciting incident to relate and an eager audience to hang upon her words. She sat down ponderously and prepared to make the most of ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... softly; for though I am convinced my little Lydia would elope with me as Ensign Beverley, yet am I by no means certain that she would take me with the impediment of our friends' consent, a regular humdrum wedding, and the reversion of a good fortune on my side: no, no; I must prepare her gradually for the discovery, and make myself necessary to her, before I risk it.—Well, but Faulkland, you'll dine with us to-day ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... can only have a fleeting look at things, but we'll get enough, I hope, to freshen your minds, change the humdrum, and elicit ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... selection and courting of a mate, that greatest of all adventures (to the young), was made humdrum. Doubtless his mother already had selected the girl, and presently would marry him to her. ... Somehow this was the one phase of the situation that galled ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... which kept our Plymouth stones rattling. Besides the coaches—the "Quicksilver," which carried the mails and a coachman and guard in scarlet liveries, the humdrum "Defiance" and the dashing "Subscription" or "Scrippy" post-chaises came and went continually, whisking naval officers between us and London with dispatches: and sometimes the whole populace turned out to cheer as trains of ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... go into the vegetable and flower-raising business instead of humdrum commercial pursuits. The characters ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... of her friend's safe and sheltered life. No care for her; no anxiety about ways and means; no need to work for money; and no need to fear for anybody dear to her. Christina's father was her guardian, not she his; he might be a very humdrum man, and no doubt was, but his daughter had no cause to be ashamed for him; had not the burden of his life and character on her own shoulders to take care of. A swift, keen feeling of this contrast would come over Dolly; but she put it away as instantly, and would not see or hear anything ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... heard; saw and heard with the least emotion, perhaps, ever experienced by a soldier. Absorbed in reflections on what I heard, and in fancies of a world of which I knew so little, it is not to be doubted that I constructed ideals far beyond the humdrum reality of home life, impracticable ideals that tended only to separate me more from other men. Their world was not my world; this I knew full well, and I sometimes thought they knew it; for while no rude treatment marked their intercourse with me, yet few sought me as a friend. My ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... look clearly along extensive lines of possible action in Europe, America, and the East. For there is a poetic as well as a commonplace side to business; and the man of business genius lights up the humdrum routine of daily life by exploring the boundless region of possibility wherever it ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... Annie was continuing her lecture. "I dare say Tom Robinson will do very well—all the better, perhaps, because he has no ambition, and is content to make money in the most humdrum way as a tradesman." ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... had been instantly followed by a stir of movement; a little shiver ran through the house. Doors opened and shut; voices murmured; quick feet sounded on the stairs. Now the boarders were gathered in the parlor, very still and solemn, yet not to save their lives unaware that for them the humdrum round was to go on just the same. And here, of course, is no matter of a boarding-house: for queens must eat though kings lie high ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... thanked you for telling me those things! What interest lay in those few words! You have taken thought for that thing belonging to you called Claudine? This imbecile would never have opened my eyes; he thinks that everything I do is right; and besides, he is much too humdrum, too matter-of-fact to have any ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... saving Evie from moral disaster, he rises to the height of his chance and fulfils his ideals. But he is misunderstood by his wife, who sues him for a divorce but fails to bring conclusive evidence. The book ends happily, and throughout its course is a fine picture of a rather humdrum soul seeking—and reaching—the heights of ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... who enter it as brilliant young ladies, and come from it at the end of a few years morbid, harassed, depressed; sunk in all the graces and powers that make a woman's life beautiful and distinct from a man's. The circle in many cases is so narrow that there is no room for growth. The humdrum toils, the petty cares and rude contact with hired help, sink many a charming woman into a domestic drudge ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... along the line, the talk a year ago had been almost entirely on gold hunting. Every storekeeper advertised Klondike goods, but these signs were now rusty and faded. The fever was over, the reign of the humdrum ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... from a humdrum, comfortable, conventionally ordered life into a career of insane adventure is a step that is radical; but it can be exhilarating, and I proved the fact that day. To dwell on present danger was to forget the past hour in the garage, which I had to ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... this, and in fact for most of Our sojourn here, life in the trenches was of a somewhat humdrum character. There were a few days cf activity now and then, but normally the enemy was very inoffensive so far as we were concerned. He did, however, raid the 6th Battalion one night in the right sub-sector, almost completely levelling one of their communication trenches with heavy trench mortars ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... as regards the story, it brings about only one death and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred other ways. Otherwise the tale runs on, with little exception, in that humdrum course of daily monotony, out of which some people coin materials to act, and others excuses to doze, just as their ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... at once clear out of one's life. There is no drudgery nor humdrum nor hardship, because everything is for Jesus, and seen through His eyes. Whatever comes in the pathway of his work is gladdest joy, whether an obscure narrow round of home work or shop or store, or leaving home for a strange land far across the sea with a peculiarly uncongenial ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... young Edison began to get tired of the humdrum life of a telegraph operator in Boston. As I have told you, after the vote-recorder, he had invented a stock ticker and started a quotation service in Boston. He opened operations from a room over the Gold Exchange with thirty to ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... I stumbled through my schooling till I was sixteen, when I was sent off to my father's office on the Quay at Yarmouth to take charge of the books, which were an everlasting humdrum record of herrings and the various trawl fish which came in ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... death—nothing interested me—living the most commonplace, humdrum, unromantic existence imaginable. Teas and dances, dances and teas, clubs and theatres, theatres and clubs, motors and yachts, yachts and motors. It was horrible, and I can't help thinking it was all my dear old governor's fault. He had no ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... Dalzell, suddenly, "where do we of the Navy come in? Shelling a few forts, possibly, and serving in the humdrum life of ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... champion of a resurrected South, Henry Grady; here also he obtained fugitive glimpses of a struggling and briefless lawyer, who, like Page, was interested more in books and writing than in the humdrum of professional life, and who was then engaged in putting together a brochure on Congressional Government which immediately gave him a national standing. The name of this ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Vera Nevill was an incongruous element in the Daintree household. In that quiet humdrum country clergyman's life she was as much out of her proper place as a bird of paradise in a chicken yard, or a Gloire de Dijon rose ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... and mind. He was a perfect sailor, and had that dreaminess in his nature which matches with nothing but the ripple of the waves. Still, I could not hide from myself that he was a changed man since that voyage in search of health from which he had just returned. His mother talked in her humdrum way about heart disease; and his father, taking up the strain, bored us about organic lesions, till we almost wished he had a lesion himself. Severance ridiculed all this; but he grew more and more moody, and his eyes seemed to be laying more ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of the thread of life, was the eldest of the three. She held in her hand a distaff, wound with black and white woollen yarn, with which were sparingly intermixed strands of silk and gold. The wool stood for the humdrum everyday life of man: the silk and gold marked the days of mirth and gladness, always, alas! too few ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... wouldn't you," T.O. murmured after a while, "that places like this would be humdrum-y and commonplace? But I guess there are 'stories' everywhere. I'm beginning to find ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... to smile at him, which she did a little wistfully. "Your Despoina is either too much fairy, or not enough. She does very humdrum things. She has done mischief; now she is going to repair it. She is going ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... world by showing that an infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masque.' She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... swept in upon her, the contrast of her friend's safe and sheltered life. No care for her; no anxiety about ways and means; no need to work for money; and no need to fear for anybody dear to her. Christina's father was her guardian, not she his; he might be a very humdrum man, and no doubt was, but his daughter had no cause to be ashamed for him; had not the burden of his life and character on her own shoulders to take care of. A swift, keen feeling of this contrast would come over Dolly; but she ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... the old swimmin'-hole! In the long, lazy days When the humdrum of school made so many run-a-ways. How plesant was the jurney down the old dusty lane, Whare the tracks of our bare feet was all printed so plane You could tell by the dent of the heel and the sole They was lot o' fun on hands at the old swimmin'-hole. But the lost joys is past! Let ...
— A Spray of Kentucky Pine • George Douglass Sherley
... depression was due to that feeling which takes possession of one before any change of place, a feeling experienced by all melancholy, dreaming people and unknown to those of energetic, sanguine temperaments, who always rejoice at any break in the humdrum of their daily existence, and welcome a change of abode with pleasure. Nejdanov was so lost in his meditations that his thoughts began quite unconsciously to take the form of words. His wandering sensations began to ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... found liberty, and those same rakes and libertines felt highly flattered at being chosen by his highness for his companions in an enterprise which at least was something out of the beaten track of the rather humdrum amusements of the Louvre. Why the king particularly wanted to visit the fair of Neuilly on that particular day of that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to oil the wheels of her humdrum life; there was no more laughter in the house, and she ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... for though I am convinced my little Lydia would elope with me as Ensign Beverley, yet am I by no means certain that she would take me with the impediment of our friends' consent, a regular humdrum wedding, and the reversion of a good fortune on my side: no, no; I must prepare her gradually for the discovery, and make myself necessary to her, before I risk it.—Well, but Faulkland, you'll dine with us ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... the only kind of settled life which a man with a good deal of gipsy blood in him can tolerate; it affords some scope for his chaffering and predatory instincts and satisfies the roving passion, which is not so strong in those of mixed blood. But it is too respectable or humdrum a life for the true, undegenerate gipsy. One wet evening in September last I was prowling in a copse near Shrewton, watching the birds, when I encountered a young gipsy and recognized him as one of a gang of about a dozen I had met several days before near Salisbury. They were on their way, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... them. He did not share that unlucky taste for the namby-pamby by which Wordsworth annoyed his contemporaries, and spoilt some of his earlier poems. Its place was filled in Crabbe's mind by an even more unfortunate disposition for the simply humdrum and commonplace, which, it must be confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good many of his verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's influence was powerful ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... for life at the Flemings was a little bit humdrum for her, though her aunt and cousins were very kind whenever they had time to ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... for a minute. She set her wine-glass down and toyed with the stem. Then she looked up at him under her eyelashes with that old daring look of hers, and repeated: "And love, Peter. But real love, not stodgy humdrum liking, Peter. I want the love that's like the hot sun, and the wide, tossing blue sea east of Suez, and the nights under the moon where the real world wakes up and doesn't go to sleep, like it does in the country in the cold, ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... there is something precarious in such a business as mine;—but I am endeavouring to make it less so from day to day, and hope very shortly to bring it into that humdrum groove which best befits a married man. Should I ask further assistance from you in doing this, perhaps you will not refuse it if I can succeed in making the matter clear to you. As it is I thank you sincerely for what you have done. I will ask you to pay the L3000 you have so kindly ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... long, lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss Rachel about her jewel, I doubt if he spoke six words ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... named George and Mary Rabbit, and always used to sleep side by side. But after a few weeks they must have felt tired of their humdrum life; for one bright morning they ran away. I hope they are living happily together in the fragrant woods ...
— The Nursery, July 1877, XXII. No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... humdrum, casual, almost indifferent manner in which the proceedings seemed to be conducted each side was watching every move made by the other with the tension of a tiger ready to spring upon its prey. Babson and O'Brien were engaged in forcing upon the defense a jury composed entirely of case-hardened convictors, ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... everlasting happiness excepting man alone who—mysterious being!—was born to trouble and disaster as the sparks fly upwards. A pure delusion, due to our universal and ineradicable passion for romance and tragedy. Tell a man of a hundred humdrum lives which run their quiet contented course in this village, and the monotonous unmoving story, or hundred stories, will go in at one ear and out at the other. Therefore such stories are not told and not remembered. But that which stirs our pity and terror—the frustrate life, the glorious ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... show—yes, I would!" declared the farmer energetically. "I tell you I believe circus is born in you, and you can't help it. You don't have much of a life at home. You're not built for humdrum village life. Get out; grow into something you fancy. No need being a scamp because you're a rover. My brother was built your sort. They pinned him down trying to make a doctor of him, and he ran away. He turned up with a little fortune ten years later, a big-hearted, ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... man back into the mire he had just emerged from, to thwart all effort to lead a pure, sweet, rural existence. Finally Shandon contented himself by forbidding Dart to meddle in the future with anything not in any way a part of his own business; and nourished the secret hope that a few weeks of the humdrum of mountain life would tire this sparrow of the city gutters. Whereupon, when alone with his big book and a fresh cigar, Willie Dart soliloquised ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... which he extended Africa.[8] The Dark Continent, in his map, ran out on the one side to the south-east of China, and on the other to the indefinite west, though there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It was a triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science under Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known; it was not yet settled or fully known; and so a great student constructed a melange of fact and fancy mainly based on a guess-work of imaginary ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... heart, and because they voiced the rebellion of numerous other young enthusiasts who, disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution to bring in the promised age of happiness, were ready to cry out against the existing humdrum order of society. Both poets were sadly lacking in mental or moral balance, and finding no chance in England to wage heroic Warfare against political tyranny, as the French had done, they proceeded in rather head long fashion to an ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... not difficult to understand why the numerous body of teachers, who easily drift into mechanical methods, has a preference for formal studies. They are comparatively easy and humdrum and keep pupils busy. Real studies, if taught with any sort of fitness, require energy, interest, and versatility, besides much outside work in ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... congratulate himself on the self-restraint he shows in not going to a ball every night. Similarly our England may have a right to congratulate itself upon the fact that her politics are very quiet, amicable, and humdrum. But she must not congratulate herself upon that fact and also congratulate herself upon the self-restraint she shows in not tearing herself and her citizens into rags. Between two English Privy Councillors ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... second in front of an archaic Apollo of no great merit—because it reminded her of the unknown; and she wished with all her might something new and swift and rushing might come into her humdrum life. ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... relations of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a different state ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... women bent on business, with engagements to keep, the returned men found themselves with dazed, listless mind waiting for orders from someone, somewhere, or for the next movie show to open. But they were unwilling to take on the humdrum of making a living, and were in most cases incapable of initiating a congenial method of employing their powers, their new-found, splendid, glorious powers, by means of which they had saved an empire and a world. They had become common ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... being the affairs of the Gerhardt family drifted. Jennie continued her work with Mrs. Bracebridge. Sebastian fixed himself firmly in his clerkship in the cigar store. George was promoted to the noble sum of three dollars, and then three-fifty. It was a narrow, humdrum life the family led. Coal, groceries, shoes, and clothing were the uppermost topics of their conversation; every one felt the stress and strain of ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... England to continue his comparatively humdrum order of advancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangely different and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The Palestine Exploration Fund sent him with another officer to conduct topographical and antiquarian investigations in a country where practical exertions ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... oblivion of them and their deeds, and that, instead, they are depriving us of the refreshment of our forty winks, they would show a correct understanding of the situation. If they cannot be altogether silent, they might at least give their noise another pitch, and direct it into some humdrum monotone that would not jar upon our slumbers. Do their worst, however, they cannot take from us the delicious consciousness that it will be two years before another Presidential campaign. Panoplied in that reflection, we can ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... preach, and were astonished at their own disappointment. I recollect the wife of a great prelate from a distance coming to hear me, and then expressing her surprise to find that I preached nothing but a plain humdrum Sermon. I recollect how, when on the Sunday before Commemoration one year, a number of strangers came to hear me, and I preached in my usual way, residents in Oxford, of high position, were loud in their ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... islands yet dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands. Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have something altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inland Germans, or from the bon sens francais which can be at will trenchant or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is insecurity, something fitting in men walking on ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... "steel kings" or "railroad manipulators"; nearly all the industrial giants of ante-bellum times—as distinguished from the socially prominent whose wealth was inherited—had heaped together their accumulations in humdrum trade. Perhaps Peter Cooper, who had made a million dollars in the manufacture of isinglass and glue, and George Law, whose gains, equally large, represented fortunate speculations in street railroads, faintly suggest the approaching era; ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... wilderness captivated and entranced him, the humdrum life of a trader wearied him. He ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... how it is, but your very clever man never seems to care so much as your less gifted mortals for cleverness in his helpmate. Your scholars and poets and ministers of state are more often than not found assorted with exceedingly humdrum, good sort of women, and apparently like them all the better for their deficiencies. Just see how happily Racine lived with his wife, and what an angel he thought her, and yet she had never read his plays. Certainly Goethe never troubled the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the stocks offered, proceeds in a monotonous, humdrum manner, but when "Erie," or "Pacific Mail," or any other favorite stock is called, each man springs to his feet. Bids come fast and furious, hands, arms, hats, and canes are waved frantically overhead to attract the attention of the presiding ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... the awful social wreckage[C] thrown upon the strand there; or possibly it would mean an isolated post out on the frontier, or down in the equally heroic field of the mountains of the South. He might leave some of you just where you are, in a commonplace, humdrum spot, as you think, when your visions had been in other fields. He might make you a seed-sower, like lonely Morrison in China, when you wanted to be a harvester like Moody. Here is the real battlefield. ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... for human society. Last week, for instance, when for three days on end we did not exchange a single word, not even at dinner, where the amenities should come on at least with the walnuts. I grant you that humdrum wears upon the spirit, that the flatness of the daily road may be a harder thing to get over than even Mr. Bunyan's hill Difficulty, but for a man to surrender himself mind and body to solitaire argues weakness. Moreover, it was a ridiculous combination of the cards that Indiman ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... Chamberlain, who was Mayor, and who was my host, had the whole borough police force present or in reserve, and had every interrupter (and there were several hundred) carried out singly by two policemen, with a Conservative Chief of Police to direct them, after which I delivered an extremely humdrum speech to a very dull assembly. [Footnote: He spoke on the House of Lords.] Chamberlain was more lively, and made a speech in ridicule of Second Chambers, in which I still (1895) agree. On the other hand, in Chelsea we carried the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... she answered. She was searching out napkins in the sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people who have no interest in ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... fellows who had not taken the plunge seem purposeless and immature. Either they were out of tune, or I was—and I thought, of course, that they were. What freshness could I bring to an existence of peace when my gears would not mesh with its humdrum machinery! ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... had done their utmost to prepare the prince for being spoiled: the dreadful dullness of papa's Court, its stupid amusements, its dreary occupations, the maddening humdrum, the stifling sobriety of its routine, would have made a scapegrace of a much less lively prince. All the big princes bolted from that castle of ennui where old King George sat, posting up his books and droning over his Handel; and old Queen ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... This was like a picnic in the humdrum life of the farm hand. Except when the circus came to town, or there was a Harvest Home day, poor Felix knew little beyond the eternal grind of getting up before dawn, and working until long ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... young Egerton with a natural gift for boxing, and one of the best whips I ever knew—we raced our coaches to Brighton and back for a thousand a side and he beat me by six yards—a splendid all round sportsman—ruined by matrimony! He's buried somewhere in the country and passing his days in the humdrum pursuit of being husband and father. Oh, bruise and blister me! it's all very pitiful, and yet"—here the Viscount sighed again—"I do not quarrel with the state, for marriage has often proved a—er—very present help in the time ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... are happening. All very quiet and humdrum on the surface. Only the aeroplanes are busy, and if the sun is between you and them there are always the little black high Archie clouds following them, like ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... unconscious straightening of broad shoulders and a characteristic uptilt of square, cleft chin, the lines smoothed away miraculously, a touch of red crept into his lean cheeks, an eager, boyish gleam of expectation flashed into the clear gray eyes that rested caressingly on the humdrum, sleepy picture ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... ever wore the authentic laurel.[10] That Drayton deserved it, even as a successor of the divinest Spenser, who shall deny? With enough of patience and pedantry to prompt the composition of that most laborious, and, upon the whole, most humdrum and wearisome poem of modern times, the "Polyolbion," he nevertheless possessed an abounding exuberance of delicate fancy and sound poetical judgment, traces of which flash not unfrequently even athwart the dulness of his magnum opus, and through the mock-heroism of "England's Heroical ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... pistol shots and the reputation he had gained in the vicinity gave weight to his words; and "The Band" subsided into the most humdrum farmers of the region. Rita had ample information of his safety, for it soon became known that he had killed two of the most active and daring of the guerillas and captured three others; and she worshipped the hero of her girlish fancy all the ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... are not my best, only very ordinary and humdrum affairs—but ex pede Herculem! Hon'ble Sir, and you will see how transcendentally superior are even such poor effusions compared to the fiddle-faddle and gim-crack style of article with which you are being fobbed off ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... rather seriously. "I'm not altogether satisfied. I can't settle down to the idea of a dull, humdrum sort of life—and of Percy's being fond ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... the wife of a poet! that had been the dream of her life! but ruthless fate, instead of the romantic and fevered existence she sighed for, had doomed her to a peaceful, humdrum happiness, and married her to a rich man at Auteuil, gentle and amiable, perhaps indeed a trifle old for her, possessed of but one passion,—perfectly inoffensive and unexciting—that of horticulture. This excellent man spent his days pruning, scissors in hand, tending ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... Thomas is very ill, and so also is Lady Fitzgerald; but I do not feel the same interest about them that I do about you. And they are such humdrum, quiet-going people. As for Herbert, I'm afraid he'll ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... a certain pensiveness, the effect of too much early sorrow and seclusion upon a very sensitive temperament, Edith better loved the solitude of the grand old forest of St. Mary's or the loneliness of her own shaded rooms at Luckenough than any society the humdrum neighborhood could offer her. And when at the call of social duty she did go into company, she exercised a refining and subduing influence, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... simple practice of the law there offered, acting as counsel for the railway, defending a rare criminal case, collecting accounts, carrying on title contests and "adverse" suits in the many cases before the Register of the Land Office, and performing all the simple humdrum of the busy country lawyer. He made more and more money, since at that time one of his position and opportunities could hardly avoid doing so. His place in the business world was assured. He ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... in motion for the advance against the French. Colonel Joshua Fry was selected to head the expedition, and Colonel Washington made second in command. Colonel Fry at one time taught mathematics at William and Mary, but found the routine of the class-room too humdrum, and so sought a more exciting life. He had found it along the borders of the frontier, and in 1750 was made colonel of militia and member of the governor's council. Two years later, he was sent to Logstown to treat with the Indians, and made a map ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... can satisfy. Our lives are seldom adventurous all over; there are monotonous interludes with no melody, offering us little that is new to learn. Our love for war and sport shows that we were not built organically for humdrum. Now literature helps to make up for this deficiency in real life by providing us with adventures in which we can participate imaginatively, and from which we can derive new knowledge. If real life did supply us with all the intense living that we demand, we ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... lived in this little world; it was dull and humdrum. The girls looked at the hill in wistful longing, and the boys fretted, and haunted Alexandria. Alexandria was "town,"—a straggling, lazy village of houses, churches, and shops, and an aristocracy of Toms, Dicks, and Captains. Cuddled on the hill to the north was the village of the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... borrowed his fancies and opinions from Edward Ingram himself, who was amused and gratified at the same time to find his humdrum notions receive a dozen new lights and colors when transferred to the warmer atmosphere of his friend's imagination. Ingram would even consent to receive from his younger companion advice, impetuously urged and richly illustrated, which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... about, you may be sure there are others not far away, for, except in the nesting season, its habits are distinctly social, its friendliness extending to the humdrum brown creeper, the chickadees, and the nuthatches, in whose company it is often seen; indeed, it is likely to be in almost any flock of the winter birds. They are a merry band as they go exploring the trees together. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... gentle passion. This "love neurosis," as the cold specialist dubs it, is in essence a condition of exaltation, and therefore of exceptional sensitiveness. Need we wonder, then, that our artist-friend makes perhaps more frequent excursions than the humdrum individual into the realms of amorous exuberance? By nature he is more susceptible to the influence of the finer emotions, and he will find a thousand graces in the curve of an arm or the turn of an ankle, where, were you to appraise such in cold blood, there might ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... butchery was being nursed and nourished here in this obscure family of peace? Surely this good folk did not appreciate the meaning of it all. Was it not merely something awfully exciting to talk about, argue about, puzzle over, in the prosaic humdrum at this ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... spirit. But oh! if I had time now—time to write down the great thoughts that do throng the brain. They are there, I feel them, know them. No doubt the supreme exaltation of approaching death is the stimulus that one never experiences in the humdrum business of the day-to-day existence. Such mighty thoughts! Unintelligible, but if I had time I could spell them out, and how I could write then! I feel that the whole secret of Life is within my reach; I can almost grasp it; I seem to ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... under his command; he found, in fact, a nominal army of 17,000, with probably not more than 14,000 effective, and the number tended to decline as the men went away to their homes after the first vivid interest gave way to the humdrum of military life. ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... houses round London at which an eatable dinner may be obtained. And yet a few years since how delicious was that cut of roast goose to be had for a shilling at the eating-house near Golden Square. Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Green, Mrs. Walker and all the other mistresses, are too vapid and stupid and humdrum for endurance. The theatres are dull as Lethe, and politics have lost their salt. Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... hardly have satisfied that man's greed for information touching that particular spot. What knew I of tracts, of townships, of quarter sections or of subdivisions? Were I filled with a knowledge of these humdrum commonplaces, should I know aught of that enthusiasm which thrills the being who, after many and long years of weary hoping and waiting, sees the object of his desires just within his grasp? Should Moses just in sight of the promised ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there would be no surprises in his visit. But he had found that humdrum world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become the most fatal epoch of his life. The next morning he felt so harassed with the nightmare of consequences—he dreaded so much the immediate issues before him—that ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... straight from a humdrum, comfortable, conventionally ordered life into a career of insane adventure is a step that is radical; but it can be exhilarating, and I proved the fact that day. To dwell on present danger was to forget the past hour in the garage, which I had to forget or begin gibbering. Once committed to the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... have engaged him to write it, but he never will. If I lived near him I could gradually get the material out of him; but at a distance I cannot get him even to write rough notes. On the other hand, we literary people are quite humdrum people in our ways of life, and our autobiographies would generally ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... sure that my exterior was ugly, but I could derive no comfort from any of the usual consolations under such circumstances. I could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever, or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror, to be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less, since, although I was not exactly small of stature, and had, moreover, plenty of strength for my years, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... and in fact for most of Our sojourn here, life in the trenches was of a somewhat humdrum character. There were a few days cf activity now and then, but normally the enemy was very inoffensive so far as we were concerned. He did, however, raid the 6th Battalion one night in the right sub-sector, almost completely ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... your humdrum wheel, Sweep up your orts, and get your Hat; Old joys reviv'd once more I feel, 'Tis Fair-day;—ay, and ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... the midste of my Discouragements." * * A burst of gusty laughter still echoes along the crowded deck of the letter-of-marque schooner Success, whose master, Captain Philip Thrash, inserted this diverting comment in his humdrum record of the day's work: "At one half past 8 discovered a sail ahead. Tacked ship. At 9 tacked ship again and past just to Leeward of the Sail which appeared to be a damn'd Comical Boat, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... boy of thirteen who committed suicide because he could not "make good" in school, and wished to show that he too had "the stuff" in him, as stated in the piteous little letter left behind. This same love of excitement, the desire to jump out of the humdrum experience of life, also induces boys to experiment with drinks and drugs to a surprising extent. For several years the residents of Hull-House struggled with the difficulty of prohibiting the sale of cocaine to minors ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... interests in every possible manner. As for the Marquis, he actually settled down, and one cannot help feeling chagrined that such a promising rogue should have turned talents so eminently suitable for the manufacture of legendary material into more humdrum courses. Conscious of the gravity of his early misdemeanours, he founded a hospital for the poor of the parish, and each evening in one of the windows of this place the peasants could see a light which burned ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Dwight was the boy of the V, a strong, hearty, happy young woman of fourteen, who succeeded in getting a great deal of enjoyment out of this humdrum, work-a-day world. Her rosy cheeks glowed and her brown eyes shone with health; for Jean was as full of life as a young colt, and vented her superfluous energy in climbing trees, walking fences, ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... and have been pelted with inquiries. Nemestronia loves you like a grandson, and, if you ask me, I say Vedia is in love with you out and out. As I had heard from you and nobody else had, I began to feel as if I ought to look after you. Everything was abominably humdrum and I deceived myself into thinking I should enjoy the smell of green fields. I certainly should have turned back less than half way if I had been concerned with anybody else than you; and when we turned off the Via Salaria ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... 'Durham,' and the 'York,' which last became the wooden successor of the birch-bark after Governor Simpson's general inspection of the Hudson's Bay domain. Only the rather {37} barge-like 'Mackinaw' was completely outside this venturesome class. It was a useful but humdrum cargo boat, laboriously poled along shallow, quiet waters, or rowed with lumbering sweeps; or sometimes even sailed, when it shovelled its way through the water with a very safe ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... I'll have you as you are; yes, I will!' she said winsomely. 'The practical husbands and wives who take things philosophically are very humdrum, are they not? Yes, it would kill me quite. You please ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... him: to remain, according to the notions of her parents, would be wrong. Why was it that doing wrong agreed with her, energized her, made her more alert, cleverer, keying up her faculties? turned life from a dull affair into a momentous one? To abandon Ditmar would be to slump back into the humdrum, into something from which she had magically been emancipated, symbolized by the home in which she sat; by the red-checked tablecloth, the ugly metal lamp, the cherry chairs with the frayed seats, the horsehair ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Please, sir, explain what you really mean by the term 'bilious!'" The Professor had a way about him that at least made one stop and seriously inquire, before adopting any random notion in regard to medicine. It is to be regretted that, in the humdrum tread-mill work of many physicians, they even have to drop into the commonplace way of treating dyspepsias and such ailments without any further inquiry. A farmer knows better than to drive a dishing wheel, or with merely having a nail clinched in the loose shoe of a valuable horse; but ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... years ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... house—this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... beginning and the beginning as the end? The first steps in education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood over all physical existence. There is no ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... and courting of a mate, that greatest of all adventures (to the young), was made humdrum. Doubtless his mother already had selected the girl, and presently would marry him to her. ... Somehow this was the one phase of the situation ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... thing in the world," she cried. "If you had only wired, Gilbert would have stayed, but as it is he has gone down to Gilgit about some polo ponies, and won't be back for two days. Things are so humdrum and easy-going up here that one loses interest in one's profession. Gilbert has nothing to do except arrange with the foreman of the coolies who are making roads, and hold stupid courts, and consult with Captain Thwaite and the garrison people. The result is that the poor man has become crazy ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... so little to tell," she responded; "it was really humdrum and uneventful. Nothing much happened to me; I looked for work and got it. Oh, don't be distressed! it was easy, pleasant work enough, and I was much better busy. I begin to believe plenty of hard work is a real blessing to dissatisfied, restless people—you can't be very ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... never caught a glimpse of the melancholy spectre with the trailing garments, nor do I expect that I ever shall. In fact my night's experiences have cured me of my mania for the supernatural, and quite reconciled me to inhabiting the humdrum nineteenth century edifice on the outskirts of London which Mrs. D. has long ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of Men and Women. The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, with her "coarse hands and hair," ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... which were so high as to carry life and death with them in the balance. But for them the sun shone brightly. It was enough that they played the game and shared the risks together. The jocund morning was in their hearts, and brought with it an augury of success based on nothing so humdrum or tangible ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... but of a humdrum kind. What we vaguely had in mind Was some new sensation or Thrill we never felt before. ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... marry either of these gentlemen; she does not particularly require their flattering attentions.... Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions of other girls.... All of which is so clearly a ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... there are heaps of humdrum ways of living, where the husband is quite fond, but it does not make his heart beat, and Lady Ver says she couldn't stay on with a man whose heart she couldn't make beat ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... have wearied you. The small tasks have been more than your patience and strength could manage. No doubt great exigencies often call forth great powers that were dormant in the humdrum of ordinary life. But the man who knows himself best will be the most ready to shrink with distrust from the dread possibilities ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... ago, I heard one of them preach in a field, before thousands and thousands of people. A different sort of dish he gave us from that of our humdrum preachers, who, from the pulpit, choke their hearers with scraps of Latin. He spoke from his heart; told us how we had till now been led by the nose, how we had been kept in darkness, and how we ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... of ripe spawn, and a few had spawned, the season with them being a little later than on the stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold. Neither had the creek here any such eventful and startling career. It led, indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the roots and fallen treetops and among the loose stones. At rare intervals it beamed upon us from some still reach or dark cover, and won from us ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... death with alarm. What is he to do in this land of ghosts? there is no place for him. Imagine the commonplace liver of a humdrum existence being received into ghostland. He enters nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at school. The old ghosts ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... he answered. "Somebody's got to milk the poor old beasts, and I don't know who would if I didn't. That doesn't make me like it, though. Oh Janet, when I feel as tired as I do to-night I get terribly sickened with all this humdrum life on the farm! It's just work, work, from morning till night and when you get done you're too tired to read or talk or do anything but just go to sleep like a big ox. If it weren't for father's and mother's sakes ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... given herself to him so long ago gained a more priceless value with every moment's thought, "Ah, sweet Madge! I'm the blessed idiot you loved and toiled for at Santa Barbara! I shouldn't have believed that such a thing could happen in this humdrum world." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... ignoramuses—that I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose obvious moral there ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Yes, this was the very spot where either Sardi Babu and his friends had been sitting the night of the murder or Kasheed Hassoun and his friends—one or the other; he wondered if anybody would ever know which. Was it possible that in this humdrum little place human passions had been roused to the taking of life on account of some mere difference in religious dogma? Was this New York? Was it possible to Americanize these people? A door clattered in the rear, and from behind the screen again emerged the boy carrying ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... sake. But Bobbie would have enjoyed tramping over the mountains with him, an eager and alert listener to all his talks about geology and clouds, and ten to one Bobbie would have made friends of every peasant they met, every fellow traveler on the road, and taught Ruskin in turn a good bit about humdrum, picturesque mankind. And he would have made him laugh! Possibly you think it incongruous, impossible, the picture of happy-go-lucky, ridiculous Bobbie, with his slang and his grin and his outlook on life, and Ruskin, the great critic, the master of style, the intellectual giant. But then ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... those five years of my life spent in the W.B. Lead Office, but I must not weary my readers with that which would be at best a humdrum tale. My education went on apace. In the evenings I took lessons at home, and during the day, when I was not otherwise engaged, I had always a book or a pen in my hand. How high one's aspirations soar in that season when everything seems possible to the unfledged ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... "I never found it dull," she said. Nevertheless, the contrast smote her more and more, between what Mr. Knowlton was accustomed to in his world, and the very plain, humdrum, uneventful, unadorned life she led in hers. And this elegant creature, whose very dress was a sort of revelation to Diana in its perfection of beauty, she seemed to the poor country girl to put at an immense ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... a hard blow to poor Sellers to see the work on his darling enterprise stop, and the noise and bustle and confusion that had been such refreshment to his soul, sicken and die out. It was hard to come down to humdrum ordinary life again after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... married Paul? Bachelder thought, and correctly, that he discerned the reason in a certain warmth of romantic feeling that tinged her speech and manner. Daughter of an Episcopal clergyman in Paul's native town, she had sighed for something different from the humdrum of small teas, dinners, parochial calls, and when Paul came to her with the glamour of tropical travel upon him, she married, mistaking the glamour ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... not in a talking humour," she answered. "My head aches, and I shall be glad to get to bed. It was a stupid, humdrum evening" ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... long-lost heir—an heir of the melodrama, strutting into your hitherto unsuspected kingdom at just the right moment, loaded up with the consciousness of unguessed merit and of rights so long feloniously withheld—but even to be a common humdrum domestic heir is a profession to which few would refuse to ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... great dreamers and experimenters of the race. Out of this sluggish sewer the Anglo-Saxon, that fabulous creature, has gone forth to his blundering conquest of the earth. And conquering, he has brought back his loot to the place of his beginning. The great liners flashing along their policed and humdrum lanes, have long since abandoned London, but every turn of the tide brings up her fleet of cargo ships, straggling, weather-worn and grey, trudging in from ports far-flung and incredible—Surinam, Punta Arenas, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... they chose to drive, they were soon restored to her again; for Di fell into literature, and Laura into love. Thus engrossed, these two forgot many duties which even blue-stockings and innamoratas are expected to perform, and slowly all the homely humdrum cares that housewives know became Nan's daily life, and she accepted it without a thought of discontent. Noiseless and cheerful as the sunshine, she went to and fro, doing the tasks that mothers do, but without a mother's sweet reward, holding fast the numberless slight threads ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... from the compulsory contribution to the building of the embankment at Rotzis, near Wusterhausen, have left behind in me no sentimental regrets for my sphere of work in those days. Renouncing the ambition for an official career, I readily complied with the wishes of my parents by taking up the humdrum management of our Pomeranian estates. I had made up my mind to live and die in the country, after attaining successes in agriculture—perhaps in war also, if war should come. So far as my country life left me any ambition at all, it was that of a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Joan thought, and was glad that he did not. How humdrum it all would have been had he known! As it was, the wonderful feeling she had was laid upon a very safe foundation—not even Aunt Doris or Sylvia could object—and she would tell them all about it some day, and it would be part of the free, happy life and a proof that ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... method Hannah, who could only have been developed by forces applied from without, was painstaking, humdrum, and limited; while Rebecca, who apparently needed nothing but space to develop in, and a knowledge of terms in which to express herself, grew and grew and grew, always from within outward. Her forces of one sort and another had seemingly ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... from an immeasurable distance, as from another planet, a calm, humdrum planet on which events moved in commonplace, orderly array. Without a jar, with no transition stage, instead of hurtling through space, Mr. Schwab found himself luxuriously seated in a cushioned chair, ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... wooden successor of the birch-bark after Governor Simpson's general inspection of the Hudson's Bay domain. Only the rather {37} barge-like 'Mackinaw' was completely outside this venturesome class. It was a useful but humdrum cargo boat, laboriously poled along shallow, quiet waters, or rowed with lumbering sweeps; or sometimes even sailed, when it shovelled its way through the water with a very safe ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... different voice, exclaimed, to the astonishment of all:—"Have courage, good Stephanus! Strike! strike! Kill the tyrant!" On that same day, the hated Domitian was assassinated at Rome by a man named Stephanus. The humdrum interpretation of this "miracle" is simply that Apollonius had a foreknowledge of the intended attempt ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... South of France, even winter sporting in Switzerland. Aunt Margaret was determined that her nurselings should miss nothing that she could give them. The duty letters which she insisted on their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... his inability and ignorance of her own attitude fell upon him like a chill, for she had never written or said a word to him that might not have passed between any two college friends. Such thoughts occupied him, until finally, as often fortunately happens in our mental crises, a humdrum, domestic voice, the supper bell, called him, and leaving his garments strewn about the room, he ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... to have been surmounted and a wise, disinterested executive to be in supreme control of our business life. Let us suppose all this, and ask only the question: How would this executive treat the humdrum case of wool and mutton? How would it decide the number of sheep ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... week long the little bird looks into our room and sees nothing but the humdrum of work-a-day life. To-day it sees the bright rays of the Sabbath lamp and the white Sabbath cloth upon the table. Don't you ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... fierce, defiant, Greedy, grumpy, grizzly giant In the pages of a picture-book, and he Sometimes screamed, in sudden rages, "I must jump out from these pages, For this life's a much too humdrum one for me! Fiddle-dee! Yes, this life's a quite ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein
... American Independence. Yet, with the exception of the brief Nicaragua expedition—which by the side of the important occurrences of grand naval campaigns must have seemed insignificant—his services during all those years of hostilities were uneventful, and even humdrum. He seemed to miss every important operation; and when the war ended—we may almost say—he had never seen a ship ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... impotent, almost ludicrous. It left him shorn, powerless, and in moral revolt. The world had suddenly left him, as the vision of Carrie Wynn had left him, alone, a mere clerk, an insignificant cog in the great grinding wheel of humdrum drudgery. His chance to do and thereby to be had ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... rest and wait patiently. I don't know why I always seem waiting for something big to come and satisfy my life. I remember when first Hugh spoke to me, and we were engaged, I hoped I should be perfectly satisfied and happy, but in some ways he has disappointed me. He is so—so humdrum and easily pleased, and wrapped up in his profession. I wish he were more intellectual. I do love him, of course I do, but he hasn't filled my life as I thought he would. He doesn't understand some of ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... picked up in the previous decade. She learned how people received, how they set their tables and served them, how they built their houses and furnished them. She learned not only the possibilities but the actualities of splendor and luxury in the town where she had led a retired and humdrum existence for nearly a lifetime. She now thrust her head forth from her dim old cavern, and fed her eyes on the flowers and fields and skies and goodly streams of ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... half-hour after the breaking up of the conference when Hamilton at last raised his head from his arms. He looked about him dazedly for a little while, as if endeavoring to put himself in touch once again with the humdrum facts of existence. Then, when his brain cleared from the lethargy imposed by the strain to which it had so recently been subjected, he gave a sudden defiant toss of his head, and muttered wrathfully: "Go broke, or starve your men!" He got out of his chair, ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... convent, where she underwent some exalting religious experiences; and in 1822 she was assigned to her place in the "established social order" by her marriage at seventeen to M. Dudevant. After a few years of rather humdrum domestic life in the country, she became aware that this gentleman, her husband, was behaving as we used to be taught that all French husbands ultimately behave; he was, in fact, turning from her to her maids. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... straight to hell and that the community was better off without him, they had a secret conviction that he knew what he was doing and admired his foolish courage. Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives. ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... it. In this field Andersen has done his noblest work and earned his immortality. Who can read that marvellous little tale, "The Ugly Duckling," without perceiving that it is a subtle, most exquisite revenge the poet is taking upon the humdrum Philistine world, which despised and humiliated him, before he lifted his wings and flew away with the swans, who knew him as their brother? And yet, as a child, I remember reading this tale with ever fresh delight, though I never for a moment suspected its moral. The hens and the ducks and the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... man, the absence of pose and ceremony, do much to strengthen this notion; but the real truth is that while gifted with unusual imagination, Edison's march to the goal of a new invention is positively humdrum and monotonous in its steady progress. No one ever saw Edison in a hurry; no one ever saw him lazy; and that which he did with slow, careful scrutiny six months ago, he will be doing with just as much calm deliberation of research six months hence—and ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... was not good enough. You were always a dear good chap yourself, but your prospects were not quite dashing enough for your festive Violet. I believe in a merry time even if it is a short one. But if I had really wanted to settle down in a humdrum sort of way, you are the man whom I should have chosen out of the whole batch of them. I hope what I say won't make you conceited, for one of your best points used ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... impossible literary feat of showing us one person who is happy all the time, but he does what is more obvious, he makes us see a great many people who have snatches of good cheer in the midst of their humdrum lives. He lets us see another obvious fact, that happiness is more a matter of temperament than of circumstance. It is not given as a reward of merit or as a mark of distinguished consideration. There is one perennial fountain of pleasure. Any one can have a good time who ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of gentleness. That is the true force. Light, which is silent, is mightier than all lightnings. The Spirit, which is the 'Spirit of love,' is therefore 'the Spirit of power.' The true type of Christian character, which the gospel has brought into being, looks modest, inconspicuous and humdrum, by the side of the more brilliant and vulgar beauties of the world's ideals. Just as the iridescent hues on a dove's neck, and the quiet blue of its plumage, look modest and Quaker-like beside gaudy parroquets and other ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... toward the Yankee line, I saw a man riding leisurely along on horseback, and singing a sort of humdrum tune. I took him to be some old citizen. He rode on down the road toward me, and when he had approached, "Who goes there?" He immediately answered, "A friend." I thought that I recognized the voice in the ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... great emotion, through her veins. The tragic leap of Julie, as she sets her horse to the cliff and thunders to her death, was always in Hester's mind. It was so that she herself would like to die, spurning submission and patience, and all the humdrum virtues. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... does not particularly require their flattering attentions.... Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... to encompass, and lastly the opportunity for eloquent self-expression offered by parliamentary debates, all taken together exert a powerful attraction for the intellectualized mind. Contrast with this the prosaic humdrum work of a trade union leader, the incessant wrangling over "small" details and "petty" grievances, and the case becomes exceedingly clear. The mind of the typical intellectual is too generalized to be lured by any such alternative. He is out of patience ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... to arrive when he might embark upon his career. As it is with most lads, so it was with him, the prospect of a complete change in his mode of life was full of pleasurable excitement; and perhaps it was only natural that, now he had decided to forsake it, the monotonous humdrum fisher's life became almost unbearably irksome to him. Old Bill Maskell was not slow to observe this, and with the unselfishness which was so eminently characteristic of him, though he loved the lad as his own soul, he decided ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... he was four until he was thirteen Buddy's life contained enough thrills to keep a movie-mad boy of to-day sitting on the edge of his seat gasping enviously through many a reel, but to Buddy it was all rather humdrum and monotonous. ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... like Mauritius extremely. It is so comfortable to live in a place with good servants and commodious houses, and the society is particularly refined and agreeable, owing chiefly to the mixture of a strong French element in its otherwise humdrum ingredients. I have never seen such a wealth of lovely hair or such beautiful eyes and teeth as I observe in the girls in every ball-room here; and when you add exceedingly charming—alas! that I must say foreign—manners and a great deal of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... observant than old Kearney, and yet even he saw the change at last, and asked Kate what it might mean. 'She is not ill, I hope,' said he, 'or is our humdrum ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... tried to imagine Courtenay deserting her to discuss those celebrities whom Elsie had made the most of. And how she would play off the Count against the captain! They ought to be at daggers drawn long before the Straits of Magellan were reached. Certainly she never expected such sport on board such a humdrum ship as the Kansas. ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... me," he would exclaim every half-hour. He went to see people who were doing things. He went to see people who were doing nothing. In every town he would discover somebody of unusual attainment. He made every town an unusual town. He turned the humdrum travel map into a wonderland. He scolded lazy towns and praised enterprising ones. He stopped young fellows on the streets. "What are you going to do in life?" Perhaps the young man would say, "I have no chance." "You come to Chicago and I'll give you ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... who go into the vegetable and flower-raising business instead of humdrum commercial pursuits. The characters ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... no one more thoroughly devoted to another than she was to her niece. But then she was not only old, but old-fashioned. She was prudent, and Caroline also was prudent; but their prudence was a different kind. There was no dash, no ambition about aunt Mary's prudence. She was rather humdrum, Caroline thought; and, which was worse, though she liked George Bertram, she did not seem to understand his character at all in the same light as that in which Caroline ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... of a humdrum kind. What we vaguely had in mind Was some new sensation or Thrill we never ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... the girls would envy me—and they just living along their humdrum, everyday existence with fathers and mothers already married and living together, and nothing exciting to look forward to. For really, you know, when you come right down to it, there aren't many girls that have got the ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... adventures were less easy to guard against than in the ordered atmosphere of an English country town. The firm that he worked for saw fit to send him one day on a prosaic business errand to the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there, continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum affairs of commerce, but with the possibilities of romance and adventure, or even misadventure, jostling at his elbow. After two and a half years of exile, however, John James Abbleway had embarked on only ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose obvious moral there can be no question whatever, since he ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... kiss a new love put forth its strength, not the pale beatitude of his dream, with its sweet wistfulness, its shy desires. That was large and vague and insubstantial, permeating like an odor the humdrum purlieus of the day. This was savage, triumphant, that leaped like flame from his heart to his mouth, that burned blood-red on the black night. It swept away hesitation, a sick man's nicety and doubts, all the prejudices of all times! This was love, unchained, that came like waters ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... I have rather fallen off in the writing line lately, but we have been leading a very pleasant but humdrum life, and the evenings have been rather busy; at present, five rowdy young subalterns profane the air with discordant music and facetious witticisms, so it is difficult to write ("Mack, you will never write a ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... concerned, this story has now reached an end. With my departure from Aureataland, I re-entered the world of humdrum life, and since that memorable night in 1884, nothing has befallen me worthy of a polite reader's attention. I have endured the drudgery incident to earning a living; I have enjoyed the relaxations every wise man makes for himself. But I should be guilty ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... Wisdom, you have hired a drummer to attend you in this tour of yours through France and Italy!—Psha! said I, and do not one half of our gentry go with a humdrum compagnon du voyage the same round, and have the piper and the devil and all to pay besides? When man can extricate himself with an equivoque in such an unequal match,—he is not ill off.—But ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... temperamentally predisposed to the unanchored, adventurous, migratory existence which they lead. Boys so constituted run away to sea, take jobs with traveling circuses, or enlist as soldiers. The type is familiar and not uncommon. Such individuals cannot be content with the prosaic, humdrum, monotonous life of regular employment. As a rule we do not look upon this trait in boy or man ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... great a body of men who had lived sword in hand for years, and had fattened on the spoils of the commerce of a great nation, it was inevitable that there should be many utterly unable to return to the humdrum life of honest industry. Many drifted down to that region of romance and outlawry, dear to the heart of the romantic boy, the Spanish Main, and there, as pirates in a small way and as buccaneers, pursued the predatory life. For a time the war which sprung up between England and France seemed to ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... he had no sooner built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and practise ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... of learning, he engaged a room in a famous monastery some miles away from his own home. The only inhabitants of this monastery were a dozen or so of Buddhist priests, who, except when they were engaged in the daily services of the temple, lived a quiet, humdrum, lazy kind of existence which harmonized well with the solitude and the majestic stillness of the mountain scenery ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... to the story of what was, perhaps, one of the strangest of all the adventures which have befallen me in the course of a life that so far can scarcely be called tame or humdrum. ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... curiosity will permit I will try to keep out of the way. I've seen so little in my short life that I must make the most of this brief opportunity. In a day or so you may all be gone, and then the old humdrum ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... could you expect?' he replied. 'My ambition could not endure such a humdrum existence as yours; with these gay-coloured wings of mine I shall soar to higher realms, and be courted ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... that the ordinary person has any need to see what he can do in the way of detection. He gets along very comfortably in the humdrum round of life without having to measure footprints and smile quiet, tight-lipped smiles. But if ever the emergency does arise, he thinks naturally of ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... I speak of people being middle-aged and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it's only because I'm such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act as a kind of Play with Baby, and all ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... a long, lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss Rachel about her jewel, I doubt if he spoke six words or drank so much as a single glass of wine, all ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... the commonplace. Indeed, she never permits any fact of the books to become commonplace to her pupils. They all know that Columbus discovered America in 1492, but when the recitation touches this fact she invests it with life and meaning and so makes it glow as a factor in the class exercise. The humdrum traditional teacher asks the question; and when the pupil drones forth the answer, "Columbus discovered America in 1492," she dismisses the whole matter with the phonographic response, "Very good." What a farce! ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... dramatic poets of Europe have merely dramatised what was in the world's heart; Mr. Gough interpreted the more sacred dramatic elements of the human heart. He abolished the old way of doing things on the platform, the didactic and the humdrum. He harnessed the dramatic element to religion. He lighted new fires of divine ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... preparation for this event I had been happy and content, but a few days later, after the clubs had fallen back to their normal humdrum level I acknowledged with a sense of hopeless weariness that our huge city had a long way to go before it could equal the small Boston of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Howells. My desire to rejoin my fellows in New York was intensified. "As ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... upset your cherished plans, he would gladly consent to settle down in Sidmouth for life. I honoured him for his filial spirit; but, frankly, I think he was wrong. An eagle is not made to live in a hen coop, nor a spirited lad to settle down in a humdrum village; and I own that, although I regret the manner of his going, I cannot look upon it as an unmixed evil, that the force of circumstances has taken him out of the course marked out for him, and that he will have an opportunity of seeing life ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... the same. I usually retorted to the effect that I was well aware that it was noble, and that I could write as good an essay on it as any philosopher. It was all very well for great people to point out the greatness of the little, empty, humdrum life. Why ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... hero soon grew tired of this quiet life. It seemed very stupid and humdrum when compared with Aunt Sheen's marvelous tales of the great ocean, and the strange sights and thrilling adventures that there awaited the voyager. He was larger than his brothers and sisters, his sea-going ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... description of what she saw and heard:—"It was a shock to me; I had expected to be charmed with a play, instead of being nearly set to sleep by discourses in Latin from a pulpit. There were some purple, and some gold, some robes and some wigs, a great crowd, and some stir at times, while a deal of humdrum speaking and dumb show was followed by the noisy demonstrations of the students, as they applauded or condemned the honours bestowed; but in the main I tired of the heat and the mob, and the worry of these mornings, and so, depend upon it, did poor Lord Grenville, who sat up in the chair of ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... Dull, humdrum murmurs lull, but hubbub stuns. Lucullus snuffs up musk, mundungus shuns. Puss purrs, buds burst, bucks butt, luck turns up trumps; But full cups, hurtful, spur up ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... there was much eager speculation among us as to the vessels which would have the good fortune to sail with him. I hoped with all my heart that the Falmouth would be one of them, for I was weary of the humdrum life of idling on shore or aimless sailing up and down the channel. The admiral's was a peaceful mission, and no fighting was expected, but I felt a great curiosity to behold new scenes. To my vast delight, when the admiral came down from London, Captain Vincent told me that the Falmouth ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... hedges; occasionally a peacock strutted proudly along its length, trailing its tail over the gravel, and then the final touch of picturesqueness was given to the scene, but even the approach of an ordinary humdrum human had an effect of dignity, of importance, in such old-world surroundings. It gratified Pixie's keen sense of what it dramatically termed "a situation" to place herself in this point of vantage and act the part of audience; and to-day, though no one more interesting ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... romantic—most people do. But truth to tell, romance is far more common than the commonplace. There are few who have not, at one time or other of their lives, had some strange or tragic episode woven into the tissue of their every-day existence; and it would be difficult to find one person even among humdrum individuals, who, from birth to death, has experienced ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... the end? The first steps in education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Rose's heart to hold on to it for him. True, she too had been a slave to the farm. Yet not so much a slave to it, she distinguished, as to Martin's absorption in its development. And of late years there had been for her, running through all the humdrum days, a satisfaction in perfecting it. In her mind now floated clearly the ideal toward which her husband was striving. She had not guessed how much it had become her own until she felt herself ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... libertines who had been received into the intimacy of the king's newly found liberty, and those same rakes and libertines felt highly flattered at being chosen by his highness for his companions in an enterprise which at least was something out of the beaten track of the rather humdrum amusements of the Louvre. Why the king particularly wanted to visit the fair of Neuilly on that particular day of that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. It was enough for them that the king, in ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... easy for water to run down from the upper springs, but it requires a divine impulse to flow up from the valley in the nether springs. There is nothing that tells more of Christ than to see a Christian rejoicing and cheerful in the humdrum and routine of commonplace work, like the sailors that stand on the dock loading the vessel and singing as they swing their loads, keeping time with the spirit of praise to the footsteps and movements of labor and duty. ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... But the humdrum business of buying, selling, and adding up long rows of tiresome figures, did not please him, and so he neglected his duties to read books, mainly histories. His father, taking the advice of friends, placed young Alexander under the ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... Button. "And you owe it to the poor untraveled animals to give out some of your experiences to them, to enliven their humdrum lives and tell them about the outside world. Just see what a lot of pleasure the Dog and Cat Club give those stay-at-homes who have never been outside the suburbs of New York City—and most of them have never ventured ten blocks from where they ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... envied them both; a chance for them to dash out into a new channel and make some headway, not the everlasting humdrum sameness that ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... who, whilst not over ambitious, was nevertheless a brilliant physician. He had worked for the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and had spent several years in India studying snake poisons. His purchase of this humdrum suburban practice had been dictated by a desire to make a home for a girl who at the eleventh hour had declined to share it. Two years had elapsed since then, but the shadow still lay upon Stuart's life, its influence ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... their thoughts for the big thing before, "lean for the hunt," they sprang up to be in for the fray with the burst of the last shells from their guns. They knew what to do. It had been drilled into them; they had talked it and dreamed it in billets when routine became humdrum, these men with practical minds who understood the essentials of ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the oft-repeated charge of morbidity and pessimism. Gissing understood the theory of compensation, but was unable to exhibit it in action. He elevates the cult of refinement to such a pitch that the consolations of temperament, of habit, and of humdrum ideals which are common to the coarsest of mankind, appear to elude his observation. He does not represent men as worse than they are; but he represents them less brave. No social stratum is probably quite so ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... He had been a good deal shocked, but he had a strong impulse to rush into the field as Nan's champion, though it were quite against his conscience. She had been too long in a humdrum country-town with no companion but an elderly medical man. And after a little pause he made a trifling joke about their making the best of the holiday, and the talk was changed to other subjects. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... someway he did not seem to get on. Men who have managed the finances of a nation often have not been able successfully to control their own; and more than once we have had the spectacle of one who could do the thinking for a world failing in the humdrum duties of a citizen and neighbor. Coleridge tried various things, among others a secretaryship that took him to Malta, but the lack of system in his habits and his absent-mindedness made him the prey and butt ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and Bob Dillon. She pitied everybody else in the universe. They were so blind! They looked, but they did not see what was so clear to eyes from which the veil had been stripped. They went about their humdrum way without emotion. Their hearts did not sing exultant paeans that throbbed out of them like joy-notes from a meadow-lark's throat. Only those who had come happily to love's fruition understood the meaning ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... swimmin'-hole! In the long, lazy days When the humdrum of school made so many run-a-ways. How plesant was the jurney down the old dusty lane, Whare the tracks of our bare feet was all printed so plane You could tell by the dent of the heel and the sole They was lot o' fun on hands at ...
— A Spray of Kentucky Pine • George Douglass Sherley
... treasury. But Jackson drew from the experience only gall and wormwood. About the time when the men reached Natchez, Congress definitely authorized the President to take possession of Mobile and that part of Florida west of the Perdido River; and, back once more in the humdrum life of Nashville, the disappointed officer could only sit idly by while his pet project was successfully carried out by General Wilkinson, the man whom, perhaps above all others, he loathed. But other work was preparing; ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... days; making them drab, making my fellows who had not taken the plunge seem purposeless and immature. Either they were out of tune, or I was—and I thought, of course, that they were. What freshness could I bring to an existence of peace when my gears would not mesh with its humdrum machinery! ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... and unaccustomed student's life, the two golden visits which she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on just in ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... a careful reading of the report. There was really nothing very remarkable about it—nothing exciting nor sensational. It was indeed no more than a humdrum narrative of a vulgar crime. But it was necessary that he should know all about it, and be able to summarize it, and so he read it over with unusual care. It was a very plain story—there were no complications. It appeared from the evidence adduced that for some ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... the kettle boils, watch the dark shadows of the hills take form, perspective, and finally colour, knowing that there is another whole day begun, bright with chance and interest, and free from all cares. All cares—for who can be worried about the little matters of humdrum life when he may be dead before the night? Such a one was with us yesterday—see, there is a spare mug for coffee in the mess—but now gone for ever. And so it may be with us to-morrow. What does it matter that this or that is misunderstood or perverted; that So-and-so is envious and spiteful; ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... could not withstand the witchery of the gentleman's superb tenor voice, with its high culture and feeling; because even into that humdrum refrain he put a pathos and ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
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