"Pungent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a bed of flowers in full bloom, over which darted and poised a pair of humming birds. The flowers were not attractive to the eye or of pleasant odor; but the long corollas held a pungent, honeyed sweetness that attracted the birds and many insects. Its technical name was Agave Americana. The seed had been brought from Mexico by the former owner of the place who, after making a great fortune in mining, had first settled in Harlan, ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... humble vegetation could not know. The constant music of insect life sounded in my ears; everywhere were flowers of brilliant hue, masses of bush blossoms not unlike the lilac in appearance, but like all down on the Isthmus, odorless—or rather with a pungent scent, like strong catsup. ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... aware of was light, and a reeking atmosphere of burning oil. The next was the warmth and flicker of two wood fires. And after that a general odour which he recognized at once. It was the same heavy, pungent aroma that pervaded the fort where the dead chemist stored the small but precious quantities of the ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... the United States, though in former years it had some following even in the better trade. The demand for all grades of Rios has been decreasing, Santos taking their place in the United States. Rio coffee has a peculiar, rank flavor. It has a heavy, pungent, and harsh taste which traders do not consider of value either in straight coffee or in blends. However, its low price recommends it to some packers, and it is often found in the cheapest brands of package coffees and also in many compounds. In color, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... down the last of the cinders and turn to the door. There was a pungent smell of smoke in the room. She wondered if she would ever be able to cross that swaying, seething floor to open the window. She closed her eyes and listened with straining ears for ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... front door closed, Joris perceived that he was in an unusual house. The scents and odours of strange countries floated about it. The hall contained many tall jars, full of pungent gums and roots; and upon its walls the weapons of savage nations were crossed in idle and harmless fashion. They went slowly up the highly polished stairway into a large, low parlour, facing the vivid, everyday business drama of Broadway; but the room itself was like an ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... in a strain not only cheerful, but exultant—reviewing the advance of the cause from its first despised beginning to its present position, where, she alleged, it commanded the attention of the world. She spoke in her usual pungent, vehement style, hitting the nail on the head every time, and driving it in up to the head. Indeed, it seems to me, that while Lucretia Mott may be said to be the soul of this movement, and Mrs. Stanton the mind, the "swift, keen intelligence," Miss Anthony, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... dealings with both saint and sinner, but her marvellous and confirmed habit of always offering a short prayer at the bedside of the sick and suffering and dying. There was, therefore, elicited the pungent request, "Oh, pray for me," corroborated by the impressive ejaculation of confidence in her fidelity to the divine command, "Call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... and light, and company. Usually she burnt coal, but when the peats, which had been cut and dried on the moors in June, were brought down to the farms on sledges, her neighbours would often send her as a present a barrow-load of them. These would last her for a long time, and the pungent, aromatic smell of the burning turf would greet one long before her kitchen ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... separate form was La Lata, in 1860. In 1862 he left Coimbra for Beja, where he was appointed editor of O Bejense, the chief newspaper in the province of Alemtejo, and four years later he edited the Folha do Sul. As the pungent satirical verses entitled Eleicoes prove, he was not an ardent politician, and, though he was returned as Liberal deputy for the constituency of Silves in 1869, he acted independently of all political parties ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... astonishment of the first minutes, a few disappointed exclamations here and there in the boxes, "Why, it is in verse!" the house began to feel the charm of this invigorating and healthy piece, as if there had been sprinkled on it, in its rarefied atmosphere, some fresh and pungent essence, an elixir of life perfumed with thyme from ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... little anecdotes about him? His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round between his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving the backs of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little pungent Alpine ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his way of always calling me you—dear you, every letter began—I never told you a word of all that, did I? Do you suppose I could have helped telling you, if he had loved ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... pomanders, and pomades, the scented memory of which lingered about their toilet- tables, or came faintly back from the days when they were beautiful. Among this class of customers there was still a demand for certain comfortable little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to the taste, cheering to the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the proper distillation of which was the airiest secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him. And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... green myrtle, and brought water in his two hands to bathe the bruised head, whimpering the while. Then he chafed the small bare feet and warmed them in his own warm breast; and gathering handfuls of pungent mint and the sweet-scented henna, he crushed them and held them to the boy's nostrils. And these devices failing, he sat disconsolate, the curves of his mobile face falling into unwonted lines of half-weary, half-sorrowful dejection. "I know not how ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... medium Locke would not have understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... her car and drove away with a sputter and a roar, disappearing in a cloud of pungent ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... perception of the difference of their tastes; let him be able to distinguish them when his eyes are shut; let him taste the strongest of each so as not to hurt him, and when he has once acquired distinct notions of the pungent taste of an alkali, and of the sour taste of an acid, he will never forget the difference. He must afterwards see the effects of an acid and alkali on the blue colour of vegetables at separate times, and not on the same day; by these means he will ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... brow, grave lips, and faltering limbs, So came into the room where Raschi lay Stretched 'twixt tall tapers lit at head and foot. She held in both hands leafy, flowerless plants, Some she had fastened in her twisted hair, Stuck others in her girdle, and from all Issued a racy odor, pungent-sweet, The living soul of Spring. Death's chamber seemed As though clear sunshine and a singing bird Therein had entered. From the precious herb She poured into a golden bowl the sap, Sparkling like wine; then with a soundless prayer, White as the dead herself, she ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... people in the household that knew how to read,—which may account for it in some measure. It was here that Miss Elaine came in while she was thinking so hard, and found old Mistletoe huddled to the fire. She had been secretly reading the first chapters of a new and pungent French romance, called "Roger and Angelica," that was being published in a Paris and a London magazine simultaneously. Only thus could the talented French author secure payment for his books in England; for King John, who had recently murdered his little nephew Arthur, had now turned his ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... their master in exile were like Napoleon's veterans in Elba. With their tall, powerful forms they stalked about the courtyards, sniffing their disapproval at these foreign ways and longing grimly for the time when they could once more smell the pungent powder of the battle-field. But, as Charles had hoped, the change was coming. Not merely were his own subjects beginning to long for him and to pray in secret for the king, but continental monarchs who maintained spies ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... as I live, shall I smell the pungent, pleasant scent of wood burning without recalling to my memory that ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... idiots, past a juggler who kept twelve flaming torches in the air with the aid of a rudimentary third hand growing out of his chest. There were vendors selling clothing, charms, and jewelry. There were carts loaded with pungent and unsanitary-looking food. He walked past a row of brightly painted brothels. Girls crowded the windows and shrieked at him, and a four-armed, six-legged woman told him he was just in time for the Delphian Rites. Barrent turned away from her and almost ran into a monstrously ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... containing 5 or 10 per cent. birch tar, which has a characteristic pungent odour and is recommended as a remedy for eczema ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... aspirations; to have been rather envious of the more vivid renown acquired by some of their political associates who left the senate for the field; and, indeed, to have made occasional efforts to secure for themselves the opportunity for glory in the same pungent and fascinating form. A notable example of this class of Revolutionary civilians with abortive military desires, is John Hancock. In June, 1775, when Congress had before it the task of selecting one who should be the military ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... the saddle mare, she went herself through wood sombre and dark with shadows, through cedar trees, dwarfed, and making pungent the night air with aromatic breath; through old sedge fields, garish in the faint light; up, up the mountain, over it; and at last the mare stopped and stood silently by a newly made grave, while Richard Travis, with strained hard mouth and wet ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... the calmer face that belongs to a scholar, though in some respects I thought it a stronger one than his brother Joseph's. In the marble bath lay Bonaparte, only his head and a little of his shoulders visible, for the water was frothy and opaque from quantities of cologne, whose sweet, pungent odor rose to my nostrils refreshingly. Bonaparte was in the act of ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... was not until our own day that an author with a perverted sense which had already found gratification in the stench of mental, moral, and physical decay exhaled by "Salome" and "Elektra" nosed the piquant, pungent odor of the episode of Potiphar's wife and blew it into the theatre. Joseph's temptress did not tempt even the prurient taste which gave us the Parisian operatic versions of the stories of Phryne, Thais, and Messalina. Richard Strauss's "Josephslegende" stands ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... is one of many for which the public are indebted to Judge Cowley. It presents many facts of great historical value, and in the usual pungent and agreeable style of ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... and effect is the Philippic or iconoclastic article, mingling in varying proportions the resounding musical cadences of Ingersollian oratory and the pungent, audacious epigrammatic twists on which Hubbard, with cleverer salesmanship, built a more profitable, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... wheels; of chicken calls and twittering swallows in their nests; shouts of men and the clatter of tin pails; the distant song of saw mills and their noontide whistles; smells of stables mixed with the sweet breathings of oxen and the pungent odour of ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... of a hammer, and a keen, pungent scent as of something burning, warn us that we are in the vicinity of the Royal smithy. A handsome grey carriage-horse is being shod, one hoof doubled up between the farrier's legs, as that worthy, with quick taps, drives in a long nail, and makes ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... like a top. When I awoke the room was in pitch darkness. A curious smell at once attracted my notice. I thought, at first, it might be but the passing illusion of a dream. But no—I sniffed again—it was there—there, close to me—under my very nose—the strong, pungent odour of drugs; but not being a professor of smells, nor even a humble student of physics, I was consequently unable to diagnose it, and could only arrive at the general conclusion that it was a smell that brought with it ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... the room was whirling and roaring. I felt Tarrano bending swiftly over me; felt the forcible insertion of a branched metal tube in my nostrils; a hand over my mouth. I struggled to hold my breath—failed. Then inhaled with a gasp, a pungent, sickening-sweet gas. Roaring, clanging gongs sounded in my ears—roaring and clattering louder, then fading into silence. A wild, tumbling phantasmagoria ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... wading through the limpid brook, stepping from stone to stone, and sometimes plashing over. Was that the dried sweetness of balsam,—the pungent odor of pennyroyal and water-mint,—the clean, resinous fragrance of the pines? Out there were lily-pads,—great golden-hearted chalices, with long, sinuous greenish-pink stems under the shady, transparent ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... passers-by are admonished by a pungent, not unhealthy, odor of tannin, an effluvia of tamarac bark, that tanners and curriers have selected their head-quarters in St. Vallier street. History also lends its attractions ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... 1832 (Ann., 1832, 1, p. 189) and further studied by J.B.A. Dumas and Staedeler. It is a heavy, oily and colourless liquid, of specific gravity 1.541 at 0 deg. C., and boiling-point 97.7 deg. C. It has a greasy, somewhat bitter taste, and gives off a vapour at ordinary temperature which has a pungent odour and an irritating effect on the eyes. The word chloral is derived from the first syllables of chlorine and alcohol, the names of the substances employed for its preparation. Chloral is soluble in alcohol and ether, in less than ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... yesterday's sacrifice. With what manner of eyes have you frequently journeyed through Ching-fow of late, if the signs and omens there have not already warned you to prepare a coffin adequately designed to receive your well-proportioned body? Has not the pungent vapour of burning houses assailed your senses at every turn, or the salt tears from the eyes of forlorn ones dashed your peach-tea and ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... not, as in the Southern States of America, upon the political rights of the black man (for on this subject the ruling whites are in both Colonies unanimous), but upon land rights and the regulation of native labour. They are not at this moment actual and pungent issues, but they are in the background of every one's mind, and the attitude of each man to them goes far to determine his political sympathies. One cannot say that there exist pro-native or anti-native parties, but ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... on the 20th February, 1850, with what joy would he look down upon the opening of a still larger, more commodious, and handsome meeting-house, bearing his name, and capable of holding 1150 worshippers. One of Bunyan's pungent, alarming sayings to the careless was, 'Once die, we cannot come back and die better.'[328] If anything could tempt him, in his angelic body, to re-visit this earth, it would be to address the multitude at the new Bunyan Chapel with his ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... with her shifting senses. The dry, sweet, tangy canyon smells returned to her—of fresh-cut timber, of wood smoke, of the cabin fire with its steaming pots, of flowers and earth, and of the wet stones, of the redolent pines and the pungent cedars. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... was in the centre of a red-hot bonfire; the eaves we could see, as we looked upward, were already smouldering, for the roof overhung, and was supported by considerable beams of wood. At the same time, hot, pungent, and choking volumes of smoke began to fill the house. There was not a human being to be seen to ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... movement; the vista of pink-washed houses speckled with white florets; the gay muslins, the small turbans and inimitable swagger of the Rajput-Sun-descended, re-awakened in him those gleams of ancestral memory that had so vividly beset him at Chitor. Sights and sounds and smells—the pungent mingling of spices and dust and animals—assailed his senses with a vague yet poignant familiarity: fruit and corn-shops with their pyramids of yellow and red and ochre, and the fat brown bunnia in the midst; shops bright with brass-work and Jaipur enamel; lattice windows, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... said to those who refuse submission to the authority of Jesus Christ, and reject the blessings of his salvation? How pungent was his address to the Jewish nation, and how applicable to such characters in the present age! "The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... marketplace, and onward into the black yawn of the city gate) assailed the throat like a bad and lasting taste. Now, in the dusky street, pent narrowly by wet stone walls, night seemed to fall, while fresh waves of pungent odor overwhelmed and steeped the senses. Rudolph's chair jostled through hundreds and hundreds of Chinese, all alike in the darkness, who shuffled along before with switching queues, or flattened against the ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... one poor beauty would far rather have faced a loaded cannon than found herself within the immediate neighbourhood of the mocking and flashing eyes. Her meeting in the mercer's shop with the fair "Willow Wand," Lady Maddon, had been so full of spirited and pungent truth as to drive her ladyship back to London after her two hours' fainting ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... II. he, as President of the Convention Parliament, proffered the crown to William of Orange; he rose through successive titles to be a marquis in 1682; his writings, chief of which is "Character of a Trimmer" (practically a defence of his own life), are marked by a pungent wit and graceful ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... forage. But this lofty mountainside barren had yet another attraction for the caribou. Close at its edge, just where a granite buttress fell away steeply toward the lake, a tiny, almost imperceptible spring, stained with iron and pungent with salt, trickled out from among the roots of a dense, low thicket. Past the bare spot made by these oozings, and round behind the thicket, led a dim trail, worn by the feet of caribou, moose, bear, deer, and other stealthy wayfarers. And to this spring, when the moon of the falling leaves brought ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the plays thus far mentioned, excepting "The Case is Altered," which Jonson did not acknowledge, "Bartholomew Fair," and "The Devil is an Ass," which was written too late. It included likewise a book of some hundred and thirty odd "Epigrams," in which form of brief and pungent writing Jonson was an acknowledged master; "The Forest," a smaller collection of lyric and occasional verse and some ten "Masques" and "Entertainments." In this same year Jonson was made poet laureate with a pension of one hundred marks a year. This, with his fees and returns ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... opposite side of the hill, a vast, torn crater, nearly a hundred feet across and six to ten feet deep, smoked like a stirring volcano and gave off a strange, pungent ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... were elided. She went, feeling as if her legs were sticks, close to her mother's bed, and opened the cologne bottle with hands which shook like an old man's with the palsy. She poured some cologne on the handkerchief and a pungent odor filled the room. She laid the wet handkerchief on her mother's sallow forehead, then she recoiled, for her mother, at the shock of the coldness, experienced a new and almost insufferable spasm of pain. "Let—me alone!" ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... lay him warm, said Jorian; and in a moment he raised Gerard and laid him on the bed-clothes. Then he took out a flask he carried, and filled his hand twice with Schiedamze, and flung it sharply each time in Gerard's face. The pungent liquor co-operated with his recovery—he gave a faint sigh. Oh, never was sound so joyful to human ear! She flew towards him, but then stopped, quivering for fear she should hurt him. She had lost all confidence ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... it was monstrously to the point, and so rudely conceived that the old duke never recovered the indignity. He got home as far as Amboise, sickened, and died two days after (Jan. 4, 1465), in the seventy-fourth year of his age. And so a whiff of pungent prose stopped the issue of melodious rondels ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... charming little bays shone behind enlacing branches, blue as the eyes of a wood-nymph gleaming shyly through the brown tangle of her hair. Pine balsam mingled with the bitter-sweet perfume of almond blossom, and caught a pungent tang of ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... slowly and with difficulty, Weed was for twenty years the most sententious and pungent writer of editorial paragraphs on the American press."—Horace Greeley, Recollections of a ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the air became foetid with a strange, pungent, nauseous odour. There were lateral clefts branching off the main gallery, but of no depth, and to these he had given but small notice. Now, however, something occurred of so appalling a nature that he stood ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... welled from a stricken creature's wounds, Nature has been haunted by the grim presence of Fear. The hunting weasel, coming unexpectedly to a pool of blood, whence a wounded rabbit has crawled away to die in the nearest burrow, opens mouth and nostrils wide to inhale with fierce delight the pungent odour. Once I caught sight of a weasel under such circumstances, and was startled by the almost demon-like look of ferocity on ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... conviction by several generations.' So long as he is remembered at all, poor Impey will stand in a posthumous pillory as a corrupt judge and a judicial murderer.[186] One reason is, no doubt, that the effect of a pungent paragraph is seldom obliterated by a painstaking exposure of its errors requiring many pages of careful and guarded reasoning. Macaulay's narrative could be superseded in popular esteem only by a writer who should condense a more correct but equally dogmatic ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... exempted from the necessity of these, and thrown upon a life of leisure. Then it is that artificial life begins, and artificial expedients become necessary to sharpen the feelings amongst the monotony of existence; every amusement and all literature become more pungent in their character; life is no longer a thing proceeding from powers within, but sustained by new ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... made from human excrement burnt and calcined and made into lees, and dried by a slow fire, and all dung in like manner yields salt, and these salts when distilled are very pungent. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... "Karma," Ravel has continued increasingly in power, has developed his art until he has come to be one of the leaders of the musical evolution. If there is a single modern composition which can be compared to "Petruchka" for its picture of mass-movement, its pungent naturalism, it is the "Feria" of the "Rapsodie espagnol." If there is a single modern orchestral work that can be compared to either of the two great ballets of Strawinsky for rhythmical vitality, it is ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the electric current, and the apparatus began to sputter. The pungent odour of ozone from the electric discharge filled the room. Through the lead-glass bowl I could see the X-ray tube inside suffused with its peculiar, yellowish-green light, divided into two hemispheres of different shades. That, I knew, was the cathode ray, not ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... forth. Barred it was—the white of barked cotton-wood timber alternating with the brown of earth that filled the spaces between—like the longitudinal stripes of a prairie gopher or on the back of a bob-white. Long wiry slough grass, razor-sharp as to blades, pungent under rain, weighted by squares of tough, native sod, thatched the roof. Sole example of the handiwork of man, it crowned one of the innumerable rises, too low to be dignified by the name of hill, that stretched from sky to sky like the miniature waves ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... It arose from some dispute respecting the application of a rule of piquet, at which game they had been playing, each interpreting it favourably to himself, and O'Connor, having lost considerably, was in no mood to conduct an argument with temper—an altercation ensued, and that of rather a pungent nature, and the result was that he left Fitzgerald's room rather abruptly, determined to demand an explanation in the most peremptory tone. For this purpose he had sent for M'Donough, and had commissioned him to deliver the note, which ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... evil,—a misfortune,—a calamity which has been entailed upon us by former generations,—and not as an individual CRIME, embracing in its folds robbery, cruelty, oppression and piracy. They do not identify the criminals; they make no direct, pungent, earnest appeal to the consciences of men-stealers; by consenting to walk arm-in-arm with them, they virtually agree to abstain from all offensive remarks, and to aim entirely at the expulsion of the free people of color; their lugubrious exclamations, and solemn animadversions, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... broken brick-work of the walls, and a little fruit still clung to the knotted branches, while great hedges of box, ragged and uncared for, traced the old order of the walks. The heavy dew and warm morning sun brought out that antique fragrance,—the faint pungent odor which wakes the utmost memories of the past. Tom Burton thought with a sudden thrill that the girl with the sweet eyes yesterday had worn a bit of box in her dress. Here and there, under the straying boughs of the shrubbery, bloomed a late scarlet poppy from ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... The thin pungent song of a mosquito impinged upon the stillness, something settled on his neck and there followed a swift sting like the puncture of a hypodermic needle. Instantly he slapped the place with his hand, and retreated behind his smoke-smudge. There he threw himself once more on the pack that served ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... the inspired Roman we sink. With the Greek poet, it may be any poet of the Anthology, I am uplifted, I am touched by the breath of rapture. But if it is a Latin poet—Lucretius or Catullus, the quintessential Latin poets—I am hit by something pungent and poignant (they are really the same word, one notes, and that a Latin word) which pierces the flesh ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... as to the placing of the pews in the meeting-house (1720) contain a pungent element of personality. Major John Bradford is "next to the pulpit stairs"; Elisha Bradford on the left "as you go in"; Benjamin Eaton's place is "between minister's stairs and west door"; while Peter West is ingloriously, and for what ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... was apt to smell of fish and he thought that once or twice he had noticed her draw back from it, and, anyway, he was exceedingly delicate about the cling of the rottenly pungent fish ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... the steps he drew her hand through his arm. The garden looked very wild and dark. The stars were burning overhead. Slanting into the heavy perfume of flowers were the pungent odours ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... day). At church in the morning, and dined at home alone with my wife very comfortably, and so again to church with her, and had a very good and pungent sermon of Mr. Mills, discoursing the necessity of restitution. Home, and I found my Lady Batten and her daughter to look something askew upon my wife, because my wife do not buckle to them, and is not ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... captives by the rivers of Babylon; of Haggai and Zechariah, who came back with the returning exiles, and whose courageous voices cheered the laborers who wrought to restore the city and the temple; of Malachi, whose pungent reproofs of the people for their lack of consecration followed the erection of the second temple, and closed the collection of the ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... are skimming jelly, or attending to some other of the so-called higher branches of cookery, while the bread is quickly passing into the acetous stage. At last, when they are ready to attend to it, they find that it has been going its own way,—it is so sour that the pungent smell is plainly perceptible. Now the saleratus-bottle is handed down, and a quantity of the dissolved alkali mixed with the paste,—an expedient sometimes making itself too manifest by greenish streaks ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... exception, little is said of him in the story. It would seem that Tasma regards broadly humorous exaggeration to be scarcely compatible with her somewhat grave style, for in all the later stories her satire, if not less pungent, is ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... returned from the scene in the confessional we have already described. That day had brought to him one of those pungent and vivid inward revelations which sometimes overset in a moment some delusion that has been the cherished growth of years. Henceforth the reign of self-deception was past,—there was no more self-concealment, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... cliffs, where it would be used to enrich the land. Others, with the help of the women, spread out the sea-weed, which was stored in heaps on the beach to dry. This, later on, would be used for fuel, and would give out its peculiar pungent smell, so dear and memory-stirring to ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... up the material, which fell off at the lower end into a dish below. We saw her making tomales, composed of bruised green corn,—crushed by the process just described,—mixed with chopped meat, and seasoned with Chili peppers or other pungent flavoring, and made up into slender rolls, each enveloped in green-corn leaves, tied at the ends, and baked in the ashes,—resulting in a very savory article ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... the friends and servants of the deceased are sacrificed and thrown into the same grave, thus voluntarily throwing away their own lives in honour of the dead. On this coast there grows a species of melegete, extremely pungent like pepper, and resembling the Italian grain called sorgo. It produces likewise a species of pepper of great strength, not inferior to any of that which the Portuguese bring from Calicut, under the name ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... whole, with as little fuss and ado as a modern cook would roast a fowl. The inside of the tower is very dim and sombre (being nothing but rough stone walls, lighted only from the apertures above mentioned), and has still a pungent odor of smoke and soot, the reminiscence of the fires and feasts of generations that have passed away. Methinks the extremest range of domestic economy lies between an American cooking-stove and the ancient kitchen, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... deep breath—and gasped, for the pungent fumes, acrid and penetrating, of sulphuric and nitric acids, stabbed her lungs. It was like the breath of hell, to fit the simile, and aptly Professor Burr seemed the devil himself, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... the last frail bond of winter and had set the spring world free. Trees and bushes and shrubs were frosted with clinging, glistening diamonds that shimmered and gleamed in the sun, while the moist, warm earth sent up a pungent sweetness found only in ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... how easy it had been to find out what was choking the life out of Hunston. His open countenance, democratic manners, and pungent speech produced a most favorable impression, and it was undeniable that, for the moment at least, he had the house with him when he swung into ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... most readable fiction of the day is French itself. Our author is evidently a great admirer of Victor Hugo, though he is no such careful artist in language: he seldom closes with such tremendous subjects as that adventurous writer attempts; but he has all the sharp antithesis, the pungent epigram of the other, and in his freest flight, though he peppers us as prodigally with colons, he never becomes absurd, which the other is constantly ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sundry vicious criticisms upon John in the absolute certainty of not being found out. The editor of the paper did not know Vancouver's name, for the articles came through the post with a modest request that they might be inserted if they were of any use; and they were generally so pungent and to the point that the editor was glad to get them, especially as no remuneration ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... I felt a none too gentle hand finger my wound. It throbbed maddeningly. The doctor spoke again. "A nasty crack, but no fracture. Here, you—wake up." I made no move. "Come on, wake up!" I heard the plop of a cork being drawn from a bottle; a pungent odor assailed my nostrils, choked me. I writhed, pulled at the hand holding the bottle to my nose ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... wife and the young woman embraced each other tenderly—for deep regrets and pungent remorse at last attuned the mind of Nisida to sweet and ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... the fruits and flowers of no use to us? Look at plants that grow without sun,—wan, pale, long-visaged, holding feeble, imploring hands of supplication towards the light. Can human beings afford to throw away a vitalizing force so pungent, so exhilarating? You remember the experiment of a prison, where one row of cells had daily sunshine, and the others none. With the same regimen, the same cleanliness, the same care, the inmates of the sunless cells were visited with sickness and death in double measure. Our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... still, and heated moderately, the first and last product of its distillation is simple water; while, when the altered fluid is subjected to the same process, the matter which is first condensed in the receiver is found to be a clear, volatile substance, which is lighter than water, has a pungent taste and smell, possesses the intoxicating powers of the fluid in an eminent degree, and takes fire the moment it is brought in contact with a flame. The Alchemists called this volatile liquid, which they obtained from wine, "spirits ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Babet, and the soft place was in my heart!" replied Jean, heartily. The compliment was taken with a smile, as it deserved to be. "Look you, Babet, I would not give this pinch of snuff," said Jean, raising his thumb and two fingers holding a good dose of the pungent dust,—"I would not give this pinch of snuff for any young fellow who could be indifferent to the charms of such a pretty lass as Angelique ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... all over the field, and we were allowed the privilege of setting fire to them. 'Twas glorious! In a few minutes the field was alight with blazing bonfires, over which rolled great, pungent clouds of smoke. From pile to pile we ran, shrieking with delight, to poke each up with a long stick and watch the gush of rose-red sparks stream off into the night. In what a whirl of smoke and firelight and wild, ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Ralph began a sentence, which he canceled with the word, "Nothing." Suddenly, together, at the same moment, they said good-bye. And yet, if the telephone had been miraculously connected with some higher atmosphere pungent with the scent of thyme and the savor of salt, Katharine could hardly have breathed in a keener sense of exhilaration. She ran downstairs on the crest of it. She was amazed to find herself already committed by William and Cassandra to marry the owner of the halting voice ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... charms?' When first beheld, I grant, But, wanting novelty, has every want: For pleasure's thrill the sickly palate flies, Save haply pungent with a rare surprise. The humble toad that leaps her nightly round, The harmless tenant of the garden ground, Is loath'd, abhor'd, nay, all the reptile race Together join'd were never half so base; Yet snugly find her in some quarry ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... somewhere—one had no idea where. It was dingy, with a worn wooden floor, some heavy, plain, wooden benches lining the four sides, no pictures or ornaments of any kind. A single two-arm gas-pipe descended from the center of the ceiling. It was permeated by a peculiarly stale and pungent odor, obviously redolent of all the flotsam and jetsam of life—criminal and innocent—that had stood or sat in here from time to time, waiting patiently to learn what a deliberating fate held ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Southey wrote a poem filled with absurd flattery of that monarch. Byron had such intense hatred for the hypocrisy of society that he wrote his Vision of Judgment (1822) to parody Southey's poem and to make the author the object of satire. Pungent wit, vituperation, and irony were here handled by Byron in a brilliant manner, which had not been equaled since the days of Dryden and Pope. The parodies of most poems are quickly forgotten, but we have here the strange case of Byron's ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... by hunger, when in a forest, ate of the leaves of the Arka (Asclepias gigantea). And his eyes being affected by the pungent, acrimonious, crude, and saline properties of the leaves which he had eaten, he became blind. And as he was crawling about, he fell into a pit. And upon his not returning that day when the sun was sinking down behind the summit of the western ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... shelter, they made camp and after dividing a small bannock between them sat talking gloomily. Their fire had been lighted to lee of a cluster of willows and burned sulkily because the wood was green. Pungent smoke curled about them, and ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... the fences, approaching the house, and when almost there retreating in graceful lines into the shelter of the trees. The growth had the luxuriance of a jungle, and yet there was nothing weedy or awry about it, and as the breeze blew toward us the combination of many odours, both pungent and sweet, was ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... and the nail was not allowed to fade away into obscurity. Through September and October it was made matter for pungent inquiry. The Jockey Club was alive. Mr. Pook was very instant,—with many Pookites anxious to free themselves from suspicion. Sporting men declared that the honour of the turf required that every detail of the case ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... back to our minds many a delightful scramble in glacier regions, where its lovely velvet kinsman the pied-de-lion grows. On the broad top of the range of hills, covered with rich grass, we came upon large patches of a plant, with scented leaves and pungent seeds, which we had not known before, Meum athamanticum, and, to please our guide, we went through the form of pretending that we rather liked its taste. My sisters were in ecstasies of triumph over a wild everlasting-pea, ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... the friendship of the most celebrated characters. One hundred and sixteen of his poems have come down to us, most of which are short, and many of them defiled by great coarseness and sensuality. Critics say, however, that whatever he touched he adorned; that his vigorous simplicity, pungent wit, startling invective, and felicity of expression make him one of the great poets ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... matter—or rather lots of matter—and by AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, who represents Obiter and Dicta too. With an unclassical false quantity anyone who so chooses to unscholarise himself, can speak of him as the O'Biter, so sharp and pungent are some of his remarks. Ah! here is something on LAMB. For me, quoth the Baron, LAMB is always in season, serve up the dish with what trimmings you may, but, if you please, no sauce. Size and shape ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890 • Various
... horses—the property of our local Sanitary Conductors. When this was discovered, a batch of mounted men were deputed to ride out and question the legality of the proceedings. The enemy, nothing loth, opened the arguments themselves with a pungent volley, and when our side proceeded to reply, through a similar medium, the other would not listen. Later in the afternoon the Light Horse went out again, and got near enough to unlimber their guns and to plant a few shells among the Boers who guarded the route to the Reservoir. In this ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... hearth," commanded the Bishop; adding to his guest: "The evening air strikes chilly. Also I greatly love the smell of burning wood. It is pungent to the nostrils, and refreshing ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... blots; the original chaotic manuscript pages had to be disentangled by a calligraphic Taunton bookseller before they could be sent to press. This fastidiousness in part gained its purpose; won temporary success; gave to his style the glitter, rapidity, point, effectiveness, of a pungent editorial; went home, stormed, convinced, vindicated, damaged, triumphed: but it missed by excessive polish the reposeful, unlaboured, classic grace essential to the highest art. Over-scrupulous manipulation of words is liable to the "defect of its qualities"; as with unskilful goldsmiths ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... lilies—for, said these wealthy spinners—as for the lilies, "They toil not, neither do they spin." With droll invention Jacques had one of his fireplaces made like a fortress, with little windows above, out of which folk are peeping. He had a gift for pungent mottoes. Here are some he had wrought into the decorations ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... her humour. Those who would see a sample of it are referred to her description of the Eisteddfod on p. 22; and this piece of pungent fun may be profitably read in contrast with her grim story of Gladys Leonora Pratt. In that story some of the writer's saddest experiences in the East End are told with an unshrinking fidelity, which yet has nothing mawkish or prurient in it. Edith Sichel was too good an artist to be needlessly ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... serious a rival to the patron.[253] Lucan's vanity was injured by Nero's sudden withdrawal from a recitation.[254] From servile flattery he turned to violent criticism: he spared his former patron neither in word nor deed. He turned the sharp edge of his satire against him in various pungent epigrams, and was forbidden to recite poetry or to plead in the law courts.[255] But it would be unjust to Lucan to attribute his changed attitude purely to wounded vanity. Seneca was at this very moment attempting to retire from public life. The court of Nero had become no place for ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... about his long day's work, and took with him many uneasy reflections. He bad not thought of it before breakfast, but now it struck him that much in that pungent article on the men of to-day might perchance apply to the character and conduct of his own son. "A habit of facile enthusiasm, not perhaps altogether insincere, but totally without moral value . . . convictions assumed at will, as a matter of fashion, or else of singularity ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due. He loathed a bad ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... and the dry, sniffly dust of the campus lay flat under the quiet air; the clear, fall weather that is mixed in one's mind with the pungent smell of tarweed in the pasture lands, and with long exciting afternoon practices, hung cool over the land, and still Pellams went girling, with his beautiful joke on the college. Katharine's secret joke on him had succeeded equally well. The woman-hater's class ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... the air is pungent and warm with the perfume of tons of apples lying heaped in the orchards, ready for the cider-making, nights, when the owls hoot ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... catnip. Here for a few minutes he rolled in ecstasy, chewing and clawing at the aromatic leaves, all four paws in air, and hoarsely purring his delight. When, at last, he went on up the slope, he carried with him through the gathering shadows the pungent, sweet aroma of the herb. In a fierce gaiety of spirit he would now and then leap into the air to strike idly at some bird flitting high above his reach. Or he would jump and clutch kittenishly with both paws at a ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... their taste by bad habits, as chewing and smoking tobacco, and using stimulating drinks, and pungent condiments with the food. These indulgences lessen the sensibility of the nerve, and destroy ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... the heavy door, to which many strands of the vine clung, and Florette placed a stick to hold it up at an angle. Peering within by the light of a match, they saw the interior of what appeared to be a mammoth hogshead from which emanated a stale, but pungent odor. It was, perhaps, seven feet in depth and the same in diameter and the bottom was ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... o'clock in the morning Sylvius Hogg opened his eyes, stretched out his arms, and drank in huge draughts of the pungent odor of the pines. ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... the war; and old Highland Sandy of the Harbour Head talked of it when he was alone and hurled anathemas at the Kaiser across all the acres of his farm. Walter slipped away, not caring to see or be seen, but Rilla sat down on the steps, where the garden mint was dewy and pungent. It was a very calm evening with a dim, golden afterlight irradiating the glen. She felt happier than at any time in the dreadful week that had passed. She was no longer haunted by the ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... circumstance which has tended to spread abroad very false notions upon the subject of the chastity of the Japanese women. Every traveller is shocked by it, and every writer finds in it matter for a page of pungent description. Yet it is only those who are so poor (and they must be poor indeed) that they cannot afford a bath at home, who, at the end of their day's work, go to the public bath-house to refresh themselves before sitting ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... council of white men and Indians that was held at dawn in an open glade of the forest. The fragrant odours of the bush mingled with the pungent smoke of the red willow-bark, puffed from a hundred pipes. Conspicuous at this pow-wow was Tecumseh, who across his close-fitting buckskin hunting jacket, which descended to his knees and was trimmed with split leather fringe, wore a belt of wampum, made of the purple enamel ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... Apia, he seized at the pretext for escape, and asked leave to accept an engagement in the company. "I will not allow you to make a monkey of yourself," said Brandeis; and the phrase had a success throughout the islands, pungent expressions being so much admired by the natives that they cannot refrain from repeating them, even when they have been levelled at themselves. The assumption of the Atua name spread discontent in that province; many chiefs from thence were convicted of disaffection, and condemned to labour ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... drove home again to lunch, after which, on the wide veranda or the bench by the river's edge, I would read Dorothy some bits of Mr. Addison or Mr. Pope, which latter she could not abide, though his pungent verses fell in exceeding well with my melancholy humor. Evening past and bedtime come, I lighted Dorothy's candle for her at the table in the lower hall, where the silver sticks were set out in their nightly array like French soldiers, gleaming all in white, and when I gave it to her and bade ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... truck, smiled in friendly fashion, swung around, and presented his left ear cupped in his left hand. At the same time a strange, pungent ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... returning my diary after it had been long lost. 32. The special providence in preserving my son from perishing in water. 33. The surprizing relief when cited by the council[244] of Scotland to appear, with that sweet resignation to the Lord which I had then under such a pungent trial. 34. The remarkable event of a warning I was forced to give that some present should be taken away by death before the next Lord's day. 35. The Lord's immediate supporting under a long series of wonders (I may truly say) for which I am obliged in a singular way to set up my Ebenezer, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... different trees across the paths leading to the houses; and snake-skins, the tail of the grey fox, and other powerful protectors or charms, are hung around the doors of their dwellings to frighten the disease away. The same purpose is accomplished through the pungent smell produced by burning in the house the horns of cows, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... rupees. Even now, as sleep came to him, his childish spirit had left the circle of thatch roofs, and had gone on tremulous expeditions into the jungle. Far away, the trumpet-call of a wild tusker trembled through the moist, hot night; and great bell-shaped flowers made the air pungent and heavy with perfume. A tigress skulked somewhere in a thicket licking an injured leg with her rough tongue, pausing to listen to every sound the night gave forth. Little Shikara whispered ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... by sundown had worked up to where the canyon was only a shallow ravine. And finally it turned once more, to lose itself in a level where straggling pines stood high above the cedars, and great, dark-green silver spruces stood above the pines. And here were patches of sage, fresh and pungent, and long reaches of bleached grass. It was the edge of a forest. Wildfire's trail went on. Slone came at length to a group of pines, and here he found the remains of a camp fire, and some flint arrow-heads. Indians ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;—perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... On Wiggins; very pungent, suitable to the present political position; offering a beautiful contrast of Wig-ins and Wig-outs; capable of great ramifications, and may be done at least twice a-night in a half whisper ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... of iron filings and brimstone, is exceedingly noxious to animals, and I have not perceived that it grows any better by keeping in water. The smell of it is very pungent and offensive. ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... against my uncle returned at the thought. After all, he had some of my money still, or ought to have. Why shouldn't I act within my rights, threaten to 'take proceedings'? I meditated for a space on the idea, and then returned to the Science Library and wrote him a very considerable and occasionally pungent letter. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... H. S. Escott throws abundant humour blended with pungent sarcasm into his work, making his pictures very agreeable reading to all but the victim he has selected, and whose weaknesses he so skilfully lays bare. But the very clever manner in which the writer hits the foibles and follies of his fellows ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... opposite coast. The cessation of the rain, and the quick movement of the vehicle, enabled me to do this in a tolerably commodious manner. The ground however seemed saturated, and the leaves glistened with the incumbent moisture. There was a sort of pungent freshness of scent abroad—and a rich pasture land on each side gave the most luxuriant appearance to the landscape. Nature indeed seemed to have fructified every thing in a manner at once spontaneous and perfect. The face of the country is pasture-land ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... rather a fanciful morning: the day and the snowy hillside and the endless, pungent sweetness of the sunny air were like a spell. He found he was telling Claire about the things he used to do when he was a boy. He went on doing it because the adventures of the ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... to be? Persons interested in the inquiry—a small proportion, it may be owned, of the whole London public, and chiefly young men—answered this question for themselves by assuming that it would take the form of some pungent and gratifying revelation of the innermost events of her own life, from which her gushing lines had sprung as an inevitable consequence, and which being once known, would cause such musical poesy ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy |
