Word: umbrous
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...late, unwonted newtish wetness pervades the simmering gutters, and as if for efts lies puddling on the pavements. The icicles, sad eyelids of the white-haired residences, weep down the ivy cheeks and in despair cascade in shattering barrages on the innocents below. Minutious capillary streets transmit a filthy umbrous melt to unreceptive veins, unopened sewers, and all along the byways mounds of pablumgrey constrict the traveler from...
...EYES OF THE PROUD, by Mercedes Salisachs (302 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95), shows clearly that the umbrous streak in the Spanish character that accounts for the popularity of the corrida has had its effect on the nation's literature. The result is that Spain's fictional heroines suffer at least as much wear and tear as her fighting bulls. When the reader meets pretty, pregnant, unmarried Eulalia trudging toward the Catalan fishing village that cast her out months before, the outcome of Author Salisachs' novel is not hard to predict. Sure enough, 300 pages later the tarnished...
...night of Nov. 4, 1677, a few hours after he had, for certain umbrous reasons of state, brought about a marriage between William of Orange and the Duke of York's daughter, Charles II of England proceeded to the newlyweds' suite, threw back the curtains of their bed and roared patriotic encouragement: "Now nephew. Hey! St. George for England." This is the sort of behavior that caused Charles to be misunderstood by many of his contemporaries and a sizable share of his biographers. His mistresses, whom he kept in oriental profusion, thought that they governed him, and Parliament...
...places himself in the author's hands as he would commit himself to those of a trusted bartender. He is entirely confident of the craftsman's skill and gratefully aware that such competence is increasingly rare. The latest Ambler amble (his first in four years) is less umbrous than such cloak-and-Luger exercises as A Coffin for Dimitrios and The Schirmer Inheritance, but it should be no disappointment...
...experienced Wagnerian soprano can strike an attitude and hold it motionless for what can seem like a half-hour; but the characters in this umbrous opera of moss on the manse may stay frozen for 20 years or more in the postures of their neuroses. "She did not change again," writes Author Feibleman of the hero's sweetly frigid second wife, "by so much as the amount of cream in her morning coffee." He could have added that the hero himself does not alter by a jot, after a point early in the novel, and neither...