"Stilted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... formed on a reasonably good analogy and in consonance with the general spirit of the language. "Truthful," for example, is said to be an Americanism, and at one time gave offence on that account. It is not only a vast improvement on the stilted "veracious," but one of the prettiest and most thoroughly English ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the kindly editor, and full of wholesome advice, cut like a surgeon's knife in some desperate case when it is a question whether the patient can endure the heroic treatment necessary. Haldane's stilted and unnatural tales had been projected into being by such fiery and violent means that they might almost be termed volcanic in their origin; but the fused mass which was the result, resembled scoria or cinders rather than fine metal shaped into artistic forms. Although ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the room and the newcomer regarded his retiring figure with a twinkle in his eye. Then he took a turn around the room in stilted fashion—like one who "carried about with him his pits, boxes and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... loafers you ever heard of. Why, we just have to carry them and care for them like children. Look yonder," he pointed across the square to the court-house. It was an old square brick-and-stucco building, sombre and stilted and very dirty. Out of it filed a stream of men—some black and shackled; some white and swaggering and liberal with tobacco-juice; some white and shaven and stiff. "Court's just out," pursued Mr. Caldwell, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... heard that the two records might afterward be compared and verified. 'That is,' Mr. Bell had added with the flicker of a smile, 'if we succeed in talking at all!' Well, they did succeed, as you have heard. At first they held only a stilted dialogue and conscientiously jotted it down; but afterward their exuberance got the better of them and in sheer joy they chattered away like magpies until long past midnight. Then, loath to destroy the connection, ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... brother; he wears a beard, but it is the beard of the bearded lady who up-to-date appears to be a useless appanage of the strenuous life; and when you try to get at his Americanism, if he has any, he flies off into stilted periods having to do with the superior virtues of the Cingalese. And Margaret Perkins that was hangs on his utterances as though he were a ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... with impunity, but she passes. She makes her stilted passage across the arena upon which the new womanhood of Western Europe shows its worth. It is an exit. There is likely to be something like a truce in the fashions throughout Europe for some years. It is in America if anywhere that the holy fires of smartness and ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... of Our Conquerors, he vowed, was the finest thing ever written. He scoffed at me for liking Diana and Richard Feverel better, because they were easier. And now, nothing's bad enough for Meredith's 'stilted nonsense'—'characters without a spark of life in them'—'horrible mannerisms'—you should hear him. Except the poems—ah, except the poems! He daren't touch them. I say—do you know the 'Hymn to Colour'?" The girl's eager eyes questioned her companion. Her face in a moment ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... events foregone, the mind is prepared for it. But these men will have nothing but fifth acts; and seem to skip, as unworthy, all the circumstances leading to them. This, however, is part of the scheme—the bloated, unnatural, stilted, spouting, sham sublime, that our teachers have believed and tried to pass off as real, and which your humble servant and other antihumbuggists should heartily, according to the strength that is in them, endeavor to pull down. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... himself, as he returned M. de Bellegarde's greeting. And this was the starting-point of a speculative theory, in his mind, that the late marquis had been a very amiable foreigner, with an inclination to take life easily and a sense that it was difficult for the husband of the stilted little lady by the fire to do so. But if he had taken little comfort in his wife he had taken much in his two younger children, who were after his own heart, while Madame de Bellegarde had paired ...
— The American • Henry James
... Yet, whether it is because the persons entitled to be so addressed do not think that even these mild titles are consistent with American democracy, or because the American public feels awkward in employing such stilted terms of address, they are not often used. I remember that on one occasion a much respected Chief Executive, on my proposing, in accordance with diplomatic usage and precedent, to address him as "Your Excellency", begged me to substitute instead "Mr. President". The plain democratic "Mr." ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... produced no really great poet[29] before Tegner; and that thus, relatively considered, the statement is true. But Tegner seems himself to have been conscious of the strait-jacket in which the old academic rules confined him, for in the middle of the poem he suddenly discards the stilted Alexandrines with which he had commenced and breaks into a rapturous old-Norse chant, the abrupt metres of which recall the fornyrdhalag of the Elder Edda. Soon after "Svea" followed, in 1812, "The Priestly Consecration," the occasion of which was the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... These are the ages when children often experience a change of heart, as all "revivalists" know. Robert Browning was swinging off towards atheism. He grew melancholy, irritable and wrote stanzas of sentimental verse. He showed this verse, high-sounding, stilted, bold and bilious, to his mother and then to his father, and finally to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... had put something more of his sitter than usual. He had painted the soul of the girl in the body of the woman of thirty, and if he rendered his subject in a manner more stilted than usual, he repaid her in the real interest with which her portrait was invested. He liked Olga. He had accepted her warily at first until he had proved to his own satisfaction the disinterestedness of her regard and then he had given her his friendship without reserve, his first ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... remains of old frescoes on the walls; the tomb of a knight who lay still and stiff, his head resting on his hand. I read an epitaph or two, with the faint cry of love and grief echoing through the stilted phraseology of the tomb, and then I went back to ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ridiculously stilted, John turned with a song on his lips and skipped across to the home porch swing, where his mother found him a moment later, and made him come in and get washed ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... the strange and stilted description of the cave of sleep, x. 84, where Quies, Oblivio, Ignavia, Otium, Silentium, Voluptas, and even Labor and Amor are to be found. But with the exception of Amor these abstract personages are inventions of Statius. Virtus and Pietas ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... hares were numerous, and in the thick jungle bordering the tanks in places, and consisting mostly of nurkool and wild rose, hog-deer and wild pig were abundant. The dried-up bed of an old arm of the Koosee was quite close to my camp, and abounded in sandpiper, and golden, grey, goggle-eyed, and stilted ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... think you would be." Mazie, grown suddenly a bit stiff and stilted, was obviously trying to be very polite and "grown up." "There must be an awful lot to do here. Mother says she don't see ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... Mary's reply was, "To my absent, but not forgotten friend," and was simple and natural as girls' letters usually are. My Grandfather Kelly died that season, and I recall that I wrote a letter of condolence to my people, modeled upon one in the book. How absurd and stilted and unreal it must have sounded ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... suppress her fear, she walked, not sideways as always, but erect, her chest thrown out, which gave her figure a droll, stilted air of importance. Her shoes made a knocking sound on the floor, and her ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... sympathies were inactive. This judgment is entirely opposed to our youthful predilections and enthusiasm. The sweet garden-breath of early enjoyment lingers about many a page of the "Night Thoughts," and even of the "Last Day," giving an extrinsic charm to passages of stilted rhetoric and false sentiment; but the sober and repeated reading of maturer years has convinced us that it would hardly be possible to find a more typical instance than Young's poetry, of the mistake which substitutes ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... who is meant to be vulgar and ridiculous, ever condescends to use colloquial speech. Even in moments of extreme peril the heroines are very choice in their diction. Dialogue in Mrs. Radcliffe's world is as stilted and unnatural as that of prim, old-fashioned school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of description, she ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of the mountains, and the breath of the great wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled with thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to translate into the written word. And the result of the effort seemed always to be bathos! Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, obscurity, and awkwardness clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win the great secret of language; the stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished away in clearer light. The periods of despair were often long and heavy, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... in the least denying that librarians are well enough,—that is, might be well enough,—but as things are going to-day, they all seem to contribute, somehow, toward making a library a conscious and stilted place. They hold one up to the surface of things, with books. They make impossible to a man those freedoms of the spirit—those best times of all in a library, when one feels free to find one's mood, when one gets hold of one's divining-rod, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... blue devils at bay, sent him first copies of his books, and sympathised with his views on political matters. M. de Hanski was also much flattered by Balzac's friendship for his wife, and would finish a polite and stilted epistle by saying that he need trouble Balzac no more, as he knows his wife is at the same time writing him one of her long chattering letters. Even when, by sad mischance, two of Balzac's love-letters fell into M. de Hanski's hands, and the great writer ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... is actually to be acted on the English stage it takes away the most indispensable of all qualities, the natural, life-like tone of real speech. Notice this in the difference between the two extracts below. Observe how stilted and artificial the first one seems; and see how the second combines the melody and dignity of poetry with the simple naturalness ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... his fertile imagery, but even here one feels not that sense is lacking, but that one has failed to find the clue to the zigzag movements of Chapman's brain. Nor is it fair to speak of Chapman as dressing up dwarfish thoughts in stilted phrases. There is not the slightest tendency in the play to spin out words to hide a poverty of ideas; in fact many of the difficulties spring from excessive condensation. Where Chapman is really assailable is ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... son, very pretty," murmured Lysbeth, through whose bewildered brain the stilted and meaningless words buzzed like bees in an empty hive, "though I am sure I cannot guess how you find the heart in such times as these to write poetry to fine ladies ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... can boast of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been though worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, the Charadrius himaniopus, with no back toe, and therefore "liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations"! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance in Sussex of "an old family tortoise," which had then been domesticated for thirty ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... once more endured extremity; this second peace again drifting its discharged soldiers on London, so that all kinds of labor were overstocked. Beggars, too, lighted on the walks like locusts. Timber-toed cripples stilted along, numerous as French peasants in sabots. And, as thirty years before, on all sides, the exile had heard the supplicatory cry, not addressed to him, "An honorable scar, your honor, received at Bunker Hill, or Saratoga, or Trenton, fighting for his ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... comes in singing* — And when we asked him what way he'd die, And he hanging unrepented, "Begob," says Larry, "that's all in my eye, By the clergy first invented." SARAH. Give me the jug now, or you'll have it spilt in the ditch. MARY — holding the jug with both her hands, in a stilted voice. — Let you leave me easy, Sarah Casey. I won't spill it, I'm saying. God help you; are you thinking it's frothing full to the brim it is at this hour of the night, and I after carrying it in my two hands a long step from Jemmy ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... one of the paths of the Kleine Rugen. He was walking slowly toward her, his eyes fixed thoughtfully upon the ground. When she accosted him, he was plainly confused, as she had said. After the first few passages in polite though stilted conversation, his keen, grey eyes resumed their thoughtful—it was even ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... certain inconsequence of fancy they were peculiarly unfitted for the practice of a profession which requires drudgery to attain a mastery of its subtle requirements and a preternatural gravity in the application of its stilted jargon to the simplest forms ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the stilted fooling of the period to cover his confusion and to gain time; for the matter was of moment and it had taken him unaware—he did not know ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... untied the stilted Oxfords or buttoned in the arching insteps of those who sat in the "Ladies' and Misses' Dept.," which was the other side of the double-backed bench whose obverse was the "Gents' Dept.," but also he took upon the glistening surface of his trousers ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... With the stilted, slightly stiff-legged gait born of long hours in the saddle and of high-heeled riding boots, he walked unhurriedly to the corral where the boys were just driving in ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... more flexible style than was possessed by any other dramatist of the time, excepting Sheridan, he was influenced to this extent by contemporary usage, that often when he became serious he also became artificial and stilted. The sentimental part of The Heir at Law is trite in plan and hard in expression. Furthermore that portion of it which, in the character of Dr. Pangloss, satirises the indigent, mercenary, disreputable private tutors who constituted a distinct and pernicious ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... it is true, bettered their predecessors to the extent of exchanging a stilted greeting when they met; but this perfunctory salutation was usually hurtled across the historic borderline and was seldom concluded without some reference to it. For Ellen Webster was an aggravating old woman dowered with just enough of the harpy never to be able ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted conventions of the late literary epic. The Iliad is the story of a quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the immediate ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... the crowd was Casimir Joussier,—a little, pale, dark man, between thirty and thirty-five, with a Mongolian cast of countenance, thin, puny, with cold burning eyes, scant hair, and a pointed beard. His power lay not so much in his gesture, which was poor, stilted, and rarely in harmony with the, words,—not so much in his speech, which was raucous and sibilant, with marked pauses for breathing,—as in his personality and the emphatic assurance and force of will which emanated ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... vigorous growth might bring delight into her solitary life, but not flexibility of mind or body. She stood strong and straight like some forest tree, lightning-blasted but still erect. Her dignity became a stilted manner, her social supremacy led her into affectation and sentimental over-refinements; she queened it with her foibles, after the usual fashion of those who allow their ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... sufficient reliance upon his old father, who had travelled for a long time in Germany and had acquired the essentials of our language. As a matter of fact, there was no need for special knowledge in this respect, as the sole problem seemed to be to make the French verses less stiff and stilted which poor Roche had constructed under the shameful control of Lindau, who used to make out that he knew everything better than any one else. The inexhaustible patience with which Truinet proceeded from one change to another in order to satisfy my requirements, even with regard ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... or, better perhaps, your imagination, only hinting that the conclusion has something of dignity that does a little to redeem the volume. But when all is said this is not Miss YOUNG at her best, the characters without exception being unusually stilted, the plot unpleasant, and the South African atmosphere, for which I have gladly praised her before now, so negligible that but for an occasional name and a page or two of railway journey the yarn might as well have been placed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... continuous curve from the spring to the apex, they rise perpendicularly for some distance above the piers on either side, and then take rather an abrupt turn inwards, suggesting the imposition of a pointed heading on an original stilted form. Further signs of alteration appear on the northern side, where the capitals have been recut in the Perpendicular fashion; but the Norman pilasters and mouldings on the south remain untouched. On both sides the double serrated line of moulding claims attention, as an example of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... intended to place statues of saints. He also connected their pedestals with the spring of the vault by a series of inverted curves sweeping upwards along the height of the shallow attic. The omission of these details not only weakened the support given to the arches of the dome, but it also lent a stilted effect to the cupola by abruptly separating the perpendicular lines of the drum and attic from the segment of the vaulting. This is an error which could even now be repaired, if any enterprising Pope undertook ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... diplomacy. It appears that besides the composed and formal dignity of phrase which alone the public knows in published state papers and official correspondence, there is also an official language of wrath and retort not at all artificial or stilted, but quite homelike and human in ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... these lords and ladies spent their time at court, filling idle hours with compliment, love-making, veiled jibe and swift retort; if we read our Euphues again, renewing our acquaintance with its absurdly elaborated and stilted style, its tireless winding of sentences round a topic without any advance in thought, its affectation of philosophy and classical learning; if we remember that to speak euphuistically was a coveted and studiously cultivated accomplishment, and that to pun, to utter ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... New York and London in his queer stilted way. He had been a fireman on board ship, a teacher of jiujitsu, a juggler, a quack dentist, Heaven knows what else. Driven by the conscientious inquisitiveness of his race, he had endured hardships, contempt and rough treatment with the smiling patience inculcated ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make yourself at home—at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform the ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... very stilted, almost melodramatic, but my father was so much in earnest that I readily gave the promise he asked. With a look of relief he took a package from his pocket and handed ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... of the following study is not to revive the reputation of a forgotten author or to suggest that Mrs. Haywood may yet "come into her own." For the lover of eighteenth century fashions her numerous pages have indeed a stilted, early Georgian charm, but with the passing of Ramillies wigs and velveteen small-clothes the popularity of her novels vanished once for all. She had her world in her time, but that world and time disappeared with the French Revolution [a]. Now even professed ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... title Don before a surname. But if the steersman is drawn from life, so are not either the carrack, which is a fragment of the sixteenth century, out of its place, nor 'Don' Ribiera and his sons, nor the bishop, nor anybody else in that ill-fated ship, nor the stilted, transpontine style of their conversation. Francisco and his bible are no more credible than the carrack and the bishop. Francisco's brother and his love affairs are not more credible, though they are decidedly more tolerable. The daughters of Spanish ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... that, promises to visit us quarterly. It is the first fruit of a spirited and apparently well-matured plan set on foot by students in Yale College, and heartily entered into by those of several other institutions. Its objects are clearly stilted in the well-written Prospectus and Introduction. They are briefly these:—"To record the history, promote the intellectual improvement, elevate the moral aims, liberalize the views, and unite the sympathies of Academical, Collegiate, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her heart was very full and she was thinking of other matters. But as he continued she answered at length, hesitating, using phrases as trite and quaintly stilted as the theme itself, gently defending the old names he sneered at. And in her words he savoured a certain old-time flavour of primness and pride—a vaguely delicate hint of resentment, which it amused him to excite. Pacing ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... air of the man with the brown eyes had been that of banter, of impish desire to harry and confuse by stilted language the ignorant stranger who ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... these attacks each in his own way: Mr. Donne with a stilted self-complacency and half-sullen phlegm, the sole props of his otherwise somewhat rickety dignity; Mr. Sweeting with the indifference of a light, easy disposition, which never professed to have any ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the savages was a wandering schoolmaster, named John Filson, [Footnote: Do., John Small to G. R. Clark, June 23, 1786.] the first historian of Kentucky, and the man who took down, and put into his own quaint and absurdly stilted English, Boone's so-called "autobiography." Filson, having drifted west, had travelled up and down the Ohio and Wabash by canoe and boat. He was much struck with the abundance of game of all kinds which he saw on the northwestern side of the Ohio, and especially by the herds ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... said and wrote was brilliant with both these most charming qualities of the human mind. Though sometimes lax in points of grammar, as was much the custom in his day, he wrote as delightful a style as is to be found in all English literature, and that too when the stilted, verbose, and turgid habit was tediously prevalent. He was a man who impressed his ability upon all who met him; so that the abler the man and the more experienced in judging men, the higher did he rate Franklin when brought ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... style and melodious versification to relieve them. They were, for the most part, an ill-digested mass of incongruities, in which there was as little keeping and probability in the characters as in the incidents, while the whole was told in that stilted "Hercles' vein" and with that licentiousness of allusion and imagery which could not fail to debauch both the taste and the morals of the youthful reader. The mind, familiarized with these monstrous, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... forced and stilted to his ears, even while he pressed the little white hand that she put out blindly towards him. He was not sorry for his pledge; he felt that he could have done no less; but Sydney's proud, earnest face flashed before him, and his memory saw it soften and flush with the happy shyness ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... marked in the history of literature. For here was a tongue born which was destined to mate even with that of Greece in richness and flexibility, to make the language of Cicero and Virgil seem stiff and stilted in comparison, and, if not to vie with the French in airy grace, or with the Italian in liquid music, to excel them far in teeming resources and robust energy. Memorable and hallowed for ever be the hour when the 'well of English undefiled' first ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... guided ever by Fifanti's lady. And whatever we read by way of divergence, ever and anon we would come back to the stilted, lucid, vivid pages ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... write to Steve in those days and each time destroyed the badly scored sheet, either in dismay at the wilful intimacy of her pen or disgusted with its stilted aloofness. She saw less and less of Wickersham that winter, partly because his affairs were monopolizing all his time, partly because she managed to spend most of her waking hours with Miriam Burrell or her father, who appeared doubly, humbly glad of her companionship. Always she insisted that ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... and elegance of Henry as the civilized brother I shall never forget. There was something in him to which the perfect style of the D'Orsay period appealed, and he spoke the stilted language with as much truth as he wore the cravat and the tight-waisted full-breasted ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Through the stilted language of this somewhat unlettered Indian we catch faint glimpses of the poetic beauty with which the tradition glowed when actually related at the wigwam door. An attempt has been made to retain ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... took place next day, and we went to the hotel, where we were besieged at once by tradesmen, each proclaiming himself the only honest outfitter and "agent for all good export firms." Monty departed to call on British officialdom (one advantage of traveling with a nobleman being that he has to do the stilted social stuff). Yerkes went to call on the United States Consul, the same being presumably a part of his religion, for he always does it, and almost always abuses his government afterward. So Fred and I were left to repel boarders, and it came about that ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... coming was postponed by Miss Eliza for various reasons several times. The correspondence on this subject was all between her and Elinor, for Miss Eliza wrote a stilted, old-fashioned hand, not easy to read, which Ross's impatience refused to take the ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... juice, cream and flour whenever I'm ready to begin the prima donna act. I can hear his laugh when I read the letter. Sometimes he's serious and talks about the crops of their farm and tells me the community news like an old grandmother. Phares Eby writes me an occasional letter, a stilted little note that sounds just like Phares. It always has some good advice in it. Aunt Maria's letters and daddy's come every week. I'd feel lost without them. I like to feel that everybody I care for at home is interested in and cares for me even ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... excellence differs from mediocrity. Yet Hadria was glad to notice some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term "second class," though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the impression, was difficult ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... ingenious measures he had resorted to in order to acquire more information about her, when suddenly the murmur of a human voice attracted his attention. He heard whispers, the complaining tones of a woman's voice mingled with entreaties, smothered laughter, sighs, and half-stilted exclamations of surprise; but above them all, the woman's voice prevailed. Saint-Aignan stopped to look about him; he perceived from the greatest surprise that the voices proceeded, not from the ground, but from the branches of the trees. As he glided along under ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... much left; though Heaven knows how I retain it: I hear none but from my valet, and his is Nottinghamshire: and I see none but in your new publications, and theirs is no language at all, but jargon. Even your * * * * is terribly stilted and affected, with 'very, very' so soft ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... feeling, too, that somehow the class lists did not represent the relative scholarship of the Jew and herself. He knew more German than she. It was this feeling that prompted her to write him a note which brought an answer in formal and stilted English. ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... have a more delicately varied outline. None are so stately and so magnificent; and there is hardly a church in Europe that appears so vast as the minster viewed from the north. Compared with it the great French cathedrals, with their stilted roofs so often unbroken, except by a small fleche and with their outlines concealed in a crowd of flying buttresses, are apt to look short and huddled when seen ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... little bit of praise wrung from the world's cold, death-doomed lips. It is to me pathetically absurd to see gifted persons all struggling along, and rudely elbowing each other out of the way to win—what? A few stilted commonplace words of approbation or fault-finding in the newspapers of the day, and a little clapping and shouting from a gathering of ordinary minded persons, who only clap and shout because it is possibly the fashion to do so. It is really ludicrous. ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... blame Methodism for these horrors simply because it is, as we know, the cult of ugliness, but there may have been another cause for the change; it was perhaps to some extent a reaction against the stilted, the pompous and silly epitaph which one finds most common in the first half ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... style was easy, colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... in a high, stilted voice, and as she sat primly in the straight-backed old chair, knitting away at nothing, she presented a funny, attractive ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... write "Oliver Twist" in a hurry, he fell far below his own standard. I have lately read the book after many years, and while I find nearly all the comic parts admirable, some of the serious portions strike me as being so curiously stilted and bad that I can hardly bring myself to believe that Dickens touched them. An affectionate student of his books can almost always account for the bad patches in Dickens by collating the novels with the letters and diary. Much of the totally nauseating gush of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... imagination, which enforces that mode of speech.[16] Imagination is the first element of oratory, simplicity its first condition. We have seen that the Indian is wholly destitute of the former; and the stilted, meretricious, and ornate style, of even his ordinary communications, entirely excludes the latter from our conception ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... two's voyage in his flat-boat, and, in short, fascinated him. For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to poor Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... answer to all invitations, there came only polite, stilted little letters of regret, in the children's round script. "Mother would d'rather we shouldn't go to a sin-gul party until we are young ladies!" Ellen would say cheerfully, if cross-examined on the subject, leaving it to the more tactful Joanna to add, "But Mother thanks you JUST as much." ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... to vary the diction and to avoid the repetition of the same word. To find four different terms for nearly the same idea "difference," "odds," "distinction," and "contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. While it is true that the term "euphuism" has come to be applied to any stilted, antithetical style that pays more attention to the manner of expressing a thought than to its worth, we should remember that English prose style has advanced because some writers, like Lyly, emphasized ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... mind. One has to sound it loudly; there is no treating it, as in the advocacy of the cases of flesh and blood, with the masterly pathos of designed simplicity. And Weyburn was Cuper's Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of artifice to raise emotion, loathing of the affected, the stilted, the trumpet of speech—always excepting school-exercises in the tongues, the unmasking of a Catiline, the address of a General, Athenian or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he had succeeded in writing it, he read over and over again; but on each occasion he said to himself that it was cold and passionless, stilted and unmeaning. It by no means pleased him, and seemed as though it could bring but one answer—a cold acquiescence in the proposal which he so coldly made. But yet he knew not how to improve it. And after all ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... NOTE: The slang is now, alas, over ninety years old. It now sounds even more stilted than the classical ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... the chasm which her coquetry had already bridged, he paid her the quick, reckless, boyish compliment she invited—a little flowery, perhaps, possibly a trifle stilted, but very Southern; and she shrugged like a spoiled court beauty, nose uptilted, and swept him with a glance from half-closed lids, ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... if such officers were indicted while they continued to obey their paroles, and such was the logic of his argument and the force of his character that those indictments were soon after quashed. So that he penned no idle platitude; he fashioned no stilted epigrams; he spoke the earnest convictions of an honest heart when he said, "Let us have peace." [Applause.] He never tired of giving unstinted praise to worthy subordinates for the work they did. Like the chief artists who weave the Gobelin tapestries, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... has two fine heads of apostles bending sorrowfully over the body of St John. Though it is not necessary to do it, in strict justice, because good work rises superior to all accidents of comparison as well as accidents of circumstance, one must remember in regarding this, the stilted and frozen figures and faces, which, before Giotto broke their bonds and inspired them, had professed ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... about him is that he is not a natural product at all, but the outcome of an artificial drilling of the mind. In a word, he is the embodiment of the education system, uncorrected by fortuitous influences and conditions. Everybody knows that gracefulness is not acquired by means of stilted lessons in deportment, but that it consists of natural muscular movement untrammelled by self-consciousness or artifice. The same law of nature applies to the working of the brain. Stuffing a boy's head with so much knowledge is not developing his mind, and the result must necessarily ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... Betty, a little stilted we should call them now, but very interesting. Mr. King was confident of peace. Doris used to read them to Aunt Priscilla, who said Betty was very frivolous, but that she always had a good time, and perhaps good times were not as wicked ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... failed to enthuse. Languid and a bit sad, her hold on life was gone. The blight had come. On her frail beauty was stamped the sign of the white plague. She greeted me in very broken English, then left the chief duty of entertaining to the mother. The stilted conversation was after the prescribed form and my eagerness to see Zura, whom custom forbade my asking for, was, I dare say, ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... with its stilted magnificence, came a dance, a display of fireworks, a supper with twenty-four slaves in Oriental costumes, with silver collars and gilt armlets. The walls were hung with mirrors, and thousands of wax tapers reflected the brilliance ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... replied the giant, in correct but stilted English. "I have set the indicator to signal the alarm in ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... have seen the tragedians and comedians you speak of, at least if the former are men in heavy stilted shoes, and clothes all picked out with gold bands; they have absurd head- pieces with vast open mouths, from inside which comes an enormous voice, while they take great strides which it seems to me must be dangerous in those shoes. I think there ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... his armchair in front of his writing-table loaded with books, and in a solemn, rather stilted tone, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... answered Janey, as she shot a sudden mischievous glance from the corners of her downcast eyes; "but I reckon he'll think more of me, ef he thinks I's goin' to die. I am not very happy," she resumed, in the same stilted tone as before; "an' las' night you came to me in a dream, an' tol' me you was dead. I done specks he'll cry like everything, when he reads dat," she interpolated, with a nod of triumph. "Sometimes I reckon ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... his elaborate courtesy and his purposely stilted phrasing, the Sepoy said: "If the sapphire was argument, this was certainly conviction. The moral barrier which could withstand the assault of the first, must, unquestionably, have yielded to the ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... "Tragicomicall Historie often tymes acted with approbation at the Red Bull in St. John's Streete by the company of the Revells," is a coarse noisy play. The comic part consists of the most absurd buffoonery, and the rest is very stilted. But there is one scene—and one only—which shows genuine poetic power. It is where Cyprian, the sorcerer, having by his magical arts saved Justina, a Christian maiden, tries to ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... sponde" of the Mediterranean; and sandpipers and curlews, the latter wild as ever, paced the smooth, pure floor. The shoreline was backed by a dark vegetable wall, here and there broken and fronted by single trees, white mangroves tightly corded down, and raised on stilted roots high above the tide. Between wood and wave lay powdered sandstone of lively yellow, mixed with bright white quartz and debris of pink shells. Upon the classic shores of Greece I should have thought of Poseidon and the Nereids; ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... dictionaries and phrase books must all use the most stilted and ceremonious English words, ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... leaves; then the parapets in changing flamboyant patterns, then the conical roofs of the chapels hiding the exterior tracery of the triforium, then the great clerestory windows, very long, of four lights, and stilted, the tracery beginning a long way below the springing of their arches; and the buttresses are so thick, and their arms spread so here, that each of the clerestory windows looks down its own space between them, ...
— The World of Romance - being Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 1856 • William Morris
... ravens Croak James and Croak Elizabeth, a big white wedding-favour tied round the neck of each. To see these grave birds, none would have suspected how frequently they had been in the mince-pies that morning, though Popham had expressly ruled (in somewhat stilted language) that they should "take nothink ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... shaft, or into the huge pilaster rising unbanded from tier to tier; shaft and pilaster were associated in ordered groups, and the ideas of singleness and limited elevation once attached to them, swept away for ever; the stilted and variously centered arch existed already: the pure ogive followed—where first exhibited we stay not to inquire;—finally, and chief of all, the great mechanical discovery of the resistance of lateral ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... try to do better." Well, she had done better the next time. She had not forgotten him again—never, never again. That had been her first letter; how absurd of Jerry, the magnificently careless, to have treasured it all that time, the miserable, stilted little thing! She touched it with curious fingers. Surely, surely he must have cared, to have cared so ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... critical audiences in the world. As fortune would have it, too, the House was full when he spoke, and a great deal of interest was attached to the Bill that was being discussed. That was why he was so disappointed that his language, especially during the first few minutes, was so poor and stilted. He imagined, too, that he had been listened to respectfully, and even cordially, because it was his maiden speech. As a matter of fact, however, Paul had made a great impression. Something of his history was known, ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... in a recent article, says: "In the practice of acting, a most important point is the study of elocution; and, in elocution one great difficulty is the use of sufficient force to be generally heard without being unnaturally loud, and without acquiring a stilted delivery. I never knew an actor who brought the art of elocution to greater perfection than the late Charles Mathews, whose utterance on the stage was so natural, that one was surprised to find when near him that he was really speaking in a very loud ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... very erect, speaking with formality, with a certainly stilted, "learned by rote" manner, very different ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... in which attempt they succeed as much as a hollow hyperbole would in competition with a most fervent truth. Every tragical common-place is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase; and even the most common remark is forced and stilted. A total poverty of sentiment is dressed out with wit and acuteness. There is fancy in them, or at least a phantom of it; for they contain an example of the misapplication of every mental faculty. The authors have found out the secret of being diffuse, even to wearisomeness, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... dictionaries. He generally had five at his elbow (Johnson, Webster, Worcester, Walker, and Pickering) and when in doubt as to the use of a word he consulted all five and let the matter be decided on the American democratic principle of majority rule.[8] Perhaps this is one cause of the stilted and artificial character of Sumner's speeches which, unlike Daniel Webster's, are not to be thought of as literature. One does not associate dictionaries with Webster. Thus had I written the sentence without thinking of a not infrequent confusion between Noah and Daniel Webster, and this ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... assurance of" a bishop rather than a clerk. It needed familiarity with his inner life to know how much simpleness of purpose and simplicity of mind and contentment and piety lay hid under a pompous exterior and a phraseology somewhat stilted. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... and Without," "At Home and Abroad," "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," "Art, Literature, and Drama,"—he would be prepared to find eccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances, attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however, find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simply a writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair English style, perfectly intelligible, intent ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... world at large—but then the world was not responsible for his son's bringing up. When the boy had learned it, and was willing to acknowledge the error of his ways, then, perhaps, he might kill the fatted calf—that is, of course, if the prodigal should return on all fours and with no stilted and untenable ideas about his rights—ideas that St. George, of course, was instilling into ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... polite and stilted speech while possessing himself of Polly's shawl and bag. He was a very superior young man of the clerk or foreman type, somewhat ill put together at the waist, with a flat back to his head, and a cadaverous countenance. Laura gave him a rapid look. But her chief curiosity ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stilted manner left him. He set down his cup hastily. "Oh, my dear!" he exclaimed. "I was tactless! Forgive me!" Again he looked about the room and back at Lydia's face above the meager dress fashioned the year before from ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... second begins with a vowel, as in eats apples, not at all, an ox, etc. On the other hand, too evident an effort to secure the proper enunciation of the sound elements should be avoided, since a stilted mode of ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... was presented last. He had expected, hoped, to be unfavorably impressed; he had known he would be ill at ease, and that any attempts he made at conversation would be stiff and stilted. ... It was some moments after his presentation when he realized he felt none of these unpleasant things. She had shaken hands with him boyishly; her eyes had twinkled into his—and he was at his ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... feeling between the work of the two countries. The Italians are freer, broader in their treatment, show more movement and in a way more grace, where the French work is more detailed and precise, hence at times, by contrast, seems stilted and rigid. ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... her husband had many qualifications for writing prose fiction—insight into and appreciation of character, combined with much tragic force and a real gift for description—there is reason to think that he would have been stilted and artificial in dialogue, and altogether wanting in lightness of hand. Crabbe acquiesced in his wife's decision, and the novels were cremated without a murmur. A somewhat similar fate attended a set of Tales ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... many) in whom a home-trained love of beauty had survived school life. He had had to keep it to himself, of course, so that not even the drawing-master knew of it; but it was there, fastidious and clear within him. And his poem seemed to him as lame and stilted as the night was winged. But he kept it, all the same. It was a "beast," but better than nothing as an expression of the inexpressible. And he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to show it to Mother.' He slept terribly well, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... For Pacuvius' stilted expressions, cf. Quint. i. 5, 67, 'Ceterum etiam ex praepositione et duobus vocabulis ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... express my gratitude—" and so on through the stilted compliment of the day. Assurances from both sides over at last, and the chaise discharged, the one walked briskly down the unpaved street toward the Eagle, and the other entered quietly the bare and business-like room from ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... stately and magnificent, this morning! that speech sounded grand and stilted enough to have suited ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... that sounded stilted," he returned. "I explained myself poorly. It is not easy for me ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Merrill's house, the three girls and the one young man were seated around the fire, and their talk, Merrill as it had begun, was becoming minute by minute more stilted. This was largely the fault of Susan, who would not be happy until she had taken Jane upstairs and left Mr. Worthington and Cynthia together. This matter had been arranged between the sisters before supper. Susan found her opening ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a stilted and difficult hand, is a great waste of time and energy, mainly the would-be reader's. There is no excuse, in these days of the typewriter and of common knowledge of stenography, for an illegible letter or manuscript, and the carelessness which writes too hurriedly to form ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... artificiality of the American school, a tendency to pose and be self-conscious, to smirk even, if the word may be permitted, especially when advancing to the footlights to receive a full measure of applause, were fatal to such sentiment as even so stilted a play could be made to yield. It was but too evident that Parthenia was at all times more concerned with the fall of her drapery than with the effect of her speeches, and that gesture, action, intonation—everything which constitutes a living individuality were in her case not so much ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... instinctively huddled together and displayed some uncertainty as to whether they should remain or run. But the suspense was soon over, for the nearer bushes parted suddenly and out upon the tote-road floundered an immense moose, his bulbous nose wagging, his bristly mane twitching, his stilted fore ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... temperament and peculiar sensibilities. Some men write best when they sign what they write; they find impersonality a mystification and an incumbrance; anonymity makes them stiff, pompous, and over-magisterial. With others, however, the effect is just the reverse. If they sign, they become self-conscious, stilted, and even pretentious; it is only when they are anonymous that they recover simplicity and ease. It is as if an actor who is the soul of what is natural under the disguises of his part, should become extremely artificial if he were compelled ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... in reality already display a great dexterity in rhyming and in the use of imagery, may be compared to Hagedorn's poetry; but at the same time Goethe is trying to attain the serious tone of the "Pindarian" odes, just as Haller's stilted scholarly poetry conquered a place beside Hagedorn's Epicurean philosophy of life. The Book of Annette (1767) as a whole, however, presents the first attempt on the part of Goethe to reach a certain completeness in his treatment of the poetic theme. In all his subsequent ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... not hesitate any longer. The Chief Factor went to Mr. Archibald Clavering Gunter and the Home Publishing Company, and they made a very large sale of it. I never cared for the book however; it seemed stilted and amateurish, though some of its descriptions and some of its dialogues were, I think, as good as I can do; so, eventually, in the middle nineties, I asked Mr. Gunter to sell me back the rights in the book and give me control of it. This he did. I thereupon withdrew it from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... congregations, and that membership in these societies does not at all carry with it communicant membership or preparation for it." There lay the cause of the Brethren's failure in America. In spite of its rather stilted language, we can easily see in that sentence the form of an old familiar friend. It is really our German friend the Diaspora, and our English friend the system of United Flocks. For the next sixty-four years that one sentence in italics was as ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... replied in somewhat stilted fashion, "is not a question which I should be prepared to ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stranger, helping himself to a third glass of wine; "here's a health to your young folk! And now to business." Here the visitor, drawing his chair nearer to his host, assuming a more grave aspect, and dropping something of his stilted pronunciation, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... delivery and no gift of expression; he could not even give utterance to the ideas that did, not infrequently, act on his brain, nor hardly to the human tenderness which was his normal attitude towards mankind. But he did go on writing fresh ones, stilted and commonplace as they were. Mental activity was less of a burden to him than bodily activity, and he had kept himself up to that part of what he thought to ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... self or of her own charms, but frankly delighted with her success. She was still dressed in the ridiculous hoops and panniers pertaining to her part, and the powdered peruke hid the charm of her own hair; the costume gave a certain stilted air to her unaffected personality, which, by this very sense ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... were taken away from the mid-gallery, and instead, three gradated series of birds put down the length of it (or half the length—or a quarter would do it—with judgment), showing the transition, in length of beak, from bunting to woodcock—in length of leg, from swift to stilted plover—and in length of wing, from auk to frigate-bird; the wings, all opened, in one specimen of each bird to their full sweep, and in another, shown at the limit of the down back stroke. For what on earth—or in air—is the use to me of seeing their boiled sternums and scalped sinciputs, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Conway was the birthplace of Madison. His maternal grandfather, whose name was Conway, had a plantation at that place, and young Mrs. Madison happened to be there on a visit to her mother when her first child, James, was born. In the stately—not to say stilted—biography of him by William C. Rives, the christened name of this lady is given as Eleanor. Mr. Rives may have thought it not in accordance with ancestral dignity that the mother of so distinguished a son should have been burdened with so commonplace and homely a name as Nelly. But we are afraid ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... with white hair brushed straight up all over his head, and a haughtiness in his voice, in all his movements, in his every attitude which plainly showed the esteem in which he held himself. They were people who had a strict etiquette for everything, and whose feelings seemed always stilted, like ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893 |
