"Tediously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Austria opened a small Spanish leather bag, containing two hundred numbers engraved upon small balls of mother-of-pearl, and presented the open sack to the youngest of her maids of honor, for the purpose of taking one of the balls out of it. The eager expectation, amid all these tediously slow preparations, was rather that of avidity than of curiosity. Saint-Aignan bent toward Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente to whisper to her, "Since we have each a number, let us unite our two chances. The bracelet shall be yours if I win, and if you are successful, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... all the subsequent events. If, then, the first volume should appear to any as barren in important incident, dwelling prolixly on trifles, or, rather, should seem at first sight profuse of reflections, and in general tediously minute, it must be remembered that it was precisely out of small beginnings that the Revolution was gradually developed; and that all the great results which follow sprang out of a countless number of trifling and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Love, and Life. These two larger panels are more pleasing than the eight representing the Seasons, both in coloring and in figure composition; and they make pleasing spots of bright color in the dome. But again the artist is tediously careful to make his meanings plain. Not only does each figure hold its obvious symbol prominently in view, but there are labels naming the figures. To the art student the painter's stipple-and-line method, producing vibration of light and a certain ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... thousands, Paymasters—I was always remarkably ready in disposing of funds—and Heaven only knows what not were wanted in alarming numbers. Active service was proposed by Simon; but you know, gentlemen, I am constitutionally disqualified for that. And after tediously waiting months longer, I succeeded without Simon's aid in obtaining my present honorable but ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... bursts through its thin meshes, after luxuriously gorging himself with prey, and is of course at once followed out of the breach by all the pilchards. Then, not only is the shoal lost, but the net is seriously damaged, and must be tediously and expensively repaired. Such an accident as this, however, very seldom happens; and when it does, the loss occasioned falls on those best able to bear it, the merchant speculators. The work and wages of the ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... connected with the Graecomanists by the Goettingen Hainbund, preserved a noble simplicity, more particularly Salis and Holty, and also Count Stolberg, wherever he has not been led astray by Voss's stilted manner. Matthison is, on the other hand, most tediously affected. ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... during his life, was an unexpected product of his mind, but is useful to mark his limitations. It is a forecast of the future, and proves, as nothing else could so well do, the utter absence in Bulwer of the creative imagination. It is an invention, cleverly conceived, mechanically and rather tediously worked out, and written in a style astonishingly commonplace. The man who wrote that book (one would say) had no heaven in his soul, nor any pinions whereon to soar heavenward. Yet it is full of thought and ingenuity, and the central conception of "vrii" has been much commended. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the first weeks in October had dragged themselves tediously along, Mr. Caldigate, in a fit which was half rage and half moodiness, took himself off to London. He did not tell Hester that he was going till the morning on which he started, and then simply assured her that she should hear from him by every ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... tediously slow, for a strong southwest wind had come on, which lowered the water in the canal, so that The Bonita often went scraping along the bottom, and betimes stuck fast in the mud. When they were come to the Lake Drummond ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... he tasted food in my house, he sat there without hint of going. Whether from design, or because age and his sufferings had really palsied him, he came back tediously to life and warmth, nor for many days professed himself able to stand erect. Meanwhile he lived on the best of our hospitality. My wife tended him, and my servants ran at his bidding; for he managed early to make them understand ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... forward, for while the living barrier that we had to deal with was not at the outset more than twenty feet, or thereabouts, in thickness, hacking it down took us a tediously long time. While still we faced a dozen or more very desperate fighters, who held us off most resolutely from the metal bars which closed the way, a pang of dread and sorrow went through me as I perceived that Fray Antonio, who a moment before ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... Wharton was so tediously slow. About every five minutes she would stop and kneel down in the dirt, attempting to fit an old shoe of Polly's into any fresh track she happened to observe. The other two girls wandered off into bits of woods or meadows near by, calling and ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... by very tediously. The dog came and went, staying for short periods with Jack. The vast store of food was a magnet that held the little beast fast. It had doubtless been a long time since he ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... the conduct of the treasury, some to adopt improvements in the collection of the revenue, others recommended an augmentation of the excise, and others a more economical system of expenditure. In the discussion of these questions and of private bills, week after week, month after month, was tediously ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... out in a lawyer's office, with all the legal want of punctuation and unintelligible phraseology. It had been copied verbatim by the old Squire, and was no doubt a properly binding and effective will. Never before had he dwelt over it so tediously. He had feared lest a finger-mark, a blot, or a spark might betray his acquaintance with the deed. But now he was about to give it up and let all the world know that it had been in his hands. He felt, therefore, that he was entitled to read it, and ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... fornication, which makes him well content to join the "Ragged Regiment." They colour his face with walnut juice so that he looks a "true son of an Egyptian." Hundreds of pages are filled thereafter by tediously dragging in, mostly from other books, joyless and leering adventures of low dishonesty and low lust. Another book of the kind which Borrow knew was the life of Bamfylde Moore-Carew, born in 1693 at a Devonshire ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... good. I so longed to make of her my true help mate, the real artist's wife! But no! She could not understand. In vain did I read to her the great poets, choosing the strongest, the tenderest,—the golden rhymes of the love poems fell upon her ear as coldly and tediously as a hailstorm. Once I remember, we were reading la Nuit d'Octobre; she interrupted me, to ask for something more serious! I tried then to explain to her that there is nothing in the world more serious than poetry, which is the very essence of life, floating above it like a glory of light, ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... opened negotiations with the new sovereign, which were tediously protracted until May. An embassy was sent to the Birmese court, and the emperor had the folly and arrogance, after all the disaster and defeat experienced by the arms of Ava, to demand homage from the English envoys. The firmness of these gentlemen, and the fear of renewed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... commendation". "This is the tragedy that ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded" (Johnson's Works, v. 436).] But it is in speaking of the earlier poems that Johnson shows his hand most plainly. Comus "is a drama in the epic style, inelegantly splendid and tediously instructive". [Footnote: Johnson's Works, ix. 153.] Of Lycidas "the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers un-pleasing" [Footnote: Ib. 159.] As for the sonnets, "they deserve not any particular ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... deserveth most to wear a green and yellow hood with a hare's ears tied to it, either the aforesaid vainglorious champion, or that Enguerrant, who having forgot the art and manner of writing histories set down by the Samosatian philosopher, maketh a most tediously long narrative and relation thereof. For, at the first reading of such a profuse discourse, one would think it had been broached for the introducing of a story of great importance and moment concerning the ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... in the literary world more lamentable than to view a successful author, in his second appearance before the public, limping lamely after himself, and treading tediously and awkwardly in the very same round, which, in his first effort, he had traced with vivacity and applause. We would not be harsh enough to say that the Author of 'Waverley' is in this predicament, but we are most unwillingly compelled to assert ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Monkshaven auctioneer in to appraise the fixtures and necessary furniture; going over the shop books for the last twenty years with their successors, an employment which took up evening after evening; and not unfrequently taking one of the young men on the long commercial journeys which were tediously made in a gig. By degrees both Hepburn and Coulson were introduced to distant manufacturers and wholesale dealers. They would have been willing to take the Fosters' word for every statement the brothers had made on new year's day; but this, it was evident, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... at her feet the roll from the horse's back, setting his rifle down against it. Then he led Buck away, zigzagging tediously, at last passing from sight beyond an out jutting monster crag. Gloria crouched, seeking to shield herself from the whiplashes of the wind. She listened to it as it shrieked about the slabs and boulders of granite; the sound was ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... efforts and the high virtue of the knowledge imparted. The pipe is brought forward and an offering of tobacco smoke made by both preceptor and pupil, after which the former sings a song (Pl. X, A.), the time of its utterance being tediously prolonged. The mnemonic characters were drawn by Sikassig[)e], and are a copy of an old birch-bark scroll which has for many years been in his possession, and which was made in imitation of one in the possession ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... it, though, often afterward, men of clerkly attainments took me aside and kindly pointed out what they conceived to be a blunder. I have dwelt, perhaps tediously, upon this swap; my excuses are—first, that, having made few such good bargains during the days of my vanity, the memory is a pleasant one; and, second, that the horse will necessarily play a certain part in ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Carriages, as they rolled along the Street. None of them stopped, and it grew late without Leonella's appearing. Still, Antonia resolved to sit up till her Aunt's arrival, and in spite of all her remonstrances, Dame Jacintha and Flora insisted upon doing the same. The hours passed on slow and tediously. Lorenzo's departure from Madrid had put a stop to the nightly Serenades: She hoped in vain to hear the usual sound of Guitars beneath her window. She took up her own, and struck a few chords: But Music that evening had lost its charms for her, and She soon ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... them from one camp to another, and much of the time their own women had to weave whatever cloth they had. The primitive loom they used was made by driving two sticks into the ground, and stretching a row of threads between them, and then tediously weaving the cross threads in and out, a thread at a time, until a yard or so of cloth was finished. Slow work this was, and many a long day passed before enough cloth could be woven to make a coat for a man ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... lease of life for this play if it is taken at a quicker pace. He has therefore arranged an acting version which will occupy about an hour, with laughs. By eliminating the word "sentiment" alone, which is tediously harped upon, several minutes are saved. Some of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle's repetition of the word "Never" also goes. The satirical conversation in Act I. is much abbreviated as being out of date, and the whole piece is redressed in the present manner. Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... result of what I insist on tediously, but what is most necessary to insist on, for it is a cardinal particular in the whole topic. Many of the English people—the higher and more educated portion—had come to comprehend the nature of constitutional government, but the mass ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... most tediously; the half-breeds were too stupid to converse with, and the Yankee traders constantly tipsy. Had it not been that Gabriel was well acquainted with the neighbourhood, we should positively have died of ennui. As it was, however, we made some excursions among the rancheros, or cattle-breeders, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... our ancient enemy, the Metrical Romance; while the fighting, which, in those old poems, was tediously sincere, is between shadow and shadow, where we know that neither can harm the other, though are tempted to wish he might. Hazlitt bids us not mind the allegory, and says that it won't bite us nor meddle with us if we do not meddle with it. But how if it bore us, which after all is the fatal ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... thus tediously made were taken good care of. They were carefully packed in candle-boxes with compartments; were covered over, and set in a dark closet, where they would not discolor and turn yellow. A metal candle-box, hung on the edge of ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... rather in a diagonal. This is another characteristic of De Quincey; he is sometimes tediously exact in his details; perhaps the minuteness is justifiable in this instance, as the statement increases the realistic effect ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... the scene between Lear and his daughter might have been touching if it had not been preceded in the course of the earlier acts by the tediously drawn out, monotonous ravings of Lear, and if, moreover, this expression of his feelings constituted the last scene. But the ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... The journey now grew tediously laborious. The afternoon was passing, and it seemed to Max that he would never reach Dunroe; for at every tack he paused to examine his mark, and found that the water had gained, so that he was compelled to stop and ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... Fort Yukon and the Flats were passed, and the days wore tediously on. We were literally worming our way up stream, with low water and dark nights to contend with, but a second summer was upon us with warm, bright sunshine, and the hills were ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... State, the Legislature was prevailed upon, in 1879, to appoint an investigating committee. Vanderbilt and other railroad owners, and a multitude of complaining traders were haled up to give testimony; the stock-jobbing transactions of Vanderbilt and Gould were fully and tediously gone into, as also were the methods of the railroads in favoring certain corporations and mercantile establishments with secret preferential ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... think I have been tediously minute on many points which may appear trifling: my predecessors seem to have considered the RUDIMENTS of COOKERY quite unworthy of attention. These little delicate distinctions constitute all the difference between a common and an ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... their idle trucks and their separate coal stores; in many provincial towns you will find two or even three railway stations at opposite ends of the town; the streets are blocked by the vans and trolleys of the several companies tediously handing about goods that could be dealt with at a tenth of the cost in time and labour at a central clearing-house, did such a thing exist; and each system has its vast separate staff, unaccustomed to work ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... to the flames; they desired that she should be really burned alive, and that, placed on the summit of this mountain of wood, and commanding the circle of lances and of swords, she might be seen from every part of the market-place. There was reason to suppose that being slowly, tediously burned, before the eyes of a curious crowd, she might at last be surprised into some weakness, that something might escape her which could be set down as a disavowal, at the least some confused words which might be interpreted at pleasure, perhaps ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... meals, and their discomforts were at an end; while there in the boulder they had tapped, and probably in others that they saw around them, and perchance in the hill up which they had clambered so tediously, there was gold, and gold which was theirs by right of discovery, by the right of the mining laws, written and unwritten, and the right of their future toil. The tucker might be getting scarce; but what of that? A few hours' work and one of them could ride away back to Birralong to clear off the ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... wrote was brilliant with both these most charming qualities of the human mind. Though sometimes lax in points of grammar, as was much the custom in his day, he wrote as delightful a style as is to be found in all English literature, and that too when the stilted, verbose, and turgid habit was tediously prevalent. He was a man who impressed his ability upon all who met him; so that the abler the man and the more experienced in judging men, the higher did he rate Franklin when brought into direct contact with him; ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... was almost tediously long and the impending duel was arranged, White Wolf being very ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... the "old crank's" store. It was just across the street from my sample room. I met him in the middle of the street. He was a crank about keeping his engagements promptly. I respect a man who does this. The old gentleman looked carefully, but not tediously, at my goods, never questioning a price. In a little while, he said: "I shall do some business with you, suh; your ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... sight a submarine—whether to shoot it, or tell the skipper. He was nervous lest in his excitement he should shoot the skipper. At any rate, he had a firing-party of twenty in the bows, and was determined to shoot someone, if he spotted a periscope. And, moreover, the whole thing made him tediously homesick, and he ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... [Transcriber's note: sic] of the French Revolution—had emigrated on its miscarriage to America—and returned disgusted to hide himself in the retreat to which they were now ascending. That retreat is then most tediously described—a smooth green valley in the heart of the mountain, without trees, and with only one dwelling. Just as they get sight of it from the ridge above, they see a funeral train proceeding from the solitary abode, and hurry ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... convey no compliment now; and are almost among the last which any one would desire should with justice be applied either to his talking or his writing. For 'to prose', as we all now know too well, is to talk or write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a 'proser' the antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid and liveliest writer who ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... conversation, in which I employed all that I had in memory, and all that had been created in myself by the electric collision of great authors. Never did a professional wit more ingeniously produce as sudden coruscations the bon mots tediously studied; never did a philosophical conversationalist use to more advantage the wisdom conned over in the closet. I talked eloquently, profoundly. I rattled forth witticisms and poetical quotations. I amazed ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dragged tediously away. I tried to read Mr. Lecky's 'History of England,' but for the first time in my life that wise writer wearied me. I played chess and was hopelessly beaten. At last it grew dark. At seven o'clock the bell for dinner rang and the officers trooped off. Now was the time. ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... been written on the pigeon, so that we are enabled to trace the history of several breeds. And lastly, because, from causes which we can partly understand, the amount of variation has been extraordinarily great. The details will often be tediously minute; but no one who really wants to understand the progress of change in domestic animals will regret this; and no one who has kept pigeons and has marked the great difference between the breeds and the trueness with which most of them propagate their kind, will think this care ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... modesty, but from a kind of inverted pride. Even a fair measure of success seems to them a little thing when it is compared with their own estimate of their abilities. Before the war the German power of organization was tediously praised in England, and our own incapacity for organization was tediously censured. There is truth in the contrast; the Germans love organization and pattern in human society, both for their own sake and for the rest and support that they give to the individual. The British hate elaborate ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... so felicitously poisoned that they had just time to listen to a speech from the charming and ingenious lady of the house before expiring. In this address she reminded her guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and, justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and in the sudden revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... more when good Mrs. English gave him a nudge toward the end of the evening and called him "a stupid," half in sport and half in earnest; and when he had delivered that excellent woman into the care of her liege lord and had seen them securely packed into the horse-car that was to drag them tediously homeward in company with a great multitude of suffocating fellow-sufferers, he felt it; and all the way out the dark street and up the hill that ran, or seemed to run, into outer darkness—where his home was—he felt ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... little list of subjects which, though not blind-alley themes, are equally to be avoided. Some of them, indeed, are the reverse of blind-alley themes, their drawback lying in the fact that the way out of them is too tediously apparent. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... seen from the window of a train, the intervals narrowed by short-step, widening again at the "Forward—march!" the blare of the band, lessening as it approached the further end of the building, then suddenly bursting into its former volume at the right-about. He endured it all listlessly. It was tediously familiar, stamped upon his brain ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... passing through a fit of the cowardice peculiar to the tediously strained, who are being more than commonly tried—persecuted, as they say when they are not supplicating their tyrannical Authority for aid. The world will continue to be indifferent to their view of it and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... worth; for the metals had rebelled one against the other,—the gold had scorned alliance with the brass, the silver would not mingle with the molten iron. Therefore the moulds had to be once more prepared, and the fires rekindled, and the metal remelted, and all the work tediously and toilsomely repeated. The Son of Heaven heard, and ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... passage from his letter to Malone of 22 February 1791: "Poor Boswell is very low, & desperate & ... melancholy mad, feels no spring, no pleasure in existence, & is so perceptibly altered for the worse that it is remarked everywhere. I try all I can to revivify him, but he [turns?] so tiresomely & tediously—for the same cursed trite commonplace topics, about death &c.—that we grow old, and when we are old, we are not young—that I despair of effecting a cure. Doctors Warren and Devaynes very kindly interest themselves about him, but you wd be of more service to him than anyone." Quoted from a ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... grave household in the parsonage next morning. Reuben rebelled in heart, in face, and in action against the tediously long prayer of the parson, though the old gentleman's spirit was writhing painfully in his pleadings. The aunt was more pious and austere than ever. Adele, timid and shrinking, yet with a beautiful and a trustful illumination in her eye, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... see any end of it, no, not to the north, the way we were going; so the tenth day, finding the hills made a turn, and led as it were into the vast desert, we left them and continued our course north, the country being very tolerably full of woods, some waste, but not tediously long, till we came, by our gunner's observation, into the latitude of eight degrees five minutes, which we were nineteen days ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... the time. Trim the sails, and bear away to that pretty fleet of fishing boats bobbing up and down as they trail their nets, or the men gather in the glittering fish, and munch their rude breakfasts, tediously heated by smoky stoves, while they gaze on the white-sailed stranger, and mumble among themselves as to what in the world he can be. The sun mounts and the breeze presses till we are at the bay of the Somme with its shifting sands, its incomprehensible currents, and its low and treacherous ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... into rhyme in praise of your inamorata—all is unavailing. The rain is slow but ceaseless, and the hours are days to the unemployed mind. We hum a tune and whistle to hurry time, but the indicating fingers of the tediously ticking clock seems stationary, and time waits for fair weather. The ladies love their chambers, and sleeping away the laggard hours, do not feel the oppression of a ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... who are old enough will remember that in June and July 1914 the conversation turned largely and tediously on militant suffragists, Irish rebels, and strikers. It was the beginning of the age of violent enforcements of decision by physical action which has lasted ever since and shows as yet no signs of passing. The Potter press, like so many other presses, snubbed the militant suffragists, smiled ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... Afternoon school dragged tediously on, and the Den grew desperate. Fellows went off to dress. But what was the use of Heathcote putting on his choker, or Smith and Pauncefote parting their hairs, when they didn't know whether they were going to the levee ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... Slowly, tediously, the evening passed. Yourii would not admit that he was blameworthy, for he did not agree with his father that politics were no part of his business. He considered that his father was incapable of understanding the simplest things, being old and void of intelligence. Unconsciously he ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... winter set in, I went little abroad, and then we employed ourselves within doors in preparing several things which might not only be useful and ornamental, if the old glumm should come to see us, but might also divert us, and make the time pass less tediously. The first thing I went upon was a table, which, as my family consisted of so many, I intended to make big enough for us all. With that view I broke up a couple of chests, and, taking the two sides of one of them, I nailed them edge to edge by strong thick pieces underneath at each end and in the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... would have given more than he could well afford that it were that day week, and he no worse off. Why did time limp so tediously away with him, prolonging his anguish gratuitously? He felt truculently, and would have murdered that week, if he could, in the midst of its ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... things on one level of dignity,—respects one no more than another, but only its own purpose,—is careless of material qualities, and of moral qualities, too, as far as they are bound to particular shapes. Why dwell tediously upon one particle, when the value of it consists not in its particularity, but in its harmony with the rest of the universe? Giotto seems to make short work with the human form divine by wrapping all his figures from head ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... each round begins with a d.c. of 3 ch., and 3 ch., after which the pattern between the * * is done 7 times throughout, and the eighth time the last d.c. and 3 ch. are omitted, being worked at the commencement of the round. To write this at the end of every round would make the directions tediously long, and the worker can find no difficulty ...
— The Ladies' Work-Book - Containing Instructions In Knitting, Crochet, Point-Lace, etc. • Unknown
... Polemical discussion is foreign to the plan of this work. But an opinion which stands in need of much illustration, can often receive it most effectually, and least tediously, in the form of a defense against objections. And on subjects concerning which speculative minds are still divided, a writer does but half his duty by stating his own doctrine, if he does not also examine, and to the best of his ability judge, those ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Raleigh's Indian friends, while the Amishman lit a stogie in self-defense. Why, the neighbor farmers demanded, did Aaron propose to dust his bean-seeds with a powder that looked like soot? Martha's microscope, a wonder, introduced the Murnans to bacteria; and Aaron tediously translated his knowledge of the nitrogen-fixing symbiotes into Hausa. But there were other questions. What was the purpose of the brush stacked on top of the smooth-raked beds where Aaron proposed to plant his tobacco-seedlings? He explained that fire, second best to steaming, would kill ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... on the contrary, were quite serious. He had genuine poetic feeling, but little talent. In trying to reproduce Spenser's richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His stanzas are nerveless, though not unmusical. His college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Tediously an hour passed and there was no sign of Joe Hawkridge. He had a journey of only a few hundred yards to make, and Jack began to imagine all kinds of misfortune that might have befallen him, such as being ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... a moment—several moments, for I'm going to be tediously autobiographical. Once, when I was a young man, I was offered some journalistic work. It was at the very start; I had barely tasted print. Remember, I was ambitious, and it meant the beginning of a career; ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... The time passed tediously to Godfrey, for the banks were low and flat, villages were very rare, and the steamer only touched at three places. Herds of horses were seen from time to time roaming untended over the country. The only amusement was in watching the Ostjaks, the natives of the banks of the Obi. ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... was looking. There were three brothers at home, but no mother; she was half a boy for all her straight gown. To embarrass this demure professor, to presume upon her sex while discarding it, was a great joke after a tediously droned mass at San Jacopo. Nicoletta would have made room, even the hardier Guglielmotta drew back; but the wicked Selvaggia pinched their fingers so that they could not escape. All this time Messer Cino had his eyes rooted in Selvaggia's, reading ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... because Annette's husband had turned up unexpectedly; and Charteris had gone again to hear Nadine Neroni, the new prima donna, concerning whom he and his enameled Italian friend raved tediously. But I never greatly cared for music; besides, the opera that night was Faust; the last act of which in particular, when three persons align before the footlights and scream at the top of their voices, for a good half hour, about how important it is not to disturb anybody, I have ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... took occasion to talk, rather tediously, about the nature and forms of government that established themselves, almost spontaneously, in Massachusetts and the other New England colonies. Democracies were the natural growth of the new world. As to Massachusetts, it was at first intended that the colony should ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... postcards on the parapet of the bridge. My heart went out to that poor old man, whose white curls glinted in the sunlight. It seemed to me so pathetic that he should be just there, at that natural spot which the passions and the blood of men long dead had made artificial, tediously selling postcards in order to keep his worn and creaking body ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... Nasmyth, "you can blame it on Bonavista. As I have been trying to explain to Mrs. Acton, who made a similar observation, there is glamour in this air. It gets hold of one. I was, no doubt, a tediously solemn person when I left the Bush, but you will remember that soon after I arrived here, you and I sailed out together into the realms of moonlight and mystery. I sometimes feel that I must have brought a little of the ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... another danger, not so great. Wrecks of ships often sink below the surface, there to drift tediously about as long as the timbers hold together. If the "Pollard," traveling under present conditions, should collide with such a hull, there would be no future ...
— The Submarine Boys' Trial Trip - "Making Good" as Young Experts • Victor G. Durham
... between her daughters Claude and Marguerite, looked pre-occupied, and summarily dismissed her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, whom Eustacie was obliged to follow to her own state-room. There all the forms of the COUCHER were tediously gone through; every pin had its own ceremony, and even when her Majesty was safely deposited under her blue satin coverlet the ladies still stood round till she felt disposed to fall asleep. Elisabeth ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Reader also to take notice, that in writing of it I have made myself a recreation of a recreation; and that it might prove so to him, and not read dull and tediously, I have in several places mixed, not any scurrility, but some innocent, harmless mirth, of which, if thou be a severe, sour-complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge; for ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... again she had been tied in a chair for some hours. Any of these was bad enough. The first was soonest over, but was the most humiliating, the second was terrifying and nerve racking, while the third tediously long and hard to bear. For some time the child sat tremblingly listening for her grandmother's footsteps, but evidently Mrs. Otway did not intend to use undue haste in the matter. After a while the whistle of the evening train announced that those who had gone up to the city for a day's shopping ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... 1564, Cardan lapses into a philosophizing strain, and opens his discourse with the ominous words, "Sed jam ad institutum revertamur, deque ipso vitae humanae genere aliquo dicamus." He begins with a disquisition on the worthlessness of life, and repeats somewhat tediously the story of his visit to Scotland. He gives a synopsis of all the sciences he had ever studied—Theology, Dialectics, Arithmetic, Music, Optics, Astronomy, Astrology, Geometry, Chiromancy, Agriculture, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... nights slowly, tediously, achingly passed. One day was like another—one night seemed to mark no progress of time. Only the children, to whom parents gave the last bits of food, showed some animation. They played listlessly with one another. For toys they ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... of The Last Man is often tediously prolix and is disfigured by patches of florid rhetoric and by inappropriate similes scattered broadcast, occasional passages of wonderful beauty recall Shelley's imagery; and, in conveying the pathos of loneliness, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is no other ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Perhaps rather tediously I have come to the few words I want to say about Baree, the hero of this book. Baree, after all, is only another Kazan. For it was Kazan I found in the way I have described—a bad dog, a killer about to be shot to death by his master when chance, ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... perhaps tediously, endeavored to show, that what is said in this work has been learned by intimate association, and that for years, with the Indian. This association has continued under influences that secured unreservedly their confidence, friendship—and ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... about, titled imbecile had succeeded distinguished incapable at London in the task of humiliating and bullying us into subjection. Now it was Granville, now Townshend, now Bedford, now North—all tediously alike in their refusal to understand us, and their slow obstinacy of determination to rule us in their way, not in ours. To get justice, or even an intelligent hearing, from these people, was hopeless. They listened to their own little clique in the colonies—a coterie ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... the family when the sermon is always tediously dull? Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for them parallel to the adult service of worship.[47] Next, try to overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... Brocken, and the scenery is graphically described in that part of the poem. At the foot of the mountain is the little village of Schiercke, the highest in the Hartz. Here I took a narrow path through the woods, and after following a tediously long road over the hills, reached Elbingerode, where I spent the night, and left the next morning for Blankenburg. I happened to take the wrong road, however, and went through Rubeland, a little village in the valley of the Bode. There are many iron works here, and two celebrated caves, called "Baumann's ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... gifted worker must be crude in his methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he was tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary; that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked; ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... laughter. "The brain that could pull off this deal"—oh, splendid! Who now would dare deny that she was a partner in very truth, a partner worth while!... Then, her inspiration again urged her on. She was beset with feverish impatience, as the four men dallied tediously over their adieux. When, at last, the visitors were safely out of the house, the young wife bore down like a whirlwind on Delancy. She could not waste even a word ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial, and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically by the computer, but which a hacker instead has to step tediously through. "My mailer doesn't have a command to include the text of the message I'm replying to, so I have to do it by hand." This does not necessarily mean the speaker has to retype a copy of the message; it might refer to, say, dropping into a subshell from the mailer, making ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... roof of the hotel and settled with a slight bump. "Don't move." The clumsy careful business of opening the door backward with his right hand and sliding out without taking his eyes from either of them was tediously slow. ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... slowly climbed to the surge's crest! Her motion was slow and stately, for the wind had dropped very considerably, whilst, owing to the loss of her upper spars, she was under short canvas, and her approach consequently seemed to us most tediously slow. At length, however, she arrived within a biscuit-throw of us, backed her main-topsail again, and once more lowered a boat, which a dozen oar- strokes sufficed to bring alongside our raft. The bowman laid in his oar and hove us a rope, and as he did so the officer in charge of the boat—a ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... there any break in the varied splendor of the scene and of the sun's setting until we came to the dull-looking town of Aubagne. After that, the Southern darkness swooped in haste, and while we wound tediously through the immense, never-ending traffic of Marseilles, it "made night." All the length and breadth of the Cannebiere burst into brilliance of electric light, as if in our honor. The great street looked as gay as a Paris boulevard; and as we turned ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... that occasionally a certain friction—. But even if that was the case, there is a doubt whether he will ever wake. This sleep exhausts slowly, but it exhausts. Apparently he is sliding slowly, very slowly and tediously, down a long slope, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... if not all his novels—in the Chartreuse to differentiate Italian from French character, in Le Rouge et le Noir to embody the Macchiavellian-Napoleonic principle which has been of late so tediously phrased (after the Germans) as "will to" something and the like. These intentions may interest some: for me, I must confess, they definitely get in the way of the interest. For essays, "good": ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and other stores, all packed as they were in huge wooden cases. It was splendid exercise as a change from stable-work. Weather melting hot; but every one was in the highest spirits; though we blundered tediously through the job, for we had no experience in the fine art of moving heavy weights by hand. I forgot to take note of my sensations on first setting foot on African soil, as I was groaning under a case of something terribly heavy at ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... heart is sick, Sick of this everlasting change; And life runs tediously quick Through its unresting race and varied range: Change finds no likeness to itself in Thee, And wakes no ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... will be said that in this work I have pointed out a deep malady, and only suggested a superficial remedy. I have tediously insisted that the natural system of banking is that of many banks keeping their own cash reserve, with the penalty of failure before them if they neglect it. I have shown that our system is that of a single bank keeping the whole reserve under ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... a life so full of activity and importance to the State as this Hans William Bentinck. While the Ambassadors were tediously endeavouring at Ryswick to bring about peace between England and France and not making much progress, William took the unceremonious course of sending Portland to have an interview with Marshal Boufflers as representing Lewis. Both were soldiers and men of honour. The meeting ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... these devices he gained more variety and expressiveness in his verse. A passage from his early work (in spite of much that is fine) with every ending alike masculine and strong, and with every line end-stopped, harps away tediously in the same swing, like one lonely instrument on one monotonous note. His later verse, on the other hand, with masculine and feminine endings, weak ones and strong, end-stopped and run-on lines, continually relieving each other, is like the blended music of a great orchestra, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... without caring to ask what it meant, save grandeur and consolation; we have liked Montaigne, as some ten generations before us have done, without thinking him so systematic as some more eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously eminent?) authors; we have thought roses as good in their way as cabbages, though the latter would have made a better show in the witness-box, if cross-examined as to their usefulness; and as for Brahma, why, he can take care of himself, and won't ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... other side of the path lies the abyss of tediously explaining too much. That offends because it impresses the hearers that you either do not respect their intelligence or are trying to blow a breeze into a tornado. Carefully estimate the probable knowledge of your audience, both in general and of the particular ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... beggarman—'a wight of Homer's craft'—travelling through Scotland to pick up ballads; and one of the two—probably Buchan—must have been possessed of powerful inventive faculties. Each of Buchan's ballads is tediously spun out to enormous and unnecessary length, and is filled with solecisms and inanities quite inconsistent with the spirit of the true ballad. But Buchan undoubtedly gained fresh material, however much he clothed it; and his ballads are now reprinted, ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses. Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest, and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result. It is handsomer to remain in the establishment, better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... did in Cecille's. If it be so true, so inevitable, so frightful, surely it should be self-evident now and then, instead of a mere matter of report. And beautiful generalization, never anything but vague, becomes noticeable after a time, questionable. The things of glory in this world are not so tediously many that they will not bear once or twice the telling. Why not refuse, for once, to blink the facts, even though they may not be suitably sordid? Why not go into detail, once in a while, if the prospect is as fair as ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... upon the top of Mr. Hoopdriver's head, a shower bath of sunshine, a huge jet of hot light. It made his head swim. At last they emerged, and the other man in brown looked back and saw him. They rode on to the foot of the down, and dismounting began to push tediously up that long nearly vertical ascent of blinding white road, Mr. Hoopdriver hesitated. It might take them twenty minutes to mount that. Beyond was empty downland perhaps for miles. He decided to return to the inn and snatch a ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... we went to the Jesuits Church and heard one of the learnedest of the Augustinians preach, but tediously. The nixt feste was the 8 of Septembre, Nativite de nostre Dame. On which I went and heard our Comoedian the Jesuit preach hir panegyrick and his oune Valedictory Sermon (for they preach 12 moneth about, and he had ended his tower[128]). He would have had us beleiving that she was ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... miraculous narratives so tediously enumerated in the Gospels, to distinguish the miracles attributed to Jesus by public opinion from those in which he consented to play an active part. It is especially impossible to ascertain whether the offensive circumstances attending them, the ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... be a place for a soldier," she said. "Leave it to women and priests!" And then, repenting of the bitterness of her speech, she added:—"Really there is not more work than I can manage, with Julius to help me at times. Iles is a good servant if a little tediously pompous, and Chifney must see to the stables."—Lady Calmady paused, and her face grew hard. But for her husband's dying request, she would have sold every horse in the stud, razed the great square ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... naturally expected ample preferments; and, that he might not be forgotten by his own fault, wrote a song of triumph. But this was a time of such general hope, that great numbers were inevitably disappointed; and Cowley found his reward very tediously delayed. He had been promised, by both Charles the first and second, the mastership of the Savoy, "but he lost it," says Wood, "by certain persons, enemies ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... the production of weapons and household furniture, must have accustomed Greek sculptors (if we may call them by that name) to limit their personal work to the figure modelled in clay. And the great number of their works, many tediously constructed of ivory and gold, shows clearly that they did not abandon this habit in case of marble statuary, but merely gave the finishing strokes to a copy of their clay model, produced by workmen whose skill must have been fostered by the apparently thriving trade in marble ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... has Lord Egmont 'gainst this bill So much declamatory skill So tediously exerted? The reason's plain: but t'other day He mutinied himself for pay, And ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... original. Montgomery has written, besides many other poems, not a few meditative and devotional pieces among the best in the language. Pollok's "Course of Time" is the immature work of a man of genius who possessed very imperfect cultivation. It is clumsy in plan and tediously dissertative, but it has passages of genuine poetry. The pleasing verses of Bishop Heber and the more recent effusions of Keble may also ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... which I have not avoided in my Umilius. The young pupil, struck with the object presented to him, is occupied only with that, and leaping lightly over your preliminary discourses, lights at once on the point, to which, in his idea, you lead him too tediously. To render him attentive, he must be prevented from seeing the whole of your design; and, in this particular, Madam de Warrens did ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... itself away very tediously. Miss Altifiorla was in her manner more objectionable than ever. Mr. Western had evidently disliked her though he had hardly said so. During the days he had left the two women much together, and had remained in his study or had wandered forth alone. In this way he had increased his wife's feeling ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... she was especially cordial to him. Natalya felt unbearably miserable; but Volintsev was so respectful, and addressed her so timidly, that she could not but be grateful to him in her heart. The day passed quietly, rather tediously, but all felt as they separated that they had fallen back into the old order of things; and ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... above half of his first nap, when he was awakened by the clock of the chateau, in the turret over his chamber, which struck midnight. It was just such an old clock as ghosts are fond of. It had a deep, dismal tone, and struck so slowly and tediously that my uncle thought it would never have done. He counted and counted till he was confident he counted thirteen, and then ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... tasted the delights of publication and the pleasures of fame he wrote too much, and fiddled rather tediously upon a single string. Moreover, he attempted humorous effects, not very successfully; because one of the interesting points about, John Inglesant is that there is hardly the slightest touch of humour from beginning to end, except perhaps in the fantastic mixture of tragedy and comedy in the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... passed most tediously; the half-breed were too stupid to converse with, and the Yankee traders constantly tipsy. Had it not been that Gabriel was well acquainted with the neighbourhood, we should positively have died of ennui. As it was, however, ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... nature. The Poet's sporting with them is the free, loving, whole-hearted play of a truly great, generous, simple, child-like soul. Compared to these genuine offspring of undeflowered genius, the ill-natured and cynical caricatures in which Dickens, for example, so often and so tediously indulges, seem the workmanship of quite another species of being. The part of Dogberry was often attempted to be imitated by other dramatists of Shakespeare's time; which shows it to have been a decided hit on the stage. And indeed there is no resisting the delectable humour of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... And the third howre of drowsie Morning nam'd, Prowd of their Numbers, and secure in Soule, The confident and ouer-lustie French, Doe the low-rated English play at Dice; And chide the creeple-tardy-gated Night, Who like a foule and ougly Witch doth limpe So tediously away. The poore condemned English, Like Sacrifices, by their watchfull Fires Sit patiently, and inly ruminate The Mornings danger: and their gesture sad, Inuesting lanke-leane Cheekes, and Warre-worne Coats, Presented ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... senility, but intolerably sad. He made no reply to our timid salutations, but motioned tremblingly to us to enter; and with a last "good-night" to Giuseppe we obeyed, and stood half-way up the stone stairs that led directly from the door, while the old man tediously shot every bolt and adjusted the ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... ordinary conditions, when she was sick she could not bear them anywhere near. Her nerves became absolutely unstrung, as she was unable to sleep during the day, and consequently the time passed very slowly to her. In order to make the time pass a little less tediously, she gave instructions for one of the better educated eunuchs to read to her during the daytime. This reading generally consisted of ancient Chinese history, poetry and all kinds of Chinese lore, and while the eunuch was reading to her we had to stand by her bedside, one of us ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling |
