"Obtuse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... least, such was his opinion; and being so, he would not be likely to attempt the enforcement of another view of his power on other men. He was afraid of himself now,—afraid that his own preferences had made him obtuse where loyalty would have given ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... consider, that I, his paid servant, am an ambassador whom it is derogatory to the dignity—not of the lady to whom I have the happiness of speaking; she has no existence in his mind—but of his wife, a part of himself, to receive. You may imagine how regardless of me, how obtuse to the possibility of my having any individual sentiment or opinion he is, when he tells me, openly, that I am so employed. You know how perfectly indifferent to your feelings he is, when he threatens you with such a messenger. As you, of course, have ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... part of a wild young cowpuncher ready for any mischief, but beneath his obtuse good humor Flandrau covered a vigilant wariness. Soapy held all the good cards now, but if he stayed in the game some of them would come to him. Then he would show Mr. Stone whether he would ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... he rushed blindly into the fray the moment his mother was attacked; just as a dog will attack a great beast of prey, so he hung upon the big man's fists, and would not be shaken off. He hated his father, and he longed in his heart to be a policeman when he was grown up. With his blind and obtuse courage he was particularly adapted to such a calling; but he actually became ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... his feet, riveted to the spot where he stood. Obtuse as he was, he saw at a glance what had occurred. In all his calculations this chance had never suggested itself—that Hugh Ritson would risk the personal ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... high, all its parts covered with hairs, simple and tomentose. Leaves heart-shaped, angular, obtuse, unequally serrate, smooth, soft, the lower surface hoary and bearing 9 well-marked nerves. Petioles longer than the leaves, with 2 stipules at the base. Flowers yellow, axillary, solitary. Peduncles long, with a node near the ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... combs approach each other in the middle of the hive at nearly right angles, an edge of comb is left there; but when an obtuse angle, the edges are generally joined, making a sheet of crooked comb. It is evident where the two combs join, there must be some irregular cells unfit for ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... Wednesday, the 28th? I give you a long notice, because you seem to have so many appointments. Yours always, Robert Kennedy." He had no alternative. He must refuse, even though double the notice had been given. He could only think that Mr. Kennedy was a very obtuse man and one who would not take a hint, and hope that he might succeed at last. So he wrote an answer, not intended to be conciliatory. "My dear Kennedy, I am sorry to say that I am engaged on the 28th. Yours always, Phineas Finn." At this period he did his best to keep out of Mr. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... fire with great facility, and spread it in a wonderful manner. To produce it they take two pieces of dry soft wood, one is a stick about eight or nine inches long, the other piece is flat: The stick they shape into an obtuse point at one end, and pressing it upon the other, turn it nimbly by holding it between both their hands as we do a chocolate mill, often shifting their hands up, and then moving them down upon it, to increase the pressure as much as possible. By this method they get fire in less than two minutes, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... Areas with an obtuse angle above and below, sometimes rounded above; a minute projection on each side near the top. Bottom of area long-oval, smooth, sometimes with a perforation above the mouth. Mouth with a minute tooth ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... expression in our issue of April 6th concerning the possibility of a crisis in Anglo-Armenian relations. The incident of the Bobadig mules is already bearing fruit, and we can no longer doubt that popular feeling in the vilayet of Arimabug has been dangerously inflamed by the obtuse procrastination of the British Government. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... follows: 'He made me no answer, but sat sometime in a muse; then broke off that discourse, and fell upon another subject.' The result no doubt of that 'muse' was the suspicion, or, perhaps, the conviction, that the rest of the world would, in all probability, be as obtuse as Ellwood; and to that suspicion or conviction we appear to owe Paradise Regained. The Plague over, Milton returned to London, settling in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. 'And when afterwards I went to wait on him there ... he shewed me his second poem, called Paradise Regained, and in ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... understand me as attributing to the Arabian originator of Aladdin all the sentiment of the case as I have endeavored to disentangle it. He spoke what he did not understand; for, as to sentiment of any kind, all Orientals are obtuse and impassive. There are other sublimities (some, at least) in the "Arabian Nights," which first become such—a gas that first kindles—when entering into combination with new elements ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Committee in Paris declined to give him information or furnish means, and even said that they did not wish volunteers. All this may readily be explained by the consideration that a man who thereafter proved to be so bitter an enemy was not sufficiently diplomatic to deceive even the obtuse perceptions of so undeserving a body as the author describes said committee. On the other hand, it would have been more prudent for the writer to have said less on this topic, as such hesitation in accepting his services might induce the reader to think that the Poles ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of sex-life can be learned in the flower, and the associations thus indelibly impressed cannot fail to leave at least a trace of fragrance and loveliness on even an obtuse nature. No matter what the later experiences or mistakes may be, the whole conception of this side of life cannot sink so low as might be the case if there were not this flower-sweet background. And ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... of each tooth, E, to its arm, D, by means of a round tenon arranged at an obtuse angle with the axis of the tooth, and going into the arm, the same being substantially as and for ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... him. She saw Nina's near-sighted eyes welling with hurt tears; Nina's check book eagerly surrendered to win from her lord a few delicious hours of the old flattery, the old attention. Harriet fancied Nina, poor, plain, obtuse little Nina, home again: "But you don't know how hard it is, Father. He is never there any more—he ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... this Government fall into the hands of men of either of these two classes, we shall show ourselves false to America's past. Moreover, the demagog and the corruptionist often work hand in hand. There are at this moment wealthy reactionaries of such obtuse morality that they regard the public servant who prosecutes them when they violate the law, or who seeks to make them bear their proper share of the public burdens, as being even more objectionable ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... describes: "An acute-angled street may be made to contain rectangular rooms on an upper story.... Draw an acute angle—say something a little less than a right angle—and cut it into compartments; or, if preferred, an obtuse angle, and cut this into compartments also. Now, the roadway may be so prescribed as to prevent right angles from being made on the basement, but the complementary angles are ingeniously made out by allowing the joists ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... free discussion Upon all points—no matter what, or whose— Because as Ages upon Ages push on, The last is apt the former to accuse Of pillowing its head on a pin-cushion, Heedless of pricks because it was obtuse: What was a paradox becomes a truth or A something like ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... there are many persons, of no insignificant rank in society, who would from their own consciousness smile at the simplicity with which he can so easily shape men's opinions and dispositions to his mind whether they will or not. He must have been the most charitable or the most obtuse of observers. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... course they were not allowed to lie down while in the stocks, this being too comfortable a position. Upon studying the question he found that in this way much more ease was experienced owing to the more obtuse angle thus formed by the body and the legs. This did not suit him and he issued further orders that in future all prisoners in the stocks should be obliged to sit facing uphill, and that they should not be allowed to hold on to the stocks in order ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... in large masses, some or all of the endoderm cells with thick outer walls. Cones from 10 to 17 cm. long, short-pedunculate, ovoid-conic; apophyses lustrous brown-ochre or fuscous brown, elevated into thick, often reflexed, beaks with obtuse mutic umbos; seeds with large nuts and adnate striated dark gray or fuscous ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... was prepared to denounce the judgment of ignorance in words of flame. Her anger was not abated, but merely turned in another direction, by the discovery that it was not ignorance, but blindness which she had now to denounce—the blindness of the obtuse Englishman who had been granted a privilege which he was ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... should not change our drinks is a heresy; the tongue becomes saturated, and after the third glass yields but an obtuse sensation. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... that whatever he undertook he engaged in with all his might. He was a rude, coarse boy. It was scarcely possible, with his past training, that he should be otherwise. But he was very faithful in fulfilling his obligations. Though his sense of right and wrong was very obtuse, he was still disposed to do the right so far as his uncultivated ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... which is already overthrown. In the succeeding stanza, 29, two other epithetal similes are bestowed upon the monsters—they become 'reptiles' and 'ephemeral insects.' All these repulsive images are of course here applied to critics of wilfully obtuse or malignant mind, such as Shelley accounted the Quarterly reviewer ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... seem unduly obtuse," said Jurgen, "for I am a little obtuse. It is a habit with me, a very bad habit formed in early infancy, and I have never been able to break myself of it. And so I have not any notion at ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... sympathetic audience in Nikita. Thence he passed to Bucharest, where he issued—for ten numbers—a Bulgaro-Roumanian newspaper; the Bulgars in Bucharest had grown too prosperous to be interested either in his journalistic or his military schemes, and he found the Bulgarian colonies in Russia equally obtuse. He was attacked by consumption while he was at work upon the Provisional Law for the National Bands in the Forests—a sort of written constitution for the heiduks, and in the intervals of his last sufferings he wrote ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... head in his hands, for some moments. At last he said slowly: "There is no one so obtuse as the thoroughly good man. It is not the messenger I am afraid of, after all. He is but the outward symptom of the inward trouble. What you are seeing is an example of the workings of conscience where you thought conscience was absent. The trouble with me is that I know the newspaper ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the masterly air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see) gave but the full spirit of his original for ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... And obtuse as he was, Quimby could not but observe that Nattie's eyes were shining in a way he had never seen them shine before, that the ever-coming and going flush on her cheeks was very becoming, and that there was an expression in her face, ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... she did not have to get up and go to the office was Una's chief impression at awakening, but she was not entirely obtuse to the morning, to the chirp of a robin, the cluck of the hens, the creak of a hay-wagon, and the sweet smell of cattle. When she arose she looked down a slope of fields so far away that they seemed smooth as a lawn. Solitary, majestic trees cast long shadows ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... listen but with so bristling an expression that it was clear no explanation could satisfy him. Dick, however, took no heed of that. He spoke slowly as one lecturing to an obtuse class of scholars. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... added, would avowedly seek an increase of salary for gain's sake; and if such avowal were openly made by a clergyman, it would be found obnoxious to the sense of propriety among his congregation. It may also be noted in this connection that no one but the scoffers and the very obtuse are not instinctively grieved inwardly at a jest from the pulpit; and that there are none whose respect for their pastor does not suffer through any mark of levity on his part in any conjuncture of life, except ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... in some sort the more evident because he possessed in large measure a certain relieving element, in which those who are eminent in that character are very deficient. Generally such persons have but obtuse senses: we are prone to attribute the purity of their conduct to the dullness of their sensations. Milton had no such obtuseness: he had every opportunity for knowing the "world of eye and ear";[12] you cannot open his works without seeing how much he ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... sixty. When the number of degrees of angle between two lines is less than 90, the lines are said to form an acute angle one to the other, but when they are at more than 90 degrees of angle they are said to form an obtuse angle. Thus, in Figure 60, A and C are at an acute angle, while B and C are at an obtuse angle. F and G form an acute angle one to the other, as also do G and B, while H and A are at an obtuse angle. Between I and J there are 90 degrees of angle; hence they form neither an acute ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... not a match-maker, and I've no idea that Esther will ever marry George," replied Mrs. Murray with the patience which wives sometimes show to husbands whom they think obtuse. ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... native to our own. By the village of Pennington, situated about midway between Dalton and Ulverstone, is the Castle Hill, the residence of this family before the Conquest. The area of the castle-yard appears to have been an octagon or a square, with obtuse angles, about forty-five yards in diameter. The south and east sides have been defended by a ditch about ten yards wide, and by a vallum of earth, still visible. There are no vestiges of the ancient building. It stood apparently on the verge of a precipice, at the foot of which flows a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... hollow in front of the joint. As the line of the radio-humeral joint is horizontal, while that of the ulno-humeral joint slopes obliquely downwards, the arm forms with the fully extended and supinated forearm an obtuse angle, opening laterally—the "carrying angle." This angle is usually more marked in women, in harmony with the greater width of the female pelvis. The ulnar nerve lies in the hollow between the olecranon and the medial condyle, and the median nerve passes over ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... which, next to the power of thought and expression, is the happiest gift an author's fairy godmother can bestow upon him, saves Kielland from saying too much—from enforcing his lesson by marginal comments, a la George Eliot. But he must be obtuse, indeed, to whom this reticence is not more eloquent and effective than a page of ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... 'that man is sinking under old age, his senses have become obtuse, suffering has destroyed his strength, and he is despised by his relations. He is without support and useless, and people have abandoned him, like a dead tree in a forest. But this is not peculiar to his family. In every creature youth is defeated by old age. Your ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... talked Lowland Scotch. But Scott has anticipated these cavils in the eighteenth chapter of the second volume. Certainly no Lowlander knew the Highlanders better than he did, and his ear for dialect was as keen as his musical ear was confessedly obtuse. Scott had the best means of knowing whether Helen MacGregor would be likely to soar into heroics as she is apt to do. In fact, here ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... unbroken waters, the fantastic wreaths which spring to meet it, and then, the shadowy mist that veils the horrors of its crash below, constitute a scene almost too enormous in its features for man to look upon. "Angels might tremble as they gazed;" and I should deem the nerves obtuse, rather than strong, which did not quail at the first sight of this ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... obtuse vanity could ever have induced Bozzy to publish all this. 'Curiosity,' he declares in the preface, 'is the most prevalent of all our passions, and the curiosity for reading letters is the most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity. Had any man in the three kingdoms found the following ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... of the poor fellow?" asked Cap, scarcely knowing how to take the other's manner, which was so dry, while it was so simple, that a less obtuse subject than the old sailor might well have suspected its sincerity. "One who has passed the place knows how ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... feel amiable when passing through these desolating scenes, where nature, originally so beautiful, has been defaced, and the people, instead of deriving pleasure from natural beauties, are obtuse to all the surroundings, which, according to educated taste, would ensure appreciation. I felt inclined to upset the donkeys, capture their proprietors, and . . . I could not have hung them upon the trees that they had defaced, for no bough had been left that would ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... compare with these lakes, as seen under the Italian heaven. As to those persons who have pretended to discover that the effects of light and atmosphere were no finer than they found in our own lake scenery, I can only say that they must be exceedingly obtuse in organization,—a ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of a girl so obtuse that she permits a man like this fat, disgusting actor to dangle about her?" asked Mrs. Crego of her husband, who ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... he continued, "that this man or spirit of a man has been sitting here night after night, and that we have not been able to see him, because our minds are dull and obtuse. Last night the elevating force of a strong passion, such as that which you have confided to me, combined with the power of fine music, so exalted your mind that you became endowed, as it were, with a sixth ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... sort. It includes all those heresies which result from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse. The former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in comparison natural, simple confusions. The former are the errors of the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside, ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... are silly enough to accept when gallantry obliges us to make nooses to catch our happiness. We swear eternal faithfulness, and declare that we desire to pass our lives with them, and seem to await a husband's death impatiently. Let him die, and there are some provincial women obtuse or silly or malicious enough to say: 'Here am I, free at last.' The spent ball suddenly comes to life again, and falls plumb in the midst of our finest triumphs or our most carefully planned happiness. I have seen that you love Beatrix. I leave her therefore in a position where she loses nothing ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... touch had grown almost as delicate as that of a blind man; but had it been ever so obtuse, I could have told at that moment, what were the two flat round objects which I held between my fingers. There was no mistaking the "feel" ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... and her estimation of their relative powers was the same. Emily had a head for logic, and a capability of argument, unusual in a man, and rare indeed in a woman, according to M. Heger. Impairing the force of this gift, was a stubborn tenacity of will, which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned. "She should have been a man—a great navigator," said M. Heger in speaking of her. "Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... merits are grossly undervalued by a stiff-necked and obtuse generation. But what would you have, my learned brother? If poverty steps behind you and claps the occulting bushel over your thirty thousand candle-power luminary, your brilliancy is apt to ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... sat still on her bough, and gave herself up to the keen sense of unmerited reproach. She would have given the world not to have eaten all her puff, and to have saved some of it for Tom. Not but that the puff was very nice, for Maggie's palate was not at all obtuse, but she would have gone without it many times over, sooner than Tom should call her greedy and be cross with her. And he had said he wouldn't have it, and she ate it without thinking; how could she help it? The tears flowed so ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... tacked a piece of what he calls an English garden to a set of stone terraces, with steps of turf. There are three or four very high hills, almost as high as, and exactly in the shape of, a tansy pudding. You squeeze between these and a river, that is conducted at obtuse angles in a stone channel, and supplied by a pump; and when walnuts come in I suppose it will be navigable. In a corner enclosed by a chalk wall are the samples I mentioned; there is a strip of grass, another of corn, and a third en friche, exactly in the order of beds in a nursery. They have ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... interested in letters and in life, the work of a fastidious and yet a very robust artist. But the book is fairly certain to be misunderstood of the people. The publishers' own announcement describes it as "perhaps chiefly for youth," a description with which I disagree. The obtuse are capable of seeing in it nothing save a bread-and-butter imitation of "The Jungle Book." The woodland and sedgy lore in it is discreet and attractive. Names of animals abound in it. But it is nevertheless a book of humanity. The author may call his chief characters the Rat, the Mole, the ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... to the accidents of support; if it is fixed on a flat surface the under side, which is always moulded by the support, is itself flat. The nest then takes the form of a demi-ellipsoid, or, in other words, half an egg cut longitudinally; more or less obtuse at one end, but pointed at the other, and sometimes ending in a ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... at ease until I have given my friendly counsel. Thou art free to follow it or not to follow it. But for the sake of this beard Sheikh Khalid, do not speak at the Mosque to-day. I know the people of this City: they are ignorant, obtuse, fanatical, blind. 'God hath sealed up their hearts and their hearing.' They will not hear thee; they can not understand thee. I know them better than thou: I have lived amongst them for forty years. And what ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... or asteroids, between Jupiter and Saturn, they kept the maximum repulsion on Jupiter as long as possible, and moved at tremendous speed. Saturn was somewhat in advance of Jupiter in its orbit, so that their course from the earth had been along two sides of a triangle with an obtuse angle between. During the next four terrestrial days they sighted several small comets, but spent most of their time writing out their Jovian experiences. During the sixth day Saturn's rings, although ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... had spent many hours of each day in smoking and watching her thus; and the fact that he had never yet found the occupation monotonous was a danger-signal in itself. But your comfort-loving man is singularly obtuse in the matter of danger-signals: and loyalty apart, Richardson was too genuinely devoted to his friend to admit the possibility of that which was almost an accomplished fact. The man was not built for high tragedy; and, in truth, the sittings were an equal pleasure ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he happened to see a Samoyede on one of these "amorous evenings," that he "loved" his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of gratifying his selfish appetites. In the preceding pages I endeavored to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman, individual ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... his boots and was standing, hat in hand, with an air of meek expectancy. Angel, always so fluent when we were by ourselves, balked at explaining things to grown-ups, and, though the Bishop usually saw things from our point of view, one could never be absolutely certain that even he would not prove obtuse on such ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... angustifolius foliis obtuse carinatis rectis, floribus cernuis, Linn. Fil. Ait. Kew. v. i. ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 8 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... had been obtuse to the insinuation of poisoning, fires up violently at the charge of doing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... dear," and Anna shook her sleek black head with the air of explaining matters to an obtuse child. "I was the only one who understood. Gil misunderstood. He thought that I would really wait for him until he should have made enough money to come home and pay off the mortgage. I let him think ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... so rash as try to depict Mrs. Ellison's arts, for then, indeed, I should make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance of such matters. Whether Mr. Arbuton was ever aware of them, I am not sure: as a man he was, of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other hand, he had seen far more of the world than Mrs. Ellison, and she may have been clear as day to him. Probably, though, he did not detect any design; he could not have conceived of ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... or hill, or eminence, termed Drumsnab, I would be proud to hold some dialogue with you, Sir Duncan, on the nature of the sconce to be there constructed; and whether the angles thereof should be acute or obtuse—anent whilk I have heard the great Velt-Mareschal Bannier hold a learned argument with General Tiefenbach during a ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... A bare-legged woman, surrounded by her half-naked children, leaving the potato she was peeling in front of her door, gazed, like her husband, after the rolling vision of elegance that went by her, and her obtuse brain probably summed up the implacable decrees of Destiny in ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... sending down aerial roots. Wood hard, bark smooth, not scaling, with prominent warty lenticels; shoots short-jointed, angled, with fine scurfy pubescence; diaphragms absent; tendrils intermittent, simple. Leaves small, broadly cordate or roundish; petiolar sinus wide, shallow; margin with obtuse, wide teeth; not lobed; dense in texture, light green color, glabrous above, sometimes pubescent along veins below. Cluster small (6-24 berries), loose; peduncle short; pedicels short, thick. Berries large, globular or somewhat oblate, black or greenish-yellow; skin thick, tough and ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... like "craze" which had rioted within his own blood when he was a boy, and had sent him out into the world to fight and jostle men, to win renown, and prove his manhood by risking life and limb in all kinds of mad adventure? Nothing had so moved that self-contained, moody man for years, and even obtuse Tom could see that his story had touched some hidden spring of feeling. The stern lines had relaxed, and there was a softer though more intense ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... possessing wealth and station,—in short, if Dorothy betrayed an intention to refuse his exalted hand,—then she, Mrs. Hanway-Harley, would interfere. She would take Dorothy in solemn charge, and compel that obtuse maiden to what redounded to her good. Mrs. Hanway-Harley doubted neither the propriety nor the feasibility of establishing a censorship over Dorothy's heart, should the young lady evince a blinded inability to see ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... hated him in the middle of her love because he stood to her as the living symbol of her daily inescapable servitude in this household. Jenny could never have felt that she would like to kill Pa. Emmy sometimes felt that. She at times, when he had been provoking or obtuse, so shook with hysterical anger, born of the inevitable days in his society and in the kitchen, that she could have thrown at him the battered pot which she carried, or could have pushed him passionately against the mantelpiece in her fierce ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... are seven men, and four more on land to relieve them regularly. {275} In the course of a lively conversation with their visitor, they said, "How lonely you must be!" Surely when the men exiled to a lightship pronounce the Rob Roy "lonely" there must be something in the charge; but my obtuse perception has not yet enabled me to find ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... knuckle, ankle, groin, crotch, crutch, crane, fluke, scythe, sickle, zigzag, kimbo^, akimbo. corner, nook, recess, niche, oriel [Arch.], coign^. right angle &c (perpendicular) 216.1, 212; obliquity &c 217; angle of 45 degrees, miter; acute angle, obtuse angle, salient angle, reentering angle, spherical angle. angular measurement, angular elevation, angular distance, angular velocity; trigonometry, goniometry; altimetry^; clinometer, graphometer^, goniometer; theodolite; sextant, quadrant; dichotomy. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mind will say to itself, when it comes across them, 'You great duffer, aren't you going to ask Why?' Suppose that, by way of experiment, I assume that the fourth angle of my quadrilateral will be acute, or again obtuse, will the body of conclusions I can now deduce from my set of postulates be free from contradictions or not? If I really give my mind to the task, cannot I define a continuous function which is not differentiable? The raising ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... not understand the game. It puzzled him, just as the yellow men so stoically playing it puzzled him, just as the entire country puzzled him. Yet, obtuse as he was, he felt the gulf of centuries that divided the two races. These yellow men about him seemed as far away from his humanity, as detached from his manner of life and thought, as were the animals he sometimes stared at through the bars of the ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... in dreams as well as in waking moments, I bad been brooding over the identity of the lady of the ice, and had become convinced that the O'Halloran ladies knew something about it; yet so obtuse was I that I had not suspected that the lady herself might be found in this house. In fact, such an event was at once so romantic and so improbable that it did not even suggest itself. But now here was the lady herself. Here she stood. Now I could understand ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... diminution in the number of the teeth and their rapid decay, are matters of daily comment." In like manner, the Caucasian race is melting away in the colonies of Great Britain, in South Africa, Australia, and the West Indies. "In these uniform consequences the most obtuse cannot fail to recognise the operation of a universal law, whose primary effects are to diminish migration, and whose ultimate results are the extinction of the exotic population." We suppose none of our readers are obtuse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... clear, and easily perceived by the most obtuse or indifferent observer; but these distinctly marked varieties pass into milder shades as they are exhibited in common Conversation, and then a nicer observation is needful to detect the varieties of hue that color language when used in ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... was not only base, but obtuse and absurdly wanting in human feeling and revolutionary sympathy, when he concurred in the execution of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... was still gray and uncertain, as Csar and his retinue rode down upon the banks of the fatal river—to cross which with arms in his hands, since the further bank lay within the territory of the Republic, ipso facto proclaimed any Roman a rebel and a traitor. No man, the firmest or the most obtuse, could be otherwise than deeply agitated, when looking down upon this little brook—so insignificant in itself, but invested by law with a sanctity so awful, and so dire a consecration. The whole course of future history, and the fate of every nation, would necessarily ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... explain the majesty of the great Abbey to one so utterly obtuse as Sedgwick seemed to be. He drove on in silence for half an hour or forty minutes before he rallied enough to speak again. Then he pointed to a structure and called down to Sedgwick that the ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... I must say that I think you are rather obtuse, Captain Rowly, and I shall be under the painful necessity of helping you to see it. ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... the evening, and all were delighted except Kawawa himself. He showed symptoms of dread, and several times started up as if to run away, but was prevented by the crowd behind. Some of the more intelligent understood the explanations well, and expatiated eloquently on them to the more obtuse. Nothing could exceed the civilities which had passed between us during this day; but Kawawa had heard that the Chiboque had forced us to pay an ox, and now thought he might do the same. When, therefore, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... candid truth, 'squire, I do not," answered Ithuel, simply; for the nature of the tie which bound the young Frenchman so closely to Ghita was a profound mystery, in all that related to its more sacred feelings, to a being generally so obtuse on matters ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Perhaps her prominent thought was how cruel were those who fancied that Ethel's lofty faith was unfeeling, and how very good Leonard must be to be thus mourned. At any rate, she was an excellent comforter, in the sympathy that was neither too acute nor too obtuse; and purely to oblige her, Ethel for the first time submitted to her favourite panacea of hair brushing, and found that in very truth those soft and steady manipulations were almost mesmeric in soothing away the hard oppressive excitement, and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The flakes, of course, did not rebound. But they did not come to rest either, not for the most imperceptible fraction of time. As soon as they touched the white, underlying surface, they would start to scud along horizontally at a most amazing speed, forming with their previous path an obtuse angle. So long as I watched the single flake—which is quite a task, especially while driving—it seemed to be in a tremendous hurry. It rushed along very nearly at the speed of the wind, and that was considerable, say between thirty-five ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... teeth are perfectly efficient instruments for mastication. But their true canine character, as Owen (42. 'Anatomy of Vertebrates,' vol. iii. 1868, p. 323.) remarks, "is indicated by the conical form of the crown, which terminates in an obtuse point, is convex outward and flat or sub-concave within, at the base of which surface there is a feeble prominence. The conical form is best expressed in the Melanian races, especially the Australian. The canine is more deeply implanted, and by a stronger fang than the incisors." ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... friendly power, it was evident to the Spaniards in the two remaining ships that the English frigate was approaching them with the most sinister and malevolent purpose. One glance at the sinking remains of their ruined and battered consort established that fact in the most obtuse mind. Consequently the exultant men on the Mary Rose could hear the shrill notes of the trumpeters on the two other ships calling their ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... down to us from the firmament; which animal calls itself man. We have, with sedulous care and patient industry, taught this singular creature in our school, and after a very severe examination, pronounce it to be very quick in its perceptions and very docile in its manners. Nevertheless, from its obtuse and miserable judgment—which we believe arises from its too hasty inferences—its ridiculous scepticism on unquestionable points, and its no less ridiculous credulity on doubtful ones, we may scarcely number it among sensible ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... parvenu who is most particular as to the cut of his coat, and the precision of his equipage, and the minutiae of his menage. Those between the parvenu and the exquisite, who know their own consequence, and have something solid to rest upon, are slow in following all the caprices of fashion, and obtuse in observation as to those niceties which neither give them another ancestor, nor add another thousand to the account at their banker's;—as to the last, rather indeed the contrary! There was a decided elegance about the Baron's house and his dinner. If he had been ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... of the district was clear in his mind—the valley he had just left and the main valley, forming an obtuse angle with the apex out on the wind-torn plain and a double range of mountains lying out between the sides ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... see who's got a right to interfere with you if you do,' she said, stiffly. Then, however, it occurred even to her obtuse and self-centred perception, that she was saying something unexpected and distasteful to a man who was clearly a great friend of the Farrells, and therefore a member of the world she envied. So she changed ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ministry of Christ included, that slavery was, pure and simple, a "Covenant with death and an agreement with hell;" and then, sad to say, they were convinced against their wills. Their sense of justice had become so obtuse as to wholly blunt the sense of reason, the brotherly sympathy of a common race-feeling, and the broad, liberal and just inculcations of Jesus Christ. The nation was sunk to the moral turpitude of Constantinople; ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... ovate and incumbent. The germ of the second species is round, smooth, inferior and pidicelled: the style long and thicker than the stamens, simple, cylindrical, smooth and erect. It remains with the corolla until the fruit is ripe, the stamen is simple and obtuse, and the fruit much the size and shape of our common garden currants, growing like them in clusters supported by a compound footstalk. The peduncles are longer in this species, and the berries are more scattered. The fruit is not ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... with the neat little sitting-room which Nettie's presence made dainty and refined in its homeliness, lounging in Nettie's way. He could not bring himself to speak with ordinary patience to Fred; and Fred, obtuse as he was, perceived his brother's disgust and contempt, and resented it sullenly; and betrayed his resentment to the foolish wife, who sulked and said spiteful things to Edward. It was not a pleasant family group. As for Nettie, she ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... a time, in the years gone by, that face has been uplifted heavenward from the pulpit of the East Meeting-House, when the Rev. Mr. Burroughs seemed to worship God. What!—he? The holy man!—the learned!—the wise! How has the Devil tempted him? His fellow-criminals, for the most part, are obtuse, uncultivated creatures, some of them scarcely half-witted by nature, and others greatly decayed in their intellects through age. They were an easy prey for the destroyer. Not so with this George ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Apropos of this, I might adduce an instructive and somewhat forbidding example. Strauss strongly resented the action of one of his opponents who happened to refer to his reverence for Lessing. The unfortunate man had misunderstood;—true, Strauss did declare that one must be of a very obtuse mind not to recognise that the simple words of paragraph 86 come from the writer's heart. Now, I do not question this warmth in the very least; on the contrary, the fact that Strauss fosters these feelings towards Lessing has always excited my ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Should an obtuse cabman, misled by some similarity of name or error in number (as may occur in large cities), permit a perplexed guest, perhaps a stranger, to drift across the wrong threshold, let it be a hospitable one. The hostess, though she may not be able to ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... beneficial action of marriage on hysteria, that is only true of slight cases and scarcely enables us to counsel marriage in hysteria.[201] Even a woman's intelligence is sometimes heightened by pregnancy, and Tarnier, as quoted by Vinay, knew many women whose intelligence, habitually somewhat obtuse, has only risen to the normal level during pregnancy.[202] The pregnant woman has reached the climax of womanhood; she has attained to that state toward which the periodically recurring menstrual wave has been drifting her at regular intervals throughout her sexual ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the feelings of HUME more obtuse, or did his temper, gentle as it was by constitution, bear, with a saintly patience, the mortifications his literary life so long endured? After recomposing two of his works, which incurred the same neglect in their altered form, he raised the most sanguine hopes of his History, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... parchment may be tightened or slackened by means of a series of screws disposed round the circumference of the hoop. Attached to the body, which has no back, is a long neck, terminating in a flat head acting as a peg-box and bent back slightly at an obtuse angle from the neck. There are five, six or nine strings to the banjo; they are fastened to a tail-piece as in the violin, pass over a low bridge, on the body, and are strained over the nut or ridge at the end of the neck, where they are threaded through holes and wound round ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... muttered, with a stealthy smile: "It was a coup de theatre, and it had evidently great success. They had to accept peace at my hands as a favor. Ah, if they had guessed how much I needed it myself! But these men are obtuse; they cannot see any thing. They have no aim; they only live from minute to minute, and whenever they find a precipice on their route, they stumble over it, and are lost beyond redemption. My God, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... forty-foot street at a point thereon one hundred and sixteen and fifty-five hundredths feet Northwest from the point of beginning meets the said boundary at right angles to Falmouth street, sixty-six and seventy-eight hundredths feet; thence at an obtuse angle on said line at right angles to said forty-foot street sixty-seven and thirty-five hundredths feet to said forty-foot street; thence Southeasterly on said forty-foot street one hundred and sixteen and fifty-five hundredths feet to the point of beginning; containing ...
— Manual of the Mother Church - The First Church of Christ Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts • Mary Baker Eddy
... parts again offers difficulties. Sexual relations in women are, at the onset, almost inevitably painful; and to some extent the same experience may be repeated at every act of coitus. Ordinary tactile sensibility in the female genitourinary region is notably obtuse, but at the beginning of the sexual act there is normally a hyperesthesia which may be painful or pleasurable as excitement culminates, passing into a seeming anesthesia, which even craves for rough contact; so that in sexual excitement a woman normally ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... indolent, ignorant of the modes and implements of labor, and of the language of his master and, perhaps, of his fellow-laborers. To tame and domesticate, to instruct in the modes of industry, and to reduce to subordination and usefulness a barbarian, gross, obtuse, perverse, must have demanded persevering ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Theobald was giving her a lively account of a concert at the Eyre Arms; and it was the fascination of his presence which made her answer at random to her cousin's questions about the last volume of the Laureate's, which she had been lately reading. Even Mr. Pallinson, obtuse as he was apt to be when called upon to comprehend any fact derogatory to his own self-esteem, was fain to confess to himself that this evening's efforts were futile, and that this dark-faced stranger ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the idiot play Openly or 'neath decent cloak. Yet sometimes this or that deceit Encountered punishment complete, And sometimes into snares as well Himself just like a greenhorn fell. He could in disputation shine With pungent or obtuse retort, At times to silence would resort, At times talk nonsense with design; Quarrels among young friends he bred And to the field ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... his eyes fixed upon those of his companion. He distrusted his own powers, as is usual with persons of real merit, but he felt that if he could succeed in making his convictions penetrate his comrade's obtuse mind, their exactitude would ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... James Stanhope himself, and Spencer Cowper and Lord Coningsby and young Lord Finch and Pulteney, now in his period of full devotion to Walpole. There were Whig lawyers, like Lechmere; there were steady, obtuse Whigs, like Edward Wortley Montagu, husband of the brilliant and beautiful woman whom Pope first loved and then hated. There was Aislabie, then Treasurer of the Navy, afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, who came to disgrace at the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... in terminal, dense, narrow obtuse spikes, 1 to 2 in. long. Calyx pink or greenish, 5-parted, like petals; no corolla; stamens 8 or less; style 2-parted. Stem: 1 to 3 ft. high, simple or branched; often partly red, the joints swollen ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... prudent observer of Mr. Ricketty would give his closest attention. He would look at the acute interior angle which it formed at the eyes, and think it much too acute to be pleasant and much too interior to be pretty. He would look at the obtuse exterior angle which it formed on its bridge, and wonder how any humane parent could have permitted such a development to grow before his very eyes when by one quick and dexterous strike with a flat-iron it might have been remedied. He would look at the angle of incidence made by the ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... the tearing asunder of those tender chains that renders slavery the horrible curse that it really is; human beings are reduced to the position of animals, without the blessings enjoyed by the brute creation—short memories and obtuse feelings. ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... add, but to the end, That thou mayst use thyself to own thy thirst And men may mingle for thee when they hear." "O plant! from whence I spring! rever'd and lov'd! Who soar'st so high a pitch, thou seest as clear, As earthly thought determines two obtuse In one triangle not contain'd, so clear Dost see contingencies, ere in themselves Existent, looking at the point whereto All times are present, I, the whilst I scal'd With Virgil the soul purifying mount, And visited the nether world of woe, Touching my ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... said Philippa: and the Grey Lady's penetration must have been obtuse if she were unable to detect a tone of deep sadness underlying the words. "And parents—living—did you ask me? By Mary, Mother and Maiden, I have but one living, and I hate—I hate him!" The passionate energy with which the last words were spoken ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... "How obtuse you are, step-papa! You are a lunatic; we have the certificates of two physicians to that effect; and that is all the law requires. Now, be ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Notwithstanding all his escapes and experiences, that indomitable man of science still ranges, like a mad philosopher, far and wide over the archipelago in pursuit of "booterflies ant ozer specimens of zee insect vorld." It is observed, however, even by the most obtuse among his friends, that whereas in former times the professor's nights were centrifugal they have now become centripetal—the Keeling Islands being the great centre towards which he flies. Verkimier is, and probably will always be, a subject ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... hands with this Moscow official, after a friendly chat, I asked him if he would be a little obtuse arithmetically as to the old and new style of reckoning, and let me have my January "Century" if it arrived before my departure for Petersburg, as my license expired January 1. He smilingly agreed to do so. I also ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... 'Yes! I see,' he said. 'How obtuse not to read it in his own manner! How much it explains!' and he silently rested ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... when the ladder by which he had attained them was removed. It was not that she had ever given him occasion to feel that marriage and not inheritance was the source of his distinction in the land, but that having a soul as keenly sensitive to small material rights as it was obtuse to great spiritual ones, he never felt the property quite his own until his wife was no longer within sight. Had he been a little more sensitive still, he would have felt that the property was then his daughter's, and his only through her; but ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I SAW. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and 'seen' still more, and should probably ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... after expressing his condolences, and, overcome by the heavy silence and close atmosphere, had just fallen asleep. And everybody respected his slumber. Was he dreaming as he dozed of that map of Christendom which he carried behind his low obtuse-looking brow? Was he continuing in dreamland his terrible work of conquest, that task of subjecting and governing the earth which he directed from his dark room at the Propaganda? The ladies glanced at him affectionately ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ranked accordingly at Court whilst his father, some poor Fellah, was ploughing the ground. Tanfik Pasha began his ill-omened rule by always placing natives close to him in the place of honour, addressing them first and otherwise snubbing Europeans who, when English, were often too obtuse to notice the petty insults lavished ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... zeal, my rustic Muse Feels fluttering fain to tell her news, And paint her simple, lowly views With all her art, And, though in genius but obtuse, May touch ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... finger by a ring. She gets an artificial grandeur out of superlative trivialities; she simply drops her hand impressively, letting it fall over the arm of her chair as dewdrops hang on the cup of a flower, and all is said—she has pronounced judgment beyond appeal, to the apprehension of the most obtuse. She knows how to listen to you; she gives you the opportunity of shining, and—I ask ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... render a wig unnecessary; I have got many white hairs, in spite of the proverb. My teeth, formerly square pearls, are now of the colour of wood, and will soon be of slate. My legs and thighs first formed an obtuse angle, afterwards an equilateral angle, and at length, an acute one. My thighs and body form another; and my head, always dropping on my breast, makes me not ill represent a Z. I have got my arms shortened as well ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... lizard''), an animal so closely allied to the crocodile that some naturalists have classed them together as forming one genus. It differs from the true crocodile principally in having the head broader and shorter, and the snout more obtuse; in having the fourth, enlarged tooth of the under jaw received, not into an external notch, but into a pit formed for it within the upper one; in wanting a jagged fringe which appears on the hind legs ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and when the central window of the nave was enlarged, and that, and the others which now enliven the inner wall, were filled with perpendicular tracery. The porch is vaulted with stone, and is entered by an obtuse arch, over which is an elliptical window, divided by mullions into six lights under cinquefoil arches, which are again subdivided in the head into ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... And it has been urged on high authority in our day that there is nothing really "fine" in Gray's "Churchyard." However conscious Gray was in limiting his address to "the common reader," we may be certain he was not writing to the obtuse, the illiterate or the insensitive. He was to create an evocation of evening: the evening of a day and the approaching night of life. The poem was not to be perplexed by doubt; it ends on a note of "trembling hope"—but on "hope." There are perhaps better evocations of similar moods, but not ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... immature feet, certain malicious spirits had so willed it that the chief and more autumnal of the Maidens Blank (who, nevertheless, wore an excessively flower-like name), had long lavished herself upon the possession of an obtuse and self-assertive hound, which was in the habit of gratifying this inconsiderable person and those who sat around by continually depositing upon their unworthy garments details of its outer surface, and when the weather ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... that could vanquish the ever-growing misery of his broken-down body. The mere thought that he could not grow well, while the cabra would daily continue to live in insolent impunity, was enough to give him convulsions of rage; he would foam at the mouth, gnash his teeth and, in that obtuse brain of his, concoct scheme upon scheme of vengeance, almost all of them impracticable, for he was chained to ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... of the elbow was growing obtuse as the shadowy arm straightened itself. Thirty seconds more! I began to count, and, gripping my staff, braced myself for what might be, when —with a sudden cry, Charmian sprang forward, and, hurling herself against the door, shut it with ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... obtuse. If the Bishop had only known it, he was afraid of vexing him further by saying anything, and accordingly he ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt |
