"Moribund" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there is what is called a Panchayat, or committee of five, for the settlement of disputes, although of late years many of the Panchayats have become practically moribund. The members of this council are chosen from the leading men of the village. All kinds of disputes can be submitted to this court of arbitration, from cases of cattle trespass, or doubtful land boundaries, to breaches of Hindu religious custom. It is the Panchayat which has ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid's pastimes to shoot Mexicans "to see them kick": if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with "/quien sabes/" and denials ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... organs of most European governments proceeded to fan the flames— encouraged Spain to resent the fancied affront by assuring her that she would not lack powerful allies. There was no recognition by this government of Cuban independence; no recommendation that we wrest the island from the moribund nation that has so long misgoverned it; but a semi-official expression of concern for men striving to achieve their liberty afforded Europe a pretext to "get together" and work off on a distant people that war spirit, so long suppressed at home, lest it disturb the balance of power. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... one way to give life to the dead or the moribund, the way of the Hebrew prophet,—to give it one's own. Theophilus Londonderry instinctively knew this, and he began at once to breathe ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... [FN35] So the moribund father of the "babes in the wood" lectures his wicked brother, their guardian: "To God and you I recommend My children deare this day: But little while, be sure, we have Within this world to stay." But, to appeal to the moral ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... root of the whole matter. Only where there is community of heart and thought is national or personal life possible in any worthy sense. Unless that community exists between the various nationalities within an Empire, we may be sure the Empire is moribund. It is dying, as Napoleon said, of indigestion, and that other community of the world which is slowly taking shape among free and reasonable peoples will demand its dissolution. Our hope is that the other community will further proceed to demand that these disastrous experiments ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... fields was changed, green giving place to gold; the woodlands and lower slopes of our hills flamed with the scarlet of dying sumach, with the russet and orange and crimson of a foliage making merry against its moribund to-morrows; a drought parched the land, and our little river lessened to a mere trickle of water. The daylight hours became sensibly abbreviated; while they endured they were golden and warm and hazy: faint veils of purple shrouded the distances. Twilight fell ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... perspicacious enough to see in the Terrestrials' coming not a threat but a last hope of revivifying their own moribund species. Accordingly, the Earthmen were encouraged to go ahead building on the sites originally selected, the only ban being on the type of construction materials used—and a perfectly reasonable one under ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... sunshine; the grass is already withered to hay. Drenched in light and heat, this Sahara-like enclosure is altogether devoid of life save for the cats. The majority are dozing in a kind of torpor, or moribund, or dead. My experiences in the hospital half an hour ago dispose me, perhaps, to regard this menagerie in a more morbid fashion than usual. To-day, in particular, it seems as if all the mangy and decrepit cats of Rome had given themselves a rendezvous on this classic soil; cats of every colour ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... rancher'a early and started for Elcuanam. This was the farthest from headquarters of all his parishes. An outpost station had been established there nine years before, under the name of Santa Ysabel, but, with only yearly visits since then, it was in a moribund condition and had not progressed beyond the architectural stage of a ramada, or brush shelter. A message had been sent a few days before (without Pio's knowledge, as it happened), telling the Indians to get the ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... irremediable wrong which Fate had inflicted was to shadow all his life. Indeed, I felt disheartened, for I had warm sympathies; and besides, the cruel prose of his experience broke upon the easy, pleasure-loving harmony of my life like the sudden crash of kettledrums in the midst of moribund flute melody. I had always possessed too much leisure not to have become saddened and perplexed at times with doubts before the eternal problem of life; and they all returned now, and not until I reached The Headlands in the late afternoon did I rouse ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... said I, "that there is something in all this very like democracy; and I thought that democracy was considered to be in a moribund condition many, many ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... high fever, his eyes deep sunken, with a moribund and yellowish face, his tongue dry and parched, and the whole body much wasted and lean, the voice low as of a man very near death: and I found his thigh much inflamed, suppurating, and ulcerated, discharging a greenish and very offensive sanies. I probed it with a silver probe, wherewith ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... permitted to present his own brief through an attorney, but was detained in his own person at Namur. The innocence or guilt of his prisoner was no longer the chief point of interest as far as the Duke of Burgundy was concerned. The latter had made an excellent bargain on his own behalf with the moribund Duke of Guelders, who had signed (December, 1472) a document wherein he sold to Charles all his administrative rights in Guelders and Zutphen for ninety-two thousand florins,[3] in consideration of Arnold's enjoying a ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... and gone; dead as a doornail, dead as a doorpost[obs3], dead as a mutton, dead as a herring, dead as nits; launched into eternity, gone to one's eternal reward, gone to meet one's maker, pushing up daisies, gathered to one's fathers, numbered with the dead. dying &c. v.; moribund, morient|; hippocratic; in articulo, in extremis; in the jaws of death, in the agony of death; going off; aux abois[Fr]; one one's last legs, on one's death bed; at the point of death, at death's door,, at the last gasp; near one's end, given over, booked; with one foot in the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... its gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely constructed armour of which Homer tells, but without its miraculous lightsomeness—he looked out baffled, labouring, moribund; a mere comfortless shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction of the labours of Hercules, through those northern, mist-laden confines of the civilised world. It was as if the familiar soul which had been so friendly disposed towards him were actually departed to Hades; and when he read the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... used simultaneously as collateral for notes to pay current expenses until the lands could be sold. These last were kept at a fair price by taking seventy-one millions of treasure from the Tuileries vaults for their purchase. Throughout the previous year the moribund legislature had been left inert, the budget being decreed without its consent, and the Emperor told Metternich at Dresden that he contemplated its abolition. In a crisis like this latest one, however, its aid was not to be despised; it was now ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... bearing the cross upon his shoulders, and crowned with thorns; of an Ecce Homo, insulted and scourged, with a reed for derisive scepter, and his hands bound with a rough cord; of a Christ crucified, bleeding and moribund, Pepita would not have dared to ask what she now asked of a Saviour, still a child, smiling, beautiful, untouched by suffering, and pleasing to the eye. Pepita asked him to leave her Don Luis; not to take him away from her, since he, who ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... returned in morning costume, she heard from Mrs. Malory of the summons by telegram calling the cook to her moribund mother. 'I must send her over to the station in ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... fussy little Pomeranian dog, and allowed it to lick her hands and face all over, which so disgusted Beth that she could not eat anything the woman touched. It was in this shop that Beth picked up the moribund black beetle that kicked out suddenly, and set up the horror of crawling things from which she ever afterwards suffered. This was another reason for not going back to the shop, but Aunt Victoria could not understand ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Socialist Party as a party of the working people, a class party, a party of political, economic, and social reorganization, and on the other side a bourgeois radical party as a completion of, and perhaps also as a center of new life force for, the sleeping and half moribund bourgeois democratic radicalism."[105] That is, the "reformist" Turati denied that there is anything Socialistic about Bissolati's "ultra-reformist" faction. To this Bissolati answered that compromise and the political collaboration of the working people with other classes, ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... just at this point and he found himself thinking that perhaps Sir Isaac might last for years and years, might even outlive a wife exhausted by nursing. And anyhow to wait for death! To leave the thing one loved in the embrace of the moribund!) ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... His own business was moribund, so he wanted to bring theirs to a standstill also. They had no fundamental objection to the new state of affairs; in any case they could see no real occasion ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... meant, even for a ghost, to drown. Consequently, when the word went round the just rousing villages that "He-on-foot-from-afar" was adrift in the waves, rescue parties were hurriedly organised, a boat launched, and, in spite of all my kicking and shouting (which they took to be evidence of my semi-moribund condition), I was speedily hauled out by hairy and powerful hands, pungent herbs burnt under my nose, and my heels held high in the air in order that the water might run out of me. It was only with the greatest ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... very shadowy and narrow pass through which her road of life led Katherine at this period, nor was there much prospect beyond. Moreover, as her mother had anticipated, the invisible cords which bound her to the moribund old miser were tightening their hold more and more, she often looked back and wondered at the sort of numbness which stole over her spirit during this ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... tumultuous cheering from his followers, moved a direct vote of want of confidence in the government. By a majority of one the motion was carried. The dissolution of Parliament was announced on the morrow. The appeal to the country resulted in a strong gain of Conservatives. The moribund Ministry made another attempt to carry their measures before retiring from office. Sir Robert Peel, in his proposals for a sliding scale in the duties on corn, already showed some bias toward that free-trade policy to which he afterward ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Protestantism regards it. It is seen now in the light of historical criticism, that the amount of knowledge requisite for the proper exercise of private judgment on the Bible is immense, and such as can only be acquired by a few, comparatively speaking. Protestantism is, therefore, moribund. Infidelity is to be combated by the church; by this only can it be conquered. Nor is it hard to conquer. We should see it disposed of very soon, if it ventured to put forth a system. But its strength lies in grumbling. It asks, like Pontius Pilate, What ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... the carriers had in the meantime increased instead of diminishing. Numbers had deserted, abandoning their loads, and the transport was almost in a moribund condition, the 23rd Regiment being even re-embarked for want of carriers. Sir Garnet Wolseley in this emergency called upon the West India regiments for assistance, saying that the fate of the expedition ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... institution of an independent nationality. If a club called "The Milk and Soda League" (let us say) was set up yesterday, as I have no doubt it was, then, of course, "The Milk and Soda League" is a young club in the sense that it was set up yesterday, but in no other sense. It may consist entirely of moribund old gentlemen. It may be moribund itself. We may call it a young club, in the light of the fact that it was founded yesterday. We may also call it a very old club in the light of the fact that it will most probably go bankrupt to-morrow. All this appears very obvious when we ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... patient has had a liberal allowance of warm fluid nourishment, such as soup or tea, a full dose of anti-tetanic serum is injected. The tourniquet is removed and the wound inspected. Urgent amputations are performed. Moribund patients are detained lest they ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... purpose of arranging the affairs of a sick aunt in Camberwell, came back only a little less gloomy than before. It was also clear that Mr. Swann's complaisance was nearly at an end, and a letter, couched in vigorous, not to say regrettable, terms for a moribund man, expressed such a desire for fresh air and exercise that Hardy was prepared to see ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... creative imagination of the poets and playwrights of three quarters of a century, will always be studied by the few from motives of curiosity, or for purposes of reference; but it is improbable, though not impossible, that in the revolution of taste and sentiment, moribund or extinct poetry will be born again into the land of the living. Poetry which has never had its day, such as Blake's Songs of Innocence, the Lyrical Ballads, or Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam, may come, in due time, to be recognized at its full ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... other rooms, a long succession of them, filled with melancholy evidences of incapacity and defeat in almost every department of human activity—plans of abortive military campaigns, prospectuses of moribund business enterprises, architectural and engineering drawings of structures never to be reared, charts, models, unfinished musical scores, finally a huge papier-mache globe on which were traced the routes of Mr. Colman Hoyt's four unsuccessful dashes ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... morals of the influential classes of society were, there is, however, no indication of any such "ooze and thaw of wrong" as indicated a moribund ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... of philanthropy, can so confuse cause and effect. If we were civilized, if we were doing the nation's work in an orderly manner, every recruit would be so much clear gain. It is the disorganization of our moribund industrial system which leaves no welcome for the immigrants save as the tenement-house agent may bleed them, and the sweating contractor "grind their bones to make his bread." It is this disorganization which turns the source of our finest reinforcement into a means of demoralization ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Florence in '61, London again in '62, Amsterdam in '64; and in '65 the mania had overspread the globe, that year witnessing exhibitions dubbed "international" in Dublin, New Zealand, Oporto, Cologne and Stettin, with perhaps some outliers we have missed. Then ensued a lull or a mitigation till the moribund empire of France and the remodeled empire of Austro-Hungary flared up into the magnificent demonstrations of '67 and '73. To these last we shall devote the remainder of this article, with but a glance at the second British ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... treated Speke at Kasenge. Followed by his satellites, he came (a tall nervous-looking man, of fifty or thereabouts) to see me in my camp, and asked me if I wished to purchase donkeys. As all my animals were either sick or moribund, I replied very readily in the affirmative, upon which he graciously said he would sell me as many as I wanted, and for payment I could give him a draft on Zanzibar. I thought him a very considerate ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... electing magistrates and councils, but also voting taxes, auditing the accounts of expenditure, and deciding on all questions of exceptional importance. Where the general assembly is non-existent or moribund, offices are filled either by co-optation or by elections in the assemblies of the craft-gilds, or are even allowed to descend by hereditary right. As the popular control over the executive declines, jealousy of the executive ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... woman question in Europe is pushed into the background by the all-absorbing struggle still going on in various forms between the republican and monarchical principle, between the vital present and the moribund past; but the most superficial observer must perceive, that the amelioration of the lamentable situation of European womanhood is sure to be one of the first problems to come to the front for resolution, as soon as liberty gains undisputed control on this continent,—a victory assured in the not-distant ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... true, with indecent revelry, but Bearing up with a Grave and Reverent countenance, and taking our Four Meals a day, with Refreshing Soups between whiles. And I have always found that the vicinage of a Sick Room is apt to make one exceeding Hungry and Thirsty, and that a Moribund, albeit he can take neither Bite nor Sup himself, is, in his surroundings, the cook's best Friend, and ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... from beside the other Postlethwaite saying, 'It is a matter of minutes now,' and then—and then—the slow creeping of her hand to her husband's mouth, the outspreading of her palm across the livid lips—its steady clinging there, smothering the feeble gasps of one already moribund, till the quivering form grew still, and Frank Postlethwaite lay ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... himself; exiling Ovid because of Livia, who in the end poisoned her prince, and adroitly, too; illiterate, blundering of speech, and coarse of manner—a hypocrite and a comedian in one—so guileful and yet so stupid that while a credulous moribund ordered the gods to be thanked that Augustus survived him, the people publicly applied to him an epithet which does not look well ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... fine girl, full of eager interest in life, and the demoralised being her son so pathetically described. She was quite sincere in her desire to lift the gifted young man from his moral quagmire, but this new opportunity to exercise her power, almost moribund since her party was no longer in Opposition, was a ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... drachm every 2 hours, and soda bicarbonate, both by mouth and rectum. She died after one day of starvation. This is hardly a fair test case of the starvation treatment, as the child was already in coma and almost moribund when she entered the hospital. When a diabetic, old or young, goes into coma, he rarely comes out of it, no matter what ...
— The Starvation Treatment of Diabetes • Lewis Webb Hill
... fact unique in literary history had been consummated. That moribund society of the eighteenth century, which possessed painters, musicians and architects imbued with its tastes and doctrines, had not been able to produce a writer who could truly depict its dying elegances, the quintessence of its joys so cruelly expiated. It had ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... lost a dear friend, and with him, alas, the piping days of peace. No, he is not dead, or even moribund, but his friendship for us lives no longer. His name is Feodor, and he is a Bulgar comitadjus, or whatever is the singular of "comitadji," and he lived until lately in No. 2 Dugout, Hyde ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... congested districts supplement their pocket-money. They have annexed the revenues of the industrial schools. They are engaged in transforming the universal proprietary of Ireland in order to add materials for their exactions from the living and the moribund. I am told that not less than L5,000,000 are lifted from the Irish people every year by the innumerable agencies of clerical suction which are at work upon all parts of the Irish body, politic and social. Nor can it be forgotten that the material loss is only a portion of ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... old mother of ours is in a moribund condition, in order that you may gather in as many of her scattered children as possible to stand at her bedside? Ah, my dear Holland! the moribund brings together the wolves and the vultures and all unclean, ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... heavily at Mt. Pertica; but on the Piave they completely collapsed, and the breach of their line on the 27th was followed by a disorderly flight. The booty was colossal, the heterogeneous troops of the moribund Hapsburg Empire surrendered wholesale, and on 3 November their dying government submitted to the terms of an armistice imposed by General Diaz. On that day Italians landed at Trieste, where insurgents had taken over the government on 31 October; but an ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... last to the South, and was one of the four advantages she lost. Another was the hope of foreign intervention, which died hard in Southern hearts, but which was already moribund halfway through the war. A third was the hope of dissension in the North, a hope which often ran high till Lincoln's reelection in November, '64, and one which only died out completely with the surrender of Lee. The fourth was the unfounded ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... a few minutes the progenitor emptied his ancient lungs of some further moribund intimations of tone. Later came ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... not able to make any such study, because the Soviet system is moribund.[4] No conceivable system of free election would give majorities to the Communists, either in town or country. Various methods are therefore adopted for giving the victory to Government candidates. In the first place, the voting is by show of hands, so that all who vote against ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... England. Schismatics from Salem and revellers from Merrymount were ready with their tales of woe, and now Gorges and Mason were vigorously pressing their territorial claims. They bargained with the king. In February, 1635, the moribund Council for New England surrendered its charter and all its corporate rights in America, on condition that the king should disregard all the various grants by which these rights had from time to time been alienated, ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... passed, to be succeeded by general diffusion of a belief that the inevitable catastrophe was only postponed. In the breathing-time allowed, Arabs, Kurds, and Armenians discussed and planned together revolt from the moribund Osmanli, and, separately, the mutual massacre and plundering of one another. Arab national organizations and nationalist journals sprang to life at Beirut and elsewhere. The revival of Arab empire was talked of, and names of ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... beneath the shock; the moribund life which it was pursuing to imbecility and foulness, was extinguished. For another reason, the end of the universe seemed near; such cities as had been forgotten by Attila were decimated by famine and plague. The ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... be got, and it was got—somehow. Modern war involves a spy system, and a friendly telephone company is not to be despised. And all of this work from first to last had to be done with extreme caution. Moribund distinctions of right and wrong did not trouble me, for the modern man labours religiously when he knows that Evolution is ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... epithanous (i. e. moribund) was suggested by the Reader of Macmillan's edition of 1893. Other alternatives, e. g. epideuous (the lacking), to the word as misprinted in the Literary Souvenir have been suggested, but there can be no doubt that what Coleridge intended to imply ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... It was a small but choice assemblage of old poetry formed by Mr. Thomas Hill, otherwise Tommy Hill, otherwise Paul Pry, which he offered to Longmans on the plea of failing health, and for which the purchasers elected, looking prophetically at his moribund aspect, to grant him an annuity in preference to a round sum. Mr. Hill's apprehensions, however, were premature, as the transaction had the effect of restoring his spirits; and the booksellers scored rather indifferently. How pleased they must ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... magician for casting epileptics into convulsions. You had no reason for demanding that I should produce these slaves. I have good reason for asking you to name those who witnessed that guilty ritual when I cast the moribund Thallus into one of his fits. The only witness you mention is that worthless boy, Sicinius Pudens, in whose name you accuse me. He says that he was present. His extreme youth is no reason why we should reject his sworn evidence, but the fact that he is one of my accusers does detract ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... prospect. It was necessary to provide 45,000 pounds in cash, towards relieving the chairman from a personal liability of 75,000 pounds, and to let free the action of the company from the chancery suits; also further sums to discharge the claims of the contractors and carry on the works." So moribund, indeed, did the whole affair seem, that the North Western, treating it as practically extinct, began to consider a scheme for converting the Shropshire Union Canal, already in their hands, ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... organs, which chained, cramped, and hindered me. I like work, too. And I had a sort of shame of confessing myself incapable. I morbidly derided the sympathising regret likely to be shown by my friends, and I pictured the moribund predictions likely to follow a temporary desertion ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... Grant Duff I wrote on May 17th: "The Queen is much against our arrangements with France. If we 'let them out' we spoil them, and if we don't we shall be condemned for a 'secret negotiation with France by a moribund Cabinet.' Yet, though we look ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... resources run to the lees, is known; and that France, getting lively at present with its Belleisles and adventurous spirits not restrainable by Fleury, is always on the watch to bring Austria lower; capable, in spite of Pragmatic Sanction, to snatch the golden moment, and spring hunter-like on a moribund Austria, were the hunting-dogs once out and in cry. To Friedrich it seems unlikely the Pragmatic Sanction will be a Law of Nature to mankind, in these circumstances. His opinion is, "the old political ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... disfigured by a fringe of job-hunting negroes, for all the world—to use a local simile—like a string of buzzards sitting on a rail, awaiting their opportunity to batten upon the helpless corpse of a moribund city. ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... me I must avoid excitement and await the news with composure. For heaven's sake, man, be reasonable. You might as well recommend your next moribund victim to get up and take exercise," he ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... could have none, and might with justice have exclaimed, 'A plague on both your houses!' What cared they, on the one hand (and this was the popular sentiment), for the hypocritical crusade undertaken for purposes of aggrandisement; or, on the other, what sympathy could they have with the moribund State which had ever been to them as the daughters of the horseleech, and whose atrocities were identical with those that were perpetrated in the days when Huns and Vandals devastated their own fair ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... The Brahmo Saniaj is still a great influence for good, but it appears to be gradually losing vitality, and though its literary output is still considerable, its membership is shrinking. The Prarthana Samaj is moribund. The fashion of the day is for religious "revivals," in which the worship of Kali, the sanguinary goddess of destruction, or the cult of Shivaji-Maharaj, the Mahratta chieftain who humbled in his day the pride of the alien conquerors of Hindustan, plays an appropriately conspicuous ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... him a drink. He could scarcely swallow it. The reaction from the powerful drug was coming in regular, intensifying waves. But his moribund fancy must ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... been scattered over the face of Russia, had spent their lives in Petersburg, Moscow and Paris; for twenty years the house had stood vacant and moribund. Then the Revolution came! The instinctive fury of the masses burst forth—and the remnants of the Rastorov family gathered in their old nest—to be hidden from ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... set forth, Mr. Abbey made a monumental financial fiasco; but his was a heroic effort to galvanize Italian opera, which seemed moribund, into vitality. He showed an honest desire to keep all his promises to the public made when he asked support for his enterprise, and all in all, his administration was signalized by virtues too frequently absent in the doings of operatic managers. His stage sets were uniformly handsome, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gentle Tahitians. He married a Maori, a trial marriage, oblivious of the fact that he had left behind him in France a wife and children, and, clothed in the native girdle, he roamed the island naked, unashamed, free, happy. With the burden of European customs from his shoulders, his almost moribund interest in his art revived. Gauguin there experienced visions, was haunted by exotic spirits. One picture is the black goddess of evil, whom he has painted as she lies on a couch with a white background, a colour inversion ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... with that vast and doleful experience of death-beds which belongs to men of his class, was quick to perceive the cause of this. The fever was flickering up before life's final extinction, and the poor moribund was delirious and ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... unity—one Roman, one Christian in origin—had possessed the middle ages. In the strength of them the wandering barbaric hordes had been reduced to order, and Western Europe had been trained into some perception of human fellowship. Of these two unifying forces, the imperialistic ideal was moribund in Catherine's time: not even a Dante, born fifty years after his true date, could have held to it. Remained the ideal of the Church universal, and to this last hope of a peaceful commonwealth that should include all humanity, the ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP), KAYSONE PHOMVIHAN, party chairman; includes Lao Patriotic Front and Alliance Committee of Patriotic Neutralist Forces; other parties moribund ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Andrews, Augustus A. Wallace, and James D. Stowers, and W.H. Waldron was subsequently associated with them. The Eagle was successful at the outset, but its fortunes declined with those of the party of which it was the exponent, and in the summer of 1846 it was found to be moribund. The proprietors had lost money and labor in the failing enterprise, and now lost interest. After many protracted discussions they resolved to establish an evening edition under another name, which should ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... James, John Adams was having no better luck in pressing the rights of the moribund Confederation. Notwithstanding the explicit terms of the Treaty of 1783, British garrisons still held strategic posts along the Great Lakes, exercising a strong influence upon the Indians and guarding ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... Anderson, who was nominally an invalid, and a son and daughter of marriageable age. If it be stated that they were chips of the old block, meaning their father, it must not be understood that he had reached the moribund stage. On the contrary, he was still in the prime of his energy, and, with the exception of the housekeeping details, set in motion and directed ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... the living force of the simple sentiment. Never in their lifetimes, if ever before, had the Union held the first place in the hearts of men of their section; and such love as had been felt was already moribund, overcome by supposed interest and local pride. Thus misled, it was easy to believe that in the North, controlled by considerations of advantage, yielding would follow yielding, even to permitting a disruption of the Union—a miscalculation of forces more fatal even than that of "Cotton is ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... earth, the vast and rich tropics and sub-tropics of North and South America, from California, Texas, and the Rocky Mountains, Mexico, Central America, down through the great Andes of Peru and Chile to Cape Horn, was in the hands of Spain, and it slipped from the grasp of a foolish and moribund nation. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... of which are free to the public. It would be unfair to give the idea that Cracow has completely fallen to decay. This is not the case. Austria has erected some very handsome buildings; and a town with such fine pictures, good museums, and two universities, can not be complained of as moribund. At the same time, I can only record faithfully my impression, and that was that everything new, everything modern, was hopelessly out of tone in Cracow; progress, which, tho' desirable, may be a vulgar thing, would not suit her, and does not ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... obedience does not affect the duty of obedience, nor slacken in the smallest degree the stringency of a command. This obligation lies upon us as fully as it did upon them, and the discharge of it by professing Christians would bring new life to moribund churches. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... hardly suffice to account for what looks like the beginning of an artistic slope and a renaissance of the human spirit. One would hesitate to explain the dark and middle ages by the mosaics at Ravenna. The spirit that was to revive the moribund Roman world came from the East; that we know. It was at work long before the world grew conscious of its existence. Its remotest origins are probably undiscoverable. To-day we can name pioneers, beside Cezanne, in the new world of emotion; there was Tolstoi, ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... for Human Worth and Wisdom: none, or too little,—and I pray for a restoration of such reverence, as for the change from Stygian darkness to Heavenly light, as for the return of life to poor sick moribund Society and all its interests. Human Intelligence means little for most of us but Beaver Contrivance, which produces spinning-mules, cheap cotton, and large fortunes. Wisdom, unless it give us railway scrip, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... or so later Mayne & Son surprised Appleboro by purchasing the moribund Clarion. They didn't have to go into debt for it, either. They got it for an absurdly low sum, although folks said, with sniffs, that anything paid for that rag was ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Arch says many were again taking what the farmer chose to give. From 1884 the Union steadily declined, and after a temporary revival about 1890, practically collapsed in 1894. Other unions had been started, but were then going down hill, and in 1906 only two remained in a moribund condition. Their main object, to raise the labourer's wages, was largely counteracted by the acute depression in agriculture, and though there has since been considerable recovery, there are districts in England to-day where he only gets 11s. ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... London and in the manufacturing districts with Manchester as a centre. From the first the old anti-slavery orator of the 'thirties, George Thompson, had been the most active speaker and was credited by all with having given new life to the moribund emancipation sentiment of Great Britain[1204]. Thompson asserted that by the end of 1863 there was a "vigilant, active and energetic" anti-slavery society in almost every great town or city[1205]. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... The Moribund The Gamekeeper The Story of a Farm Girl The Wreck Theodule Sabot's Confession The Wrong House The Diamond Necklace The Marquis De Fumerol The Trip of the Horla Farewell ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant • David Widger
... instructions regarding the camp to be made. A few moments later he was back, and raised the side of the wagon cover to let in the light. The look on her face alarmed him. It seemed to tell unmistakably that the great change was near. Already she looked moribund. An irregular gasping for breath, an occasional delirious mutter, were the only signs of life. She was too weak to show restlessness. Her pinched and faded face was covered with tiny cold beads. The pupils of her eyes ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... disappeared of itself, a contention surely open to dispute. Here I neither dispute nor approve, but only say, if the claim can be made good, what a vindication would it constitute of men, who looked for the quiet dying out of an inveterate evil, deprecating passionate attack upon a thing moribund? And what an indictment of the John Browns, whose impatient consciences pressed for instant abolition careless of whatever cataclysm it might involve! Certainly the two prime champions whose graves I saw at Lexington did not fight to sustain slavery. Their principle ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... The daughter would not leave her father; the suitor would not leave his darling; the brilliant young wrangler who at Cambridge used to dream of waking to find himself famous awoke instead to find himself six years buried in a now third-rate and moribund school in a moribund Devonshire town. He had a father-in-law now permanent invalid, bedridden. He had four children and another, ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... village still preserved its outer shell of quaintness and had a constantly increasing charm for summering strangers who rejoiced with a shameless egoism in the death-like quiet of the moribund place, and pointed out to visiting friends from the city the tufts of grass beginning to grow in the main street as delightful proofs of the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... the palpable proof of which Mr. Knapp speaks—the J. Z. on the dagger, and the possibility of this being the object he was seen carrying out of Philemon Webb's gate—I maintain that this old man in his moribund condition never struck the blow that killed Agatha Webb. He hadn't strength enough, even if his lifelong love for her had not ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... Immense temple bells of bronze, colossal statues of Buddha, and lesser ones of saints and worthies innumerable, bear witness to the lavish use of wealth in the expression of religious devotion. It is sometimes said that Buddhism is moribund in Japan. It is seriously asserted that its temples are falling into decay. This is no more true of the temples of Buddhism in Japan, than of the cathedrals Of Christendom. Local causes greatly affect the prosperity of the various temples. ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... impressionable, had refused to profit by the advice, and now the consequences of his stubbornness were upon him. He had said truly that his literary gift was novelistic and nothing else; and here he was, stranded and desperate, with the moribund book on his hands, and with no chance to write another even if he were so minded, since one can not ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... intervention in American affairs, which depended not upon actual European concern in the territory involved, but upon a purely political arrangement between certain great powers, itself the result of ideas at the time moribund. In its first application, therefore, it was a confession that danger of European complications did exist, under conditions far less provocative of real European interest than those which now obtain and are ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... some explaining. For the most part, it is the result of the untiring efforts of one man, the dynamic new leader of the Radical-Socialists and their present candidate for the Consolidated States of North America Senate, Chester Pelton, who has transformed that once-moribund party into the vital force it is today. And this achievement has been due, very largely, to a single slogan which he had hammered into your ears: Put the Literates in their place; our servants, not our masters!" He brushed a hand deprecatingly over his white ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... seemed to lend me strength and to revive the hope that lay moribund in my breast. And then, scarce was it taken, when the door again opened, and a man, who was splashed from head to foot with mud, in earnest of how hard he had ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... is, indeed, moribund; but it is perhaps not quite superfluous, even now, to emphasize the difference between what the French call the "mot d'auteur" and the "mot de situation." The terms practically explain themselves; but a third class ought to be added—the "mot de caractere." The "mot d'auteur" is the distinguishing ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer |
