United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They are but commonplaces in marble and plaster, such as we should not tolerate on a printed page. He seems to have been a respectable man, highly respectable, but no more, although those who knew him seem to have rated him much higher.
He took both her hands in his and pressed them without a word. "Welcome back," she murmured "you have been gone a long time." "Nothing but an overpowering sense of duty could have kept me away so long," said he, in a deep, low voice. A few similar commonplaces followed; but with these two the tone of the voice invested the feeblest commonplaces with some hidden meaning.
Far off, in the almost empty nave, an ecclesiastic was preaching. He recognized, by the unctuousness of his delivery, and his oily accent, a well-fed priest who poured on his audience, according to his wont, his best known commonplaces. "Why are they so devoid of eloquence?" thought Durtal. "I have had the curiosity to listen to many of them, and they are much the same.
When Couper's statue of Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; his happy and confident expectation, born of a sense of tremendous national vitality; his love of simple things in normal relations to world-wide interests of the mind; his courage in interpreting those deeper experiences which craftsmen who know art but who do not know life call commonplaces; the unaffected and beautiful democracy of his spirit these are the delicate flowers of our new world, and as much a part of it as its stretches of wilderness and the continental roll of its rivers."
Thus, as she followed Cliffe to his last blood-stained rest, did her mind sink in dreams of Ashe and in the dismal reckoning up of all that she had so lightly and inconceivably lost. Sometimes she found herself absorbed in a kind of angry marvelling at the strength of the old moral commonplaces. It had been so easy and so exciting to defy them.
And in this new story we see the life of the girl, the woman; she, too, groping among the commonplaces, with her heart set upon a wider experience, till a moment comes when her story coincides with and is complementary to that of Clayhanger.
Pecquius replied by smooth commonplaces in favour of peace with which Villeroy warmly concurred; both sadly expressing the conviction however that the wrath divine had descended on them all on account of their sins. A few days later, however, the Secretary changed his tone.
The matter is far advanced, is beyond any alteration. The company is formed. The concurrence of parliament is not to be, but has long been, given. The ministry favours the project. They all repeated to me the same formula: public works are to the public interest. They babbled commonplaces. They spoke of great advantages to the province.
Kynaston looked well; no one had ever seen her look better; there was an unusual colour in her cheeks, an unusual glitter in her blue eyes, that always seemed to be roving restlessly about her as though in search of something even all the time she was saying her polite commonplaces in answer to the pleasant and pretty speeches that she received on all sides from men and women alike.
He was lost in the witchery of the spell she cast over him. Not the drooping maidenhair ferns through which she trailed were more delicate or graceful than she. But some instinct in him played surface commonplaces against the insurgent emotion of his heart. "You like Washington?" "I like home better." "But you were popular at the capital. I read a great deal in the papers about your triumphs."
Word Of The Day