|
|
|
More "Uncouth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sounds of music; not such, indeed, as Milton's echo, with Henry Lawes's notes, would have made,—of which the night and the scene had made me dream; but the voice of the slaves on this their night of holiday, beguiling their cares with uncouth airs, played on rude African instruments. Taking one of my ship-mates with me, I immediately went to the huts of the married slaves, where all merry-makings are held; and found parties playing, singing, and dancing to the moonlight. A superstitious ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... Ywain together with other worthies of the Round Table (ll. 58-84, 107-115). Arthur, in mood as joyful as a child, his blood young and his brain wild, declares that he will not eat nor sit long at the table until some adventurous thing, some uncouth tale, some great marvel, or some encounter of arms has occurred to mark the return of ...
— Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight - An Alliterative Romance-Poem (c. 1360 A.D.) • Anonymous
... fancied that dignity and beauty were to be achieved by placing figures in difficult postures, exaggerated muscular anatomy, and twisting the limbs of their models upon sections of ellipses in uncomfortable attitudes, till the whole of their work was writhen into uncouth lines. Buonarroti himself was not responsible for these results. He wrought out his own ideal with the firmness of a genius that obeys the law of its own nature, doing always what it must. That the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... storms and suns of eight centuries: a chapel with pointed windows and low square tower, a hall and the alms-houses of the ancient guild. In the second story of the hall was the endowed grammar school of Stratford, restored by Edward VI. in 1553, and the uncouth, venerable desk at which Shakespeare is said to have studied is included among the few unauthenticated relics in the museum at the homestead. It is a reasonable inference that whatever education he received was obtained here, but this fact, as well as the character and amount of his early ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... to the hospital. And now, brother, about this terrible beast who still gazes and snorts at us over the top of the wall as though his thoughts of Holy Church were as uncouth as those of Squire Nigel himself, what are we ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... exercise; Ere yet reform'd and modelled by the drill, The free-born legs stand striding as they will. Much have I tried to guide the fist along, But still the blunderers placed their blottings wrong: Behold these marks uncouth! how strange that men Who guide the plough should fail to guide the pen: For half a mile the furrows even lie; For half an inch the letters stand awry; - Our peasants, strong and sturdy in the field, Cannot these arms of idle students wield: Like them, in feudal days, ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... of the engine, and as it crawled sinuously along it looked like some huge monster with myriad eyes. As it entered the wood below, the dark barrel-like body of the engine seemed to give a bound, a lurch forward, and the men that manned it laughed out suddenly and loudly. The sound of their uncouth mirth floated upwards ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... "he is neither to look sillily, like a stupid pedant; nor unsettledly, with an uncouth morgue, like a new-come-over cavalier; not over sparing in your courtesies, for that will be imputed to incivilitie and arrogance; nor yet over prodigal in jowking or nodding at every step, for that forme of being ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... ev'n these bones from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still[13] erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked, Implores the passing tribute of ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... groves that were interspersed at intervals. His house, constructed of heavy stones, was about fifteen feet square, and not more than ten in height. The floor was formed of hewn timbers, the walls covered with a rough coat of lime, and the roof made of heavy boards. However uncouth this abode appeared to the eye of Glenn, yet he had followed the instructions of Boone, (to whom he had fully disclosed his plan, and repeated his odd resolution,) and reared a tenement not only capable of resisting the wintry winds ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... first amounted to a sum that our young mate knew to be very considerable. Rose had made him acquainted with the sex of Jack Tier since their own marriage; and he at once saw that the claims to the gold in question, of this uncouth wife, who was so soon to be a widow, might prove to be as good in law, as they unquestionably were in morals. On representing the facts of the case to Capt. Mull and the legal functionaries at Key West, it was determined to relinquish this money to the heirs of Spike, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... supposed she was thinking of the queer-looking men and women who were swarming through the rooms, and he made, after his own delicate notion of humour, some uncouth jests on those who passed by. Mrs. Lee, however, was in no humour to explain or even to ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... performing in turn the part of either; a moveable yard, which supported the sail, had to be shifted towards the end converted into the stern for the time, at each tack; while the sail itself—a most uncouth-looking thing—formed a scalene triangle. Such was the vessel—some eighteen inches long or so—with which I startled from their propriety the mimic navigators of a horse-pond in the neighbourhood—all very masterly critics in all sorts of barques ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... more great took its place At the thought of his face: The droop, the low cares of the mouth, The trouble uncouth 'Twixt the brows, all that air one is fain To put out of its pain, 40 And, "no!" I admonished myself, "Is one mocked by an elf. Is one baffled by toad or by rat? The gravamen's deg. in that! deg.44 How the lion, who crouches to suit His back to my foot, Would ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... found, lay a little to the left of the mountain path, for on nearing the summit we found ourselves passing through a peculiar avenue of trees interspersed with long bamboo poles. From the tops of the latter there were stretched across the approach strong, rough-looking cords, which supported various uncouth emblems, and among which were large triangles, circles, and stars, cut apparently out of the stems of huge bamboos. After traversing this avenue for nearly three hundred yards we saw the tree trunks which Hassan had mentioned, and which were deeply scarred with cabalistic messages ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... terminated the view, there now stood a huge figure of some ten or twelve feet in height,—two heads, which surmounted this colossal personage, moved alternately from side to side, while several arms waved loosely to and fro in the most strange and uncouth manner. My first impression was that a dream had conjured up this distorted image; but when I had assured myself by repeated pinchings and shakings that I was really awake, still it remained there. I was never much given to ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... which I lodged in my way from London, the host hath courteously offered me the bath, and the hostess linen curious and fragrant; and to say truth, the poor people are hospitable and kind, despite their uncouth hate of the foreigner; nor is their meat to be despised, plentiful and succulent; but pardex, as thou sayest, little helped by the art of dressing. Wherefore, my father, I will while the time till the poulardes be roasted, and the fish broiled or stewed, by the ablutions ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... appears in Scripture as the sphere of perfected sight, where the faculty is raised and exalted to its highest act, and the happiness of existence culminates in vision." {23} If this be so, all the most entrancing spectacles and scenes of earth shall appear dim and coarse and uncouth in comparison with the sight on which the ravished gaze of eternity shall be fastened. For then shall our eyes see "The King in His Beauty." {24a} They shall see GOD, see Him face to face,—GOD! No higher conception of happiness is set before the heart of ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... their feet. An oblong, flat package wrapped in brown paper lay in the trail. They dove for it together and Creighton secured it, properly enough, since the flash-light revealed his name on the face of it, scrawled in the same uncouth writing that they had seen before on the anonymous communication of the monk ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... very worst of courses and company. Being a rough soldier of fortune himself, he had never been a favourite with the officers of his regiment; who had a contempt for Irishmen, as Englishmen sometimes will have, and used to mock his brogue, and his blunt uncouth manners. I had been insolent to one or two of them, and had only been screened from punishment by his intercession; especially his successor, Mr. Rawson, had no liking for me, and put another man into the sergeant's ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Partridge and Granby, next to him the most important members of my combine, since they were the only ones who had interests that extended into many states. It was after an uneasy silence that Granby, the uncouth one of the ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... was almost virtuous. But, sir, when we have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour—the battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... previous was reproduced and accentuated, and as they were so much nearer to the bank, and occasionally took walks on shore, they saw it all more clearly. Sam was much interested in the foreign troops. Their uniforms looked strange and uncouth. ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... contemporaries, according to the vivid description of the last quoted author, were "subject to their husbands' tyranny, not even knowing how to read in many cases, occupied with their household duties, in which they were assisted by rough and uncouth slaves, with no other mission in life than to give birth to a numerous posterity.... This life ruined them, and their beauty quickly faded away; no wonder, then, that they summoned art to the aid of nature. ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... Madjapahit as the principal towns of Java, divides the inhabitants into three classes: (a) Mohammedans who have come from the west, "their dress and food is clean and proper"; (b) the Chinese, who are also cleanly and many of whom are Mohammedans; (c) the natives who are ugly and uncouth, devil-worshippers, filthy in food and habits. As the Chinese do not generally speak so severely of the hinduized Javanese it would appear that Hinduism lasted longest among the lower and more savage classes, and that the Moslims stood on a higher level. As in other countries, the Arabs ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Canon, by this time clothed in funereal drapery and shadows. The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier. A hare, surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating in the ferns by the roadside as the cortege went by. Squirrels hastened to gain a secure outlook from higher boughs; and the blue-jays, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... fertile in Latin and French works, only counts, as far as English works are concerned, devotional books in prose and verse. The verses are uncouth and ill-shaped; the ancient rules, half-forgotten, are blended with new ones only half understood. Many authors employ at the same time alliteration and rhyme, and sin against both. The sermons are usually familiar in their style and kind in their tone; they are meant for the poor and ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... tremendous imprecations of the Witches in MACBETH, when they do 'a deed without a name', to the sylph-like expressions 'of Ariel, who 'does his spiriting gently'; the mischievous tricks and gossiping of Robin Goodfellow, or the uncouth gabbling and emphatic gesticulations ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... he does not think that the manners of his own countrymen, do not require great amendment? I am very sure, that the citizens of the States so disrespectfully spoken of, would feel a deep humiliation, to be compelled to exchange their urbanity of deportment, for the uncouth incivility of the people of Massachusetts. Look at their public journals, and you will find them, very generally, teeming with abuse of private character, which would not be countenanced here. The idea of New England becoming a school for manners, is about as fanciful as Bolinbroke's "idea of ...
— The Code of Honor • John Lyde Wilson
... actually brings the pagan religion, and with it the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters had introduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers, while he has given to that Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of the older and more primitive ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... keep them in their place. Indeed, she did this instinctively, so thoroughly was she imbued with the spirit of her class. She did not open her doors to many people on the score of their talent, and least of all did she encourage lions of appearance so coarse and uncouth as Orin Stanton. She found the role of lady patroness amusing, however, and, although she would not have put the sculptor's name on the lists of guests for a dinner or an evening reception, she did invite him to a Friday ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... all for earth and heaven, By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well His fitness for the task,—this, even this, Was the true doctrine only yesterday As thoughts are reckoned,—and to—day you hear In words that sound as if from human tongues Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth As would the saurians of the age of slime, Awaking from their stony sepulchres And wallowing hateful ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... form could not be clearly distinguished. As far as they could decide by their occasional glimpses, they thought she was still alive. The brute did not seem to treat her with any malevolent violence. Only in a rude uncouth way; which, however, might suffice to cause the death of one ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... would receive this important avowal, Master Doe flushed when he saw no signs of emotion on Baptist's countenance. He didn't like thinking he had made himself look a fool. Probably Baptist perceived this, for he felt he must contrive a reply, and, abandoning "H'm" as too uncouth and too unflavoured with sympathy, ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... remarked, "some say a man of ability. I find him a trifle boisterous and uncouth. Monsieur Jesen, our conversation interests ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... brave and thrifty burghers boasted in their uncouth rhyme, That their great imperial city stretched its hand ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... the window of the Dickerson kitchen. The family was around the supper table-Mr. and Mrs. Dickerson, Pete, and the children, little and big. It was a cheerful family group, after all. Rough and uncouth as the farmer was, Dickerson likely had his feelings like other people. Instead of bursting right in at the door as had been Hiram's intention, and accusing Pete to his face, the indignant ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... consciousness and a social passion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows of no greater man than his own Isak of "Growth of the Soil"—a simple pioneer in whose wake new homes spring up, an inarticulate and uncouth personification of man's mastery of nature. When Hamsun speaks of Isak passing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, "with the grain flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands," he pictures it ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... degree, and there are two Latin and Greek elegies remaining, which he composed on the death of an eminent minister, bearing his signature, with the addition, Senior Sophister. How curiously do the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin proclaim themselves the universal languages, thus blending with the uncouth Mohican word! Caleb's constitution proved unable to endure College discipline and learning, and he died of decline soon after taking his degree. Consumption was very frequent among the Indians, as it so often is among savages suddenly brought to habits ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... things—and, if his angel had then drawn up the curtain, and, whilst he was gazing with admiration, had pointed out to him a speck, and had told him, "Young man, there is America—which, at this day, serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death,"' &c. BURKE ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... often sadden for him as I noticed his uncouth, nervous movements, his furtive glances and twitching features. Who would have believed that this slinking, cowering creature had once been a dashing officer, who had fought the battles of his country and had won ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... arrived in Hill Street, and slouched into the saloon with as uncouth and graceless a general mien as a handsome and naturally graceful man could contrive to present, his keen though listless glance at once revealed to him that he was as he described it at dinner to Hugo Bohun ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... sire, which I transcribe with faithful undeviation, appears to be the dialect of a remote province, spoken only by maidens—both young and of autumnal solitude—under occasional mental stress; as of a native of Shan-si relapsing without consciousness into his uncouth tongue after passing a lifetime in the Capital.) "Don't you think so too, ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... moods of the boat and hasty and determined throbs of the engine are manifestations of something accomplished in the overcoming of distance. Here it is all mere idle fancy, while the echoes jeer. Surely the uncouth imps of the dimly-lit jungles need not proclaim their spite ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... and stark brick chimney, sprinkled the bare fields between, for hedgerows were scanty and fences of rusty colliery rope replaced them. Yet it was a wealthy country, and bred keen-witted, enterprising men, who, uncouth often in speech and exterior, possessed an energy that has spread their commerce to the far corners of the earth. That day the autumn haze wrapped a mellow dimness round its defects, but Grace Carrington sighed as ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... many of them might have been clippings from the columns of "The Old Lancaster Day-Book." It is, perhaps, worthy of note that Mr. Rink was, in fact, a man of rather more thought and general information than one might suppose, if judging him merely by his uncouth grammar, and the clipped coin of his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the visitor be engaged in trade, his power to facilitate his host's schemes would bring him a certain measure of civility and complaisance. He is fond of, and seeks the patronage of Europeans of position. In manners, the Negros and Panay Visayo is uncouth and brusque, and more conceited, arrogant, self-reliant, ostentatious, and unpolished than his northern neighbour. If remonstrated with for any fault, he is quite disposed to assume a tone of impertinent retort or sullen defiance. The Cebuano is ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... "What a strange, uncouth place this is," said M. Morrel, after a brief silence. "It seems like some city of the far orient. No one, suddenly transported here, would ever imagine that he was in the ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... Ericson was taken ill, he was too depressed and miserable to ask how he was cared for. But by slow degrees it dawned upon him that a heart deep and gracious, like that of a woman, watched over him. True, Robert was uncouth, but his uncouthness was that of a half-fledged angel. The heart of the man and the heart of the boy were drawn close together. Long before Ericson was well he loved Robert enough to be willing to be indebted to him, and would lie pondering—not ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Jericho; But be not you, my booke, abashed by scoff, For I will teach you where you boun to go,— Which is in Gloucestershire, there unto Bisley, Where the church spire is spied long afarre; It is not either uncouth, square, or grisly, But soareth high, as if to catch a starre; Where shall the brother of the Christian Yeare, Keble, hereafter tend the seven springs, Above whose fountains doth The Grove uproar, Like to Mount Helicon, where Clio sings, Where rookes build, and ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... say that my ear is not sufficiently attuned nor my mind accustomed to the subtleties of German for me to offer any judgment on the prosody of Wagner's librettos. So far as I can understand them, they are uncouth enough. On the other hand, dramatically they are admirably constructed; and when we compare the words with the completed musical setting we can see how the drama was, so to speak, always latent; the words are as an invisible writing, on which the music is poured like ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... for days at a time, and often attain a high velocity. The effect of these winds is strikingly shown by the trees. None of the trees are tall, and most of them are leaning, pushed partly over by the wind. Some are sprawled on the ground like uncouth vines or spread out from the stump like a fan with the onsweeping direction of the storms. Most of the standing, unsheltered trees have limbs only on the leeward quarter, all the other limbs having been blown off by the wind or cut off by the wind-blown gravel. ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... little ship that was far at sea and that went by the name of the Petite Esperance. And because of its uncouth rig and its lonely air and the look that it had of coming from strangers' lands they said: "It is neither a ship to greet nor desire, nor yet to succor when in the ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... light streaming between drawn window curtains showed bright patches on the lawn and the shrubs near the house. As Max passed through the iron gate which shut in the garden from the park, a group of men and boys, shouting, encouraging one another with uncouth cries, rushed out from the stable yard toward the front of ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... night had the room permitted it, and Mrs. Payne was still perfectly sure that her protege had in him all the elements of success, but I fear Prof. Church expressed the sad truth when he said in writing, "Your man Garland is a diamond in the rough!" Of course I must have appeared very seedy and uncouth to these people and I am filled with wonder at their kindness to me. My accent was western. My coat sleeves shone at the elbows, my trousers bagged at the knees. Considering the anarch I must have been, I marvel at their toleration. No western audience could have been more hospitable, ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... so; for I am but a rude, uncouth companion, and my society annoys you. The duke was, indeed, very wrong to ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... entertainment I will relate the history of my life from my first landing in this desert island." He then called for Caliban to prepare some food, and set the cave in order; and the company were astonished at the uncouth form and the savage appearance of this ugly monster, who (Prospero said) was the only attendant he had to wait ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the smoothness of a perfectly balanced machine. To the very uttermost Hazel enjoyed the well-appointed orderliness of it all, the unruffled placidity of an existence where the unexpected, the disagreeable, the uncouth, was wholly eliminated, where all the strange shifts and struggles of her two years beyond the Rockies were altogether absent and impossible. Bill's views he kept largely to himself. And Hazel began to nurse the idea that he was ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... which I had taken up was the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning[25]; but I had called it a favorite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... nearly thrown down by a something that slipped agilely between his legs, pinching each fat calf as it passed—a something that looked like a ball, but proved to be a human creature—no other than the crazy Sigurd, who, after accomplishing his uncouth gambol successfully, stood up, shaking back his streaming fair ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... when brave deeds of chivalry and self-sacrifice became exalted by the very plenitude of rich imagination, into supernatural facts of heaven conquering, hell-charming prowess. Not then was man made to seem uncouth, or mean and savage in his attempts to dominate the planet, but strong, fearless, and endowed with dignity and power. Not then was every noble sentiment derided,—every truth scourged,—every trust betrayed,-every tenderness mocked,—and every ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... you should rejoice that your husband is willing that he shall be so trained that, if the need should ever come, he shall do no discredit to his ancestors on our side. These English have many virtues, which I freely recognize; but we cannot deny that many of them are somewhat rough and uncouth, being wondrous lacking in manners and coarse in speech. I am sure that you yourself would not wish your son to grow up like many of the young fellows who come into town on market day. Your son will make no worse a farmer for being trained as ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... a Broadway theater lobby for a friend to appear, when who should arrive on the scene but L——, most outlandishly dressed in what I took to be a reductio ad absurdum of his first pose, as I now half-feared it to be: that of the uncouth and rugged young American, disclaiming style in dress at least, and content to be a clod in looks so long as he was a Shelley in brains. His suit was of that coarse ill-fitting character described as Store, and shelf-worn; his shoes all but dusty brogans, his headgear a long-visored yellowish-and-brown ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... reserved To man, with soul just nerved To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: Here, work enough to watch The Master work, and catch Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. As it was better, youth Should strive, through acts uncouth, Toward making, than repose on aught found made; So, better, age, exempt From strife, should know, than tempt Further. Thou waitedst age; wait death ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... afterward for a song; and all the furniture, of which some yet helps to fill the house I now stay in. In the bedroom I write in is Dr. Johnson's own bookcase and secretaire; with looking glass in the panels which often reflected his uncouth shape. His own bed is also in the house; but I do not sleep ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... movement felt throughout the republic, in those halcyon days of brilliant speculation, which commenced with the promise of good fortune to all, and ended by bringing poverty to many, and disgrace to others. A rail-road now runs through the principal street, and the new depot, a large, uncouth building, stands conspicuous at its termination, looking commercial prosperity, and internal improvement. Several new stores have been opened, half-a-dozen "tasty mansions"—chiefly imitations of ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... [256] Uncouth. "If thou shuldest refuse to do any of these thynges, and woldest assaye to do some thing of more sadnes and prudence, they wyll esteme and count the vnmanerly, cloubbysshe, frowarde, and clene contrarye to all mennes myndes."—Erasmus De Contemptu Mundi, transl. by ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... to modern refinement, the devil usually discards the antiquated horns, hoofs, and tail; and if, as Dr. Mede supposed, 'appearing in human shape, he has always a deformity of some uncouth member or other,' such inconvenient appendages are disguised as much as possible. As Goethe's Mephistopheles explains ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... unsightly chasm crossed— how the waiting woods opened their long files to receive them! How the children—perhaps because they had not yet grown quite away from the breast of the bounteous Mother—threw themselves face downward on her brown bosom with uncouth caresses, filling the air with their laughter; and how Miss Mary herself—felinely fastidious and intrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collar, and cuffs—forgot all, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood, until, romping, laughing, and panting, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... certain rule, 'arcere profanum vulgus.' Persons who will despise you for the want of a good set of chairs, or an uncouth fire-shovel, at the same time that they can't taste any excellence in a mind that overlooks those things; with whom it is in vain that your mind is furnished, if the walls are naked; indeed one loses much of one's acquisitions in virtue by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... him the great reality. The external, that which makes the chief consciousness of most men, was to him only staging, an incumbrance, and uncouth, but to be endured and made the most of. The world of the imagination was the true world. Imagination bodied forth the forms of things unknown in a deeper sense, perhaps, than the great dramatist meant. His poet's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... uncouth in appearance, the new-comer seemed decidedly harmless—nay, almost idiotic in appearance. His smile was pleasant, though illuminating features of the ruggedest description, and the tones of his ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... who called out to me to take coffee. The moon was splendid and the scene was lovely. The handsome black-brown Sheykh in dark robes and white turban, Omar in a graceful white gown and red turban, and the wild Ababdeh in all manner of dingy white rags, and with every kind of uncouth weapon, spears, matchlocks, etc., in every kind of wild and graceful attitude, with their long black ringlets and bare heads, a few little black-brown children quite naked and shaped like Cupids. And there we sat and looked so romantic and talked quite like ladies and gentlemen ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... honeysuckle which almost hid the actual road from view. He was not a prepossessing object in the landscape; short and squat, unkempt and dirty, and clad in rough garments which were almost past hanging together, he looked about as uncouth and ugly a customer as one might expect to meet anywhere on a lonely road at nightfall. He carried a large basket on his back, seemingly full of weeds,—the rope which supported it was tied across his chest, and he clasped this rope with both hands ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... into my cheeks as I looked at him, fat and soft and so triumphant at his victory. The sight of him, however, gave me the tonic I needed. My nerve was shaken badly, but I was determined it must answer to this last strain, to play this uncouth fish for two hours. After that ... if ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... the desert opened. Uncouth, lame, scarred by flame and shell, Nissr spread her vast wings and—still the Eagle of the Sky, undaunted and unbeaten—roared into swift flight toward the waiting mysteries of the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... triumphant than these, "I am not afraid to die now! I have a hope beyond the grave!" It is indeed a mighty deliverance. What calm, what security, what blessed hope does it inspire! To lose all fear of the last and greatest of human calamities; to look into the face of that which was "once an uncouth hideous thing," and to find that through our Saviour's death it hath become "most fair and full of grace;" to see no longer a dark and shrouded fiend arrayed in mortal terrors, and poising an envenomed dart for the purpose of laying us low, and compassing our lasting ruin; but ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... this man, entertained for him, notwithstanding his harsh speech and uncouth exterior, something akin to affection. Yet remembering the part he had played in the fate of the father, it was very dreadful to her that he should touch the child. And Dr. Knott read her thought. He did not resent it. It was all natural enough! From his heart he was sorry for ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... age—an age which ate and drank and slept and fought, and kissed the feet of popes, and maundered of the divine right of kings—from this sluggish degradation it roused and transfigured the Englishmen who came to be known as Puritans. It was a transfiguration, though its subjects were the uncouth, almost grotesque figures which chronicle and tradition have made familiar to us. For a people who were what the Puritans were before Puritanism, cannot be changed by the Holy Ghost into angels of light; their stubborn carnality will not evaporate like a mist; ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... fatal timidity which pervaded his character extended to his manners. From being merely awkward, he at last became uncouth; but from the natural goodness of his heart, the nearest to him soon lost sight of his ungentleness from the rectitude of his intentions, and, to parody the poet, saw his ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... approach, and surveyed them from a distance with bright, timid eyes. Sea-birds in great numbers hovered about the cliffs on the shore, and what most aroused their astonishment and interest, were the solemn, ungainly auks, which had their abodes along the beach. These uncouth and helpless-looking birds, disturbed in their occupation of fishing among the rocky shallows, waddled off in alarm at the approach of the intruders, who were irresistibly moved to laughter at their clumsy movements. No doubt these strange creatures had ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... Trenton. You'd have liked him a lot. But you could have liked him more if he'd been a little kinder to Felice. For by one of those strange, unexplained twists of human nature this fine gentleman, who was so tolerant with his uncouth servants and so admirably gentle with his wee dogs, was unconsciously cruel to the small grand-daughter who so adored him. She adored his immaculate neatness, the ruddy pinkness of his skin; she loved his wavy white hair and the deep sparkle of his dark eyes. She saw nothing ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... hermitage deep desiring, Tenements uncouth I was fain to house in; "Let such lodging be for a breath-while," thought I, "Soon a ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... possessed both by a love of that still uncouth city and an ideal objectively learned in the days when the "White City" stood between it and the lakes, have already spent a half-million francs in study and in making plans—in addition to all the months and years of ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... unbroken peace and a strong Russian administration, their old warlike spirit. Their latest military exploits were performed during the last years of the Napoleonic wars, and were not of a very serious kind; a troop of them accompanied the Russian army, and astonished Western Europe by their uncouth features, their strange costume, and their primitive accoutrements, among which their curious bows ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... anchor was let go; strange voices were heard alongside—and looking out of the stern-ports, high cliffs arose before her eyes. She and Marianna continued gazing out of their prison at the strange scent before them, and at the number of boats filled with uncouth, savage-looking beings pulling in boats round the ship. Among others, one appeared to leave the vessel and take a direct course towards ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Tursellinus writes. "Nothing was a greater impediment to him than his ignorance of the Japanese tongues; for, ever and anon, when some uncouth expression offended their fastidious and delicate ears, the awkward speech of Francis was a cause of laughter." But Father Bouhours, a century later, writing of Xavier at the same period, says, "He preached in the afternoon ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... master—outwardly at least. No greater contrast could well be, than the unrestful dramatic realism of the "Crucifixion" on this Standard, and the inspired serenity of the "Resurrection" of Pier dei Franceschi close by; than the coarsely-conceived figure of the crucified Christ, with its heavy features and uncouth limbs, and the spiritual beauty of the ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... cypress images of Juno Regina were carried; after these went seven and twenty virgins, arrayed in white vestments, and singing in honour of Juno Regina a hymn, which to the uncultivated minds of that time might appear to have merit, but if repeated now would seem inelegant and uncouth. The train of virgins was followed by the decemvirs, crowned with laurel, and in purple-bordered robes. From the gate they proceeded by the Jugarian street into the forum: in the forum the procession stopped, and the virgins, linked together by a cord passed through their hands, moved on, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... Yudge, people from over by Muchinippi, and out Noodletoozy way, big, red-necked men with the long loping step that comes from walking on the plowed ground. Following them are lanky women with their front teeth gone, and their figures bowed by drudgery, dragging wide-eyed children whose uncouth finery betrays the "country jake," even if the freckles and the sun-bleached hair could keep the secret. From the far-off fastnesses, where there are still log-cabins chinked with mud, they have ventured to see the show come into town, and ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... within less than a yard of me. Half my closet walls are covered with the peculiar fossils of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; and certainly a stranger assemblage of forms has rarely been grouped together—creatures whose very type is lost, fantastic and uncouth, which puzzle the naturalist to assign them even to their class; boat-like animals, furnished with oars and a rudder; fish, plated over, like the tortoise, above and below, with a strong armour of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other fish with the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... has known good society. In spite of his careless garb he had the look of class. The well-shaped, lightly poised head, the level blue eyes of a man unafraid, the grace with which he carried himself, all denied that he was an uncouth rustic. ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... the puttees and the pants That mock at cut and mar the neatest leg, The battle-jacket with its elbows patched And bands of leather, round its hard-used cuffs, And, worst of all, the fuggy flannel shirt, Rough and uncouth, that suffocates the soul; And in their stead I donned habiliments Cadets might dream of—serges with a waist, And breeches cut by Blank (you know the man, Or dare not say you don't), long lustrous boots, And gloves canary-hued, bright primrose ties Undimmed by shadows of Sir FRANCIS ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... with no greater leniency the Greeks in his family, even those with whom he was most pleased. Having asked one Zeno, upon his using some far-fetched phrases, "What uncouth dialect is that?" he replied, "The Doric." For this answer he banished him to Cinara [354], suspecting that he taunted him with his former residence at Rhodes, where the Doric dialect is spoken. It being his custom to start questions at supper, arising out of what he had been reading in the day, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... tastes, was staying at an inn near the Strathmore estate, and, roaming abroad one afternoon, in a fit of absent-mindedness entered the castle grounds. It so happened—fortunately for him—that the family were away, and he encountered no one more formidable than a man he took to be a gardener, an uncouth-looking fellow, with a huge head covered with a mass of red hair, hawk-like features, and high cheek-bones, high even for a Scot. Struck with the appearance of the individual, Mr. Vance spoke, and, finding him wonderfully civil, asked whether, by any chance, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... belov'd Belvira; for a little Verse after the dull Prose Company of his Servant, was as great an Ease to him, (from whom it flow'd as naturally and unartificially, as his Love or his Breath) as a Pace or Hand-gallop, after a hard, uncouth, and rugged Trot. He therefore, finding his Pegasus was no way tir'd with his Land-travel, takes a short Journey thro' the Air, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... June 7, we passed at four and a half miles Big Manitou creek, near which is a limestone rock inlaid with flint of various colours, and embellished, or at least covered with uncouth paintings of animals and inscriptions. We landed to examine it, but found the place occupied by a nest of rattlesnakes, of which we killed three. We also examined some licks and springs of salt water, two or three miles up this ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... Greece and Rome. An Elizabethan writer, for example, would begin almost as with a formula by begging to be forgiven that he has sought to render the divine accent of Plato, the sugared music of Ovid, into our uncouth and barbarous tongue. There may have been some mock-modesty in this, but it rested on a base of belief. Much of the glory of English Literature was achieved by men who, with the splendour of the Renaissance in their eyes, supposed themselves to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... restlessness. He sat on the fence and regarded me, or he drove away an intrusive neighbor, with the same calm and serious air with which he did everything. I have heard of pranks and fantastic performances, of strange, uncouth, and absurd cries, and of course it is impossible to say what vagaries he might have indulged in if he had thought himself unobserved, but in many hours and days of close study of this bird I saw nothing of the kind. The only utterance I heard from him, excepting ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... and his sage's expense: "I have seen many a bear led by a man; but I never before saw a man led by a bear." But though, as Boswell says, she could not be expected to like his "irregular hours and uncouth habits," she never failed in courtesy to him: and he on his part was unwearied in sending friendly messages to his "dear enemy" as he called her, and was well aware of her importance to her husband. The event unhappily proved his prescience; for after her death ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... considered the first Chinese scholar in Europe, attempted indeed a translation of the travels of Fahian, a Buddhist pilgrim, who visited India about the end of the fourth century after Christ. It was in many respects a most valuable work, but the hopelessness of reducing the uncouth Chinese terms to their Sanskrit originals made it most tantalising to look through its pages. Who was to guess that Ho-kia-lo was meant for the Sanskrit Vyakarana, in the sense of sermons; Po-to for the Sanskrit Avadana, parables; ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... though they really belonged to the body of the inhabitants. It was known to us all that abundance of poor despairing creatures who had the distemper upon them, and were grown stupid or melancholy by their misery, as many were, wandered away into the fields and Woods, and into secret uncouth places almost anywhere, to creep into a ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... inland to-day,—an awful, inarticulate roar. All else was solemn silence. The great salt marshes rolled away on one side of the road, lush and rank,—one solitary dead tree rising from them, with a fish-hawk's uncouth nest lumbering its black trunk; they were still as the grave; even the ill-boding bird was gone long ago, and kept no more its lonely vigil on the dead limb over wind and wave. She glanced uneasily from side ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... any polluting Normans, as poor Ulrica had done, and having assisted no parricide, the milk of human kindness was not curdled in her bosom. She never cursed, therefore, but blessed rather. This, however, she did in a strange uncouth Saxon manner, that would have been unintelligible to any ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... kept forever at sea. You feel as if no one but yourself had ever landed there; and yet, perhaps, even there, looking straight downward, you see below you in some crevice of the rock a mast or spar of some wrecked vessel, encrusted with all manner of shells and uncouth vegetable growth. No matter how distant the island or how peacefully it seems to lie upon the water, there may be perplexing currents that ever foam and swirl about it —currents which are, at ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... testimony of a cloud of witnesses, and to ignore all our former reading. The vast systems of Asiatic superstition, it seems, are less objectionable than our own folk lore; the tremendous shades of Brahma and Budhu, of Juggernaut and the goddess Kali, with their uncouth images and horrid worship, are harmless when compared with Puck, the Pixies, and Robin Goodfellow; and Caste, Suttee, and Devil-worship[3] are evils of less magnitude than cairns, kist-vaens, and cromlechs. The mental balance must be peculiarly constructed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... I waited for her to go. Oddly enough, in spite of her sex and the illegality of her proposal, I was inclined to help her, if she had approached me in a reasonable manner and not with the uncouth bearing of a superior toward an inferior. If she could find a counteragent, I thought ... if she could find a weapon, then the possibility of utilizing the Grass as a raw material for food concentrates, a design still tantalizingly just beyond the reach ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Elaine, with icy dignity, "what your uncouth language may mean, but I tolerate no interference whatever with my personal affairs." In a moment she was gone, and Dick watched the slender, pink-clad figure returning to the house ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... their legal bond. She had looked to him so like heaven's own, he had upborne her in his thought almost to the gate of heaven itself; and yet she was walled in by a bond she would not repudiate with the brute who persecuted her. In spite of her uncouth speech, in spite of her ignorance of delicate usage, she seemed to him a creature infinitely removed from the rougher aspects of this New England life; yet there she was in one of the most sordid scenes of it, and she was absorbed by it, she fitted it as a Madonna fits a cave. And ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... in Cartagena, unfortunately. You must pardon my Yankee inquisitiveness, but I've watched you out here for several evenings, and have wondered what weighty problems you were wrestling with. A quite unpardonable offense, from the Spanish viewpoint, but wholly forgivable in an uncouth American, I'm sure. Besides, when I heard you speak my language it made me a bit homesick, and I wanted to hear more of the rugged tongue ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... but there is a church, which was well attended, for the peasants were on their knees all round it; and while we were breakfasting (in a manger with the horses out in the air) they came out, strange-looking figures, rude, uncouth, and sunburnt, and without any of the finery which they generally wear ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Unseen, uncouth John Thorne, furious at the scant courtesy shown to the lady of his dreams, had brought his whip down heftily, just above the mangy tail of the ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... things appeared to him! He was in an apartment of prodigious and uncouth architecture, dimly lighted from one side by some opening invisible to him, and by a blazing fire in a little fireplace built on the broad stone floor. The fireplace was without chimney, but a steady draught of air, from the side where the opening ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... person, however, who did not join in the jesting; and this was Langley. When he began to understand the matter he regarded the two with sympathetic curiosity and interest. Why should not their primitive and uncouth love develop and form a tie to bind the homely lives together, and warm and brighten them? It may have been that his own mental condition at this time was such as would tend to often his heart, for an innocent passion, long cherished in its bud, had burst into its full ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... me the more pleasure, as I received it among barbarians, and an uncouth set of people. Since you received my last letter I have not slept above three or four nights in a bed; but after walking a good deal all the day, I have lain down before the fire upon a little hay, straw, fodder, or a bear-skin—whichsoever ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... thereof is to get a fine-looking husband or wife, as the case may be; whereas one who has unfortunately pulled a crooked, ill-shaped stock, may expect that his or her conjugal companion will be deformed and uncouth. In proportion to the quantity of earth adhering to the root, so will the riches of the possessor be; and according to the sweet or sour taste of the stem's centre, so will the temper or disposition of the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... present day. My mother was quite famous for her skill in manufacturing them, and my great delight was to superintend her operations, and be rewarded for good behavior with a limited quantity of dough, which I manufactured into certain uncouth images, called 'dough-nut babies.' Sometimes these beloved creations of genius performed rather curious gymnastics on being placed in the boiling grease—such as twisting on one side, throwing a limb entirely over their heads, &c.; while not unfrequently a leg or an ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... as hungry as a Yukon husky. He observed that Culvera's table manners were nice and particular, whereas those of his chief, though they ate off silver taken from the home of a Federal supporter during a raid, were uncouth in the extreme. He wolfed his food, throwing it into his mouth from knife or fork as rapidly ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... which we now have, and which I am sorry to say, are sufficiently rude to disgrace the civilization of the age. Why not further amelioration and adaptation? Are we to have no progress in the modes of government among men? Are we and future generations to be ever imprisoned in the uncouth alternative of monarchical or democratic forms as they now obtain? I can not believe it. For five years past we have had revolution enough among us to satisfy even the most conservative that the present is no ultimatum, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and gamekeeper language; I made absurd, ineffectual cuts in the air with my thongless hunting-crop; I hurled my sandwich case at the brute; in fact, I really don't know what more I could have done. And still we lumbered on through the deepening dusk, with that dark uncouth shape lumbering ahead of us, and a drone of lugubrious music floating in our ears. Suddenly Esme bounded aside into some thick bushes, where we could not follow; the wail rose to a shriek and then stopped altogether. This part of the story I always hurry ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... strained her eyes to see through the dusk, forth from its depths loomed uncouth, motionless shapes. Almost life-size lions and Teddy bears, and huge, grinning baboons as big as five-year-old boys, posed in silent, expressive groups, dangerously near to unprotected dolls' houses with open fronts—splendid dolls' houses, large enough for children ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... continued the Doctor, "is the rudest, most uncouth kind of shop; and Beauchamp was not fit to keep it, he had to turn it over to his wife, who was thankful to serve shepherds and bush-rangers for aught I know. She lost one child in the bush, God help her! The little thing wandered away and was never heard of again; and her other ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... come upon an uncouth-looking boy with deep eyes and a shaggy crop of red hair. The boy was poring over an old volume, and was plainly not disposed to leave it. He rose, not too graciously, and replied to the elder man's greeting, and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... manner of Satirs, some of them in the dress ascribed to Silenus, attended by performers on instruments adapted to that character of dance. These made the comic part of the procession, and the persons representing Satirs, took care to divert the people by leaps, by a display of agility, and by odd uncouth attitudes, such as were in the character they had assumed. There were also in another part of the procession twelve Salii, or priests of Mars, so called from their making sacred dances in honor of that God, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... that a Scotch empiric of the seventeenth century professed the cure of those "'visseit with frenacies, madness, falling evil (epilepsy), persones distractit in their wittis, and with feirful apparitiones, etc., and utheris uncouth diseases; all done be sorcerie, incantation, devellische charmeing.' Above forty persons are enumerated for whom he had prescribed, for which he was strangled and burnt as too familiar with Satan."[32] The same author ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... in creating the earth and providing for its illumination, a whole host of maggot-like creatures had been breeding in Ymir's flesh. These uncouth beings now attracted divine attention. Summoning them into their presence, the gods first gave them forms and endowed them with superhuman intelligence, and then divided them into two large classes. Those which were dark, treacherous, and cunning by nature were banished to Svart-alfa-heim, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... every one we find that, where anything is really achieved, it is done by a new and thoroughgoing emphasis on Jesus Christ. It may be put in language which to some ears is repulsive, in metaphors strange or uncouth; but whatever the language, the fact that underlies it is this—men are brought back to the reality, the presence, the power, and the friendship of Jesus Christ; they are called to a fresh venture on Jesus Christ, a fresh exploration: and again and again the experience ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate or in the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... these bones, from insult to protect, Some frail memorial still, erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked, Implores the passing tribute ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... domesticating such a prize. It is a more open ravine than that at Shanklin, and like it cut out by a tiny stream, while far away through the entrance is a distant view westward to Portland Isle and St. Aldhelm's Head. The rocks are dark green, streaked with gray and brown sandstone, looking like uncouth courses of masonry. The adjoining coast is guarded by grim crags on which many ships have been shattered. There are other chines to the westward—all of great attractions, though of less size and celebrity. The coast is not of so much interest beyond, but the cliffs, which are ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... back yard. After heaping up more than a sufficient quantity, we returned to the sitting-room, drew our chairs close to the hearth, and began to talk over our prospects. Soon, with a tremendous stamping in the entry, appeared Silas Foster, lank, stalwart, uncouth, and grizzly-bearded. He came from foddering the cattle in the barn, and from the field, where he had been ploughing, until the depth of the snow rendered it impossible to draw a furrow. He greeted us in pretty ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... written on each forehead of the worshippers. Browning, the artist and student of art, was not insensible to the spiritual power of beauty; and beauty is conspicuously absent from the praise and prayer that went up from Mount Zion chapel; its forms of worship are burlesque and uncouth. Browning, the lover of knowledge, was not insensible to the value of intelligence in things of religion; and the congregation of Mount Zion sit on ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... very important part in the advancement of civilisation and the development of the resources of the world, a part which the more fiery horse could not have played; let us then bear with his heavy trailing gait and uncouth movements; only next time we will keep him tight, even though he starve for it. If bullocks be invariably driven sharply back to the dray, whenever they have strayed from it, they will soon learn not to go far off, and will be cured even of ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... eccentric bady, and there is a small tincture of a barbarous sart of wit in what he says; but it wants an immensity of correction, an infinitude of polishing; he is a mere son of nature, everything he says is express'd in such a Gathic, uncouth, Anti-Chesterfieldian style; and as for his dress, it is pasitively most prepasterously ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... easily be overcome by a small degree of practice and application [113]: however, for the further illustration of this matter, and the satisfaction of the curious, a fac simile of one of the recipes is represented in the annexed plate. If here and there a hard and uncouth term or expression may occur, so as to stop or embarrass the less expert, pains have been taken to explain them, either in the annotations under the text, or in the Index and Glossary, for we have given it both titles, as intending it should answer the purpose of ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... a year or more in Italy, and came home, as I have implied, in time for my wedding. He found his native city more uncouth and unkempt than ever. Such it was, absolutely; and such it was, relatively, after his years under a more careful and self-respecting regime. The population was still advancing by leaps and bounds, and hopeful spirits had formed a One-Million Club. A few ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... instantly reminded of certain experiences he himself had had in using a telegraph key while sending a message over the wires or listening to the sounder rattle off one from some distant point. Rude and uncouth though the dots and dashes were, Max quickly found that he could make out a positive word; and it was the significant one ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... the Chamber. He was answered by "Blunderbuss" Pepper, the new Senator who had turned every aristocrat out of office in his aristocratic Southern State and filled the vacancies with men of his own humble origin. He was a burly untidy- looking man, and frequently as uncouth in speech, a demagogue and excitable. But the Senate, now that three years in that body had toned him down, conceded his ability and took his abuse with the utmost good-nature. Betty recalled his biography as sketched by Senator Burleigh, and noted that almost every Senator ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... well as a considerable share in the actual administration, the Hungarian county-assemblies, handing down a spirit of rough independence from an immemorial past, were probably the hardiest relic of self-government existing in any of the great monarchical States of Europe. Ignorant, often uncouth in their habits, oppressive to their peasantry, and dominated by the spirit of race and caste, the mass of the Magyar nobility had indeed proved as impervious to the humanising influences of the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... his iron arm when he held her in a kind of frenzied gratitude. A wild upland rider, living only for a wild horse! How like Indians some of these riders! Yet this fellow had seemed different from most of the uncouth riders she had known. He spoke better. He appeared to have had some little schooling. Lucy did not realize that she was interested in him. She thought she was sorry for him and interested in the stallion. She ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Gentleman we visited the other day. I think him handsome. Mr. Masenbird is an Englishman, and single, that has settled in this part of the World. I had heard he was a very uncouth creature, but he is quite ...
— Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia, 1782 • Lucinda Lee Orr
... before the dire prostratiou of this malady. A young lady will recline unwittingly in the arms of a perfect stranger, and the bride of three months, deserted by her husband, will offer no resistance to the uncouth seaman, who, in his kindness, would loosen the laces that ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... popularly of men so devoid of all principle and integrity, so strangely uncouth and assorted, as the Daniel O'Connells, the John M'Hales, and the Feargus O'Connors; of men so unlearned in all principle, political and economical—so wanting, moreover, in the presence of the higher order of moral sentiments, as the Cobdens, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the most gold, but the first amounted to a sum that our young mate knew to be very considerable. Rose had made him acquainted with the sex of Jack Tier since their own marriage; and he at once saw that the claims to the gold in question, of this uncouth wife, who was so soon to be a widow, might prove to be as good in law, as they unquestionably were in morals. On representing the facts of the case to Capt. Mull and the legal functionaries at Key West, it was determined to relinquish this money to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the scene of the encounter. Kathleen's sole reply to the threat was a contemptuous shrug of her shoulders. "Come on, girls," she said so nonchalantly that the curious ones dropped disappointedly away. Not more than four minutes had elapsed from the time the uncouth stranger had appeared until he slunk off. Emma, Grace and Patience ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... though a prisoner, the eccentric general was treated with the greatest courtesy, and seems even to have received a card for the famous ball. But, never too careful of his personal appearance, he must on this occasion have looked particularly uncouth. Certainly the beautiful Miss Franks, one of the Philadelphia belles, thought him far from ornamental, and, with the keen wit for which she was celebrated, spread abroad a report that General Lee came to the ball clad in green breeches, patched with leather. To prove to ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... their parents as early as possible. When the family council finds an heiress who answers all the conditions of the programme laid out, they begin by giving the victim his cue. Provided the young lady has not a positively crooked nose, arms too red, and too uncouth a waist—sometimes even notwithstanding these little misfortunes—the transaction ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... son's life thus blighted, and having abandoned all hope of his recovery, nor caring to have the cause of his mortification ever before his eyes, bade him betake him to the farm, and there keep with his husbandmen. To Cimon the change was very welcome, because the manners and habits of the uncouth hinds were more to his taste than those of the citizens. So to the farm Cimon hied him, and addressed himself to the work thereof; and being thus employed, he chanced one afternoon as he passed, staff on shoulder, from one domain to another, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the voice and action of the orator; but, in the reports which are read the next day by hundreds of thousands, the difference between the noblest and the meanest figure, between the richest and the shrillest tones, between the most graceful and the most uncouth gesture, altogether vanishes. A hundred years ago, scarcely any report of what passed within the walls of the House of Commons was suffered to get abroad. In those times, therefore, the impression which a speaker might make on the persons who actually heard him ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... them behind her. "Aunt Raby is a good woman," continued Priscilla; "she is brave, she is a heroine. Although she is just a commonplace old woman, no one has ever led a grander life in its way. She wears poor clothes— oh, the poorest; she has an uncouth appearance, worse even than I have, but I am quite sure that God— God respects her— God thinks her worthy. When my father and mother died (I was fourteen when my dear mother died) Aunt Raby came and took ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... nature is but a poor and imperfect business", unless it proceeds into action. As justice consists in no abstract theory, but in upholding society among men,—as "greatness of soul itself, if it be isolated from the duties of social life, is but a kind of uncouth churlishness",—so it is each citizen's duty to leave his philosophic seclusion of a cloister, and take his place in public life, if the times demand it, "though he be able to number the stars and measure ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... head-dress nought but a 'crantz,' or wreath of roses, encircling their bare hair, as laurel Caesar's; and though of the worshipful, scorned, yet is braver, I wist, to your eye and mine which painters be, though sorry ones, than the gorgeous, uncouth, mechanical head-gear of the time, and adorns, not hides her hair, that goodly ornament fitted to her head by craft divine. So the good lasses, being questioned close, did let me know, the rosebuds are cut in summer and laid then in great clay-pots, thus ordered:—first bay salt, then ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... coterie which we aspire to imitate. The only difference is that remote and unsophisticated communities are more constant to a style they once adopt. There are isolated peasant communities in Europe who have kept for centuries the most uncouth and inconvenient attire, while we have run through a dozen variations in the art of attraction by dress, from the most puffed and bulbous ballooning to the extreme of limpness and lankness. I can only conclude that the civilized human being is a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... before the hour of his departure, Mrs. Evremonde summoned him to her, and showed him a slip of paper, on which was written, in an uncouth ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mature: the contour of the face sharpened from the roundness of boyhood, and losing its bloom without yet acquiring that relief and shadow which make the expression and dignity of the masculine countenance. Thus accoutred, thus gaunt, and uncouth, stood Morton. Arthur Beaufort, always refined in his appearance, seemed yet more so from the almost feminine delicacy which ill-health threw over his pale complexion and graceful figure; that sort of unconscious elegance which belongs ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... order to take toll from those who wished to lay up for themselves treasures in the Western Heaven. The first passer-by who took any notice of her was an amiable maniac. His dress was made of coloured shreds and patches, and his general appearance was wild and uncouth. "Whither away, nun?" he asked. She explained that she was collecting subscriptions for the casting of a great image of Buddha, and had come all the way from Shantung. "Throughout my life," remarked the madman, "I was ever a generous giver." So, taking the nun's subscription-book, he headed ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... he shewed a very acute penetration. My wife paid him the most assiduous and respectful attention, while he was our guest; so that I wonder how he discovered her wishing for his departure. The truth is, that his irregular hours and uncouth habits, such as turning the candles with their heads downwards, when they did not burn bright enough, and letting the wax drop upon the carpet, could not but be disagreeable to a lady. Besides, she had not that high admiration of him which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of Mr. Sheridan's life we are indebted for most of those elegant love-verses, which are so well known and so often quoted. The lines "Uncouth is this moss-covered grotto of stone," were addressed to Miss Linley, after having offended her by one of those lectures upon decorum of conduct, which jealous lovers so frequently inflict upon their mistresses,—and the grotto, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... He was a gift of Heaven. At any other epoch he would have been as great, perhaps greater. What he received from his surroundings and from the "civilization" with which he was blessed, he has handed down to us in the uncouth form, the intricacy of plot and adventures, which would have rendered barbarous a poet less naturally gifted. And, although the question has never been definitely settled, it is probable that he was born and lived a Catholic; and it is strange how Elizabeth, who, tradition tells us, was present ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of a somewhat soft and ugly-coloured jade is sent from Yarkand, also agates and carnelian; beads of these are strung into rather uncouth necklets, which may be bought for half the sum ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... at Newport, but is altogether on a grander scale, and shows a more poetic union of shore and sea; besides, it offers the curious and fascinating spectacles of the rocks inhabited by the sea-lions, and the Cypress Point. These huge, uncouth creatures can be seen elsewhere, but probably nowhere else on this coast are they massed in greater numbers. The trees of Cypress Point are unique, this species of cypress having been found nowhere ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... would not the men find us better and more suitable companions and assistants to them in every useful purpose of life?—O that your lordly sex were all like my dear Mr. B.—I don't mean that they should all take raw, uncouth, unbred, lowly girls, as I was, from the cottage, and, destroying all distinction, make such their wives; for there is a far greater likelihood, that such a one, when she comes to be lifted up into so dazzling a ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... human feeling and unexaggerated friendship; they were always restless for the something deeper. Ordinary folk seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable. And so they were unaccustomed, painfully uncouth in the simplest social intercourse, suffering, and yet insolent in their superiority. Then beneath was the yearning for the soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because they were too dumb, and every ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... which the mantle of mystery and romance could seem to hang more ungracefully than upon that of the uncouth and clownish Schalken—the Dutch boor—the rude and dogged, but most cunning worker in oils, whose pieces delight the initiated of the present day almost as much as his manners disgusted the refined of his own; and yet this man, so rude, so dogged, so slovenly, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... NOTE. The original title, Mester-Pijl-droegster Herdal, would sound a trifle too uncouth to the Philistine ear, and is therefore modified as above, although the term "droegster," strictly speaking, denotes a practitioner who has not received a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... this appreciation and this critical discrimination myself. I believe that what I have written and may still write about pictures will give them pain, and I am honestly sorry for it. I even promised that I would hide my uncouth sentiments in my own breast. But alas! I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... adds that the real proletarian is "uncultured and uncouth in appearance," that he has "no manners and little education," and that his religion is "the religion of hate." Of course this is a mere caricature of the attitude of the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... been so solitary, and had taken more care of himself in his way of living than he did, he would have made known the greatness of his intellect in such a way that he would have been revered, whereas, by reason of his uncouth ways, he was rather held to be a madman, although in the end he did no harm save to himself alone, while his works were beneficial and useful to his art. For which reason every good intellect and every excellent craftsman should always be taught, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... What in the name of goodness are you doing here? I hardly recognized you." Marsh's voice was round and musical, his accent Eastern. With an assumption of heartiness, he extended a white-gloved hand, which the big, uncouth man who faced him refused to take. The other three had risen. George seemed to be groping for a retort. Finally he blurted ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... furniture began to arrive, and this was another surprise for the Close, where houses were not adorned with the designs of any one period, but were filled with a heterogeneous collection of articles, generally aged and remarkably uncouth. Everything in the Tenor's long low room, on the contrary, even down to the shape of the brass coal scuttle and including the case of the grand piano, was in harmony with the colour and design of the frescoes on the walls and ceiling; ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to the Professor's teaching and example, Lucy," replied her lover. "He was an uncouth lad, I understand, when your step-father took him into the house six years ago. Now he is quite presentable. I shouldn't wonder if he ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... power. And while for the first years he had drifted, he was always aware of his power. Knew that he had only to rise to assume gigantic stature. And then, just because he was very stiff, and the pain of stiffness and stretching made him uncouth, he grew angry. He resented his captivity, chafed at his being limited like that, did not understand how it had come about. It had come about through love, through sheer sheltering love. She had placed a crystal ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... no intermission in the work. It is true that in the trench they were in some measure protected from the storm. The lashings had been fixed on the brickwork under his careful superintendence; the men were on the point of hauling on the ropes, when a thing of monstrous size and uncouth shape glided silently into the opening of the trench, and ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... with character. On every page there is set the strong stamp of sincerity, and the attraction of a certain artlessness; the most awkward sentence rings true; and there is often a pure and simple note that touches us more than if it were the perfection of elaborated melody. The uncouth procession of the periods discloses the travail of the thought, and that too is a kind of eloquence. An honest reader easily forgives the rude jolt or unexpected start, when it shows a thinker faithfully ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... mimic. But his mocking habits almost annihilate his value as a songster,—as the effect of a good concert would be spoiled, if the players were constantly introducing, in the midst of their serious performances, snatches of ridiculous tunes and uncouth sounds. I have never heard the Nightingale; but if I may judge from descriptions of its song, and from the notes of those Canaries which are said to give us perfect imitations of it, we have no bird in America that equals this classical songster. The following description, by Pliny, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... stairway. Beyond the twentieth century portieres of a thirteenth century doorway lay the goal we sought. I hesitated briefly before drawing them apart and taking the final plunge. As a matter of fact, I was beginning to feel ashamed of myself. Suppose that she really had a headache! What an uncouth, pusillanimous brute I— ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... at Penelope in awe. She was no longer the little girl whom I had met by the mountain stream. I was still an uncouth boy, with face smudged with the dust of the fields and hands blackened in play. Yet she did not see the wide gulf which separated us, and, forgetting the hat, the frock, the chaff that clung to my matted hair and the grime of my shirt, she ran to me, threw her arms about my neck and cried: "Davy—Davy—I ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... This uncouth vestment, which was used only by men of the lowest order, or by others solely when engaged in long and toilsome journeys, or in cold wintry weather, was composed of a thick loose-napped frieze or serge, of a dark purplish brown, with loops and fibulae, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... therefore he follows the old corrector in substituting "unsane lunes." Now it strikes me that there is quite as much tautology in "unsane lunes" as in the double epithet, "dangerous, unsafe." It is, in fact, equivalent to "insane madness;" and, moreover, drags in quite needlessly a very unusual and uncouth word. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... loss for words. A great pity and resentment swelled up in my heart. I still hoped that there might be a mistake somewhere. I shrank from picturing this young and beautiful girl as the wife of old Griffith Hawke, sharing with him the uncouth and half-barbarous life of a wilderness trading post. It ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... appreciation of his genius, whereas her mind was too limited to comprehend it. She was in love with the possibility of being a queen upon such easy terms, delighted to find that the necessary husband was no uncouth tyrant but a man of winsome personality whose delicate assiduities were ever present and yet never over ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... woman he had sought so long, whose face he had not found in the cities and dwellings of the living, neither her grave in the silent communities of the dead. There, before the uncouth monument of dark red marble beneath which Tycho Brahe rests in peace, there she stood; not as he had seen her last on that day when his senses had left him in the delirium of his sickness, not in the freshness ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... universally respected and admired. A resident contemporary writes: "He was certainly a Reformer, but not a violent one. His most conspicuous services to the College were, in my opinion, these: (1) Sage guidance of the turbulent and uncouth democracy of which a College Governing body consists. (2) A steady aim at the highest in education, being careful to secure the position of literary education from the encroachments of science and mathematics. (3) Affectionate stimulus to all undergraduates ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... filled pipes and smoked in contemplation; children warmed themselves as near the tiny fires as they dared. Out of the dense blackness of the forest from time to time staggered what at first looked to be an uncouth and misshapen monster, but which presently resolved itself into an Indian leaning under a burden of spruce-boughs, so smoothly laid along the haft of a long forked stick that the bearer of the burden could sling it across his shoulder like a bale ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... execution of these scenes are singularly rude; men and beasts—indeed, all the figures—have exaggerated proportions, uncouth forms, awkward positions, and an uncertain and heavy gait. The war ended in a treaty concluded with Enakalli, vicegerent of Grishban, by which Lagash obtained considerable advantages. Idingiranagin replaced the stele of Meshilim, overthrown by one of Enakalli's predecessors, and dug a ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... I think; including the matrix, it had about the size and shape of the palm of the hand. He cautioned us not to drop it. When it had reached about the middle of the audience a crash was heard. The precious thing had been dropped by a new and somewhat uncouth assistant whom we will call Dr. X. He hastily gathered up the pieces and rushed out of the room. For a few seconds Agassiz stood as if himself petrified; then, without even an 'Excuse me,' he vanished by the same door. Presently he returned, flushed, gazing ruefully at the fragments ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... inexorable logic. Rene Descartes, who was born at La Haye, near Tours, in 1596, and died at Stockholm in 1650, escaped the influence of Richelieu by the isolation to which he condemned himself, as well as by the proud and somewhat uncouth independence of his character. Engaging as a volunteer, at one and twenty, in the Dutch army, he marched over Germany in the service of several princes, returned to France, where he sold his property, travelled through the whole ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... none with her opine, and, in the lack Of a companion, singly must she fare, So then, alone and friendless, she a track Uncouth pursues, and through a wooded lair. Gryphon the white and Aquilant the black Take road more beaten with the other pair; And on the following day a castle see, Within which they are ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... after all, the true ones. "The Old Red Sandstone" formed an era in the history of fossil geology. That formation had hitherto been regarded as well nigh barren of organic remains; but Mr. Miller demonstrated that it contains at least three successive stages, each characterized by a suite of uncouth and hitherto unknown fishes. A few years later he published his "Footprints of the Creator." This is undoubtedly his chef-d'oeuvre, exhibiting, as it does, the full powers of his massive intellect and his poetic ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... crowds the uncouth forms advance: Each would outstrip the other, each prevent Our careful search, and offer to your gaze, 80 Unask'd, his motley features. Wait awhile, My curious friends! and let us first arrange In proper order your ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... diseased thoughts and harmonizing them, Nurse would become once more composed; the phantom danger was again put off, and the violinist would presently fall into silence,—sometimes into sleep. But still, while he slept, the witch-eye watched him; though with an expression of yearning, uncouth intensity which seldom ventured forth while ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... sums it up. I doubt if I've ever seen an uncouther kid than this Glossop. Ask anyone who knew him in those days to describe him in a word, and the word they will use is 'uncouth'. And he's just the same today. It's the old story. The boy is the father ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... hospitable, unsuspicious. Their board, though simple and uncouth, was wholesome and plenteous. Their residence was sequestered and obscure, and not obnoxious to impertinent inquiries and malignant animadversion. Their frank and ingenuous temper would make them easy of persuasion, and their sympathies ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... cast upon his son the imputation of robbing him. Violent scenes ensued between the two—they quarrelled and wrangled from morning till night; and at length, upon Simon's refusing his assent to the marriage of his hulking boy with a very honest, but at the same time somewhat uncouth and very poor girl—went ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... in his uncouth native language, until his new shipmates feared his jaws would split asunder. They furnished him with garments, entertained him hospitably, and on the following day landed him on the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... foam, white as the bitten lip of hate, When, in the solitary waste, strange groups Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like, Staring together with their eyes on flame— God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod: But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between The withered tree-roots ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... everything. He is said to have known one Henry Needler, a pupil of Purcell, and also Gostling, the son of the singer of the same name for whom Purcell wrote; but neither acquaintance seems to have profited him aught. His anecdotes are the product of inborn wickedness and an uncouth, boorish imagination. When we have cleared away his garbage, there remains only a skeleton life, but at any rate we have the satisfaction of knowing that ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... Baltic coast and at the mouth of the Elbe, there appeared before the gates of Luneburg, and later on at Hamburg, Lubeck, Wirmar, Rostock, and Stralsuna, a herd of swarthy and strange specimens of humanity, uncouth in form, hideous in complexion, and their whole exterior shadowed forth the lowest depths of poverty and degradation. A cloak made of the fragments of oriental finery was generally used to disguise the filth and tattered garments of their slight remaining apparel. The women and young ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... short sixth chapter of his eleventh book is the real keynote of Blackstone and De Lolme. It led them to investigate, on principles of at least doubtful validity, an edifice never before described in detail. It is, when the last criticism has been made, an immense step forward from the uncouth antiquarianism of Coke's Second Institute to the neatly reticulated structure erected upon the foundations of Montesquieu's hint. That it was wrong was less important than that the attempt should have been made. ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... twinkling of an eye (both these sights, when once they come, being in the same organ and inseparable), or they strike them dumb. The tramontanes to this day place bread, the Bible, or a piece of iron, to save their women at such times from being thus stolen, and they commonly report that all uncouth, unknown wights are terrified by nothing earthly so much as cold iron. They deliver the reason to be that hell lying betwixt the chill tempests and the firebrands of scalding metals, and iron of the north (hence the loadstone causes a tendency to that point), by an antipathy thereto, these odious, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... came, and knocked at my thin door. I from my window looked: the thing I saw, The shape uncouth, I had not seen before. I was disturbed—with fear, in sooth, not awe; Whereof ashamed, I instantly did rouse My will to seek thee—only to fear the more: Alas! I could not find thee ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... "what an advantage it'll be to ye. Richard'll inherit the hull of our property some day. He will be a gentleman, an' the son of a gentleman, too—of a good old fambly. It'll be a very gratifyin' thing, too, fer ye to know that Richard's father was a Councillor of Glendow. So now, dear, give up that uncouth Frenelle boy, an' take on with our ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... this meenit, Jock Gordon, ye gomeral!" cried Meg, shaking her fist at the uncouth shape twisting and singing against the sunset ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... has to serve and wait ere he can awaken love in her who is to him the one woman in the world. Many a woman has to wait and wonder and face distress. Then, too, till the stage of mutual acknowledgment is reached love makes men and women awkward. They do uncouth, crude, and clumsy things. They get into muddles. They make mistakes. It would seem that some delicate process of mutual adjustment is often necessary before two souls can really find each other, and while the stumbling preliminary days last, love is often ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... Though inartistic and uncouth, That effort of a novice hand Exemplifies a striking truth, And may Time's ravages withstand, To be by future ages read, When years and centuries ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... chiselled. I cannot, however, declare them less interesting on that account. The work of the Tokkaido sculptor copies the conventional artistic notion of light grace and ghostliness. The rustic foxes of Izumo have no grace: they are uncouth; but they betray in countless queer ways the personal fancies of their makers. They are of many moods—whimsical, apathetic, inquisitive, saturnine, jocose, ironical; they watch and snooze and squint and wink and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... The gross, jaded, uncouth present has slipped from me as a garment might, and I see the past like a little show, struggles and heartbreakings of long ago, and watch it with the same indifferent curiosity as I would the regulated mimicry of a stage play. Pictures from the past come and go without ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... sentences is a curious framework with pegs and hooks to hang his thoughts upon, for his own use and guidance, but almost out of the reach of every body else. It is a barbarous philosophical jargon, with all the repetitions, parentheses, formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage of law-Latin; and what makes it worse, it is not mere verbiage, but has a great deal of acuteness and meaning in it, which you would be glad to pick out if you could. In short, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... he paused to look down into the vast chamber below. At some point among its chandeliers burned a small pinhole of light that revealed in a strange dimness various forms of furniture, showing monstrous and uncouth in their night attire. Night-gowns rather than pajamas seemed the general wear; only a few legs were to be seen. In this, its sleeping aspect, the place was certainly more harmonious and more chaste than by day; mirrors and pictures loomed from the white walls with a mystery that would disappear ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... together have been Inquisitive into the State of that Land in which I was Captivated; whose Curiosity I indeavour to satisfie. But my Relations and Accounts of Things in those Parts were so strange and uncouth, and so different from those in these Western Nations, and withal my Discourses seeming so Delightful and Acceptable unto them, they very frequently called upon me to write what I knew of that Island of Ceilon, and to digest ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... with more art than truth. Sheen, i.e. smiling, shining. That sheen signifies shining, is easily proved, but when or where did it signify smiling? yet smiling gives the sense necessary in this place. Sir T. Banner's change is less uncouth, but too remote from the present text. For my part, I question whether the original line is not lost, and this substituted merely to fill up the measures and the rhyme. Yet even out of this line, by ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... at seeing the doctor pull out his note-book and write in it. The doctor, to indulge them, made a few clear strokes; and a young man, who had attached himself to Jerry and me, imitated them in a wonderful way, considering his rough and uncouth hand. We had heard them making a number of strange sounds, and at last we discovered that ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... thy test; "Still, it should be our very best. "I thought it best that thou, the spirit, "Be worshipped in spirit and in truth, "And in beauty, as even we require it— "Not in the forms burlesque, uncouth, "I left but now, as scarcely fitted "For thee: I knew not what I pitied. "But, all I felt there, right or wrong, "What is it to thee, who curest sinning? "Am I not weak as thou art strong? "I have looked to thee from the beginning, "Straight up to thee through all the world "Which, ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... he would willingly have given her the most gorgeous ring in the shop, was delighted to find that her taste was so good, and like herself. He had great ideas about taste, some of his secret fears had been lest her strange uncouth upbringing should have caused her to like gaudy things. He could have hugged her before them all when she chose that particular ring, which he had himself noticed as ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... she had unfortunately conceived for Mr. Falkland, would listen with reluctance to any matrimonial proposal. Grimes he selected as being in all respects the diametrical reverse of Mr. Falkland. He was not precisely a lad of vicious propensities, but in an inconceivable degree boorish and uncouth. His complexion was scarcely human; his features were coarse, and strangely discordant and disjointed from each other. His lips were thick, and the tone of his voice broad and unmodulated. His legs were of equal size from one end to the other, and his feet misshapen ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... all the dinners for a French hotel, and no window is ever opened. Among our fellow-travelers there was here and there a west- country Missouri farmer going down, under the protection of the advancing army, to look after the remains of his chattels—wild, dark, uncouth, savage-looking men. One such hero I specially remember, as to whom the only natural remark would be that one would not like to meet him alone on a dark night. He was burly and big, unwashed and rough, with a black ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travellers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men, and uncouth manners!"—Hume's Essay on Miracles, p. 179, 12mo; p. 185, 8vo, ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... half-breed clerk to the Swan River every winter. But this man had lately died, and now the trade threatened to lapse for the lack of an interpreter. None of the Kakisas could speak English, and there was no company employee who could speak their uncouth tongue except Gordon Strange the bookkeeper, who could not ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... a girl at our house who's called Ruth: She is fond of an unpleasant truth; She says she is seeking To practise plain speaking, But we think she is merely uncouth." ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... life here I looked upon as only an incident. The gay tawdry had faded; I realized how much more enduring were the rough, uncouth but genuine products like my friend Mr. Jenks and those of that ilk, who spoke me well instead of merely fair. Health of mind and body ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... epitaphs are to be found scattered up and down our country churchyards—'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons do not look with favour upon them, besides which—to use a clumsy phrase—besides ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... depends much on the physical conditions by which he is surrounded. We have only to instance a mountain and valley population. The former is isolated and out of the way, and the people simple, uncouth, and uncultivated—contented, it is true, but, nevertheless, enjoying but little of the abundance and variety in which people of culture luxuriate. The valley population have a city, villages, rich lands, trade, and commerce; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... far, Marianne: remember I have no knowledge in the picturesque, and I shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere. You must be satisfied with such admiration as I can honestly give. I call it a very fine country,—the hills are steep, the woods seem ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth; Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be, Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... consciousness that he was being steered by a knowing hand, he sped onwards at a terrific pace. While in mid career, one of the mounted police espied the captain coming along the road at a distance; recognizing the horse, but not knowing the rider, and noticing also the portmanteau, and the uncouth equipment, this rural guardian of the peace came to the conclusion that this was a case of robbery and horse stealing; and as the captain neared him, he endeavoured to stop him, and stretched forth his hand to seize the improvised bridle, but the ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... the drinking-horn, pleasantly brimming with wine and mead." "Horn in hand,—what then?" "Bravely carouse until drunkenness overwhelm you—all to the honour of the gods, that they may bless the marriage!" The rough warriors break into laughter, and in uncouth jollity stamp with their feet and spear-butts. "Great good fortune is indeed abroad on the Rhine when Hagen the grim grows jovial!" Not the faintest smile illumines the bleak face. At sight of Gunther's ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... Names of our People do in a manner import somewhat, which from a peculiar Note at first of some of the Progenitors, in process of time inverted itself in a possession of the Posterity, even as wee see the like often befall to those whose Fathers bare some uncouth Christian Names. Yet for the most part we avoid the blemish given to the Romanes in like Cases, who distinguished their People by the Imperfections of their Bodies; from whence grew their Nasones, Labeones, Frontones, ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... again as she thought of her eldest daughter,—Mattie was thirty; and her mother felt she would never marry. It was not that she was so absolutely plain,—people who liked her said Mattie had a nice face,—but she was so abrupt, so uncouth in her awkwardness, such a stranger to the minor morals of life, that it would be a wonder indeed if she could find favor in any ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... joyless toils in early youth endured, The expanding dawn of mental day obscured, Each genial passion of the soul oppress'd, And quench'd the ardour kindling in his breast. Then censure not severe the native song, Though jarring sounds the measured verse prolong, Though terms uncouth offend the softer ear, Yet truth and human anguish deign to hear: 80 No laurel wreath these lays attempt to claim, Nor sculptured brass to tell the poet's name. And, lo! the power that wakes the eventful song Hastes hither from Lethean banks along: ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... through Grizzly Canon, by this time clothed in funereal drapery and shadows. The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier. A hare, surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating in the ferns by the roadside as the cortege went by. Squirrels hastened to gain a secure ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... anticipated. If it had not been for her music she would never have pulled through with the boys of Wissan Bridge. By her music she tamed them. The young Marsyas himself never piped to a wilder set of creatures than the uncouth lads and young men that sat in wide-eyed, wide-mouthed astonishment listening to the first song their pretty young schoolmistress sang for them. To have singing exercises part of the regular school routine was a new thing at Wissan Bridge. It took like ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... however; for the main object of these remarks is to convey and impress the idea, that what naturally seems to us the strange and uncouth spelling of former times, was not a proof of the gross, untaught ignorance which it would now indicate. The purpose of the writer in those days was, not to spell accurately words which there was no strict rule for spelling, but to note down words ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... features are far from being disagreeable; some females I observed among them whose expression of countenance was extremely prepossessing, and who would pass for "bonnie lasses" even among the whites, if divested of their filth and uncouth dress, and rigged out in European habiliments. The women fasten their hair in a knot on the crown of the head, and anoint it with rancid oil in lieu of pomatum; they also tattoo their faces, with the view, no doubt, of enhancing their charms in the estimation of their blubber-eating lovers. ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... score of horses ready to start.... There is no public education. The colleges—sumptuous buildings—palaces to be compared to the Tuileries, are occupied by rich idlers, who sleep and get drunk one part of the day, and the rest they spend in training, clumsily enough, a parcel of uncouth lads to be clergymen.... In the fine places that have been built for public amusements, you could hear a mouse run. A hundred stiff and silent women walk round and round an orchestra that is set up ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... might come when she could enjoy him—as a reminiscence. Mrs. Dyer was kindly, and not more of a gossip than her neighbors; and there were no children,—only one grandchild, the inoffensive Nicky. The ways of the house were somewhat uncouth, but everything was clean and in a certain sense homelike. To Miss Newell's homesick sensitiveness it seemed better than being stared at across the boarding-house table by Boker and Pratt, and pitied by the engineer. She had a little ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... [Greek: barbaros], the name among the early Greeks for all foreigners. The word is probably onomatopoetic, designed to represent the uncouth babbling of which languages other than their own appeared to the Greeks to consist. Even the Romans were included in the term. The word soon assumed an evil meaning, becoming associated with the vices and savage natures of which they believed their enemies to be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... attempting to be at all familiar. A mutual atmosphere of suspicion, in fact, seemed to pervade our quarters, making things already uncomfortable enough, still more so. Now, however, they fraternized with us, and in a variety of uncouth ways made havoc of the English tongue, as they tried to impress us with the beauty, fertility and general incomparability of their beloved Cape Verds. Of the eleven white men besides myself in the forecastle, there were ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... two centuries ago, o'ergrown With brush and ivy, all undoored, ungated; And in restoring it we found a stone Set here and there in the dilapidated And crumbling frieze, inscribed, in antiquated Big characters, with certain uncouth names, Which we conclude were borne of old by awful Rapscallions guilty of all sinful games— Vagrants engaged in purposes unlawful, And orators less sensible than jawful. So each ten years we add to the long row A name, the ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... for them, and they rewarded him—not indeed with toys or money, but with their countenance, their company, their praise. And scarcely was there a sermon preached from the patrician part of the bench, in which the dean did not fashion some periods, blot out some uncouth phrases, render some obscure sentiments intelligible, and was the certain person, when the work was printed, ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... his suite in the Auditorium Annex, Partridge and Granby, next to him the most important members of my combine, since they were the only ones who had interests that extended into many states. It was after an uneasy silence that Granby, the uncouth one ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... due caution being taken that I should not escape. As a matter of fact I held up the would-be passengers for nearly a minute by my unaided attempts to boost my uncouth baggage aboard. Then my captors and I blundered heavily into a compartment in which an Englishman and two French women were seated. My gendarmes established themselves on either side of the door, a process which woke ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... operated upon life with their full force. He might therefore have displayed a series of subordination and a form of government, which, in more luminous and improved regions, have been long forgotten, and have delighted his readers with many uncouth customs that are now disused, and wild opinions that prevail no longer. But he probably had not knowledge of the world sufficient to qualify him for judging what would deserve or gain the attention of mankind. The mode of life which was familiar to himself, he ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... of this fellow, and his wild, uncouth appearance, had often filled the girl with a vague apprehension even when other people were by, and had occasioned her to shrink from him involuntarily. The having him for an unbidden companion in so solitary a place, with the darkness fast gathering ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... church is in that unhappy condition which bespeaks the churchwarden's period—whitewash plastered over everything, obliterating lights and shades and rare carvings beneath a glare of uncouth cleanliness. In their desire to remove every object that could harbour dust or obstruct the besom of reform, they have bodily removed from the church many rich monuments and interesting effigies, and these are to be seen huddled away in an obscure corner ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... resting-place of the dead. Arrived there, the two coffins were at once deposited in their respective graves, when the new captain, standing between the two holes, somewhat hurriedly completed the ritual—for the light was fading fast; whereupon, after bestowing a final parting glance at the rough, uncouth box which concealed our beloved chief's body, we all turned slowly and reluctantly away to retrace our steps back to the apology for a camp which was to shelter us for the night, leaving a fresh party of workers to ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... that might almost be a tower rising above the rest of the building. Then there were documents that seemed all names and dates, with here and there a coat of arms done in the margin, and she came upon a string of uncouth Welsh names linked together by the word 'ap' in a chain that looked endless. There was a paper covered with signs and figures that meant nothing to her, and then there were the pocket-books, full of old-fashioned writing, and much of it in Latin, as her husband told her—it was ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... helpful. Ralph could not help feeling grateful to her, the more so, perhaps, because he had not told her the truth about his state; and when they reached the gate again he wished to make some affectionate objection to her leaving him. But his affection took the rather uncouth form of expostulating ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Portuguese, sir, from Fayal," said the woman, prolonging with sweet intonation the soft name of her birthplace. "This is my capote, she added, taking up with pride the uncouth costume, while the children gathered round, as if its vast folds ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... this crazy hut a thin thread of smoke would now and then rise into the air, for there were folk living far up in that empty, airy desert, and oftentimes wild, uncouth little children were seen playing on the edge of the dizzy height, or sitting with their bare legs hanging down over the sheer depths, as they gazed below at what was going on in the court-yard. There they sat, just as little children in the town might sit upon their ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
