What is "grossness"

Usage examples of "grossness".

It must have seemed very cruel to Alphonsine that she, with her smooth brown hair which she coiffed perfectly, her long white hands, and her slender body with its hour-glass waist, which had a strange air of having been filleted of all grossness, could never know the joy that could be obtained even by this black untidy girl.

Pagans are in a state of the extremest wretchedness in consequence of the grossness of their superstitions.

She it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us.

The capaciously strong in soul among women will ultimately detect an infinite grossness in the demand for purity infinite, spotless bloom.

Indeed, its aspect of comicality almost overcame its grossness, and even when the hero loaded in faster than he could swallow, and was obliged to drop his knife for an instant to arrange matters in his mouth with his finger, it was done with such a beaming smile that a pig would not take offense at it.

The bond between the story of Alcestis, who goes down to death to save the life of Admetus, and that of Leonore, who ventures her life to save Florestan, is closer than that of the Orphic myth, for though the alloy only serves to heighten the sheen of Eurydice's virtue, there is yet a grossness in the story of Aristaeus's unlicensed passion which led to her death, that strongly differentiates it from the modern tale of wifely love and devotion.

It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.