"Pungency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other elements, and so are apt to warp when used in buildings on account of this superfluity of moisture, yet they can be kept to a great age without rotting, because the liquid contained within their substances has a bitter taste which by its pungency prevents the entrance of decay or of those little creatures which are destructive. Hence, buildings made of these kinds of wood last for an unending ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... herbalist is a noun of multitude: it comprises several sorts, differing in kind but possessing the common properties of wholesomeness and pungency. Here "order in variety we see"; and here, "though all things differ, all agree." The name is thought by some to be derived from the Latin verb ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... in the House of Lords. He wrote pretty verses and clever pamphlets, and he has left to the world a collection of "Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second," which will always be read for its vivacity, its pungency, its bitterness, and its keen, penetrating good-sense. Hervey succeeded in obtaining the hand of one of the most beautiful women of the day, the charming Mary Lepell, whose name has been celebrated in more than one poetical panegyric by Pope, and he captivated the heart of ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... work upon him. He possessed no knowledge, but instinct was born within him. He knew this was HIS world, that the sun and the warmth were for him, and that the sweet things of the earth were inviting him into his heritage. He puckered up his little brown nose and sniffed the air, and the pungency of everything that was sweet and to be yearned ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... action, for "action," it is written in an ancient book, "is surrounded with evil as a fire is surrounded with smoke." The imperfection of the medium makes the smoke round every Word of Fire, every Word of Truth. And the Founder must endure the pungency of the smoke, if He would speak the Word of Fire. The realisation of that, however dimly, however imperfectly, makes the passion of gratitude in the human heart to those Men who bear their infirmities ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... growth, a climber, with smooth, soft stems, ten or twelve feet long, and tough, broadly ovate leaves. It is supported much as hops are. When the berries on a spike begin to turn red they are gathered, as they lose pungency if they are allowed to ripen. They are placed on mats, and are either trodden with the feet or rubbed by the hands to separate them from the spike, after which they are cleaned by winnowing. Black pepper consists of such berries ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... something. I pray thee, think of something, Harry." He looked at me with such exceeding wistfulness that I was forced to cudgel my brains for something which, having a slight savour of truth, might be seasoned to pungency at fancy. "Often have I heard her say that she liked a fair man," I replied, and indeed I had, and believed her to have said it because I was dark, and seemingly inattentive to some new grace of hers as to the tying of her hair or ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... than any other; that of Rollins was more calculated to conciliate and capture the votes of hesitating, or Border-State men; that of Garfield was perhaps the most scholarly and eloquent; while that of Stevens was remarkable for its sledge-hammer pungency and ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... in 1794. It was during the period of her husband's brilliant career in this office that the Countess made her greatest success as a hostess in ministerial society. She was a good conversationalist, and especially attractive to men of individuality who admired her sagacious, picturesque pungency of expression. The great naval commanders, who frequented the admiralty, were impressed with the frankness and force of her superior mind, Nelson and Collingwood particularly. She is frequently mentioned in their letters as being sure to have much sympathy ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... investigator, is a liquor compounded of spirit and acid juices, sugar and water. The spirit, volatile and fiery, is the proper emblem of vivacity and wit; the acidity of the lemon will very aptly figure pungency of raillery, and acrimony of censure; sugar is the natural representative of luscious adulation and gentle complaisance; and water is the proper hieroglyphick of easy ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... cases, it took another and more bodeful turn. That inextinguishable laughter of his was heard no more, or at best gave place to a feeble tittering; his stories dropped from his lips with but flat pungency; and instead of performing his lady-love's 'chores' with a mirthful readiness, he went through them in a heartsick way, the while directing towards her furtive looks of supplication. The true state of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... drooping in many cases right down to the ground, was an inextricable maze and tangle of lianas, or "monkey rope," intertwined with which were countless festoons of flowering creepers, the mingled perfumes of which were almost overpowering in their pungency. Long pliant twigs thickly studded with needle-sharp thorns constantly protruded across the path, menacing their faces and tenaciously grappling their clothing, so that they had to halt at almost every other step to free themselves; ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... and Essential Oils are contained in minute quantity in a very large number of animal and vegetable foods. They contribute in part to the flavour of fruits. They are the cause of the pungency and aroma of mustard, horse-radish, cloves, nutmegs, cinnamon, caraway seeds, mint, sage and other spices. Onions contain a notable quantity. When extracted the essential oils become powerful drugs. In moderate quantities they are stomachic and carminative, in ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... elements; in vain adjust the springs; and I have now arrived at such a pitch of disconsideration that (except yourself, dear fellow) I do not know a soul that I can face. My subordinates themselves have turned upon me. What language have I heard to-day, what illiberality of sentiment, what pungency of expression! She came once; I could have pardoned that, for she was moved; but she returned, returned to announce to me this crushing blow; and, Somerset, she was very inhumane. Yes, dear fellow, I have drunk a bitter cup; the speech ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the stone were clumps of small flowers. They were crimson in colour and had thick, fleshy leaves. Hastily, he snatched a handful and piled it on the fire. The smoke darkened and rose in a thick column; there was a curious pungency ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... a bay tree, a little thing awaiting its slaughter—for shade trees might not grow too near the windows in San Francisco. It was flopping its lance-leaves against the panes; puffs of the breeze brought in a suggestion of its pungency. That magic sense, so closely united with memory—it brought back a faint impression upon her. Her very panic at this ghost of old imaginations inspired the inquiry, barbed and shafted ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... MONTALEMBERT has been elected a member of the French Academy, in place of M. Droz. The election gives little satisfaction outside the Institute; but the Count is not without eminence as a man of letters. Some of his religious tracts are written with great eloquence and pungency. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... wonders. It sublimates wine; it sublimates fame; nay, is the creator thereof; it enriches and darkens our spears of the Palm; enriches and enlightens the mind; it ripens cherries and young lips; festoons old ruins, and ivies old heads; imparts a relish to old yams, and a pungency to the Ponderings of old Bardianna; of fables distills truths; and finally, smooths, levels, glosses, softens, melts, and meliorates all things. Why, my lord, round Mardi itself is all the better for its antiquity, and the more to be revered; to the cozy-minded, more comfortable ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... mixed. This in the first instance goes through a kind of fermentation, and, like the basis of soup at the modern hotels, forms, as it were, the stock from which all the varieties in flavor and appearance are produced by special treatment and flavoring. Of course the strength and pungency of the snuff will depend a good deal upon the richness of the tobacco originally put aside for it. About one thousand pounds of tobacco would form an ordinary batch of snuff. The duty on this would amount to about L150, and this has to be paid before the tobacco ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... charming ignorance. The thought of it wove a strand of melancholy into his present mature realization like the delicate scent of blossoming trees borne to him on the evening air, barely perceptible and then lost in the pungency of the opium. The latter became, mystically, all China, the irresistible fascination that had gradually possessed his imagination, dulling the associations of his heredity and birth, calling him further and further into ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... know that the building is on fire. Hark! There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible. There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting shingles. Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes. Let us get up and see what is going on.—Oh,—oh,—oh! do you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his thousand lashing red ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the captain, went quietly up the ladder at the fore-end of the house and listened to what was said. The owner was grateful at hearing such good things said about himself, though the eulogy was flavoured with a pungency of language that was not intended for delicate ears. At last one of the crew finished, tossed his tin plate on ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... Norwegians are fond of things with a pronounced flavor, the more pronounced the better, and cheese is one of the chief articles of diet. A Norwegian housewife would not consider a meal complete without five or six different kinds of cheese of all degrees of pungency in taste and odor upon the table. At breakfast you are served sardines, anchovies, smoked salmon, dried herring and five or six other kinds of fish and an equal variety of cheese before they think of offering you coffee and meat and potatoes. You get seven or eight kinds of bread ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... delight there must be a distinguishable touch of shrinking and sorrow; for it is this conflict and rending of our will, this fascination by what is intrinsically terrible or sad, that gives these turbid feelings their depth and pungency. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... order by the prickling sensation to drive away the demon of disease which may be clinging to their persons. In Java a popular cure for gout or rheumatism is to rub Spanish pepper into the nails of the fingers and toes of the sufferer; the pungency of the pepper is supposed to be too much for the gout or rheumatism, who accordingly departs in haste. So on the Slave Coast the mother of a sick child sometimes believes that an evil spirit has taken possession of the child's body, and in order to drive him out, she makes small cuts in ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... chair near the foot of the table. Her bosom fluttered at the base of the throat. Half blindly she reached out her hand toward a glass of wine which stood near by, foaming and sparkling, its gem-like drops of keen pungency swimming continuously up to the surface. Her hand caught at the slender stem of the glass. Leaning upon her left arm, she half rose as though to put it to her lips. Her head moved, as though she would follow the retreating figure of the man who had thus scornfully used ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... withdrawn. Then it was again cautiously protruded, and the next minute there descended on the head of Frederick a black hot mass of tar and bitumen. It scalded his face, it blinded his eyes. It choked and almost poisoned him by its vaporous pungency. It matted itself in his voluminous periwig, and plastered it down to his shoulders; it clotted his lace frills, and ran in filthy rivulets down his smart clothes. In a word, it rendered him in a moment a disgusting and helpless object, unable to see or hear, almost unable to breathe, ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... this tree yields a concrete oil called cinnamon suet, which was formerly employed to make candles for the Kandian kings. An oil, called clove oil, is also distilled from the leaf, which is said to be equal in aromatic pungency to that made from the clove at ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... The young man's gestures became more vigorous. The dogged look on Beale's face deepened. The comments of the ring increased in point and pungency. ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... them to swallow a few drops of the spirit that still remained in the canteen given them by Erskine on their departure from Detroit. The genial liquid sent a kindling glow to their chilled hearts, and for a moment deadened the pungency of their anguish; and then it was that Miss de Haldimar entered briefly on the horrors she had witnessed, while Clara, with her arm encircling her waist, fixed her dim and swollen eyes, from which a tear ever and anon ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... Celtic note, shown so exquisitely in her "Irish Peasant Song", and one has the more obvious characteristics of poetry that, whatever its theme, is always distinguished and individual. Miss Guiney has a crisp economy of phrase, a pungency and tang, that invest her style with an unusual degree of personality. Her volumes in their order have been: "The White Sail", 1887; "A Roadside Harp", 1893; "Nine Sonnets Written at Oxford", 1895; "The Martyr's Idyl", 1899; and "Happy Ending", her ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... came on. Stonor loved travelling at night, and the unknown trail added a zest to this ride. The night world was as quiet as a room. Where one can see less one feels more. The scents of night hung heavy on the still air; the pungency of poplar, the mellowness of balsam, the bland smell of river-water that makes the skin tingle with desire to bathe, the delicate acidity of grass that caused his horse to whicker. The trail alternated ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... ignorant. Lucy was a keen observer, and her epistles were filled with amusing comments on the follies that were daily committed in New York, as well as in Paris, or London. I was delighted with the delicate pungency of her satire, which, however, was totally removed from vulgar scandal. There was nothing in these letters that might not have been uttered in a drawing-room, to any but the persons concerned; and yet they were filled with a humour that rose often to wit, relieved by a tact and ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... are really delirious they do not remember, but you were only slightly delirious ... you were maddened by the pain occasioned by the pungency of ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... the jack rabbits," she rallied herself shakily, when she was safely hidden behind a sagebush whose pungency made her horribly afraid that she might sneeze, which would be ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... What are all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now? The critics and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... woe, which, as he shrieked again and again, was a just judgment on him for his wilfulness and ferocity. The surgeon talked, of course, learnedly about melancholic humors, and his liver's being "adust by the over-pungency of the animal spirits," and then fell back on the universal panacea of blood-letting, which he effected with fear and trembling during a short interval of prostration; encouraged by which he attempted to administer a large bolus of aloes, was knocked down for ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Family (published by Phillips, Sampson, and Co., Boston), is a new novel by the author of Margaret, the original and erratic New England story, which established the reputation of the writer as a shrewd delineator of manners, a watchful observer of nature, a satirist of considerable pungency, and a profound thinker on social and religious topics. Richard Edney is of the same stamp with that unique production. It has all its willful perversity, but with less ability. It is not so fresh and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... to her, and then as she passed, turn to gaze after her with feminine analysis and admiration for every detail of her attire. Then came "Uncle Tom" looking men, driving wagons loaded with newly-riven rails, breathing the virile pungency of freshly-cut oak. Occasionally an old white man or woman rode by, greeting her with ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... though the editor may be. But in the case of a confessedly "satirical" journal the danger is enormously increased, for the margin between "fair comment" and flat libel shrinks strangely when the raison d'etre of the criticism is pungency, and the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... South American species, grandiflora, was introduced and supplanted it. This berry is naturally much larger and sweeter, and better adapted to the English climate, than our Virginiana. Hence the English strawberries of to-day surpass ours in these respects, but are wanting in that aromatic pungency that characterizes most ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... muddy confusion of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony—these never desert her (though she wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So great is her self-possession that ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Clementi's "Sonatinas," the child had made a rash adventure upon life in the company of a half-bred hawbuck; and she was already not only regretting it, but expressing her regret with point and pungency. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that pervades the place, acting as an orchestral accompaniment to the chorus of human voices. Listen to it all, breathe it all, let your noses and your ears take it all in. Then let your eyes and your imagination have their turn before the pungency of rank tobacco adds to the difficulty of seeing and breathing. And so we look, and we find there are sixty human beings of both sexes and various ages in that kitchen. Some of them we know, for have we not seen them in Cheapside, St. Paul's Churchyard, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... said here is this: the three qualities exist in even the immobile objects of the universe. As regards Darkness, it predominates in them. As regards Passion, it dwells in such properties of theirs as pungency, sourness, sweetness, etc, which change with time or in consequence of cooking or through admixture. Their only properties are said to appertain to Goodness. Tiryagbhavagatam is explained by Nilakantha as adhikyam gatam. Telang thinks this is unwarrantable. His own version, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... appear to betray;—for the truth is, were I not as liberal and as candid in respect to my own productions, as I hope I am to others, I could not have been gratified by the present circumstance; for the marginal notes of the noble author convey no flattery;—but amidst their pungency, and sometimes their truth, the circumstance that a man of genius could reperuse this slight effusion at two different periods of his life, was a sufficient authority, at least for an author, to return it once ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... controversy which eventuated in the Disruption, of three separate pamphlets, each bearing the title, "Cracks about the Kirk, for Country Folks." Two of these pamphlets, written in "broad Scotch," were remarkable for their pungency and effective banter. Although published anonymously, it was generally known that these pamphlets owed their existence to "young Norman," and they contributed very materially to establish his growing fame as a writer and preacher. During the memorable ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... The pungency of extreme grief acts as a temporary opiate: for a short time it lulls the sufferer to insensibility, and sleep; but it is only to recruit him and awaken him to ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... type of character was Mr. Nathan Gore, of Massachusetts, a handsome man with a grey beard, a straight, sharply cut nose, and a fine, penetrating eye; in his youth a successful poet whose satires made a noise in their day, and are still remembered for the pungency and wit of a few verses; then a deep student in Europe for many years, until his famous "History of Spain in America" placed him instantly at the head of American historians, and made him minister at Madrid, where he remained four years to his entire satisfaction, this ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... of small octavo size, each number contained about one hundred pages, and was illustrated with a fine portrait of an actor or actress. The regular performances at the theatres were criticised with a good deal of pungency and acumen. It is said in the preface that "London boasts several periodical publications founded on the Drama alone. In America there has not yet been one of that description." In January, 1811, the magazine changed hands, and was published by Thomas Barton ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... Edinburgh Review is undeniable, but temperamentally he was inclined to give any writer a fair chance to stir his emotions; and he did not adopt the magisterial mood that dictated the famous remark, "This will never do." Scott's style lacked the adroitness and pungency which helped Jeffrey successfully to take the attitude of the censor, and which made his satire triumphant among his contemporaries. Scott declined, moreover, to cultivate skill in a method which he considered ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... smoke at meals, but a monster assured me that Gorgonzola best survives this malpractice. Clearly, some pungency is necessary, and confidence suggests rather Cacio which would ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... science is only the handmaid of his ethics; his wood-lore is the foil of his moral and intellectual teachings. His observations are frequently at fault, or wholly wide of the mark; but the flower or specimen that he brings you always "comes laden with a thought." There is a tang and a pungency to nearly everything he published; the personal quality which flavors it is like the formic acid which the bee infuses into the nectar he gets from the flower, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... offended scandalously... the hearers would be all drowned in tears, as if the admonition had been, as indeed he would with much artifice make it be directed unto them all; but such would be the compassion, and yet the gravity, the majesty, the scriptural and awful pungency of these his dispensations, that the conscience of the offender himself, could make no resistance thereunto." [Footnote: Magnalia, bk. 4, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... abdomen, stretching the hip- cloth out with their fingers so that he might breathe more easily. For the first time Genevieve saw the stomach-breathing of a man, an abdomen that rose and fell far more with every breath than her breast rose and fell after she had run for a car. The pungency of ammonia bit her nostrils, wafted to her from the soaked sponge wherefrom he breathed the fiery fumes that cleared his brain. He gargled his mouth and throat, took a suck at a divided lemon, and all the while the ...
— The Game • Jack London
... a wrathful and uneasy Minister, not yet overthrown, shortly took stringent measures against the 'liberty' of the stage; measures by which a political stage censorship was formally established, and the topical gaiety of our theatre, and the pungency of our ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... and sparkle. But their quality of a new literary tone and spirit is very evident. The ease and fun of these bright prolusions, without impudence or coarseness, the poetic touch and refinement, were as unmistakable as the brisk pungency of the gibe. The stately and scholarly Boston of Channing, Dana, Everett, and Ticknor might indeed have looked askance at the literary claims of such lines as these "Thoughts in Dejection" of ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... held to be a Roland of sufficient pungency for de Vere's Oliver. Everyone laughed. And then the two youngsters betook themselves to a humorous puffing of the miscellaneous contents of the store: tulip-beds of gorgeous Crimean shirts, boots, books, tobacco, canvas slippers, pocket-knives, Epsom salts, ...
— Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales • Rolf Boldrewood
... Charlotte Bronte's; I think that a narrative writer, a humorous writer, a critical writer, a biographical writer may continue to improve until his faculties begin to decay. He may get a wider, a more penetrating, a more tolerant view of life; his style gain lucidity, impressiveness, incisiveness, pungency; but in the case of the poetical and the reflective writer it seems to me that something evaporates—some quite peculiar freshness, naivete, indiscreetness, which, can never be recaptured. Take a few typical instances. Coleridge lost the poetical gift altogether when he left his youth ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... buy his own snuff, it would give him no sensation. The strongest would not make him sneeze, or wring from the sensibility of his eyes the smallest tribute to its pungency. He would turn up his nose at it, or, at the best, use it as sand-dust to receipt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... an orchestra, each instrument holding a part of its own, all interwoven to a harmonious whole; an orchestra of strings, be it added, for even the Proudfits' motor fails to introduce a note of brass.... With the wholesome pungency of humor that pervades it all, the book cannot fail to find a welcome."—New ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... a prelude, bright and childlike; her hands, that had just now twisted and twined the aromatic greenery, exhaled the pungency of crushed herbage, and recalled her old girlish ramblings through the wildness of the Paradou. Then there came a flutelike song, a song of short musky notes, rising from the violets that lay upon the table near the head of the bed; and this flutelike strain, trilling melodiously to the soft accompaniment ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... their efficacy. Mansion and man are large alike, and alike overflowing with hospitality and kindliness. His original and poignant conversation is so joyous and good-humored, the making every body happy is so evidently his predominant taste, that the pungency only adds to the flavor of his talk, and never casts a moment's shade over its ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... surface of the body invested the exposed or partially clad parts with a wreath of vapour. The air had a perceptible pungency upon inspiration, but I could not perceive the painful sensation which has been spoken of by some Siberian travellers. When breathed for any length of time, it imparted a sensation of dryness to the air-passages. I noticed that, as ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... Mary, who really was delighted with the pungency of her own composition. "Mayhap we may have a point ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Indian-pudding. Add to this a red-eyed dog, that seems to be a savage representative of a Scotch colley,—a lean, wrinkled, dark-faced woman, who is unwinding the bandages from a squalling Bambino,—a mixed odor of garlic and of goats, that is quickened with an ammoniacal pungency,—and you may form some idea of the home of a small Roman farmer in our day. It falls away from the standard of Cato; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... instant one goes to put his hand upon it, he is sure to find it or feel it somewhere else. The wit of Benedick, on the other hand, springs more from reflection, and grows with the growth of thought. With all the pungency, and nearly all the pleasantry of hers, it has less of spontaneous volubility. Hence in their skirmishes she always gets the better of him; hitting him so swiftly, and in so many spots, as to bewilder his aim. But he makes ample amends ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... nodded at Mrs. Leverett's reasoning, adding the pungency of her sniff. Betty's heart dropped like lead. True, she had not really counted ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... contradictions. He can no more define liberty than he can locate his soul. Mr. D. G. Ritchie truly says: "Many crimes have been done, and a still greater amount of nonsense talked in the name of liberty."[27] Seeley, with as much justice as pungency, asserts that some writers "teach us to call by the name of liberty whatever in politics we want," and so lead us to disguise our selfishness and cowardice in the stolen garb of moral principle.[28] At any rate, there is urgent need that before ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... of rather spiteful gossip, of which Gibbon was the subject in Switzerland about this time. Rousseau and his friend Moultou have preserved it for us, and it is probable that it has lost none of its pungency in passing through the hands of the latter. The substance of it is this:—that in the year 1763, when Gibbon revisited Lausanne, as we have seen, Susanne Curchod was still in a pitiable state of melancholy and well nigh broken-hearted at Gibbon's manifest coldness, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... Polyporus cristatus, Fr., Polyporus poripes, Fr., which, when raw, tastes like the best chestnuts or filberts, but is rather too dry when cooked. Polyporus Berkeleii, Fr., is intensely pungent when raw, but when young, and before the pores are visible, it may be eaten with impunity, all its pungency being dissipated by cooking. Polyporus confluens, Fr., he considers superior, and, in fact, quite a favourite. Polyporus sulfureus, Fr., which is not eaten in Europe, he considers just tolerably safe, but not to be coveted. It is by no means to be ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... sustenance under given difficulties of famine or drought. Lastly you will consider what chemical actions appear to be going on in the root, or its store; what processes there are, and elements, which give pungency to the radish, flavour to the onion, or sweetness to the liquorice; and of what service each root may be made capable under cultivation, and by proper subsequent treatment, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Foster house, though others put it down to sheer, reckless mischief. And today, as he made his fire between two stones—a smoldering, evil-smelling fire of sagebrush—the smoke kept running up his clothes and choking his lungs with its pungency. And the fat bacon which he cut turned his stomach. At last he sat down, forgetting the bacon in the pan, forgetting the long fast and the hard ride which had preceded this meal, and stared ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... Venus shone out with mellow brilliance a little to the right of the church. The air was full of bush scents, and somewhere, not far from where I stood, dead brushwood was burning and diffusing abroad the aromatic pungency that fire draws from ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... each orator being affectionately tugged to the pedestal and set on end by his special constituency. Every speech was good, without exception; with the queerest oddities of phrase and pronunciation, there was an invariable enthusiasm, a pungency of statement, and an understanding of the points at issue, which made them all rather thrilling. Those long-winded slaves in "Among the Pines" seemed rather fictitious and literary in comparison. The most eloquent, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... certain fly that is a great pillager of honey, so that when the real fly comes it thinks that the flowers are bespoke, and goes on elsewhere. Some are so clever as even to overreach themselves, like the horse-radish, which gets pulled up and eaten for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself against underground enemies. If, on the other hand, they think that any insect can be of service to them, see how ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... repetition. Come to them often as you will, they are ever fresh as though new minted from the brain of the poet. Being perfect, they can never droop under that satiety which arises from the perception of fault; their virtue can never be so entirely savoured as to leave no pungency of gusto ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... was more dilatory than usual, a whim seized the company to write epitaphs on him, as "The late Dr. Goldsmith," and several were thrown off in a playful vein, hitting off his peculiarities. The only one extant was written by Garrick, and has been preserved, very probably, by its pungency: ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... constitution of 1782. The exciting cause of contest was the wrath of Flood at seeing the laurels which he had relinquished seized by a younger champion, and the daring, yet justified confidence of Grattan in his own admirable powers to win and wear them. Flood, in the bitterest pungency of political epigram, charged Grattan with having sold himself to the people, and then sold the people to the minister for prompt payment. (A vote of L50,000 had been passed to purchase an estate for Grattan.) Grattan retorted, that "Flood, after having ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... bluff-bowed boats that look like coffins. On these ashen, weather-beaten features indigence was drawn in its most ghastly outlines. Every eye was aglow with the wild gleam of fever; and the odors that came from clothes, here, had not the vigorous pungency of the open seashore, but the subtle nausea of swamp land and the infectious muck of stagnant pools. The bags these women were emptying on the tables were squirming masses of life. As the eels came out they twisted into rings of black slime, or wriggled on their white ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... thinks nothing profitable that is not painful; it has great suspicion of facility. My appetite, in various things, has of its own accord happily enough accommodated itself to the health of my stomach. Relish and pungency in sauces were pleasant to me when young; my stomach disliking them since, my taste incontinently followed. Wine is hurtful to sick people, and 'tis the first thing that my mouth then finds distasteful, and with an invincible dislike. Whatever I take against my liking ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Assumption. Here and there was a boat, with a boy or an old man asleep in the bottom of it. The gulls sailed high, white flakes against the illimitable blue of the heavens; the air, though it was of early spring, and in the shade had a salty pungency, was here almost languorously warm; in the motionless splendors and rich colors of the scene there was a melancholy before which Mrs. Vervain fell fitfully silent. Now and then Ferris briefly spoke, calling Miss Vervain's ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... chosen period. The gods smiled upon him then if ever. The time of the chase, the season of the buck and the doe, and of the ripening of all forest fruits; the time when all men are incipient hunters, when the first frosts have given pungency to the air, when to be abroad on the hills or in the woods is a delight that both old and young feel,—if the red aborigine ever had his summer of fullness and contentment, it must have been at this season, and ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... stock company was imported early this morning from Ireland. All very good Shakspearian actors with a taste of a brogue to give their remarks pungency. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... guano on analysis—especially among retail buyers—did not largely obtain in the early years of the trade. A good deal of this adulteration was probably caused by ignorant prejudice on the part of the farmer, to whom the pungency of its smell and its colour were too apt to be ranked as its most important properties. The variation in the quality of different kinds of guano was too often not sufficiently realised by the buyer, who not unfrequently was made to pay as high a price for guano of an inferior quality as he ought ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... Our authority for the remark of the Parisian doctor, Pierre Cornu, is Farel, in a MS. note to a hitherto inedited letter of Pauvan, and in his speech at the discussion at Lausanne. Herminjard, i. 293, 294. Farel's application was not without pungency: "Votre foi est-elle si bien fondee qu'un jeune fils, qui encore n'avoit point de barbe, vous ait fait tant de dommage, sans avoir tant etudie ne veu, sans avoir aucun degre, et vous etiez tant?" The admirer of heroic fortitude will scarcely subscribe to the words of the Jesuit ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... rebuke, which probably lost nothing of its pungency from the tone in which it was delivered, so incensed the pope that he attempted to seize the paper and tear it in pieces, giving vent at the same time to the most indecent reproaches against the minister and his ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... of adjustment. It was Paris in its essence—the thing in itself—and it had all come unedited through the hands of a mother and a sister who were so rapt or so subservient as to be incapable of offering opposition to the full pungency of the Parisian evangel, and of hushing down an emphatic text for acceptance in a more quiet environment. I can only say that several nice young chaps looked once and then looked away. Raymond himself was inconvenienced. Nor did matters mend when, within a week or so, Mrs. Raymond Prince began ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress. The matter is completely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps his ideas are altogether so marked and individual, as to require their point and pungency to be neutralized by the affectation of a singular but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked out in the prevailing costume, they would probably seem more startling and out of the way. The old English authors, Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... dancer, did not want for more essential graces. Very sprightly, very pretty and intelligent; not without piquancy and pungency: the King himself has been known to take tea with her in mixed society, though nothing more; and with passionate young gentlemen she was very successful. Not long after her coming to Berlin, she made conquest of Cocceji, the celebrated Chancellor's ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fibres, whitish on the outside, and white within. The thick, outer covering separates readily, and should be removed when the root is eaten in its crude state. It possesses a nutty flavor; but is inferior to the true Rampion, having a slight pungency. If required as a raw salad, it should be eaten while young. When the roots have attained their full size, they are usually dressed in the manner of ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... old gentleman considerably changed. There were, occasionally, flashes of his former customary, sarcastic pungency; now and again he would rouse himself to be ill-natured, antagonistic, and self-willed. But old age and illness had sadly told upon him; and he was content for the most part to express his humour by little ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... the Post Office, surrounded by the flower sellers with their bunches of exuberant waratah, feathery wattle and sweet, sober-looking boronia, she let her mind travel back to Lashnagar and the acrid smoke of the green-wood fires, the pungency of the fish, the sharp tang of the salt winds pushed the heavy perfume of flowers aside. In a moment the last six weeks of mad, unhappy dreaming and hoping vanished; she saw herself back again in her own sphere among her own people. She tried ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... and little incidents that give variety to the performance. No drama would be complete without a few diversions. So far as the drama itself goes, they are of no great importance except to give pungency and interest ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... quite sure that they will be any better there than they were before. Every form of literary art must be a symbol of some phase of the human spirit; but whereas the phase is, in human life, sufficiently convincing in itself, in art it must have a certain pungency and neatness of form, to compensate for its lack of reality. Thus any set of young people round a tea-table may have all the comedy emotions of 'Much Ado about Nothing' or 'Northanger Abbey,' but if their actual conversation were reported, it would possibly not be a ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... as Morgan Rattler of "Fraser's Magazine"—died in London on the 13th of August. Mr. Banks, though only in his forty-fifth year, was the last of the race of writers, who, with Dr. Maginn, Mr. Churchill, and others, gave a sting and pungency (of a vicious and unwholesome kind however), to the early numbers of that journal. He seldom did justice to his own talents, for he wrote too often in haste, always at the last moment, and too rarely with good taste. He was by profession a barrister. The world at ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... her whatever effect I produced in either part. She had great comic as well as pathetic power, and the incisive point of her delivery gave every shade of meaning of the dialogue with admirable truth and pungency; her own performance of Mrs. Oakley had been excellent; I acted it, even with the advantage of her teaching, very tamely. Jealousy, in any shape, was not a passion that I sympathized with; the tragic ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... contradict." Now that "dandies are outmoded" and everybody is "a philosopher," "they are philosophers." It is essential to be like all the rest of the world. But that which they best appreciate in the new materialism is the pungency of paradox and the freedom given to pleasure. They are like the boys of good families, fond of playing tricks on their ecclesiastical preceptor. They take out of learned theories just what is wanted to make a dunce-cap, and derive the more amusement ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are, to him, burning and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... do over the edifying pages of a novel, merely for relaxation and innocent amusement, do singularly delight in treasons, executions, Sabine rapes, Tarquin outrages, conflagrations, murders, and all the other catalogues of hideous crimes, which, like cayenne in cookery, do give a pungency and flavor to the dull detail of history; while a fourth class, of more philosophic habits, do diligently pore over the musty chronicles of time, to investigate the operations of the human kind, and watch the gradual changes in men and manners, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... substance it was) by Browning, who has thus given to the poem a tone of pleasant colloquialism. Told as it is, it becomes in part a dramatic monologue of which the dramatis persona is Robert Browning. It is full of quiet, sometimes grim, humour; of picturesque and witty touches; of pungency and irony. Its manner, the humorous telling of a tragic tale, is a little after the pattern of Carlyle. In such a setting the tragic episodes, sometimes all but heroic, sometimes almost grotesque, have ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... meadowsweet and yellow flags in the pasture beyond. All this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to her on mingled currents of fragrance. Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalation to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... lovely natural grove, where the air was spiced with the gentle pungency of the young hickory foliage, the train paused a moment to let off a man in fine gray cloth, whose yellow stripes and one golden star on the coat-collar indicated a major of cavalry. It seemed as though pandemonium had opened. Mules braying, negroes yodling, axes ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... was growing at the upper part of the creek on which we were encamped last night. Its fruit was two inches in diameter, with longitudinal ribs, scarlet red, and very eatable when dropt from the tree, but when gathered on the tree, it had an aromatic pungency. This tree was very common along the well watered creeks of Arnheim's Land; particularly along the South Alligator River, and at Raffles Bay. Brown brought from the same locality a Melastoma, which, according to him, was a shrub, three or four ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... morning air was snell and sharp; there was an earthy aroma which suggested nothing but decaying vegetable matter, but soon it was succeeded by a pungent penetrating odour which made one wonder whence its source. This pungency remained for the remainder of the morning's ride, almost to the top of the mountain pass, some 9000 feet above sea-level, and we ascertained on our return that it proceeded from the enormous cabbages grown by the mountaineers ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... pitched at, say 56, 58, or 60 degrees will by this time have increased to 80, or even more, and the specific gravity of the wort diminished from 26 or 27 pound per barrel, to six or seven pound per barrel; this attenuation will give it all the pungency and spirituosity it stands in need of. At this time your cleansing operation commences; after which it will work but little in the casks. It should be filled regularly every two or three hours, after cleansing, for the first twenty-four. After it has done working, you should immediately start ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... And even censurers excuse the woes in me they see: O thou whose love hath gotten hold the foremost in the heart * Of me whose fondness is excelled by mine insanity: Fear the Compassionate in my case and some compassion show! * Love of thee makes me taste of death in bitterest pungency." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... smell of perfume in the room, a heavy voluptuous smell in which the odour of sandal-wood mingled with the pungency of myrrh. It was very silent, so that when Grantham mixed a drink the pleasant chink of glass upon ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... constantly aims to increase their piquancy. By crossing and selection he deepens and intensifies the scents and hues of flowers, the tastes of fruits, and so on. He pursues the same method in poetry,—that is, strives for strong light or shade, for high color, perfume, pungency, in all ways for the greatest immediate effect. In so doing he leaves the true way, the way of Nature, and, in the long run, comes far ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... of interest and perpetual entertainment, for the constant surprises of an unique species of wit, for happy and unexpected turns of phrase, for graphic characterisation and clever anecdote, for playfulness, pungency, irony, persiflage, there is nothing like his letters in English.' A collected edition of his works, edited by Mary Berry, under the name of her father, Robert Berry, was published in 1798 in ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... admit it, shared to some extent Hilditch's passionate interest in his fellow-creatures, and notwithstanding the strange confusion of thought into which he had been thrown during the last twenty-four hours, he felt something of the pungency of life, the thrill of new and appealing surroundings, as he sat in his high-backed chair, sipping his wonderful wine, eating almost mechanically what was set before him, fascinated through all his being by his ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Crockfordians seemed to be composed exclusively of the riff-raff of same. They wore green shirts with a bright yellow leopard over the heart, and C.F.C. woven in large letters about the chest. One or two of the outsides played in caps, and the team to a man criticized the referee's decisions with point and pungency. Unluckily, the first year saw a weak team of Austinians rather badly beaten, with the result that it became a point of honour to wipe this off the slate before the fixture could be cut out of the card. The next year was also unlucky. The Bargees managed to score a penalty ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... better, simply to plant ourselves upon the moral nature of man, and the irreversible dictates of common sense, and annihilate the speculations of the atheist, than to endeavour to parry them off by such invented quibbles and sophisms. They give point, and pungency, and power to the shafts of the sceptic. If we meet him on the common ground of necessity, he will snap all such quibbles like threads of tow, and overwhelm us with the floods of irony and scorn. For, in the memorable words of Sir William Hamilton, "It can easily be proved by those who are ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... voudrez, ca m'est egal! il s'agit pour moi d'avoir du talent, et voila tout! But, as we have seen, he has undergone various influences, he has had his periods. From the first he has had a style of singular pungency, novelty, and colour; and, even in Le Drageoir a Epices, we find such daring combinations as this (Camaieu Rouge)—Cette fanfare de rouge m'etourdissait; cette gamme d'une intensite furieuse, d'une violence inouie, m'aveuglait. Working upon the foundation of Flaubert and of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... just as a profusion of figures and metaphors sometimes tempted this great orator into incongruous images and coarse analogies, so his passion for irony was occasionally too intense. Hence, there are occasions where his pungency is embittered into acrimony, strength degenerates into vulgarism, and the vehemence of satire is infuriated with ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... no adequate sense of the strength and pungency of her younger sister's spirit, but who would not in any event have hesitated to rush on an individual martyrdom that might secure some consideration for the collective family—threw herself into ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... of Retaliation, was published after his death. This hypothetical account receives some confirmation from the fact that the scheme of the poem and its component parts do not fit together well; the introduction looks like an after-thought; and has not the freedom and pungency of a piece of improvisation. An imaginary dinner is described, the guests being Garrick, Reynolds, Burke, Cumberland, and the rest of them, Goldsmith last of all. More wine is called for, until the whole of his companions have fallen ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... was on a yet higher level than this, embodying in it a concentrated pungency and a curiosa felicitas which were quite in the vein of Horace, but contain a thought not present in the original. They were comprised in these ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... chroniquear, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable influence for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some pungency for dull people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms the rare utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the antidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Luculluses of the day, who could afford to pay for its rearing. The small sneezing plant, a vegetable smelling-bottle, is still employed in headach by the common people of Sicily, who bruise the leaves and sniff their pungency: its vulgar name, malupertusu, is the corruption of Marum del Cortuso, as we find it in the ancient herbal of Durante. The Ferula communis or Saracinisca, a legacy left to the Sicilian pedagogues by their eastern ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... denominations, or preached in the sermons of heretical clergymen. He found it impossible to think of her in connection with those denunciations of sinners for which his discourses had been noted. Some of the sharp old church-members began to complain that his exhortations were losing their pungency. The truth was, he was preaching for Myrtle Hazard. He was getting bewitched and driven beside himself by the intoxication of his ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... path, an orange-coloured scrap with a broken stem, dropped from some coolie's necklace. Hilda picked it up and drew in the crude, warm pungency of its smell. She closed her eyes and drifted on the odour, forgetting her speculations, losing her feet. All India and all her passion was in that violent, penetrating fragrance; it brought her, as she gave her senses up to it, a kind of ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their reward." Like so many solitaries, he experienced the joy of intense, long-continued effort in composition, and he was artist enough to know that his pages, carefully assembled from his note books, had pungency, form, atmosphere. No man of his day, not even Lowell the "last of the bookmen," abandoned himself more unreservedly to the delight of reading. Thoreau was an accomplished scholar in the Greek and Roman classics, as his translations attest. He had some acquaintance with several ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... remarkable. I could not understand, for example, just how your wife proposed to have you keep out of her sight forever and still have supper with her to-night; nor why she should desire to sup with such a reprobate as she described with unbridled pungency ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Kathleen, up till that morning, had never been at close quarters with more than one dog at a time, and had never seen more than about a dozen dogs outside their own breed altogether. The noise of barking, the pungency and variety of smells, and the crowded multiplicity of doggy personalities were at first overpowering, and Finn and his sister walked with lowered tails, quick-shifting eyes, raised hackles, and twitching skin. But pride of race, and the self-confidence which goes with exceptional strength, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... sometimes on week days. Susan who was more about and could often get five minutes with me slyly, threw herself in my way, got it when and where she could, and had it once or twice daily. I was not loth. The excitement of two cunts and a certain pungency in the position stimulated me. I have seen the two standing side by side, each at the same moment with my spunk in them, yet neither knowing the other's condition. At times before I had washed my prick after one sister, I was ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... person towards whom duties are to be acknowledged—the genuine crim. con. antagonist of the villainous seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate match must have the downright pungency of life—must (or should) make you not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you in a neighbour ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... graceful movement. He was explaining in clean cut, and evidently memorised speech the details of the movements he wished executed, but through his more formal and memorised vocabulary his native cockney would occasionally erupt, adding vastly to the pungency and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... Terje Vigen is unique as a piece of pure sentimentality carried right rough without one divagation into irony or pungency. It is the story of a much-injured and revengeful Norse pilot, who, having the chance to drown his old enemies, Milord and Milady, saves them at the mute appeal of their blue-eyed English baby. Terje Vigen is a masterpiece of ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Ossaroo stated that it is usually cultivated under a shed made of bamboos, and wattled all around the sides to exclude the strong rays of the sun. The plant requires heat and a damp atmosphere, but exposure to the sun or dry winds would wither it, and destroy the flavour and pungency of the leaf. It requires great care in the cultivation, and every day a man enters the shed by a little door and carefully cleans the plants. The shed where it grows is usually a favourite lurking-place for poisonous snakes, and this diurnal visit of the ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... the lower and back Part of the Neck, as well as to the Part affected. If the Disease has seiz'd the Thighs, Legs, or Feet, the Application must not only be made to them, but likewise to the Back Bone, at the Loins. As this Medicine cannot, on account of it's Volatility and Pungency, be properly applied to the Whole, of a Paralytic Limb at once, but only to a small Part of it, the Application therefore may be made sometimes to one Part, and sometimes to another, as ...
— An Account of the Extraordinary Medicinal Fluid, called Aether. • Matthew Turner
... to consciousness with the pungency of the ammonia reeking through his head, he found himself lying on very soft pillows in a very big white sunny kitchen, where everything was scoured to a brightness that dazzled you. Bending over him was a tall, gaunt woman with a thin, determined face and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... putrefaction. Here in the tropics, under a brazen sun, all unclean things turn to putrid filthy life within the hour; and in a native gaol the atmosphere is heavy with the fumes and rottenness of the offal of years, and the reeking pungency of offal that is new. No ventilation can penetrate into the fetid airless cells, nor could the veriest hurricane purge the odours bred ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... before read such a mixture of the bombastic and the burlesque? We are called upon to cry over every joke, and, for the life of us, we cannot hold our sides when the catastrophes occur. It is a salad in which the pungency of the vinegar has been wholly subdued by the oil, and the fatness of the oil destroyed by the tartness ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Cape Mount, of several sorts, Maboobo, Massaaba, Massa, Amquona, Tosan, &c.; the three first are of a weaker flavour, and are oblong and angular in their seeds; but the last excels in pungency, and is the native Malaguetta ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... dull. We are perfectly confident, that, beyond those two classes, no speaker can ever expect to retain the ear of the House. Our theory, however, is not the favourite one with that crowd, whose diatribes nightly fill the columns of the newspapers; where bitterness is perpetually mistaken for pungency, and petulance for power, dryness for business and commonplace for conviction. But failure is the inevitable consequence; the archer showers his shafts in vain; they are pointed with lead, and they always fall blunt on the ground. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... either still or brisk. There are the sparkling wines (mousseux), and the still wines (non-mousseux). The brisk are in general the most highly esteemed, or, at least, are the most popular in this country, on account of their delicate flavour and the agreeable pungency which they derive from the carbonic acid they contain, and to which they ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... from a species of vinagrilla, about the size of a billiard ball, which grows in dry and sterile soil. The natives chew it, and throw it into a wooden mortar, where it is left to ferment, some leaves of tobacco being added to give it pungency. They consume it in this form, sometimes with slices of peyote itself, in their most solemn festivities, although it dulls the intellect and induces gloomy and hurtful visions ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... a pint of beer may be added. Simmer for half an hour, and serve in a deep dish. The herbs to be used should be burnet, tarragon, parsley, thyme, basil, savoury, marjoram, pennyroyal, knotted marjoram, and some chives; a good handful all together. But observe to proportion the quantities to the pungency of the several sorts. Garnish with carrots, turnips, or truffles and morels, or pickles of different colours, cut small, and laid in little heaps separate. Chopped parsley, chives, and beet root may be added. If there ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... grows up, unprovided for by you in its early life; and profligacy mark his pathway, and demon guilt throw its chains around him in the prison cell; and he trace back the beginning of his ruin to your unfaithfulness, oh, with what pungency would the reflection send the pang ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... most part our walks and observations keep us within the more urban quarters of Lucerne. From a number of beautifully printed placards at the street corners, adorned with caricatures of considerable pungency, we discover an odd little election is in progress. This is the selection, upon strictly democratic lines, with a suffrage that includes every permanent resident in the Lucerne ward over the age of fifteen, of the ugliest local ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... and pickles owe their value to acidity; while mustard, pepper black and red, ginger, curry-powder, and horse-radish all depend chiefly upon pungency. Under the head of aromatic condiments are ranged cinnamon, nutmegs, cloves, allspice, mint, thyme, fennel, sage, parsley, vanilla, leeks, onions, shallots, garlic, and others, all of them entering into the composition of ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... native sweet-pea, are fragrant. A lowly creeping plant (VITEX TRIFOLIA), with small spikes of lavender-coloured flowers, and grey-green silvery leaves, mingles with the coarse grasses of the sandy flats, and usurping broad areas forms an aromatic carpet from which every footstep expresses a homely pungency as of marjoram and sage. The odour of the island may be specific, and therefore to be prized, yet it gladdens also because it awakens happy and all too fleeting reminiscences. English fields and hedges cannot be forgotten when one of our trees diffuses the scent of meadow-sweet, and one ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... sharpnes of his afflictions, (than which few men underwent sharper) I dare say, I know it, (I am sure conscientiously I say it) tho' God dealt with him, as he did with St. Paul, not remove the thorn, yet he made his grace sufficient to take away the pungency of it: for he made as sanctified an use of his afflictions, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... somewhere in a thin, tattling voice. The soda fountain, fountain pen, the picture postcard, the umbrella, and the face-powder demonstrator had not yet invaded here. Isaac Neugass, Chemist—was just that. His walls were lined in labeled jars of panacea. The pungency of valerianate of ammonia smote the entrant. He pummeled his own pills, percolated his own paregoric, prescribed for neighborhood miseries from an invariable bottle that was slow, sluggish, and malodorous in the pouring, anointed the neighborhood bruises, and extracted, always gratis, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... slightest stain should remain on her smooth, fine-textured skin. She felt, as a pretty woman always feels, that her personality was indissolubly connected with her looks, and it was a symbolic act which she performed as she fiercely scrubbed her face with the yellow soap till its acrid pungency blotted out for her the woodland aroma of moist earth and green leaves. She dashed the cold water up on her cheeks till the spattering drops gleamed like crystals on the crisp waviness of her ruddy brown hair. She washed her hands and arms in the icy mountain water till ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... bodily sacrifices denote the inward sacrifice of the heart, whereby man offers his soul to God. But in the inward sacrifice, the sweetness, which is denoted by honey, surpasses the pungency which salt represents; for it is written (Ecclus. 24:27): "My spirit is sweet above honey." Therefore it was unbecoming that the use of honey, and of leaven which makes bread savory, should be forbidden in a sacrifice; while the use was prescribed, of salt which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... the age and quality of the brandy than there was in regard to the negro trader's birthplace. Major Frampton might or might not have been born in the Old Dominion—that was a matter for consideration and inquiry—but there could be no question as to the mellow pungency of the peach-brandy. ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... pleasure of picking out the best and cheapest bundle of rhubarb, or lettuce, the biggest and hardest cabbage, the most appetising rasher; they compared notes, and bantered each other on purchases. The hot air reeked with odours. From stalls where whelks were sold rose the pungency of vinegar; decaying vegetables trodden under foot blended their putridness with the musty smell of second-hand garments; the grocers' shops were aromatic; above all was distinguishable the acrid exhalation from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... the room, for all the dreary stiffness of their shore-clothes, carried upon their faces, in their hands shaped to the rasp of ropes, in every attitude of their bodies, the ineradicable hall-mark of the sea which was the arena of their lives; they salted the barren place with its vigor and pungency. Pausing within the door, Tom Mowbray sent his pale inexpressive glance flickering along the faces they turned ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... colours and hues of the water, endlessly varying, cool and lovely and delicate, contrasting with the wet washed rocks and the dark line of sea-weed lying where high tide had cast it up. The breeze blew in her face gently, but filled with freshness, life, and pungency of the salt air; sea-birds flew past hither and thither, sometimes uttering a cry; there was no sound in earth or heaven but that of the water and the wild birds. And by and by the silence, and the broad freedom of nature, and the sweet freshness ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... Helen Campbell slept so well as she did that night on the sleeping porch. Toward morning there came a quiet life-giving rain that freshened the parched earth and brought out the pungency of the pine trees. Only Mary knew of the shower and of the soft wind that followed just before dawn, bearing with it the fragrance of the wet woods. Only Mary saw the miracle of the dawn; first the faint flush ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... energy. He does not argue his points systematically, but launches a series of maxims, as with set teeth, clenched hands, and a brow like a thundercloud. He hails the oppressors of his life, the priests and the parliaments, with a pungency that is exhilarating, and winds up with a description of the intolerant as one who forgets that a man is his fellow, and for holding a different opinion, treats him like a ravening brute; as one who sacrifices the spirit and precepts of his religion to his pride; as the rash fool who thinks ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... truth: as is the teacher, so will be the school. Those pupils will graduate, it may be, at our poor-houses, at our county jails, or at the state penitentiary. These debasing and corrupting appendages of civilization spent not all their influence upon the white man; and this is what gave pungency to the withering satire of the chief. They were at once working the ruin of the red man and of his ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... thorough realist, and herein is his strength. In him the comic is a vehicle for satire; and the satire gives pungency and body to the comic. He was primarily a satirist, secondarily a poet. Such being his powers and his aims, helpful to him, nay, needful, was a present Parisian actuality of story and agents. A poetic comedy ought ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert |
