Word: drabs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After Harvard and Heidelberg he taught in Iowa, never marking attendance, always forgetting the drab scene and his lecture subjects to stray into ancient Greece. But one day his blackboard bore a note: "No class today. I've gone to war." He had met Rudyard Kipling at sea. Twenty years later he had renounced war, rebuked Kipling...
...could be as beautiful as a star, that Thoreau enjoyed wind singing on telegraph wires. But machines were only instruments, not manna or masters to these men. So he finds little health in the so-called Chicago realists of today. He sees their renowned leader, Theodore Dreiser, swallowing the drab scene "with a vast hippopotamus yawn"; engulfing, nothing more: no digestion or creation. Philosopher John Dewey he finds serviceable but juiceless, with a mode of expression "as depressing as a subway ride." William James at least had a style, the lack of which suggests an organic failing in his disciple...
...definition, definitely shifted to Harlem, the Mother House of the new order was also brought there. The Roman Catholic Church considers Negroes "the humble members of Christ's Church." And it prefers not to leave them entirely to their Protestant churches, in which "a diluted Christianity, by essence drab and drear and emasculated, has been made feverish with the emotionalism of experience meetings, revivals and raucous-voiced hymns."- So white priests have, for a half-century, been urged by their bishops to work among the Negroes. Roman Catholics do not urge blackamoors to join their Church. But they...
...Fire Brigade (Charles Ray, May McAvoy). Lest that drab day come when Young America shall cease to begin life with fire-fighting aspirations, Director Nigh provides the public with a picture well calculated to arouse boyish enthusiasm. The hero is a fireman who not only rescues women and children from the flames, but fearlessly announces to the heroine's papa, corrupt politician, that it is unethical to build firetraps. Charles Ray is the young man with brass buttons, tin hat; and May McAvoy, as the pleasing heroine, marries him in a smoky fadeout, while Boy Scouts in the audience...
...only shudder, or pretend to, at the "dark and awful things" he saw in barns, woods and alleys. It is not for him to live within himself. He must paint a dismal background against which the present will seem bright. So that he can say: "Those boys of a drab and dirty day, grown mature, have performed a miracle . . . modern civilization ... a great agricultural empire ... a rich industrial commonwealth . . . out of the bottomless cornucopia of Providence," etc., etc. He accuses men his age of overmuch pride in their material achievements and sentimentality over their oldtime virtues. But then he turns...