"Sleepless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first brought Death on all, am grac't The sourse of life; next favourable thou, Who highly thus to entitle me voutsaf't, 170 Farr other name deserving. But the Field To labour calls us now with sweat impos'd, Though after sleepless Night; for see the Morn, All unconcern'd with our unrest, begins Her rosie progress smiling; let us forth, I never from thy side henceforth to stray, Wherere our days work lies, though now enjoind Laborious, till day droop; ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the other tried and failed in the tasks allotted to them, while the country waited and lost courage, and even Mr. Lincoln's heart sank. His care and wisdom and sorrow dominated the whole long persistent struggle. That first sleepless night of his after the battle of Bull Run was but the beginning of many nights and days through which he kept unceasing watch. From the time in June, 1861, when he had been called upon to preside over the council of war that ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... and one that proved to be good for the soul of the man who made it, in the Seventy-seventh Psalm. Asaph, the singer of that song, had had a bad spell of the blues. He was nervous, sleepless, fretful, full of vague regrets and querulous complainings. He had reviewed the whole troop of his imaginary miseries, and wound up by wondering whether God really cared anything about him. One might well believe that he had been taking in altogether ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... well-nigh appalled as I contrasted the sluggish conversation, the hide-bound officialism, the stereotyped and sleepy methods of the Western Powers with the sleepless energy, the daring initiative, the desperate industry and courage of this ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... had the deepest interest in public subjects, loved his country with a fervid love, had read much and thought much upon questions of politics and government Busy as he always was in his profession, his mind, discursive, sleepless, always thirsting for knowledge, was never content to walk along the beaten highway of the law, but was ever wandering into the flowery fields of poetry and philosophy on the right hand and the left. These volumes show how untiring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... cunning hand, ready brain, broad back, and warm heart; in want of a wife mayhap; a man that can earn his own bread and another's;—half a dozen others' when the half dozen come? Would not that be a good sort of lodger? Such a question as that too did flit, just flit, across the widow's sleepless mind. But then she thought so much more of the wolf! Wolves, she had taught herself to think, were more common than ...
— The Courtship of Susan Bell • Anthony Trollope
... before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of her keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honor with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... furious people and the fire-breathing bulls. O how pitiful it was that the strange hero and his friends should have come to such a place for the sake of the Golden Fleece that was watched over by the sleepless serpent in the grove ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum
... mine, and the world as seen from an aeroplane, and the Quatres Arts ball, and a bull fight—I am glad to have seen it once, but I have no desire to see it again. During the carnival my companion and I enjoyed a period of sleepless gaiety. To be sure, we went to bed every morning, but what is the use in doing that if you also get up every morning? We went to the street pageants, we went to the balls at the French Opera House, we saw the masking on the streets, and when the carnival was finished ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... influence of opium, was sleepless, his mind was clear, and he gave the impression of being extremely ill, ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... burst out in a voice that rang through the room and fastened every eye upon him—"what his cowardly weakness will bring him? The misery it will entail; the sleepless nights, the fear, the remorse that will follow? The outrage on Bowdoin's home, on his children? Has he thought of the humiliation of the man deserted—the degradation of the man who caused it? Does he know what it is ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... hair of theirs shall be touched, not a thatch shall blaze, nor shall a sleepless night befall the vilest among them—and all for your sake, Alice! England comes to this contest with a seared conscience, and bloody hands, but all shall be forgotten for the present, when both opportunity and power offer to make ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Call a thing a drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug. Everything that affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink. Noise is a stimulant and quiet an opiate. What is life but response to stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm exhausted I want food. When I'm overactive and sleepless I want tranquillizing. When I'm ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... comfort her Katherine went to her bed with a heavy heart that night, and a dread of the morning to which before she had been a stranger. Her father had said that it was of no use to fear disaster until it really came, but her heart quailed that night as she lay sleepless, thinking of the days which stretched in front of her. Until her father grew strong again she would have to let the day teaching go, even though it might be possible to keep the night school together. Her days would have to be spent in buying and selling, in bartering barrels ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... to resent your attitude or contradict your calumnies. Miss Hamilton will see very little of me. An inflexible sense of duty will keep me away from the frivolous circle of society, sir. Alert an' sleepless——" ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... After a sleepless night Sir John arose, feverish and unrefreshed. He threw open the window of his chamber, which looked into the courtyard. Near a side postern stood a grey palfrey, caparisoned for a lady's use, and impatiently awaiting its burden. The hour was too early for morning rambles, but the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... come to get me to go off on a coon hunt. He thinks he's treed several," replied Perez, strapping on his accoutrements. He had no notion of leaving his mother a prey to sleepless anxiety during his absence. ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... secondary to the variety of experiences received and rendered back in it. This particular form in imaginative literature has too often led to the indulgence of mental analysis, metaphysics, and sentiment, all in excess: but Dickens was carried safely over these allurements by a healthy judgment and sleepless creative fancy; and even the method of his narrative is more simple here than it generally is in his books. His imaginative growths have less luxuriance of underwood, and the crowds of external images always rising so vividly before him are more ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the powerful rays of the sun blazed on the eyes of the youth that he awoke, so tired had he been with the anxiety and fatigue of the preceding day, and the sleepless harrowing night which had introduced it. He rose and seated himself upon his sea-chest: how different was the scene from that of yesterday! Again the ocean slept, the sky was serene, and not a cloud to be distinguished throughout the whole firmament; the horizontal line was clear, even, and well ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... as that slave boy who stands behind your chair. Why, he is a merchant; and whether he lives upon a scale of princely expenditure, whether wholesale or retail, banker, or proprietor of a chandler's shop, he is a speculator. Anxious days and sleepless nights await upon speculation. A man with his capital embarked, who may be a beggar on the ensuing day, cannot lie down upon roses: he is the slave of Mammon. Who are greater slaves than sailors? So are soldiers, and all who hold employ under government. So are politicians: they ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... days endure ne'er shall forget her I, * Nor draw to any nigh save those who draw her to me nigh Like to the fullest moon her form and favour show to me, * Laud to her All-creating Lord, laud to the Lord on high, She left me full of mourning, sleepless, sick with pine and pain * And ceaseth not my heart to yearn her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... tin roof exposed to the direct rays of a midsummer sun? Have you ever, at the close of some hot, labor-spent day in August, sat out of doors until the evening air became deliciously cool, and then climbed to your attic dormitory, there to spend a sleepless night in perspiration and despair, anathematizing the man who built and the fate which compelled you to occupy such a chamber ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... position; he knew Reggie and his devotion to good form sufficiently well to enable him to appreciate the other's horror at having spoken to a fellow to whom he had never been introduced; but necessity forbade any other course. However Reggie's soul might writhe and however sleepless Reggie's nights might become as a result of this encounter, he was prepared to fight it out on those lines if it took all summer. And, anyway, it was darned good for Reggie to get a jolt like that every once in a while. ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Harun al-Rashid was sleepless one night; so he sent for Al-Asma'i and Husayn al-Khali'a[FN151] and said to them, "Tell me a story you twain and do thou begin, O Husayn." He said, "'Tis well, O Commander of the Faithful;" and thus began: ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... opposite hers, Mr. Chadwick Champneys, more sleepless even than Nancy, was tabulating his estimate of the young woman he had acquired. It ran ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... from the unceasing exertions which her difficult position demanded of her; apart from the harassing days, the sleepless nights, and pecuniary deficiencies which somehow never were made up; apart from the shadow of death which hovered ever near her; and the unvarying labours which pulled at her fingers, and strained at her eyes, so that her efforts seemed still devoted to ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... childhood; hoary age is not inaccessible to his wiles. "All this will I give thee"—is still his bribe to deny Jesus and to "mind earthly things." He will meet you in the crowd; he will follow you to the solitude; his is a sleepless vigilance! ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... pain kept her sleepless through many hours. She resolved that when Dic should come again she would throw off the restraint that so hurt and provoked her, and would show him, at whatever cost, that she had not intended her ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... privations, want of rest and food, the army remained hopeful, for their king shared their danger, wants, and sleepless nights. He was always with them—he hungered and worked with them. If the soldiers were deprived of their rations, they had at least the consolation of knowing that the king suffered likewise. This strengthened ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... dazing me by its very suddenness like a "bolt from the blue." I had returned to the 'Three Jolly Anglers,' determined to follow the advice of the Duchess and return to London by the next train. Yet, after passing a sleepless night, here I was sitting in my old place beneath ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... would always reply that she had indeed said the boy would be an apple of discord in the house, and a Winter like this they had never experienced. Often Sami had to endure many hard words and undeserved punishment. On such evenings he remained sleepless for a long time sitting ...
— What Sami Sings with the Birds • Johanna Spyri
... the voices of newsboys, the murmur of the lunch-hour crowd twanged a man's nerves, and I noticed for the first time the devilish song of the electric fan on my wall. As you have foreseen, I felt suddenly the wilting of my will. Tired, hungry, sleepless, I slipped down into my chair, and there seemed no happiness left in a world which did not include the girl I had left ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... those who had great interests at stake gradually wore off; business was as brisk as in the old times, and the Custom-house was being worked with a promptitude hitherto unknown in the Islands. There were no more sleepless nights, fearing an attack from the dreaded rebel or the volunteer. The large majority of foreign (including Spanish) and half-caste Manila merchants showed a higher appreciation of American protection than of the prospect of ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... few little bubbles to the surface, as though minute creatures were drowning in it down below. The man was sweating more than ever, so that, under the single, low-turned gas jet, his crooked face had a greasy shine to it. A church clock down in the next block struck twelve slowly. The sleepless flies buzzed evilly. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... dull beer-apostle till he's hoarse Vent his small spleen and spite, Fate fill his sleepless night With nightmares of invincible remorse! We sing Champagne, the sparkling soul of mirth, That bubbling o'er with laughing gas, Flashes gay sunbeams in the glass, And like our flag ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... a sleepless one. Beauvallon's arrest, his speedy trial and condemnation, the desertion of Eulalie, had followed each other with such stunning rapidity, that, until now, he had hardly time to reflect upon the dismal chain of circumstances—now they ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... velvet softness out of the darkened London station through the sweet, quiet, summer night into a sleepless Folkestone. The division went straight onto the right transports; there wasn't a man, a horse, or a gun out ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... hath been by sorrow nursed, And ached in sleepless sorrow long; And now 't is doomed to know the worst, And break at once, or ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... tiny fretwork of wrinkles in his forehead and around his mouth. Then, whilst speaking, he grew frequently abstracted, and would start and murmur: "I beg pardon! I didn't quite catch what you were saying." Then I understood that he had sleepless nights as well as troublous days; and all the time I was powerless to help him, though I yearned to be able to do so. What was most aggravating was the complete silence of Father Duff and his contemporaries during these days of trial, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... go on being happy, darling. He is a splendid fellow—and a good man, too. Nothing shall happen to prevent your being the happiest pair alive," comforted Mrs. Ozanne, and, with crooning, motherly words, herded Rosalie to bed. But she herself stayed sleepless for many hours. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... stopping and speaking to the girl with the poster because she had such hair, was suddenly reminded by the comic and romantic quality of her attitude that this was the typist he had met on the previous evening, whose manifest discontent and ambition had come into his mind more than once during his sleepless night and had distressed him until some recollected gesture or accent made him laugh. He slightly resented this recognition and the change it worked on his emotional tone. For he was compelled to think of her as a human being and be sorry because she was plainly cold and miserable; and it ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... course of the week. She noticed her lack of appetite, the long spells of abstraction that came sometimes after her merriest outbursts; the deep shadows under her eyes of a morning, as if she had passed many sleepless hours. ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... creek. Revisit the pass. Hornets and diamond birds. More ornamented caves. Map study. Start for the mountain. A salt lake. A barrier. Brine ponds. Horses nearly lost. Exhausted horses. Follow the lake. A prospect wild and weird. Mount Olga. Sleepless animals. A day's rest. A National Gallery. Signal for natives. The lake again. High hill westward. Mount Unapproachable. McNicol's range. Heat increasing. Sufferings and dejection of the horses. Worrill's Pass. Glen Thirsty. Food all gone. Review ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... great deal of this may depend on ill-health; and will pass away as the man's bodily condition gets better. We know, in the same way, that the strange anxiety which comes over us in sleepless nights, comes from bodily causes. That is merely because, the circulation of our blood being quickened, our brain becomes more active; and because we are lying alone in the silent darkness, with nothing ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... had become of her? What obscure and passionate impulse had led her suddenly to defy and desert him, to cast in her lot with these insensate aliens? A hundred times during the restless, inactive hours of a sleepless night this question had intruded itself in the midst of his scheming to break the strike, as he reviewed, word by word, act by act, that almost incomprehensible revolt of hers which had followed so swiftly—a final, vindictive ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... He daily changes his opinion of what is pleasure; and, on the trial, finds none that he can call such; and then falls to sighing again, for the emptiness of all that he has enjoyed. So that, instead of being my delight, and the comfort of my old age, sleepless nights, and anxious days, are all the rewards of my past labours for him. But I have had many visions and dreams to admonish me, that if I would venture with my old frame to travel hither a-foot in search of the fairy Sybella, she had a glass, which if she showed him, he would ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... he said to himself, for business. But to his great disappointment he found Mr. Ransom in a frame of mind which precluded action. Indeed, that gentleman looked greatly changed. He not only gave evidence of a sleepless night but showed none of the spirit of the previous evening, and hesitated quite painfully when Gerridge asked him if he did not intend to go ahead with the ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... sent has been preserved. It was written from Tortona, on June fifteenth, 1796. Life is but a vain show because at such an hour he is absent from her. His passion had clouded his faculties, but if she is in pain he will leave at any hazard for her side. Without appetite, and sleepless; without thought of friends, glory, or country, all the world is annihilated for him except herself. "I care for honor because you do, for victory because it gratifies you, otherwise I would have left all else to throw myself at your feet. Dear friend, be sure and say ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... have to fear; the eyes see all things falling to decay, and yet the heart finds joy in following them; but I have little strength of purpose, or command; this heart of mine is feeble and distraught, reflecting thus on age, disease, and death. Distracted, as I never was before; sleepless by night and day, how can I then indulge in pleasure? Old age, disease, and death consuming me, their certainty beyond a doubt, and still to have no heavy thoughts, in truth my heart would be a log or stone." Thus the prince, for Uda's sake, used every ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... room on the Friday morning, after a sleepless night, when Barthrop came in and handed me a telegram from the doctor. "Mr. Payne never recovered consciousness, and died an hour after the operation. All details arranged. Please await letter." I raised my eyes to Barthrop's face, but ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the sleepless, watchful nights ahead of them. That was probably his trouble, all of his life. He didn't trust people; he had to stay awake and keep an eye on everybody. Well, he would ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... great for thought of ours to scan, A wave upon the sleepless sea of time That sinks and sleeps for ever, ere the chime Pass that salutes with blessing, not with ban, The dark year dead, the bright year born for man, Dies: all its days that watched man cower and climb, ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to send her husband out, so that she might be alone with her son the next morning. She was in a state to excite pity. Her eyes, worn with tears; her face, weary with the fatigue of a sleepless night; her feeble voice,—in short, everything about her proved an excess of suffering she could not have borne a second time, and ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... meant for him a lot of trouble, and he was in a fiendish temper, when, after a sleepless night, he came downstairs. He responded gruffly to the greetings of the others, and favored Teddy with a black stare that showed that ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... and down her room, little fists clenched, her soul in passionate turmoil, Beatrice went over it all again as she had done through a sleepless night. She had given him so much, and he had seemed to give her even more. Hours filled with a keen-edged delight jumped to her memory, hours that had carried her away from the falseness of social fribble ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... reputation still; but these people were not fit for the encounter. They had been living in the moist mildness of Holland for thirteen years, and for more than sixty days had been penned in that stifling "Mayflower" cabin, seasick, bruised and sleepless. It sleeted, snowed, rained and froze, and they could find no place to get ashore on; their pinnace got stove, and the icy waves wet them to the marrow. Standish and some others made explorations on land; but found nothing better than some baskets of maize and a number of Indian ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... b-better by half g-give it, Your Eminence; it's only w-what all your b-brother prelates would do in your place. 'Cosi fan tutti;' and then you would be doing s-such a lot of good, and so l-little harm! Really, it's n-not worth all the sleepless nights you have been ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... am just a whip and a spur that smites To fierce endeavour. In the restless days and the sleepless nights ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... the fair and agitated reader will pass a sleepless night in endeavouring to decipher the mutilated sentence. She will fail, and consequently call the book delightful. But should there not have been a marriage previously to this ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... editorial in the Patriot, I at once recognized Sir F. Head's hand in it, and was horror-struck at the idea of a man being exiled from his country, and then deprived of his professional character and privileges without a trial! I passed a sleepless night. ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the dates when he had read and re-read each chapter: the Book was full of tags of yellowed paper, on which the old man had jotted down his simple thoughts. The Book used to rest on a shelf above his bed, and he used often to take it down during the long, sleepless nights and hold converse with it rather than read it. It had been with him to the hour of his death, as it had been with his father. A century of the joys and sorrows of the family was breathed forth from the pages of the Book. Holding ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... thing he heard in the heat of those weary sleepless hours was the steady beat of some sentry's pace, and the click of his arms as he changed his piece from ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... lie down. The pain was unbearable. I could not move my leg nor my back and finally fell into a high fever. We were forced to stop and rest. I swallowed all my stock of aspirin and quinine but without relief. Before me was a sleepless night about which I could not think without weakening fear. We had stopped in the yurta for guests by the side of a small monastery. My Mongols invited the Lama doctor to visit me, who gave me two very bitter powders and assured ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... outs, no reserves. Ceaseless German attacks, rain, mud, death. And then, three or four days of icy coldness, with the bitter Arctic wind cutting the sodden, tired, breaking men like a knife. Fighting every hour, with rifles and bayonets and fists—sleepless, tired out, finished. Only a spirit which made possible the impossible supported them: only the glory of their traditions held the breaking line of Old Contemptibles to the end. And at the end—they ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... wound that bleeds and aches, This long pain, a sleepless pain— When the Father my spirit takes, I shall feel it ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... "You have had a sleepless night," she told me. "It must have been hard to keep awake after all the work you have done in the ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... vessel flies, the land is gone, And winds are rude in Biscay's sleepless bay. Four days are sped, but with the fifth, anon, New shores descried make every bosom gay; And Cintra's mountain greets them on their way, And Tagus dashing onward to the deep, His fabled golden tribute bent to pay; And soon on board the ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... mouthfuls and we were on the tramp again. Our sleepless night, and the strong emotions that had kept us awake, made us feel tired and listless, but the bare idea of being exposed to the same torment and fear another time, gave us courage and strength to press on as far as possible in search of some nocturnal refuge, ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... pale, expressionless stare instead, such as an ancient Christian might have worn when the call-boy told him the lions were ready in the Colosseum. Resignation, obstinacy and defiance—all nicely blended under a turn-the-other-cheek exterior. He looked woebegone, and his thin, handsome face betrayed a sleepless night and a breakfastless morning. I could feel that my presence was the last straw to this unfortunate ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... fixed rivet," said the smith. "The town hath given the Johnstone a purse of gold, for not ridding them of a troublesome fellow called Oliver Proudfute, when he had him at his mercy; and this purse of gold buys for the provost the Sleepless Isle, which the King grants him, for the King pays all in the long run. And thus Sir Patrick gets the comely inch which is opposite to his dwelling, and all honour is saved on both sides, for what is given to ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... only kind of egotism which he seems to take a pleasure in indulging. At the opening of his earliest extant poem of consequence, the "Book of the Duchess," he tells us how he preferred to drive away a night rendered sleepless through melancholy thoughts, by means of a book, which he thought better entertainment than a game either at chess or at "tables." This passion lasted longer with him than the other passion which it had helped ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... There are sleepless nights in the tent of the general-in-chief. When all others except the pickets are asleep, he is examining maps and plans, calculating distances, estimating the strength of his army, and asking himself whether it will do to attack the enemy, or whether he shall stand on the defensive? can this brigade ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... reaction from the prolonged period of exhausting strain, his treble tour in the trenches, with its unrelieved sense of impending destruction, that its endless procession of broken, torn bodies, with its nights of sleepless activity, with its eternal struggle against depression, consequent upon the loss of his comrades, its eternal striving after cheeriness and more than all the shock of the train wreck, with its scenes of horror; all this had combined to reduce his physical powers ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... thing she seemed to care for was her baby; she held it tight in her arms, and Dr Morgan bade them leave it there, its touch might draw the desired tears into her weary, sleepless eyes, and charm the aching ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and was seen by the most people. Everyone in northern New Mexico had seen it going from west to east, so Dr. La Paz and his crew worked eastward across New Mexico to the west border of Texas, talking to dozens of people. After many sleepless hours they finally plotted where it should have struck the earth. They searched the area but found nothing. They went back over the area time and time again— nothing. As Dr. La Paz later told me, this was the first ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... elapsed since that meal in the peasant's house when the Nemesis that holds sleepless vigil over the affairs of men stirred her pinions and, like a strong angel with glittering sword, prepared to avenge the wrongs of a people whose rulers had outraged every law, human and divine, by which human society is held together. King, nobles, and prelates had ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... I weep, From faithless thing like thee to sever? Or let one tear mine eyelids steep, While thus I cast thee off for ever? I loved thee—need I say how well? Few, few have ever loved so dearly; As many a sleepless hour can tell, And many a ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his hope of a speedy end of the war and devoted himself with new enthusiasm to his work. His eyes were sleepless—his ear to the ground. The information on conditions and public sentiment in Richmond and the South which he had dispatched to Washington were of incalculable service to his government. One of ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... Monsieur,—I am here. Poor mamma is in the hospital. I am allowed to see her twice a day. At all other times I remain alone, praying and weeping. I trust that monsieur has passed a good night. For me, I was sleepless, thinking of mamma. ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... nurses,' said Leonora, when they had gone to Washington. Indeed we could not stay where we were, nor flit off to Newport to banish care. I grew sleepless, and a sudden sound would send the blood to my heart. Leonora maintained an undaunted front, but she grew thin in spite of her cheerfulness. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sleepless night, broken twice by the merciless call of the watch, a peep of daylight struggled into view from above, and someone came below. It was my old ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... exclaimed, extending his hand and searching her face as he did so for signs of a sleepless night. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... direct legacy from Louise Lane, needed neither powder nor rouge, and the scarlet lips asked for no touch of carmine. But the big brown eyes were wistful beyond words, the dark hollows beneath spoke of sleepless nights, and the corners of the sweet mouth drooped continually, in spite ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... the hour of two having been struck by Swetman's one-handed clock on the stairs, that is still preserved in the family. Christopher heard the strokes from his chamber, immediately at the top of the staircase, and overlooking the front of the house. He did not wonder that he was sleepless. The rumours and excitements which had latterly stirred the neighbourhood, to the effect that the rightful King of England had landed from Holland, at a port only eighteen miles to the south-west of Swetman's house, ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... sentinels, had scrutinized so long through the night every wavering shade of cloud and moving form of buffalo in the dim distance, that their sleepless eyes, strained and aching, failed to distinguish this moving mass that was so like the brown plains and starless sky that it could scarce be told from them. The night, too, was bitter; northern cold cut hardly ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization, and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... afraid, oh I am so afraid! The cold black fear is clutching me to-night As long ago when they would take the light And leave the little child who would have prayed, Frozen and sleepless at the thought of death. My heart that beats too fast will rest too soon; I shall not know if it be night or noon,— Yet shall I struggle in the dark for breath? Will no one fight the Terror for my sake, The heavy darkness that no dawn will break? How ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... was the crack in the leather he had first discovered yesterday, and which had caused him a sleepless night. The first crack in ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... Brenton to the heart to think that he stood there before her, and could not by any means say a soothing word that she would understand. That she had wept many bitter tears since the terrible Christmas morning was evident; there were dark circles under her beautiful eyes that told of sleepless nights. She sat in a comfortable armchair, facing the window; and looked steadily out at the dreary winter scene with eyes that apparently saw nothing. Her hands lay idly on her lap, and now and then she caught her breath ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... the expression of a rich and engaging personality, which has written itself like an indorsement across the face of a young nation's literature. It is that of a man so sensitive that the scornful finger of a child might have left him sleepless; so kindly that nobody ever applied to him in vain for sympathy; so modest that the smallest praise embarrassed him. His manner and tastes were simple and unassuming. He had no great passions; the brother was stronger in him than the lover. To these qualities, ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... quietly devised a scheme to prevent it, without his knowledge, by hemming him in with tables and chairs, so that each time he sprang up to walk he sank back discouraged at sight of the obstructions. When I recall the sleepless care with which Mrs. Stevenson watched over him at that critical point in his life, it seems to me that it is not too much to say that the world owes it to her that he lived to produce ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... father, the next morning, with all her ordinary composure, in which he could not rival her, after his sleepless, anxious night. His looks of affectionate solicitude disconcerted what she had intended to say, and she waited, with downcast eyes, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... not another word, but walking or rather shuffling disdainfully away, muttered to herself, "Dat is de very meanest man, for a white man, I ever did see; he looked at dat 'ere punkin which has cost me so many anxious days and sleepless nights—which I have watched over as though it had been my own child—which I planted wid dis here hand of my own, and fought for agin the June bugs and the white frost, and dat mouse dat's been tryin ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... the third day after the failure of the search, and of the sixth since McCarthy's disappearance, had arrived. During that time Percy Darrow, apparently insensible to fatigue, had maintained an almost sleepless vigil. His meals Jack Warford brought in to him; he dozed in his chair or on the couch. Never did he ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... girl stole from her couch, and laid on the altar beyond the village heavy clusters of grapes and the richest fruits from her store of dainties. "Hylas!" she softly cried, and the sleepless echo repeated the name; but though she watched long, no form emerged from the forest. Timidly she flitted back to her dwelling, and waited for an eastern gleam. At last the veil of night was lifted a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... sea and in a wilderness, has always something more solemn in it, than on land in the centre of civilization. As the curtain is drawn before his eyes, the solitude of the mariner is increased, while even his sleepless vigilance seems, in a measure, baffled, by the manner in which he is cut off from the signs of the hour. Thus, too, in the forest, or in an isolated clearing, the mysteries of the woods are deepened, ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... get my horses detrained, as the only platform was still being used for the vans not yet unloaded. "Thanks," said I. "Well, it's quite simple. To-morrow I go straight towards the cannon. Good-night." And I went off to finish my sleepless night, lying beside my horses. With my eyes fixed on the chink of the door, I waited, hour ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... end, which marked the passage of those days, left little either of time or inclination to dwell upon aught save the horrid reality of the drama. To others who more immediately participated in those great events, the daily vexations and annoyances—the hot and dusty day —the sleepless, anxious night—the rain upon the unsheltered bivouac—the dead lassitude which succeeded the excitement of action —the cruel orders which recognized no fatigue and made no allowance for labors undergone—all these small trials of the soldier's ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... eyes beneath her smooth brow, were surely the eyes of an old woman? Certainly they were, and of a woman one could not tell how old, for it must have taken years of trouble and sorrow, of tears and of sleepless nights, and a whole long existence, thus to dull, to wear out and to roughen those ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... in his bed with a throb of horror. Could this be the delirium of drink? But no; he had often had an experience like this when he was sleepless; he had the learned description of it pat and ready; it ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... are some miles from the firing line in a fair-sized French town. It's a treat to be away from the noise of battle, and from sleepless nights, and in a civilised place again. We are only here for a day or two, however, and then on we go—or at least that ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... this wonder at a blow, but she detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to which the individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs,—a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came) which carry them ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... greyish hair. The peculiarly melancholy expression of his face was due to the excessive drooping of his eyelids under rounded brows; beneath the eyes were heavy lines; he generally looked like one who has passed through a night of sleepless grief. He wore a suit of black, which had for several years been his reserve attire, till it grew too seamy for use on Sundays. The whole look of the man was saddening; to pass him in the street as a stranger ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... are in the habit of striking the hour twice, with a short interval; so that if anyone is not sure what the clock meant the first time, he has a second chance of counting the strokes. This is no doubt an admirable plan under ordinary circumstances, but it does certainly try the patience of a sleepless dyspeptic after a surfeit of cafe-au-lait and honey; and when he has counted carefully the first time, and is bristling with the consciousness that it is only midnight, it is aggravating in the extreme to have the long slow ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... cramped and almost sleepless night. Although in his training on Terra, on his trial trips to Mars and the harsh Lunar valleys, Raf had known weird surroundings and climates, inimical to his kind, he had always been able to rest almost by the exercise of his will. But now, curled in his roll, he was alert to every sound out ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... here Beatrice now lay in his arms, stricken by some strange malady. He could not know the cause—the sleepless nights, the terrible toil, the shattering nervous strain of catastrophe, of nursing, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... summer midnight—not like the one I told of when the story began, white with snow and glittering with the keen polish of frost. But a soft, still night, drowsy yet sleepless, with an itch of thunder tingling in the air—and, indeed, already the pulsing, uncertain glow of sheet-lightning coming and going at long ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... journey and the road. But great as was his fatigue, he could not get to sleep. He tried to read ... but the lines got entangled before his eyes. He extinguished his candle, and darkness took possession of his chamber.—But he continued to lie there sleepless, with closed eyes.... And now it seemed to him that some one was whispering in his ear.... "It is the beating of my heart, the rippling of the blood," he thought.... But the whisper passed into coherent speech. ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Rising from a sleepless bed, she goes down next morning to find Mrs. Connolly standing on the lowest step of the stairs, as if awaiting her, booted and spurred for ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... a political force, limit its spread as a so-called religion, and buckler the mothers and daughters and sisters of the country against an enemy whose advances are aimed peculiarly at them. The morals of a people are in the custody of its women; and, against Mormonism - that sleepless menace to American morality - these confessions of Lee the Danite are set in types to become a weapon in their hands. It was the womanhood of the nation that compelled the present Senate investigation of Smoot and what Mormon ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... Marseilles company as well as his Genoese friend had been beforehand with him, had obtained from the Government at Turin the right to work the mines, and were already in possession. Balzac's monetary sacrifices, and the hardships he had suffered on his journey, were in vain; he must return to sleepless nights of work, and must redouble his efforts in the endeavour to pay back the money he had borrowed for his expedition. He showed his usual pluck at this juncture; there were no complaints in his letters, and with singular forbearance he does not even abuse the faithless Genoese merchant. His expedition ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... their demands from flagging human muscles to the tireless sinews of electric motors—which ask no wages when they stand unemployed. Similar motors already enjoy favour in working the elevators of tall dwellings in cities. If a householder is timid about burglars, the electrician offers him a sleepless watchman in the guise of an automatic alarm; if he has a dread of fire, let him dispose on his walls an array of thermometers that at the very inception of a blaze will strike a gong at headquarters. But these, after ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... who attracted the attention of the entire medical profession two years ago by a sleepless spell of ninety-three days, and last year by another spell which extended over one hundred and thirty-one days, is beginning on another which he fears will be more serious than the preceding ones. He was put on the circuit jury three weeks ago, and counting to-day has not ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Lady Kirkbank prostrate on a low divan in the saloon, sleepless, and very cross. The atmosphere reeked with red lavender, sal-volatile, eau de Cologne, and brandy, which latter remedy poor Georgie had taken freely in her agonies. Kibble, the faithful Grasmere girl, sat by the divan, fanning ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Another sleepless night—another anxious morning. About eight o'clock I heard Kate's bell ring, and Eunice go upstairs. Presently the girl ran down and entered the room ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... door during the night, and thus hold the doctors and attendants at bay until those in authority had accepted my ultimatum, which was to include a Thanksgiving visit at home. But before morning I had slightly altered my plan. My sleepless night of activity had made me ravenously hungry, and I decided that it would be wiser not only to fill my stomach, but to lay by other supplies of food before submitting to a siege. Accordingly I set things to rights and went about my business ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... were steadfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... clear skies and cloudy skies, head seas and cross seas as well as stern seas. A wind that justifies studding-sails may change, without premonition, to a gale that will make ribbons of top-sails and of storm-sails. The best crew afloat cannot preclude all casualties, or exclude sleepless nights and cold sweats now and then; but a quick eye, a cool head, a prompt hand, and indomitable perseverance will ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... their foolish eyes, blurring their vision and damping their material. Coristine, who longed for a sight of fresh young life after the vision of death, did not know what kept that young life within, and, like an unreasonable man, was inclined to be angry. He was overwrought, poor fellow, sleepless and tired, and emotionally excited, and, therefore, ready for any ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... though with me he used nothing but the raciest of boulevard French. "My friend," said he, "your promise to those Ministers of Marines was rash; for, unless there is the most perfect execution of your scheme and the most sleepless watching of those whom you call dockyard hands—ceux qui travaillent dans les chantiers, ne c'est pas?—the sailing of these grands croiseurs will be told to Germany. There are too many who will know. We are upon une folle ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... "Mrs. P. retired early, but Kay and I sat up chatting and enjoying the peaceful loveliness of this old garden. A sleepless mocking bird and a sleepy little thrush gave a concert in the sweet-lime tree; a couple of green frogs in the fountain rendered a bass duet; Kay thought that if we remained very quiet the spirits of some lovers of the 'splendid idle forties' ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... She complained of faintness and depression, and said she felt sick. I inquired if she had taken anything in the way of physic or food while I had been asleep. She answered that her husband had come in about an hour since, and, finding her still sleepless, had himself administered the composing draught. Mr. Macallan (sleeping in the next room) joined us while she was speaking. He too had been aroused by the bell. He heard what Mrs. Macallan said to me about the composing draught, and made no remark upon it. It seemed to me that he was alarmed ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... tell you how much dismay this sight of a footprint in the ground gave me, nor how many sleepless nights it cost me. All the time I was trying to make my mother think that there was no ground for anxiety, and yet all the time I was showing her that I was very anxious. The more I pretended that I was not troubled, the more absent-minded, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... Is trembling; pressed by potent neighbours On every side, whom I have found the means To raise against that murderer; and I Am left the royal mistress of those lands; In peace the fruit of my sagacity Enjoying. But, some days ago, there came A sleepless trouble to arrest the course Of my prosperity. A dream (why should a dream Disquiet me?) feeds in my heart a pang That wrings it; everywhere I try to shun it; But everywhere it follows me. It was During the horror ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... cruelty in her case, for she was still a good-natured girl; it was as though a passing wind of madness were blowing ever more strongly in the shut-up bedroom. A storm of lust disordered their brains, plunged them into the delirious imaginations of the flesh. The old pious terrors of their sleepless nights were now transforming themselves into a thirst for bestiality, a furious longing to walk on all fours, to growl and to bite. One day when he was playing bear she pushed him so roughly that he fell against a piece of furniture, and when she saw the lump on his forehead she burst into ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Schuyler, whose sleepless vigilance acquired for him the title of "the Eye of the Northern Department," was the terror of the Tories in Northern New York, from Sir John Johnson down to Joe Bettys. Schuyler was, for a long time, commander of the Northern ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... give up all the trades in which human life or health is sacrificed to mere fancy? In London, the bakers have struck. They are kept up from midnight to noon, sometimes far even into the afternoon, sleepless, or only snatching broken slumbers, that London may indulge its fancy for hot bread, which it would be much better without. The result of the strike probably will be, besides relief to the bakers themselves, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... first night it was powerless to disturb me. I thought it possible that on leaving the ship I might be in the condition of the woman, whose husband, a fearful snorer, was suddenly called from home. The lady passed several sleepless nights, until she hit upon the expedient of calling a servant with the coffee mill. The vigorous grinding of that household utensil had the ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... in 2 shots & pulpel samples for assay. Rigged windows on shack to keep out bees, nats & flies & mosquitoes. Bud objects because it keeps out air as well. Took them off. Sick folks must be humored. Hot, miserable and sleepless. Bud ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... all times! And Pete Carlin at the bottom of it! With her nerves frayed raw by two nights of sleepless vigil and the memory of the Curlew's disabled motor rankling within her, Dickie Lang brushed by a group of men and confronted a bullet-headed man in a loose ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... pink and hard acquaintance. I understood that stale look in his eyes. Tears do not bring that. Nothing brings it but sleepless thoughts beyond the assuagement of tears. Behind such eyes the heart is aching cold and the brain searing hot. Who should know better than I, though the kindly years have brought their healing! But here was a wound, raw and fresh ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the skies regained: The fervent king a year remained With arms upraised, refusing rest While with one toe the earth he pressed, Still as a post, with sleepless eye, The air his food, his roof the sky. The year had past. Then Uma's lord,(198) King of creation, world adored, Thus spoke to great Bhagirath: "I, Well pleased thy wish will gratify, And on my head her waves shall fling The ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth . . . though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it. And now you're looking disappointed. You don't think I'm half as interesting a ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I the virgin-hearted cold chaste sea. Behold all ye that weary of life do lie, There is no rest at all beneath the sky Save in the nethermost deepness of the deep. Only the silence and the midst of Me Can still the sleepless soul that fain would sleep; For such, a cool death and a sweet have I, Ev'n I the crystal-hearted cool sweet sea. Behold all ye that in my lap do lie, To love is sweet and sweeter still to die, And woe to him that laugheth me to scorn! Lo in a little while the anger of Me Shall make him mourn ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... diseased self-listenings, self-questionings, impotently painful dubitations, all this fatal nosology of spiritual maladies, so rife in our day, was eminently foreign to him. Quite on the other side lay Sterling's faults, such as they were. In fact, you could observe, in spite of his sleepless intellectual vivacity, he was not properly a thinker at all; his faculties were of the active, not of the passive or contemplative sort. A brilliant improvisatore; rapid in thought, in word and in act; everywhere the promptest ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... a large and murmurous sound, apparently from very far off, had begun to steal upon her ears, level and deep, suggestive almost of the vast slumber of a world and of the underthings that are sleepless but ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... in the nation, readers have come to approve the heir who puts on overalls and works up in a few months from the bottom of the factory to the top, the standards of success are practically the same in all instances: sleepless industry, restless scheming, resistless will, coupled with a changeless probity in the domestic excellences. Nothing is more curious about the American business man of fiction than the sentimentality he ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... genuine affliction are not only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, sleepless. Persons they normally like, they often turn from. No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely. Although the knowledge ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Powers, and I Full many a sleepless night have spent in anxious thought, because I'd find the tawny cock-horse out, what sort of ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... of his two interviews, Cecil felt he had no option but to refer the whole matter to the Bishop, whom he found in his study. He received a somewhat grim reception from the old gentleman, to whom a sleepless night had afforded ample opportunity for reflecting on the vagaries of his son, to which he, not altogether unjustly, attributed his adventures of ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... with aid to the Lancastrians; that power is France. Make Louis thy friend and ally, and thou givest peace to thy life and thy lineage; make Louis thy foe, and count on plots and stratagems and treason, uneasy days and sleepless nights. Already thou hast lost one occasion to secure that wiliest and most restless of princes, in rejecting the hand of the Princess Bona. Happily, this loss now can be retrieved. But alliance with Burgundy is war with France,—war more deadly because Louis ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... through the interlacing branches of jasmine and wavered into the room, when Nisida dressed herself hurriedly, and went as usual to present her forehead to her father's kiss. The old man at once observed the depression and weariness left by a sleepless night upon his daughter's face, and parting with an eager and anxious hand the beautiful black hair that fell over her cheeks, he asked her, "What is the matter, my child? Thou ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sunken eye And wasted cheek. I gazed and thought to spend My Christmas with the angels. God knows best; And here I linger, weary sufferer still. The morning comes long watched-for, long desired; The day drags on, and then the sleepless night: But this will have an ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... the good jeweller, in the tender scenes between that honest ruined tradesman and his wife and children, and in the devoted affection of his apprentice. But the true illumination of the book, and its personal value for the biographer, lie in the white heat of anger, the "sustained and sleepless irony" to adopt Mr Austin Dobson's happy phrase, with which Fielding, with a force unwavering from the first page to the last, here assails his subject. An underlying attack on the Ministerial iniquity of "Great Men" ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... his sleepless bed, saying, "The saints above, as you call them, must take care of you now, Ally, any how; for I'm fairly tired out: so I must go a-hunting or a-shooting with my friend, Sir Hyacinth O'Brien, to ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... patiently collected, as obviously and patently enjoyed. Again there is the mystery of his lectures. They seem to have been fiery, eloquent, impressive harangues; and yet Carlyle describes himself stumbling to the platform, sleepless, agitated, and drugged, inclined to say that the best thing his audience could do for him would be to cover him up with an inverted tub; while as he left the platform among signs of visible emotion and torrents of applause, he thought, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... she get well when the stubborn weakness and languor persisted, when her nights were so long and sleepless, her appetite so slight, her strength ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... so slack a waking on their dykes! Now have they made a sleepless winter for us. Every night we must look, lest the down-slope Between us and the woods turn suddenly To a grey onrush full of small green candles, The charging pack with eyes flaming for flesh. And well for us then if there's no ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie |
