"Sluggish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intelligence, the greater would be the dissatisfaction with their situation—just as we see that the dissemination of education among the English agricultural laborers (by whom, of all classes in Christendom, independence is least to be hoped for), has lately aroused these sluggish beings to strikes and a struggle for a change in ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... alarmed than ever. For he was not singing, and his voice was for wont never wanting in that stormy and uncouth unison of sluggish men's voices, women's eager earnest shrilling. It was as if he had been absent, and so strong the illusion that she leaned to the side a little to touch him and assure herself ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... entered Balliol College, Oxford, and came under the influence of Jowett, afterwards famous as Master of Balliol and translator of Plato. Though he matured early, Green was not a brilliant student. On the contrary, he appeared to be indolent and sluggish. "No man," wrote one of his fellow-students in 1862, "is driven with greater difficulty to work not to his taste.... He wrote some of the best college essays: he never sent them in on the right day, and might generally be seen on the Monday pondering over essays which every one else had sent in ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... things looked bad for the League. How were girls who raced at machines all day, who had neither money nor the voice of the press, to rouse this sluggish, corrupt city to the menace of sending to the legislature men like E.J. Troy, pledged body and soul to the manufacturers? How could they waken the public to woman's bitter necessity for shorter hours? ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... gigantic club mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh or sluggish stream. But there is a general lightening of the sky over head; as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern covered bank and long withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... lenses at naught, while carrying death most horrible in their train; and chief of these are the products of Nature's laboratory, that provides some sixty species of serpents with their deadly venom, enabling them in spite of sluggish forms and retiring habits to secure abundant prey and resent mischievous molestation. The hideous trigonocephalus has forced the introduction and acclimation of the mongoose to the cane fields of the Western tropics; the tiger snake ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... father had crossed the Maine a dozen times, and no harm had come of it! This encouraged them, and, with many pretty screams, mes fois, and oh, Dieu, they finally embarked. The punt was a narrow scow that a ton weight would not have disturbed, the river was so low and sluggish that it might have been forded two-thirds of the distance, and the width was not three hundred feet. Pierre protested that the danger was certainly not worth mentioning, and away he went, as philosophical in appearance as his punt. The voyage was made in safety, and the bows ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... as they were pursuing their aerial path along the borders of a narrow, sluggish bayou, they were suddenly made to realize that the tree-tops held perils more deadly than that of the lurking leopards. They were all staring down into the water, which swarmed with gigantic crocodiles and boiled ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... man of commonplace appearance, with dull, expressionless eyes, sluggish movements, and slow, affected manner of speech. His technique is not astonishing, but he has a full, penetrating, sympathetic tone. There is no charlatanism or trickery in his playing, nor any virtuoso effects, ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... the tree, with its branches sheltering the roof in a picturesque, half foreign fashion. Here and there were massive old houses and shops, with some approach to the size and the substantial—even costly—fittings of "Robinson's." A side street led down to a little sluggish canal which joined the Dewes, a river of considerable size on which Redcross had originally been built. This canal was crossed by a short solid stone bridge, bearing a quaint enough bridge-house, still used ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... of the little river that went slowly through the meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of its French neighbours on the watershed, and was called by some such epithet as hangs to all the waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds and marshes: for they are called 'the Sluggish', 'the Muddy', or 'the Laggard'. Even the name of the Saone, far off, meant once ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the manor-house. The building is closely hemmed in by the sordid signs of progress. Ugly houses, in crowded blocks, cover all the great surrounding space that once was thick forest, fair orchards, gardens, fields, and pastoral rivulet. The Neperan or Saw Mill River flows, sluggish and scummy, under streets and houses. A visit to the manor-house, now, would spoil rather than improve one's impression of what the place looked like in the old days. Yet the house itself remains well preserved, for which all honor to the town of Yonkers. ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... to slacken our speed. The river runs far more slowly in its latter course than when it came babbling and leaping down the hillside. And sometimes a Christian life seems as if it crept rather than ran, like those sluggish streams in the Fen country, which move so slowly that you cannot tell which way the water is flowing. Are not there all round us, are there not amongst ourselves instances of checked growth, of arrested development? There are people listening ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the same shape as the head. This peculiar form, added to their habit of wriggling backwards as well as forwards, has given rise to the fable that they have two heads, one at each extremity. They are extremely sluggish in their motions, and are clothed with scales that have the form of small imbedded plates arranged in rings round the body. The eye is so small as to be scarcely perceptible. They live habitually in the subterranean chambers of the Sauba ant; only coming out of their abodes occasionally ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... providentially, I may say, are not likely to be manufacturers to any great extent, since they have not water powers; the valley of the Mississippi is an alluvial flat, and although the Missouri and Mississippi are swift streams, in general the rivers are sluggish, and, at all events, they have not the precipitate falls of water necessary for machinery, and which abound in the North-eastern States; indeed, if the Western States were to attempt to manufacture, as well as to produce, they would spoil the ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... 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 ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... were in fact to be his subjects. And having read aloud his commission, and having thus as it were shown his authority, Lord Delaware next spoke sternly to his new subjects. He warned them that he would no longer endure their sluggish idleness or haughty disobedience. And if they did not amend their ways they might look to it that the most severe punishment of the law would come upon them. Having thus spoken his mind plainly, to cheer them he told of the plentiful ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... trudged briskly along the smooth highway, every sense alive to the delights of the forest. All about him the woods were vocal with the calls of birds. The wind whispered and sighed in the pine tops. And sometimes, when the air in the bottom was still as sluggish water, Charley could hear the wind roaring among the trees far up on the hillsides. The scent of spring was in the air—that indescribable mixture of the smell of opening buds and flowers and green things and rank ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... world never plumbed the depths of dignity and purpose in Woman till it saw her chained to a railing, clasping the hated constable like a lover, a hoarse example to her sluggish sisters, so it can never realize her capacity for foolishness till it has seen her waiting through weary years, hoping against reason, the victim of illogical constancy to a mere young man. Sweet and gracious Ellen Berstoun, ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... zestfully eating or swiftly eaten: in the air the ecstasy of flight, on the earth the happy movements of animals, the very dust palpitating pleasurably with crawling and creeping populations, the soil riddled with the sluggish voluptuousness of worms; each tiniest creature a perfect expression of the idea of its essence, individualized by its conatus, its effort to persist in existence on its own lines, though in man alone ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... were mounted up quite to happiness. Everything wore a different air. James and his horses seemed not half so sluggish as before. When she looked at the hedges, she thought the elder at least must soon be coming out; and, when she turned round to Harriet, she saw something like a look of spring—a ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... standing in orange groves, the long stretches of jungle, wild tangles of rank growth, cactus, giant ferns, brake and netted vines; birds of gorgeous plumage and discordant note, alligators basking on the sunny bank of a sluggish stream, half-dressed natives at work in coffee fincas, sugar-cane and cotton fields; nude children standing in the doorways of palm-thatched huts, staring with still and stupid wonder at the train, and looking like inanimate clay models of a fairer, ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... strong. He did not like the miller's work, and looked upon it as dreary and unprofitable, and only lived at the mill in order not to live at home. He was a leather-worker, and was always surrounded by a pleasant smell of tar and leather. He was not fond of talking, he was listless and sluggish, and was always sitting in the doorway or on the river bank, humming "oo-loo-loo." His wife and mother-in-law, both white-faced, languid, and meek, used sometimes to come from Kurilovka to see him; they made low bows to him ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... wind, not much of it, but fair, so that we were able to log a sluggish two knots on our northerly course. The mornings of the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh found us with a similar breeze. We were fearfully weak, but we abided by our decision ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... there had been heavy rains which had raised the Chickahomeny river from a low, sluggish stream into a broad, deep, swift running river. As soon as the army got into its then position; by which it was divided by the river, several bridges were built to more effectually reunite the army. The Second Corps had two such bridges, Richardson's being ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... every joint and lame all over; but Don could not think of going into the house and taking a rest. He had been a close prisoner there for a whole week, and now that he had taken a breath of fresh air and stirred his sluggish blood with a little exhilarating exercise, he could not bear to go back to his sofa again. He proposed that they should leave their ponies at the barn and go up to David's in the canoe. They would take their guns with them, he said, and after they had paid David his ...
— The Boy Trapper • Harry Castlemon
... formidable obstacle. It showed no signs of subsiding, for thunderstorms still broke on and behind the mountain range. In the vicinity where the raft lay the channel was about a hundred yards wide and was very deep. The current here was sluggish, but just above was a long and dangerous rapid with many rocks projecting from the water. On these rocks crocodiles of various sizes used to bask with half opened jaws. Around the head of each saurian ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... clingings to the familiar are three parts dread of the unfamiliar and want of resource in its presence, for one part in them of genuine loyalty. Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... a symptom and a cause of our economic problems. Unless we reduce the dangerous growth rate in government spending, we could face the prospect of sluggish economic growth into the indefinite future. Failure to cope with this problem now could mean as much as a trillion dollars more in national debt in the next 4 years alone. That would average $4,300 in additional debt for ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... the object of his daring deeds had been his own other self; that never satisfied nature of humanity, which, continually cries for more, that unreasonable element of our existence, that is not content, when we have dipped our trembling hands in the sluggish, sullied waters of sin and shame, to gather the little bright deceptive flower they craved to hold, something that looks so tempting and precious on the dangerous water's edge, but which when gathered becomes offensive, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... obstructed by branches of trees and other rubbish, which had come down the river, and settled close to it. Johnson, partly from a desire to see it play more freely, and partly from that inclination to activity which will animate, at times, the most inert and sluggish mortal, took a long pole which was lying on a bank, and pushed down several parcels of this wreck with painful assiduity, while I stood quietly by, wondering to behold the sage thus curiously employed, and smiling with an humorous satisfaction each time when he carried his point. He worked till ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals, fallen in the pool, Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array. Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... his savage, discordant cry: "Don't do that!" rang in her ears. She thrilled and crumpled in turn. The blood ran hot once more in her veins. As she looked back over the past year it seemed to her that her blood had been cold and sluggish. But now it was warm again and tingling. Even the desolating thought that her discovery would yield no profit failed to check the riotous, grateful warmth that raced through her body from crown to toe. Despair had its innings, ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... day—might take their pleasure either sadly, as indeed best befits our pilgrim state, or uproariously to deaden the ear to the still small voice of conscience—the pangs of slighted love, the law's delay, the sluggish step of Fortune, the stealthy strides of approaching poverty, or any other of the familiar incidents of our mortal life. The sixty-two illustrations which adorn the book are as honest as the letterpress. There is a most delightful Morland depicting ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... low tide there lies sand again and shingle (albeit but a narrow beach, for here a depth of water sinks rapidly) laved with relentless obstinacy by long, furling, growling rollers that are grey at their sluggish base and emerald-lighted at their curvetting crest. Sand yet again to the south, towards the nearer coast line, for a mile or perhaps less, dotted, along an irregular path, with grey rocks that look as though the advance guard of a giant army had attempted to ford its insecure ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... sisters learned of the plight of the two girls whom they knew slightly, and how after getting lost themselves on one of the sluggish rivers of interior Florida, Ruth and Alice were able to render a great service to the Madison girls—this you may read in ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... Annabella Day! She's so reluctant to obey! She acts so sluggish and so sickly! Oh, Anna, why not do it quickly? Oh, Anna, do be prompt, and then, No one ...
— The Goop Directory • Gelett Burgess
... go no farther. Physically, the strain was not as yet greater than I could bear but my machine had reached its limit. The attenuated air gave no firm support to the wings, and the least tilt developed into side-slip, while she seemed sluggish on her controls. Possibly, had the engine been at its best, another thousand feet might have been within our capacity, but it was still misfiring, and two out of the ten cylinders appeared to be out of action. If I had not already reached the zone for which I was searching then I should never ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... though I grant you it's difficult, when you look at this peaceful landscape; but try to call up something as different as darkness is to light. Forget the river, and the houses, and the pretty branching canals, and see nothing but marshes, wild and terrible, with sluggish rivers crawling through mud-banks to the sea, beaten back by fierce tides, to overflow into oozy meers and stagnant pools. Think of raging winds, never still, the howling of seas, and the driving of pitiless rains. No other views but those, and no definite forms rising out of ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... my man of rhymes, "I know your bent—these are no laughing times: Can you—but, Miss, I own I have my fears— Dissolve in pause, and sentimental tears; With laden sighs, and solemn-rounded sentence, Rouse from his sluggish slumbers, fell Repentance; Paint Vengeance as he takes his horrid stand, Waving on high the desolating brand, Calling the storms to bear him o'er ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Wright's land, on the route to Ballarat, was a small forest of gum trees, through which ran a small stream, similar to the one that we crossed on the night that we captured the bushrangers. The water was shallow and sluggish, with a soft, sticky bottom, and boggy sides. This stream Mr. Wright had told us we should have to cross, and that after we were over we could soon find the numerous trails and roads leading to the mines, and probably meet with parties ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... "Oh, don't ask me to do that! You know what a sluggish brain mine is. I can quite understand your not wanting to marry me, but why you should want to marry a farmer—like Jeff ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... after the arrival of the cavalcade, the great wappenshaw was set in array, and forming up company by company the long double line extended as far as the eye could reach from north to south along the side of the broad and sluggish-moving river. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish. Yet there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of another Revolution, when they said that they knew not so much as whether there were a Holy Ghost or not. The same want of kindling power in the national intelligence which made of the English Reformation one of the most sluggish and tedious chapters in our history, has made the still mightier advance of the moderns from the social system and spiritual bases of the old state, in spite of our two national achievements of punishing a king with death ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Laurier met with his real difficulties. He could not, by tactics of procrastination or evasion, keep the question out of the domestic field; the era of abject, passive and unthinking colonialism was beginning to pass; and the spirit of nationalism was stirring the sluggish waters of Canadian politics. Sir Wilfrid had to face the issue and make the best of it. He handled the question with consummate adroitness and judgment; but ultimately its complexities baffled him and the Imperialists ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... natural cause of the depression of the working class was the rise in prices. Wages have always shown themselves more sluggish in movement than commodities. While money wages, therefore, remained nearly stationary, real wages shrank throughout the century. In 1600 a French laborer was obliged to spend 55 per cent. of his wages merely on food. A whole ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Tartar camp. But the exploits of the hunters of Scythia are not confined to the destruction of timid or innoxious beasts; they boldly encounter the angry wild boar, when he turns against his pursuers, excite the sluggish courage of the bear, and provoke the fury of the tiger, as he slumbers in the thicket. Where there is danger, there may be glory; and the mode of hunting, which opens the fairest field to the exertions of valor, may justly be considered as the image, and as the school, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... blue tobacco smoke curling above our heads. We were alive and sound of limb, well treated and with the promise of release; we might have waited, seeing that wait we must, in some measure of content. We did not so. There was a horror in the air. From the marshes that were growing green, from the sluggish river, from the rotting leaves and cold black earth and naked forest, it rose like an exhalation. We knew not what it was, but we breathed it in, and it went to the marrow of ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... overview: In late 1978 the Chinese leadership began moving the economy from a sluggish, inefficient, Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a more market-oriented system. Whereas the system operates within a political framework of strict Communist control, the economic influence of non-state organizations and individual citizens has been steadily increasing. The authorities switched ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... wounding her tough little feet. She noticed blood-stains on the rocks as she heaped them with a broader base for her fifth attempt. The snake rested, waving his head downward as if in query. Fortunately, he was full and sluggish. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... scare-crows, and some so small that they may be easily concealed. Some I have ground into oval forms to be hung at watches; and some, for the curious, I have set in wedding rings, that ladies may never want an attestation of their innocence. Some I can produce so sluggish and inert, that they will not act before the third failure; and others so vigorous and animated, that they exert their influence against unlawful wishes, if they have been willingly and deliberately indulged. As it is my practice honestly to tell my customers the properties of my magnets, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... conquest. Spain kept the eastern portion of the island, calling it Santo Domingo. This cession was of great economic value to France, she increased her number of slaves and soon supplied all Europe with cotton and sugar. Santo Domingo, Spain's portion of the island, as compared with Haiti, was a sluggish community. Here also Negroes increased as slaves and soon the population of these two colonies was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... gratitude sometimes struggled through the stillness of his features, or a murmured word of thanks found its way through his parched lips, and he would relapse into the partial stupor or the fitful sleep in which, with intervals of slight wandering, the slow hours dragged along the sluggish days one after another. With no violent symptoms, but with steady persistency, the disease moved on in its accustomed course. It was at no time immediately threatening, but the experienced physician knew its uncertainties only too well. He had known fever ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... doubt figure as a momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-sticking or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or an argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a sluggish movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep. For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... about labour unions in that coal region. If there were any, I did not know of them—I was not asked to join. In those same pits and at that same time worked Keir Hardie, and "wee Keir" was just beginning to move the sluggish souls of his fellow labourers to improve their condition by collective effort. My ideal did not lead me in that direction. I was struggling to get into the other world for another reason. I wanted to live a religious life. I wanted to move men's souls as ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... solitary), this Country, for many miles round, has nothing that could be called a Hill; it is definable as a bare wide-waving champaign, with slight bumps on it, or slow heavings and sinkings. Country mostly under culture, though it is of sandy quality; one or two sluggish brooks in it; and reedy meres or mires, drained in our day. It is dotted with Hamlets of the usual kind; and has patches of scraggy fir. Your horizon, even where bare, is limited, owing to the wavy heavings of the ground; windmills and church-belfries ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... Jerry's ear and the boy countered lightly. His color was rising now and his eyes were sparkling. It was good, it was a game he loved. The moment of stage fright had passed. He had forgotten the crowd. His foot-work was fast and made Clancy seem almost sluggish by comparison. That was the danger. Would he waste himself too early? Ten rounds! Not too long for Jerry, if the other didn't land dangerously and more often than he. Clancy played for the head, and caught the boy fairly on the jaw, but got ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... sweep of the bad lands, strayed to the sluggish waters of the Missouri, and beyond, where the black buttes of the Judith Range reared their massive shapes in the distance. Suddenly a mighty urge welled up within him. He would not renounce her! ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... Walden was then sixty, but she looked seventy-five at least; she was a stern, detached woman who dealt with things individually and as she could—she never sought to comprehend that which was not writ large and clear. She was not a dull nor an ignorant woman, but she had been carried on the sluggish current of life with small effort or resistance. She did her task and made ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... athlete born; while I have never engaged in any sport, know nothing of such matters, nor could I learn them. And then there is such a vast difference mentally between us: his mind is as quick and nimble as his muscles, while mine is much like a muddy stream, I'm afraid,—opaque and sluggish. Yes, I have often wondered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... body together and otherwise be merry, and the hand of that careless arm soft on his pistol, lest Don Ruz should abruptly dislike him too much; for Luis contrived a tone for his small-talk that would have disconcerted the most sluggish, sweet to his own mischievous ears, healing to his galled self-esteem. "Good-night, Don Ruz. Good-night, Lolita. Perhaps I shall come to-morrow, manana ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... remained long hours on the quay or on the bridge, walking or standing still by turns, and waiting in vain for the inside shutter to open and to give the mute signal on which we had agreed. How have I watched the sluggish waters of the Seine beneath the arches of the bridge, bearing away in their course the trembling rays of the moon, or the reflected light of the windows of the city. How many hours and half hours have I not reckoned as they ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... she grew sulky, slackened her pace, tired, and at last fairly stood still. I had been so much used to horses that, perceiving her humour, I had the sagacity to turn her head homeward, and she then went on again, though with a sullen and sluggish pace. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... if the most ghastly and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,—who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can "on horror's head horrors accumulate." He assimilates the sluggish sympathies of his readers to those of sailors and vulgar ballad readers, who cannot be excited to an interest in the battle of the Arethusa, unless they learn that "her sails smoaked with brains, and her scuppers ran blood;"—a line which threatens him with formidable competitors ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Forbes, namely, that a glacier is a semi-fluid body, it is largely impregnated throughout its extent with water, its particles move round and past each other—in other words, it flows in precisely the same manner as water, the only difference being that it is not quite so fluid; it is sluggish in its flow, but it certainly models itself to the ground over which it is forced by its own gravity, and it is only rent or broken into fragments when it is compelled to turn sharp angles, or to pass over steep convex slopes. Forbes, by his careful measurements and investigations, ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... every one seeming to make an invasion of the little rocky domain which defied it, and to retire unwillingly, foiled, beaten, and broken, to gather new forces and come on again for a new attack. Lois watched them, fascinated by their persistence, their sluggish power, and yet their ever-recurring discomfiture; admired the changing colours and hues of the water, endlessly varying, cool and lovely and delicate, contrasting with the wet washed rocks and the dark line of sea-weed lying where high tide had cast it up. The breeze blew in her face ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... expanse of the sky. Reject it, and what can we set up against it, what can we put in its place? There is but the grand confession of scientific ignorance, aware of its knowing nothing—but this is habitually sluggish, and calculated to discourage the curiosity more needful to man than wisdom—or the hypothesis of the fixity of the species and of divine creation, which is. less demonstrable than the other, banishes for all time the living elements of the problem, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... mouth to the first fork, is a growth of cedar, on either bank, intermixed with hemlock, pine, birch, and a few scattered maples. Thence to the third fork, denoted on the map, the growth is exclusively pine and fir. This river is sluggish and deep, and is navigable for boats of ten to fifteen tons burden, without any obstruction to the third forks. Its width is uniform, about sixty to ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... as this answers a very good temporary purpose, and in still water, as, for example, over narrow lakes or very sluggish streams, where there is very little current, a floating structure of this kind is sometimes built for permanent service. Such bridges will not, however, stand on broad and rapid rivers liable to floods. The pressure of the water alone, in such cases, would very much endanger ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... bad, but they always give warning, usually a good long one. I've killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of them and never been bitten. Cotton-mouth moccasins are poisonous, but they are sluggish and not so very plenty. You'll have to get used to the smaller moccasins. You will find lots of them. I've kicked them out of my path on the prairies and in the marshes for a good many years without having been ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... melodious, pure, and cool, And meads, with life and mirth and beauty crown'd? Ah! see, the unsightly slime and sluggish pool, Have all the solitary vale imbrown'd; Fled each fair form, and mute each melting sound, The raven croaks forlorn on naked spray: And, hark! the river, bursting every mound, Down the vale thunders, and with wasteful ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... very long; the head was furnished with two short black horns, turning backwards; the tail, which reached down to the ham joint, had a tuft of hair at the end. The animal was of a mouse colour; and it trotted away from us in a very sluggish manner; moving its head from side to side, to see if we were pursuing it. Shortly after this, as we were crossing a large open plain, where there were a few scattered bushes, my guide, who was a little way before me, wheeled ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... one thing, Harry—there is always something to look at, for there are canoes constantly going up and down, and there is plenty of variety among them—from the sluggish dhows, laden with up country produce, to the long canoes with a score of paddlers and some picturesque ruffian sitting in the stern. It adds to the interest when you know that the crews are cutthroats to a man, and would make ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... sufferer also looked up, and in the direction of the doorway, and though she said nothing, her eyes expressed as much surprise as was compatible with a sluggish temperament, and a disposition to cavil at most things and persons that were presented ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... time, then, his mind ran eagerly for awhile on the project of some musical and dramatic development of a fancy suggested by that old Latin poem of Conrad Celtes—the hyperborean Apollo, sojourning, in the revolutions of time, in the sluggish north for a season, yet Apollo still, prompting art, music, poetry, and the philosophy which interprets man's life, making a sort of intercalary day amid the natural darkness; not meridian day, of course, but a soft derivative daylight, good enough for us. ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... face, have plucked it from her breast, and dashed its brains out, if she had so sworn to do it, as he had sworn to perform that murder. Then she added, how practicable it was to lay the guilt of the deed upon the drunken sleepy grooms. And with the valour of her tongue she so chastised his sluggish resolutions, that he once more summoned up ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... agreeable tete-a-tete, you were pleased to feel interested in my somewhat sluggish history. Would you pardon a ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... bequeathed by Slavery in regard to these Southern blacks, that they are sluggish and inefficient in labor! Last night, after a hard day's work (our guns and the remainder of our tents being just issued), an order came from Beaufort that we should be ready in the evening to unload a steamboat's cargo of boards, ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... broad assertion, but it is no doubt strictly within bounds. If the claim be not too much of the nature of a truism, we may add that so far as quality is concerned the superiority of our finny tribes is even more strongly marked than in regard to quantity. In the sluggish streams that abound in "ten degrees of more effulgent clime," the fish partake of the slimy properties of their native element; it is only in the limpid waters of the North that they are found ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... the people tried To push from power, here is laid aside. Death only from the bench could ever start The sluggish load ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... soft harmonies where it lifted the great branches that arched the road. He crossed strips of bottom land where the water stood in still pools about the gnarled and moss-covered trunks of trees. At intervals down some sluggish inlet he caught sight of the yellow flood that was pouring past, or saw the Arkansas coast beyond, with its mighty sweep of unbroken forest that rose out of the river mists and blended with the gray distance ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... part of your education. At that very juvenile period, the difference even of months makes a marked distinction in bestowing and receiving instruction. I, also, was so peculiarly backward, that even our Susan stood before me; she could read when I knew not my letters. But though so sluggish to learn, I was always observant: do you remember Mr. Seaton's denominating me, at fifteen, "the silent, observant Miss Fanny"? Well I recollect your reading with our dear mother all Pope's works and Pitt's "AEneid." ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... as he wandered about. The amount of tobacco which he had smoked since his return to these parts, exactly in that spot, was considerable, for there he might have been found at some period of the afternoon at least three times a week. He would sit on this rail for half an hour looking down at the sluggish waters of the little river, rolling the smoke out of his mouth at long intervals, and thinking perhaps of the great book which he was supposed to be writing. As he sat there now, he suddenly heard ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... block was alerted. The people, like some sluggish beast goaded reluctantly into action, began to make tentative movements toward Dennison, impelled by the ...
— Forever • Robert Sheckley
... smallest country in Central America, El Salvador has the third largest economy, but growth has been minimal in recent years. Hoping to stimulate the sluggish economy, the government is striving to open new export markets, encourage foreign investment, and modernize the tax and healthcare systems. Implementation in 2006 of the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement, which El Salvador was the first to ratify, has strenthened an ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... semi-constitutional authority, which the Visconti first helped him to transmute into a tyranny, and then, upon Pandolfo's assassination, seized as his own.[7] All Italy and even Germany had now begun to regard the usurpations of the Milanese despot with alarm. But the sluggish Emperor Wenceslaus refused to take action against him; nay, in 1395 he granted to the Visconti the investiture of the Duchy of Milan for 100,000 florins, reserving only Pavia for himself. In 1399 the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... unnatural habits of life alluded to have lowered the vitality and favored the accumulation of waste matter and poisons to such an extent that the sluggish bowels, kidneys, skin and the other organs of elimination are unable to keep a clean house, Nature has to resort to other, more radical means of purification or we should choke in our own impurities. These forcible housecleanings of Nature are colds, catarrh, skin eruptions, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... late—too late; the Manchu servants who have friends among the guards at the Palace gates have said this all the evening. For the Chinese Colossus, lumbering and lazy, sluggish and ill-equipped, has raised himself on his elbow, and with sheep-like and calculating eyes is looking down on us—a pigmy-like collection of foreigners and their guards—and soon will risk a kick—perhaps even will trample us quickly to ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... imprisonment—a something which he knew not, but it was not life—had crept to him in his prison, and with a cruel hand marked years upon his brow—years through which he had not lived, but suffered. And still he remained young in spite of gray hairs and wrinkles. He glowed with hope and defiance, his sluggish blood was warmed from time to time with new hopes, new expectations. His imagination painted wonderful pictures of future happiness. This hope always remained smiling and vigorous; notwithstanding his many disappointments—his many useless ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... suit and stiff shirt, and lay down on the hearth-rug. But he did not sleep. He would watch the wings of flame gilding the dark throat of the chimney, and his mind seemed drawn upward on that rush of light, up into the pure chill air where the moon was riding among sluggish thick floes of cloud. In the darkness he heard chiming voices, wheedling and tantalizing. One night he was walking on his little verandah. Between rafts of silver-edged clouds were channels of ocean-blue sky, inconceivably deep and transparent. The air was serene, ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... a double row alongside a small stream which made its way across the meadow to the lake. In the middle of their village the stream rippled over shallows, and here they had placed stepping-stones for their convenience in crossing. Below it was sluggish and deep, and here they kept their canoes. These Kakisas used both dug-outs, for the lake, and bark-canoes for the river. The main body of the lake stretched to the west and south: off to Stonor's right it gradually narrowed down to the ordinary ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... at last it joins the broad vast sea—where some halt to rest from heavy loads and think as they look over the parapet that to smoke and lounge away one's life, and lie sleeping in the sun upon a hot tarpaulin, in a dull, slow, sluggish barge, must be happiness unalloyed—and where some, and a very different class, pause with heaver loads than they, remembering to have heard or read in old time that drowning was not a hard death, but of all means of suicide ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... not so keen for growing up To wrinkled cheek and heavy tongue, And sluggish blood; with little Bud I long to be a comrade young. His sports are joys I want to share, His games are games I want to play, An old man grim's no chum for him And ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest
... the Red King. 1087.—In Normandy the Conqueror was succeeded by his eldest son, Robert. Robert was sluggish and incapable, and his father had expressed a wish that England, newly conquered and hard to control, should be ruled by his more energetic second son, William. To the third son, Henry, he gave a sum of money. There was as yet no settled ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... sorrows. Only a few words were uttered now and then when Nigel asked the name of a point or peak which rose in the distance on either hand. It seemed as if the quiescence of sea and air had fallen like a soft mantle on the party and subdued them into an unusually sluggish frame of mind. ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... and the cellar dry. With this in mind, the selection of the house site should be carefully made. Instinctively, and with reason, the immediate neighborhood of low, swampy, marshy ground, of stagnant ponds, or of sluggish streams should be avoided. It should not be necessary to warn prospective builders that low land, subject to inundation, even though this may happen only occasionally, is not a wise choice of a building site. Figure 2 shows an inundation in a small village ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... impress on the sluggish conscience of society their solemn messages from God, unless they are conspicuously free from self-indulgence, and show by their example the gulf, wide as between heaven and hell, which parts cleanness from uncleanness. Our lives must witness to the eternal distinction between ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... which has cost me many months' heavy work, 'while I bore burdens with dull patience and beat the track of the alphabet with sluggish resolution[31],' I have, I hope, shown that I am not unmindful of all that I owe to men of letters. To the dead we cannot pay the debt of gratitude that is their due. Some relief is obtained from its burthen, if we in our turn make ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... followed was one calculated to arouse the most sluggish soul present. The choir sang quite thrillingly "The Maple Leaf Forever"; the mouth organ and concertina band played "Upon the Heights of Queenston" four times through without stopping to take breath; while the boys at the ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... Shark's Bay; the anchorage is secure and the bottom clear of rocks. There is also an abundance of fish and turtle, and of the latter a ship might embark forty or fifty every day, for they are very sluggish and make no effort to escape, perhaps from knowing the impossibility of their scrambling over the rocky barrier that fronts the shore, and dries at half ebb. Of fish we caught only two kinds; the snapper, a species of sparus, called by the French the rouge bossu, and a tetradon ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... southwest corner of Lake Michigan, which, seventy years ago, was half morass from the overflowing of the sluggish creek, whose waters, during flood, spread over the low-lying, level plain, or were supplemented in the dry season by the inflow from the lake, showed no sign of any future development and prosperity. The few streets of wooden houses that had been built by their handful of isolated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... dead to confirm it. In view of the Foresight which guides men, we may trust that all this tumultuous sense of inadequacy in present institutions, this blind notion of wrong, far enough from intelligent correction, is, after all, better than sluggish inaction. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... opinion, as he no sooner asked me how I could account for the phenomenon I have already mentioned of the river appearing to decrease in bulk as we descended it, than I instinctively advanced his own theory. Moreover, the same hypothesis will answer for the sluggish flooding of the Nile ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... "For the present the Parliament side is running down the brae," wrote the sagacious Baillie, Sept. 22, 1643; and again, more pithily, Dec. 7, "They may tig- tag on this way this twelvemonth." The only remedy, Baillie thought—the only thing that would change the sluggish "tig-tagging" of Essex and the English into something like what a war should be—was the expected coming-in of the Scots. For this event the English Parliamentarians also longed vehemently. "All things are expected from God and the Scots" is Baillie's description ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... teams lined up for the first scrimmage, Teeny-bits got his first close view of Norris. The famed full-back of the purple was of about Neil Durant's height, of an impressively powerful build, but not so heavy as to appear sluggish. He looked the Ridgley team over with steady, appraising eyes; his face was keen and determined,—the very look of him indicated that he was ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... remembered that the balloon itself conveys, clinging about it, no inconsiderable quantity of air, brought from other levels, while the temperature of its own mass will be liable to affect any thermometer in close neighbourhood. Moreover, any ordinary form of thermometer is necessarily sluggish in action, as may be readily noticed. If, for example, one be carried from a warm room to a cold passage, or vice versa it will be seen that the column moves very deliberately, and quite a long interval will elapse before it ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... noted this, too. It was only natural, for after dawn the air currents that may have become sluggish during the night were in the habit of awakening and taking on ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... that a building for the insane should never exceed two stories in height; that fire proof construction and at least two stairways from the upper floors should be provided; that day rooms should be on the first and sleeping rooms on the second floor; that all buildings for the insane who suffer from sluggish and enfeebled circulation of the blood should be capable of being warmed to 70 deg. in the coldest weather; that ample cubic space and ventilation should be provided; and that, as far as possible, without too great increase of the cost of maintenance or sacrificing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... Poyang lake. Not, however, the magnificent sheet of water which is found there in summer, but the lake as it is in winter, contracted to one tenth of its maximum size, and little more than a wide and sluggish river flanked by boundless mud tracts swarming with snipe and wildfowl. Another few days' sailing, for the breeze could now be felt across the wide marshland, and Hukow (mouth of the lake) was reached, where the merchandise in ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again, And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into 'plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... bosom the ice and the steamers were struggling for mastery. Beyond stretched the snow-clad bluffs, sternly looking down on the Mississippi, as if to say, "'Thus far shalt thou come and no farther'—though sluggish, you are aggressive, ever pushing where you should not; but all attempts in this direction are alike vain; since creation's dawn, we have defied you, and here we stand, to-day, calm, majestic, immovable. Coquette as you will in other latitudes, with flowery banks and youthful piers ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... distribution, weekly markets merge into daily markets; while in place of the languid transfer from place to place, taking place at first weekly, then twice or thrice a week, we by-and-by get daily transfer, and finally transfer many times a day—the original sluggish, irregular rhythm, becomes a rapid, equable pulse. Mark, too, that in both cases the increased activity, like the greater perfection of structure, is much less conspicuous at the periphery of the vascular system. On main lines of railway, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... after the explanation of Mr. Thrush's exact relation to Rosamund that the silent contest began in the waning summer when London was rather arid, and even the Thames looked hot between its sluggish banks of mud. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the plain is worthy of a visit. It is the so-called Colonna dei Francesi, a cinquecento pillar of Ionic design, erected on the spot where Gaston de Foix expired victorious after one of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The Ronco, a straight sluggish stream, flows by the lonely spot; mason bees have covered with laborious stucco-work the scrolls and leafage of its ornaments, confounding epitaphs and trophies under their mud houses. A few cypress-trees stand round it, and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... quickly closing in. Away beyond the woods which sloped upward in the western distance until they touched the sky, the sun's blood-red beam pierced the slowly-rising mist rolling down into the valley where the pollards marked the winding course of the narrow, sluggish stream. Over brown woods and furrowed fields it cast a ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... the admonition, that they should prove their faith by good works. Since such great blessing is bestowed upon you through faith (he would say), that ye really have all that God is, do this besides: be diligent, and not sluggish; add to your faith, virtue; that is, let your faith break out before the world, so as to be zealous, busy, powerful, and active, and to do many works; let it not remain idle and unfruitful. Ye have a good inheritance and a good field, but see to it that ye do not let thistles ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... ancestors there had been a warrior who had ranged the German forests dressed in the skins of wild beasts, his helmet decorated with a pair of fierce upstanding horns. Who knows but a drop of his fighting blood had come down through the generations to stir this sluggish descendant into action just at this particular moment when something had to ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... believed, that there was any rising,' either in North Wales or at Shrewsbury, or on Marston Moor, 'at the very time when there was an Insurrection at Salisbury'—' therefore, how men of wicked spirits may traduce Us in that matter—I leave it!'[59] Surely 'sluggish mortals, saved from destruction,' not caused by secret agencies, but from an actual 'Rebellion,' which threatened to bring every one of them into 'blood and confusion,' need not be required to believe in the very existence of so great ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... is performed by contiguous cells, which are quite as effortless as in plants. Because of their organic indolence, sponges are often classed as vegetables. A body having an atonic or a lymphatic temperament is abundantly supplied with absorbent organs, which are very sluggish in their operations. In the lymphatic temperament, there seems to be less constructive energy, slower elaboration, and greater frugality. Lymph is a colorless or yellow fluid containing a large proportion ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... broad thumb on his plastic mind without his conscious knowledge. Canada with her young, red-blooded vigour swept into him like a tidal wave of open sea into a sluggish, marshy creek. Canada thrust her vastness and her limitless potentialities at him with a careless hand, as though to say: "Here's opportunity for the taking." Canada taught him in ten days what at home he would never ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... your army! Lord D.: Purify your court! Capt. Corc: Get up your steam and cut your canvas short! Sir B.: To speak on both sides teach your sluggish brains! Mr. B.: Widen your thoroughfares, and flush your drains! Mr. Gold.: Utopia's much too big for one small head— I'll float ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... morning of the 3d brought brilliant sunshine and with the perfume of the forest in our nostrils we pushed on, soon reaching a flatter and a marshy country, where the creek deepened and narrowed with a sluggish current. Here the paddling was good, and for a little ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... the Federal army was far superior in numbers, it was not animated by an energy in proportion to its strength. The march from the White House was more sluggish than the current of the Chickahominy. From May 17 to June 26 the Army of the Valley had covered four hundred miles. Within the same period the Army of the Potomac had covered twenty. It is true that the circumstances were widely different. McClellan had in front of him the lines of Richmond, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... abandon flashed into life in me, and I leapt to my feet with maniac eyes. Something stirring in King's Cobb! I should have thought nothing less than the last trump could have pricked it out of its accustomed grooves; and that even then it would have slipped back into them with a sluggish sense of grievance ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... have 'sardanapalisme', any piece of profuse luxury, from Sardanapalus; while for 'lambiner', to dally or loiter over a task, they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of Pascal's Provincial Letters will remember Escobar, the great casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the notoriety which he thus acquired ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... to blame,' said Mr. Power, nodding to Paula's architect. 'Yet not I, but accident and a sluggish temperament. There are times, Mr Somerset, when the human creature feels no interest in his kind, and assumes that his kind feels no interest in him. The feeling is not active enough to make him fly from their presence; but sufficient to keep him silent ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... bounded that area, or when, at most, it was restricted to a few lines of communication between defensible points garrisoned by the monopolists,—as were the Staple towns of England which carried on the wool trade with the British fortified counting-houses in Flanders,—a small quantity of sluggish capital sufficed. But as police improved, and the area of competition broadened faster than capital accumulated and quickened, the competitive phase dawned, whose advent is marked by Darcy v. Allein, decided in the year 1600. ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... with time and opportunity, we find that we have made life much too short, and thrown away a huge portion of our time. Then we, in our mind, deduct from the sum total of our years the hours that we have needlessly passed in sleep; the working-hours each day, during which the surface of the mind's sluggish pool has not been stirred or ruffled by a single thought; the days that we have gladly got rid of, to attain some real or fancied object that lay beyond, in the way between us and which stood irksomely the intervening days; the hours worse than wasted in follies and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... was in the stern of the canoe that had been creeping along one of the sluggish water courses that led through the cypress swamp and into the heart ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... through the hollows created by the mammoth outthrusting treetops in a course crazy and twisted, but one which kept him pointing always towards Porno. Presently he found an easier highway and a faster—a sluggish, dirty yellow stream, quite broad, which ended, he was sure, in a swamp within a mile of ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... of the successful parvenu is only the necessary continuance of the career of the needy struggler: our mental changes are like our grey hairs or our wrinkles—but the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth and decay: that which is snow-white now was glossy black once; that which is sluggish obesity to-day was boisterous rosy health a few years back; that calm weariness, benevolent, resigned, and disappointed, was ambition, fierce and violent, but a few years since, and has only settled into submissive ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the sackcloth and ashes are beginning to receive the crowns of the olive and the bay upon their consecrated heads. Many will find it very agreeable, now, to sail in upon the sunny and ardent tide of the rippling river, forgetting that once it was a darksome, sluggish stream, not pleasant to launch forth upon. My father's[208] early championship of a despised cause taught me to hold very sacred those pioneers in holy efforts, which to embrace was to suffer the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... said the Miller, 'you are very lazy. Really, considering that I am going to give you my wheelbarrow, I think you might work harder. Idleness is a great sin, and I certainly don't like any of my friends to be idle or sluggish. You must not mind my speaking quite plainly to you. Of course I should not dream of doing so if I were not your friend. But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... who hides his head in a solitude in Yorkshire, and buries his probably fine talents in a Lincolnshire fen? Have I genius? Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to cheer and convince the timid, to lead the blind groping in darkness, and to trample the audacious sceptic in the dust? My own conscience, besides a hundred testimonials from places of popular, most popular worship, from reverend prelates, from distinguished ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the Rolls, had gone over to quicken his sluggish movements, and wrote from Chester to Cromwell, in despair: "Please your goodness to be advertised, that as yet the deputy is at Beaumaris, and the Northern men's horses have been on shipboard these twelve days, which is the danger of their destruction. They have lost such ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... it.[93] Maedler showed that no part of the heavens could be indicated as a region of exceptionally swift movements, such as would result from the presence of a gigantic (though possibly obscure) ruling body; but that a community of extremely sluggish movements undoubtedly existed in and near the group of the Pleiades, where, accordingly, he placed the centre of gravity of the Milky Way.[94] The bright star Alcyone thus became the "central sun," but in a purely passive sense, its headship being determined ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... not allowed to continue for long. Lest it might leap back into the water, and, sluggish swimmer as it was, escape out of reach, Ben, with the knife which he still held unclasped in his hand, pinned it to one of the planks, and in an ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... her cradle's earliest dream, Adorned with many a vision bright Of rural life the sluggish stream; Ne'er touched her fingers indolent The needle nor, o'er framework bent, Would she the canvas tight enrich With gay design and silken stitch. Desire to rule ye may observe When the obedient doll in sport An infant maiden ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... anger, What was only done in frolic. Yes, I love her. Many other Charming women much pursue me; None, however,—e'en the stately, Richly vine-clad, blue-eyed Mosel— Ever from my heart can banish Thee, the Feldberg's lovely daughter. When I through the sands of Holland Weary drag my sluggish waters, And I hear the wind-mills clapper, Tender longings oft steal o'er me For my early lovely sweetheart. Then with deep dull sound my waves roll Onward through the tedious meadows, Roll out far into the North Sea, But not one ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... realization of it; an invention which proposes to substitute for the languishing feeble motion which is involved in the study of books—the kind of books which this author found invented when he came—for the passive, sluggish receptivity of another's thought, the living glow of pursuit and ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... of the men raised the heavy sluice-gate on the dam. A roar of water, momently increasing, marked the slow rise of the barrier. A very imaginative man might then have made out a tendency forward on the part of those timbers floating nearest the centre of the pond. It was a very sluggish tendency, however, and the men ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... readers, nor tempt even the most susceptible to imitate him; rather he presupposes himself, and dominates without appearing. His reticence, to which we have already referred, is one of his most characteristic qualities. Dr. Gosse ascribes it to a somewhat low and sluggish vitality of physical spirits. For one in this condition "the first idea in the presence of anything too vivacious is to retreat, and the most obvious form of social retreat is what we call affectation." That Pater's style has impressed ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... equipment the hook was dropped into the hole and moved up and down slowly, until a fish took hold, when it was immediately pulled out. The trout were very sluggish at this season of the year and made no fight, and were therefore readily landed. The most of them weighed from two to five pounds each, and indeed any smaller than that were spurned and thrown back into the hole "t' grow up," as Ed ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... the white warriors. And yet, in spite of the large mortality among them, the attacking force was increasing. Where one died two took his place; and the reason was soon made plain—they were reproducing. A black fighter, longer than his fellows, a little sluggish of movement, as though from the restrictive pressure of a large, round protuberance in his middle, which made him resemble a snake which had swallowed an egg, was caught by a white monster and instantly embraced by a multitude of feelers. He struggled, bit, and broke in two; then ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... if you feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its exasperating demand of time from the mind—time—life! Live! We only live in patches. We have to eat, and then comes the dull digestive complacencies—or irritations. We have to take the air or else our thoughts grow sluggish, stupid, run into gulfs and blind alleys. A thousand distractions arise from within and without, and then comes drowsiness and sleep. Men seem to live for sleep. How little of a man's day is his own—even at the best! And then come those false ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... hours; for the boat was heavy, there was no wind to propel it, and the crew were obliged to ply their huge oars the whole way. In a word, this passage was the reverse of the first,— safe in every respect,—but so sluggish and tiresome, that I a hundred times wished myself again under the guidance of the wild lad, galloping before the hurricane over the foaming billows. From eight till ten the cold was truly terrible, and though I was closely wrapped in an excellent ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... took the dreary body up And cast it in a stream— A sluggish water, black as ink, The depth was so extreme. My gentle boy, remember this Is nothing but ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... of Kaligram, sluggish as the circulation in a dying man, and dropped down the current of a briskly flowing stream which led to a region where land and water seemed to merge in each other, river and bank without distinction of garb, like brother and sister ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... do not remember, except that the dull rumble of the wheels told me we were passing over a bridge, and that I saw through the mist before my eyes a sluggish river, a muddy canal, ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... "Seventeen years ago 'Cavalleria Rusticana' had no perspective. Now, though but a small portion of its progeny has been brought to our notice, we nevertheless look at it through a vista which looks like a valley of moral and physical death through which there flows a sluggish stream thick with filth and red with blood. Strangely enough, in spite of the consequences which have followed it, the fierce little drama retains its old potency. It still speaks with a voice which sounds like the voice of truth. Its music still ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... about crossing a river, and looking to-day at the slender streak on the map I am amazed that so small a thing should have given me such ugly tremors. Yet I have rarely faced a job I liked so little. The stream ran yellow and sluggish under the clear moon. On the near side a thick growth of bush clothed the bank, but on the far side I made out a swamp with tall bulrushes. The distance across was no more than fifty yards, but I would have swum a mile more readily in deep water. The place stank of crocodiles. ...
— Prester John • John Buchan |
