"Drowse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... warm, noon-day drowse, he felt, like Abraham, the grace of God within him, and found even in the humblest sparrow enough to afford him an opportunity to discuss ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... not grown beyond the rambling, mellow kind, that drowse in poetic languor amidst flowering vines and trees. These trees, that also line the streets, meeting in cathedral arches overhead, might be stately elms of New England, poplars of the middle-west, or live-oaks of the south; for it must be strictly ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... disarmed suspicion: his right arm, twisted by Hogarth, was in a sling, and he threw himself aside, and seemed to sleep, between the peak of his cap and his muffler hardly an inch of interval: so the treasurer, too, worn with travel, settled into a half-drowse. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... became, and glistering hair, Whom Cinara welcomed, that rapacious fair, As well you know, for his own simple sake, Who on from noon would wine in bumpers take, Now quits the table soon, and loves to dream And drowse upon the grass ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... sumptuous they stand In the retired quiet of the night, Filling the chilly room with perfume light.— "And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake! Thou art mine heaven, and I thine eremite: Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake, Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... Robert, when I drowse to-night, Skirting lawns of sleep to chase Shifting dreams in mazy light, Somewhere then I'll see your face Turning back to bid me follow Where I wag my arms and hollo, Over hedges hasting after Crooked smile and baffling laughter, Running tireless, floating, leaping, Down your ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... much tea or tobacco, no excitation of unusual incident or stimulating conversation. In fact, you turn in with the expectation of rather a good night's rest. Almost at once the little noises of the forest grow larger, blend in the hollow bigness of the first drowse; your thoughts drift idly back and forth between reality and dream; ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... hazy October day and the ride to Des Moines was very beautiful. The landscape seemed to be in drowse, half-sleeping and half-waking. The jays flew from amber and orange-colored coverts of maples and oaks across the blue haze of the open, and quails piped from the hazel-thickets. Crows flapped lazily across the fields where the ploughmen were at work. The threshing machines ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... Kraus (loc. cit.) deduces the crimes of extreme old age. "The excitable weakness of the old man brings him into great danger of becoming a criminal. The excitability is opposed to slowness and one-sidedness in thought; he is easily surprised by irrelevancies; he is torn from his drowse, and behaves like a somnolent drunkard.... The very old individual is a fanatic about rest—every disturbance of his rest troubles him. Hence, all his anger, all his teasing and quarreling, all his obstinacy and stiffness, have a single ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... soul, I'll be good by-and-by, but now I'm tired and cross, so let me keep out of every one's way and drowse myself into a cheerier frame of mind. I want nothing but solitude, a draught of water, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... it beseem Through the dark to drowse and dream; In the dead-time of the night Here is One can give thee light: O, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... awaked Louis from his drowse in the cave's mouth. He had ridden down from Castle Raincy to see if he could help. The moment had come and Stair had ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... still summer weather, forced him to alight and to try and warm himself by walking. Walking brought on violent internal pains, and he returned home with the fever on him. The next day he rose and dressed, but he was unable to eat or work, and fell into a long drowse; the next day after that he again tried to take a walk, but returned with frightful pains. He refused to go to bed except at night, and tore off the mustard plaisters which the doctors had placed on his feet, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... green, An hundred miles, eight hundred miles of foam, Rainbows and fire, ransacking as they went Ship after ship for news o' the chase and gold; Learning from every capture that they drew Nearer and nearer. At Truxillo, dim And dreaming city, a-drowse with purple flowers, She had paused, ay, paused to take a freight of gold! At Paita—she had passed two days in front, Only two days, two days ahead; nay, one! At Quito, close inshore, a youthful page, Bright-eyed, ran up the rigging and cried, "A sail! A ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... with the morning and watch its rose unfold; To drowse with the noontide lulled in its heart of gold; To lie with the night-time and dream ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... summer to drowse on the deck that's all warm with the sun, and see the trees and the fields and the little houses slipping by on either side.... If there weren't so many old people.... All the boys go away to the cities.... I hate old people; they're ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... would say a mass for her, a year from now another, but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of life: with the fussy, excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would tell in her sharpish voice; with each thing; ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... their two children. She lost him; she lost the care of her children; rapidly she drifted away from them. The powerful narcotic helped to deaden her pain. When her anguish became unbearable a double dose of it would enable her to drowse away ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps, faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; The single crow a single caw lets fall And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will Who snows his soft, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... relaxed, and when they saw she was continuing her preparations with a less troubled brow, Raven took Nan upstairs to the great west room made ready for his sister with a fire roaringly active. There he installed her, and when she reminded him that the room had been wakened from its winter drowse to this exhilaration for Amelia, he bade her "hush up and stay put." Two facts were paramount: she was the first comer and this was the best room. But, Nan said, she wasn't going to stay over night. She should get the ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... to struggle on against nature's decree of a winter sleeping time; the wild animals all come more or less under its spell, and the dogs, the nearest creatures of all to man, as soon as snow covers the ground and they have their experience of ice-cut feet, drowse as near the fire as possible and in case of a stove almost under it. I wonder if nature did not intend that we also should have at least a half-drowsy brooding time, instead of making the cold season so often a period of stress and strain and short days stretched ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... the gardens; not our live humming warmth but the stale exhalation of dead summers. The very statues seemed to drowse like watchers by a death-bed. Lizards shot out of the cracked soil like flames and the bench in the laurustinus-niche was strewn with the blue varnished bodies of dead flies. Before us lay the fish-pond, ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... be a capital excuse for lying in bed; for she still liked to cuddle and drowse in her cosey, warm nest. But she was curious to know where the curious place was; so ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... and, after examining, said, quizzically, "Mr. ——, I see you have walked just half a mile in the last four hours." Of course, walking is not imperative, one may watch standing; but movement tends to wakefulness—you can drowse upon your feet—while to sit down, besides being forbidden by unwritten law, is a treacherous snare to ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... on the table an object which he has brought with him. It is seen to be a photograph in a frame of deer feet.] That's because you're all only half awake! You're all made that way. Yon drowse around and do nothing. We're not three miles distant from Berlin; our entire activity should have a ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... haze was rising. If, in taking this coign of vantage, I had any subtler purpose than to seek a draught against the warmth of the night, it did not fail of its reward, for just as I had begun to drowse, the gallery steps creaked as if beneath some immoderate weight, and the noble form of Keredec emerged upon my field of vision. From the absence of the sound of footsteps I supposed him to be either ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... a quaint device, And sees, across the city's din, Afar its silent Alpine kin; I track thee over carpets deep To Wealth's and Beauty's inmost keep; Across the sand of bar-room floors, 'Mid the stale reek of boosing boors; Where drowse the hayfield's fragrant heats, Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats; I dog thee through the market's throngs, To where the sea with myriad tongues Laps the green fringes of the pier, And the tall ships ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... said at last, "and on an arbor-moss the sun shall drowse you, the flower-scents be your opiates, the birds your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Street. The drays have gone home. The Earls of Leicester drowse in their own kitchens, or spread whole slices of bread on their broad, aristocratic palms. Somewhere in the dimmest recesses of those cluttered buildings ten thousand rat-traps await expectant the oncoming ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... together, haven't we?" She lay back with her head against Beatrice's shoulder. "You always were so clever, Beaty. I'm sure it will be all right. You'll see your poor mother through." The eyelids sank; she dropped into a drowse of complete mental and physical breakdown, and for a moment no one spoke. Mrs. Carmichael had shifted from her defiant attitude, and her hard, set face expressed a grim satisfaction not unmixed ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... churning out these irrational conclusions as it would have been for her to find her mother babbling in drunkenness; and this feeling that for Yaverland to know of her misery would be a culminating humiliation that she could not face seemed disgustingly mad. So she threw herself into a black drowse of misery unfeatured by specific ideas, until she began to think smilingly of the way his eyebrows grew; they were very thick and dark and perfectly level save for a piratical twist in the middle. But she became conscious that he was standing ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... misty waste of years, To glimpse the shadowy thrush that thou hast seen, To touch, across the ages, touch with tears The ferns that hide thee with their fairy screen, Or only hear them rustling in the dawn; And—as a dreamer waking—in thy words, For all the golden clouds that drowse between, To feel the veil of centuries withdrawn, To feel thy sun re-risen Unbuild our shadowy prison And hear on thy fresh boughs the carol ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... grew weary of gazing at the same endless diversity of grain-fields, vineyards, rows of trees, &c., though the bright moon was now shining, and, shutting out the chill night-air, I disposed myself on my old great-coat and softest carpet-bag for a drowse, having ample room at my command if I could but have brought it into a straight line. But the road was hard, the coach a little the uneasiest I ever hardened my bones upon, and my slumber was of a disturbed and dubious character, a dim ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... and wealth, and wine, the hours of night In sombre Babylon may dispense delight. These revellers, slumber-scorning, Radiant and well-arrayed, will stop, and stop, Till waiters drowse. But then, yon slaves of Shop Must meet a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... because of great illuminations Of dreamy doctrine caught from poets of old, Because of delicate imaginations, Because I am proud, or subtle, or merely cold. Natheless my soul's bright passions interchange As the red flames in opal drowse and speak: In beautiful twilight paths the elusive strange Phantoms of personality I seek. If better than the last embraces I Love the lit riddles of the eyes, the faint Appeal of merely courteous fingers,—why, Though 'tis a quest of souls, ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... there was any variation of the monotonous quiet; and indeed the tall clock had just announced the usual bedtime of the family when Clarion's bark made the squire sit up from his drowse before the fire, and set all listening. Presently came the now familiar sound of hoof-beat and sabre-clank; springing to his feet and seizing a candle, Mr. Meredith was at the front door as a troop trotted ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... when Josiah and me got to bed agin. And then jest as I was gettin' into a drowse, I heered the cat in the buttery, and I got up to let her out. And that roused Josiah up, and he thought he heered the cattle in the garden, and he got up and went out. And there we was a-marchin' round ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... asleep, the lout! in the shade of the hillock yonder; What a dog it must be to drowse in the midst of a time like this! Why, the horses might neigh contempt at him; what is he like, I wonder? If the smoke would but clear away, I have strength in me ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... short ending by his refusal to be led into the matter at all. And as he sat there, chatting in desultory way, the fretting wind died to a breath, the line of men in the chairs grew indistinct in the gloom of early night, and Ascalon rose up like a sleeping wolf, shaking off the drowse of the day, and sat on its ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... was a quiet child. Apparently he shared his mother's apathy towards all things, and he lay by the hour in a sluggish drowse, leaving his mother free to allow her thoughts to wander at will. They did wander, too. Lying there, passive, in her luxurious room, Beatrix's mind scaled the heights of heaven, sounded the depths of hell. The one had lain within her reach; but she had ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... soft and delicious air wherein I sit. A torrid drowse is in the receding landscape. The people move leisurely, as befits the world where there is no preparation for frost and no urgent need of laborious apparel. There are tardy bullock-carts, unconscious donkeys, and men pushing vehicles. There are odd products and ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... explanation of the Teuton superiority. The clue is to be found in the psychological factor. Germany is wholly alive, physically, intellectually and psychically. And she lives in the present and future. We either drowse or vegetate in and for the past. She has the decisive advantage of possessing organization and organizers. Therein lies the secret of her sustained success. The Allies lack both, and are hardly conscious of the necessity of making good the deficiency. Therein lies ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... were different. On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down their throttle. But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... passing of many a man ere now. Nay, too, in diseases of body, often the mind Wanders afield; for 'tis beside itself, And crazed it speaks, or many a time it sinks, With eyelids closing and a drooping nod, In heavy drowse, on to eternal sleep; From whence nor hears it any voices more, Nor able is to know the faces here Of those about him standing with wet cheeks Who vainly call him back to light and life. Wherefore mind too, confess we must, dissolves, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... laden with curing fish. I went from one to the other on a zig-zag course, they being widely scattered, some mere dots to the glass on the horizon. The evening was still and clear with that astral Arctic clearness, the sun just beginning his low-couched nightly drowse. These sturdy-looking brown boats stood rocking gently there with slow-creaking noises, as of things whining in slumber, without the least damage, awaiting the appalling storms of the winter months on that tenebrous sea, when a dark doom, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... days when she ran "shrill as a cicada and thin as a match" through the chill mists of her native mountains could she ever have felt so cold, so wretched, and so desolate. Her very soul, her grave, indignant, and fantastic soul, seemed to drowse like an exhausted traveller surrendering himself to the sleep of death. But when I asked her again to lie down she managed to answer me, "Not in this room." The dumb spell was broken. She turned her head from side to side, but oh! how cold she was! It seemed to come out ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... all the cream of tartar on the ship. I never have had hives like these before. I can't understand it. So long as I keep my lamp burning and read I am untroubled. The instant I put out the lamp and drowse off the irritation starts and the lumps on my skin begin ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... chemists in public are seldom of much value beyond giving a thrill to visitors who would otherwise drowse; it is like humor in an oration: it opens ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Argus seemed to pale their ineffectual fire, as when Mercury, with his delightful music, in accordance with the command of Jupiter, and with Lempriere's dictionary, made them wink in a delicious drowse. And, thirdly, in the case of a game bantam, once my property, who flew up every morning to the top of a tall pump, and challenged Nottinghamshire to fight, I could not but admire the gawstering spirit, because ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... out a few miles from the town over the grass brittle and hot, from which the clapping grasshoppers rose in swarms, and dropping down on the point of a mesa I relived again in drowse the joys of other days. It was plain to me that goldseeking in the Rocky Mountains was marvellously simple and easy compared to even the best sections of the Northwest, and the long journey of the Forty-niners ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... Judge is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least, as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty—yes, or perhaps five-and-twenty!—are no more than he may fairly call his own. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bending over me to dress my wound; at other times it was Margery come to tempt me with a bowl of broth or some other kickshaw from the kitchen. Now and again I awoke to find Scipio or old Anthony standing watch at my bedside; and once—but that was after I was up and in my clothes and able to sit and drowse in the great chair—I opened my eyes to find that my company was the master of ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... must be going out of his mind, or else he was drowsing. Perhaps he was freezing, and this was the beginning of the death drowse. But he felt himself warm under his furs, where he touched himself, and he knew he had merely been dreaming. He let himself go again, and arrived at his own door in Hatboro'. He saw the electric lights through ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... and beautiful that Poole cast his eyes around in search of some fallen trunk, with the idea that nothing could be more delightful than to sit down there in the shade and drowse the ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... to be characteristic of age. But we must meet it philosophically. We must reflect that we have done our work, and that an attempt to galvanise ourselves into activity is sure to result in depression. So we must condense our energies, be content to play a little, to drowse a little, to watch with interest the game of life in which we cannot take a hand, until death falls as naturally upon our wearied eyes as sleep falls upon the eyes of a child tired with a long summer day of ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of church sounds will now and then steal away reason from the unbeliever, and take him drugged and dreaming. "Defend, O Lord, this Thy child!...." So it came out to us in the dream and drowse of summer, which the little bubble ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... if he had been awakened by Elly's voice, and the little stir in the room, and hoped he had not. He had been off on a very long hard tramp over mountain trails the day before, and had been tired at night. Perhaps if he had been wakened by Elly he would drowse off again at once as she felt herself doing now, conscious sleepily and happily of Elly's dear tender limbs on one side of her and of Neale's dear strong ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the fashionable news interested her. Sometimes she even opened a book, for she fancied herself in literary matters. Her toilet kept her till close on five o'clock, and then only she would wake from her daylong drowse and drive out or receive a whole mob of men at her own house. She would often dine abroad and always go to bed very late, only to rise again on the morrow with the same languor as before and to begin another day, differing in nothing ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... of a dream! From glory unto glory gleam; And I will gaze and pity those Who on their pillows drowse and doze . . . And as I've nothing else to do, Of tea I'll make a rousing brew, And coax my pipes until they croon, And chant ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... ensued a certain reluctance, a dull negation, a prophetic recoil from responsibility that clogged his resolve. His eyes roved uncertainly about the familiar domestic scene, darkening now, duskily purple beneath the luminous pearly and roseate tints of the twilight sky. The old woman was a-drowse on the porch of the rickety little log-cabin beneath the gourd vines, the paralytic grandfather came hirpling unsteadily through the doorway on his supporting crutch, his pipe shaking in his shaking hand, while he muttered ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... their troubles like a surging sea. Has England, then, a tongue but not a sting? Do all complain, yet will none righted be? Godwin.—Await the time when God will send us aid. Harold.—Must we, then, drowse away the weary hours? I'll free my country, or I'll die in fight. Godwin.—But let us wait until some season fit. My Kentishmen, thy Somertons shall rise, Their prowess warmer for the cloak of wit, Again the argent horse ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... I won't," said Ewbert; and he kept his word, with the effect of remaining awake all night. Toward morning he did not know but he had drowsed; he was not aware of losing consciousness, and he started from his drowse with the word "consciousness" in his mind, as he had heard Hilbrook ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... to her home in Oxford County (State of Maine), where her early girlhood had been spent. At times it seemed that she was in the little, old, gray house in the valley, and that her father's sharp voice might come at any moment to break her delicious drowse. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... due to the appearance of Mama Therese and Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which meal they habitually consumed in the cafe when the evening rush was over, the tables undressed, and the establishment had settled down to drowse away the ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... night slipped along. After a while they began to drowse, until one by one the little groups became quiet and fell asleep. Only the glowing, flickering pine knots stayed awake to watch the ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... myself in the vastness and drowse myself with the peace, While I gaze on the light and beauty afar from the dim homes of men, May I still feel the heart-pang and pity, love-ties that I would not release, May the voices of sorrow appealing call me back to ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... the highroad and awoke from their sun-soaked drowse at the sound of the clopping hoofs. They paused to look for partridges in a rim of woods, little woods, very clean and shiny and gay, silver birches and poplars with immaculate green trunks, encircling a lake of sandy bottom, a splashing seclusion demure ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... when Josiah and me got to bed agin. And then jest as I was gettin' into a drowse, I heard the cat in the buttery, and I got up to let her out. And that rousted Josiah up, and he thought he heard the cattle in the garden, and he got up and went out. And there we was a marchin' round most all night. And if we would get into a nap, Josiah ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... passage a little drowse fell upon the two charter members. They had lunched more richly than was their wont. "Oh, these distressing, heavy lunches!" as Aldous Huxley cries in one of his poems. But Lawton was still of bright vivacity. At that time the club was ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... brand, he had settled down upon the American tivoli; it was cheap, and you could drink a couple of bottles without feeling it. Freshened up by his two bottles, he was apt to spend the evening in an amiable drowse and get early to bed, when he did not go out on newspaper duty. He joked about the three fingers of fat on his ribs, and frankly guessed it was the beer that did it; at such times he said that perhaps he should have to cut down ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... on the Lost Lagoon, And we two dreaming the dusk away, Beneath the drift of a twilight grey— Beneath the drowse of an ending day. And the ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... must have good eyes, strong limbs, nimble feet, and, above all, an alert mind. People who lack these qualities, especially the last, will not be likely to pursue the noble science of ornithology. The stupid sort will prefer to drowse in the shade, and the light-minded will care only for the gay round of social pleasures. Any bright and earnest person, however, can in good time become an expert student of the feathered creation, provided only that he feels a genuine interest in such pursuit. No one, let ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... the utter rendering of one's self up—to a good cigar. Is it not a place for reverie? Has not one with this most respectable weed, this prime havana, the concomitants of a thousand reveries? Will not one puff of that narcotic breath drowse deep all watching dragons, and make for him the sleeping beauties of his will? And, presto, there they are! and, oh! ye houris of the South, with what a smile and glance between the azure puffs! Well let me not forget myself. With a sterner morality he sees ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... Mr. DROWSE, desires to know where you get all your funny things for PUNCHINELLO? He knows they are there, does Mr. DROWSE; for he gets my copy of the penny postman, and he keeps it, too. It is the only good taste my neighbor has displayed of late years. I tell Mr. DROWSE that you make your fun. He further asks, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... to let in fresh air; but my spirit would be suddenly rapt away to that other region. I am sure I felt the waters washing over my head and sweeping me away from this world to another life. Then I would lose grip of the pole and come to myself clutching at it with wild terror; and again the drowse of life's borderland would overpower me. And all the time I was saying over and over, "I ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... yonder sleep Those who smile and those who weep, Those whose lips are set with care, Those whose brows are smooth and fair; Mourners whom the dawning light Shall grapple with an old distress; Lovers folded at midnight In their bridal happiness; Pale watchers by beloved beds, Fallen a-drowse with nodding heads, Whom sleep captured by surprise, With the circles round their eyes; Maidens with quiet-taken breath, Dreaming of enchanted bowers; Old men with the mask of death; Little children soft as flowers; Those who wake wild-eyed and ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... branches!—through the winter weeks they've slep', When the worrying winds would let 'em, all as black and mum as mutes, A-waiting for the blackbirds, with their calls like meller flutes. Just to whistle them awake like. Oh! but now they stir and rouse Like a girl who has bin dreamin' of her lover in a drowse, And wakes up to feel 'is kisses on 'er softly poutin' lips. How they burst, all a-thirst for the April shower that drips Tinkle-tink from leaf to leaf, washing every spraylet clean From the sooty veil of London, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... lazy cat, On such a pleasant day To sit and drowse beside the fire And sleep the hours away! A self-respecting dog would think Himself a sorry cur, If he did nothing all day long But fold his arms ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... disturbance possible to the little sufferer. It may be you may require to keep this up for many hours, but you will probably find that some signs of sense appear ere you have gone on very long, and you may see that natural sleep has succeeded the drowse that lay in the worn-out brain. If so, you will allow the head to lie still in the cold cloth, and change only when it gets very warm. If natural heat has been fully restored to the legs and feet, you will let these ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... for a whole silent evening, his absorption in other people, sometimes grew pettish and unresponsive and offended because he could keep neither eyes nor hands from her. And there were evenings when they seemed to have nothing to talk about, and Billy, too tired to do anything but drowse in his big chair, was confronted with an alert and horrified Susan, sick with apprehension of all the long evenings, throughout all the years. Susan was fretted by the financial barrier to the immediate marriage, too, it was humiliating, at twenty-six, to be affected by a mere matter ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... browse; Night-hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree, Home of the wild bird and home of the bee. A thousand chambers of marble lie Wide to the sun and the wind and the sky. Poppies we find amongst our wheat Grow on Caesar's banquet seat. Cattle crop and neatherds drowse On the floors of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the fire," said Tommie. "We're all tired to-night and it will be good to drowse and dream. ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... elation, for he had never before slept beneath the open sky. Over him the giant fir—tall as a steeple—dropped protecting shadow, and looking up he could see the firelight flickering on the wide-spread branches. His bed seemed to promise all the dreams and restful drowse which the books on outdoor life had described, and close by in her tiny little canvas house he could hear the girl in low-voiced conversation with her sire. All conditions seemed right for slumber, and yet ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... or so to the south of Bridgewater on the right bank of the river. It was a straggling Tudor building showing grey above the ivy that clothed its lower parts. Approaching it now, through the fragrant orchards amid which it seemed to drowse in Arcadian peace beside the waters of the Parrett, sparkling in the morning sunlight, Mr. Blood might have had a difficulty in believing it part of a world ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... him, but I've never been good at boiling things down into descriptions, and when he found I was not disposed to talk, he fell silent and I was free to drowse over what I knew of the trailmen and ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... malice may have placed in your path, you think of these after the journey is done, but they seldom haunt your fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping car and feel yourself hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only that you can endure it; and some such condition as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic acts in the world. To the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... sword lies on the grass, Heavy with gold, and Time itself doth drowse; The little stream, too indolent to pass, Loiters below the cloudy willow boughs, That build amid the glare a shadowy house, And with a Paradisal freshness brims Amid cool-rooted reeds with glossy blade; The antic water-fly above it skims, And cows stand shadow-like in ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... man was limp When laid in his chest; Yea, limp; and why But to signify That the grave will crimp Ere next year's sun Yet another one Of those in that house - It may be the best - For its endless drowse!" ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... well, yet only well enough To wish for further news thereof. Here, in this early autumn dawn, By windows opening on the lawn. Where sunshine seems asleep, though bright, And shadows yet are sharp with night, And, further on, the wealthy wheat Bends in a golden drowse, how sweet To sit and cast my careless looks Around my walls of well-read books, Wherein is all that stands redeem'd From time's huge wreck, all men have dream'd Of truth, and all by poets known Of feeling, and in weak sort shown, And, turning to my heart again, To find I ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... an hour and a half's driving, Brunow woke me by calling impatiently to the cabman, and I came to the full possession of myself in time to see the vehicle swerve suddenly to the right. My prolonged drowse half refreshed me, and the cold, wet air which blew up from the river through the window Brunow had opened fell freshly on my cheek. I could see the river gleaming ahead, with spaces of liquid blackness in it, and a red or green light burning here and there. It was still raining, and ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... watched a scene beyond the netting—something cynical, cheap, degrading—watched it with no real sense of its meaning—wondered where she was and how she had come—and why all this was going on. Then she would turn and look piteously at Joe, her face sharp with yearning. Then she would drowse, and awake with a ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... Piedmont, visible also from the mountain top. It was bright and quiet up here above the world. The sunshine drew out the strong, life-giving odour of the pines, the ground was dry and warm, it should have been a pleasant place to drowse in and be happy. But the Valley soldiers were not happy. Jackson, riding by a recumbent group, spoke from the saddle. "That's right, men! You rest all over, lying down." In the morning this group had cheered him loudly; now it saluted in a genuine "Bath to Romney" silence. He rode ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... We human beings drowse through thirty years of our threescore and ten, but the ant is awake and working all ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... aching months, which, in Merry England, go to make up the Spring of the year; and the King and his favourite concubines had betaken themselves up-river to snare turtle-doves, and to drowse away the hours in the cool flowering fruit groves, and under the shade of the lilac-coloured bungor trees. Therefore the youths and maidens in the palace were having a good time, and were gaily engaged in sowing the whirlwind, with a sublime disregard for the storm, which it would be theirs ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... remarkable in that she saw possibilities in it. She was no sensualist, longing to drowse sleepily in the lap of luxury. She turned about, troubled by her daring, glad of her release, wondering whether she would get something to do, wondering what Drouet would do. That worthy had his future fixed for him beyond a peradventure. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... hour later when Donald, just beginning to drowse before his little fire, heard someone approach and unlock his door, for the second time that night. In anticipation of any desperate emergency, the captive sprang to his feet, and retreated to a corner of the room ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... the man watched and listened. Scarcely a muscle of his body moved. Not once, as the hours slipped by, did he drowse; not for an instant was he off his guard. With the first trace of morning in the east, he was astir. As on the night before, he made his Indian's fire, ate his handful of beef, and drank of the strong black coffee. The pony, sleepy as a child, was ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... up several times more, arranging things to his satisfaction and then threw himself upon the bed, disposed to keep his watch all night, if it was necessary. He did not wish to sleep. No, he ought not to drowse.... And half an hour later he was slumbering profoundly without knowing at what moment he had slid down the soft ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Holding straight onward up into the land he heads first for the famous little island where, nowadays, in their halo of thrilling recollection, the walls of Sumter, rising sheer from the bosom of the water, drowse idle. Close under the lee of Sumter, the incoming steersman brings his ship about and chooses, probably, the eastward of two huge tentacles of the sea between which lies the city's long but narrow peninsula. To the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... many a voice along the street, And heel against the pavement echoing, burst Their drowse; and either started while the door, Push'd from without, drave backward to the wall, And midmost of a rout of roisterers, Femininely fair and dissolutely pale, Her suitor in old years before Geraint, Enter'd, the wild lord of the place, Limours. He ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... Then, left alone, he gradually yielded to the sedative effect of dinner and drink and fell into a drowse. The dusk of evening had stolen over the river and darkened the woods around the fort. The sound of footsteps at ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! 10 With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the canal if one step behind anything that shuts off the breeze it is tropically hot; yet up on the edge of the chasm above, the trees are always nodding and bowing before the ceaseless wind from off the Caribbean. Scores of "switcheros" drowse under their sheet-iron wigwams, erected not so much as protection from the sun, for the drowsers are mostly negroes and immune to that, as from young rocks that the dynamite blasts frequently toss a quarter-mile. ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... on every side arose the soft green mountains, hemming in and brooding over The Place as though they loved it. In the winter evenings there was the huge library hearth with its blaze and warmth; and a disreputable fur rug in front of it that might have been ordained expressly for tired dogs to drowse on. And there were the Mistress and the Master. Especially the Mistress! The Mistress somehow had a way of making all the ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... in the mid-heavens, hot and bright— Nor slept, nor wink'd, but with a steadfast spite Watch'd their wan looks and tremblings in the skies; And that he might not slumber in the night, The curtain-lids were pluck'd from his large eyes, So he might never drowse, but watch ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... of the holy woman in the room above, the scent of hyacinths, the drowse of the fire, on which a cedar log had just been laid, the feeling of the port soaking down into the crannies of his being, made up a momentary Paradise. Then the music stopped; and no sound rose but the tiny groans of the log trying to resist the fire. Dreamily he thought: 'Life wears ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to tell upon him; he was getting stiff in his limbs, and seldom accompanied me on hunting expeditions. He seemed only to want to sleep and drowse away the day. He had been a splendid kangaroo hunter, and took quite an extraordinary amount of pleasure in this pursuit. He would run down the biggest kangaroo and "bail him up" unerringly under a tree; and whenever the doomed animal tried to ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... he'd drowse in the meadow, Lazily swinging his tail, At break of day he used to bray,— Not much too hearty and hale; But a wonderful gumption was under his skin, And a clean calm light in his eye, And once in a while; he'd smile:— ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... in the store of Stibbs with the drowse that hung over another shop in the North Country where, in earlier years, I used to buy my supplies. Doctor Mayhew kept the shop, which flourished until a pushing Scandinavian set up a more pretentious ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... simply could not get up on the Monday morning. The agony of suspense was too keen, and he lay with closed eyes, trying to drowse his consciousness, and exchanging it in his fitful snatches of sleep for oppressive dreams, in one of which Eileen figured as a Lorelei, combing her locks on a rock as she sang ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the morning glory of the sun, I would request you now to view with me, 'Twill cheer that smitten heart, thou grieved one, And lighter make your load of misery, When you can hear and see all nature's glee. Come friend arise, determin'd, drowse no more, But stroll away to yonder hill with me; And all the landscape round we shall explore, All nature slumbers now; its ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... subjected to discipline by Col. Barlow. The evening before, on dress parade, I was named to take charge of a police detail from the Sixty-first, which was to report at brigade headquarters the next morning at five o'clock. I had slept but little during the night. Toward morning I fell into a drowse, and was awakened out of it by the reveille. I hurried out of my tent and was getting my detail together, hoping that the colonel would not notice my tardiness. I got to the place of rendezvous the first of any one in the brigade, and had to wait for ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... the heather swims in the heat. Our helmets scorch our foreheads, our sandals burn our feet. Now in the ungirt hour—now ere we blink and drowse, Mithras, also a soldier, keep us true to ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling |
