"Languor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passageway leading up-stairs he felt the pressure of a finger on his shoulder. Looking up, he met the eyes of Amabel, who was leaning toward him over the banisters. She was smiling, and, though her face was not without evidences of physical languor, there was a charm about her person which would have been sufficiently enthralling to him twenty-four hours before, but which now caused him such a physical repulsion that he started back in the effort to rid his shoulder ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... and lay listening to the weary screeching of the wind. An idea was slowly forming and growing in his brain, an idea that gained strength every time that he looked across at the man who was fighting so grimly against pain and exhaustion. In the pain and languor that Ulrich himself was feeling the old fierce hatred ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... Lasigue published a report on catalepsy in persons of hysterical tendencies, which be afterward incorporated into his larger work. Among his patients, those who were of a quiet and lethargic temperament, by simply pressing down the eyelids, were made to enter into a peculiar state of languor, in which cataleptic contractions were easily produced, and which forcibly recalled hypnotic phenomena. "One can scarcely imagine," says the author, "a more remarkable spectacle than that of a sick person sunk in deep sleep, and insensible to all efforts to arouse ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... I had been violently afflicted with a slow nervous fever attended by a continual head-ache, a total loss of appetite, and a very bad digestion, by which I was reduced to a deplorable state of languor and dejection of spirits. After being attended by many Doctors, and taking a variety of Medicines, my husband, Mr. JOHN TOD, hearing from several persons with whom he was acquainted, of the wonderful effects your excellent Tea had done in nervous disorders, in various Families with whom, in ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... watching faces, and as these two maidens approached, I saw the glowing cheeks of Margaret pale a little, her lips press together, and her chin become a little proud, but her eyes never wavered; but Mistress Helen beats me to be describing. There was an elegance about her and an air of languor, maybe from her sombre dark eyes, yet her every movement was graceful, and her smile a thing to be looking for, and she was slender as the stalk of a bluebell. The Laird of Scaurdale was in great humour, well on to seventy, his teeth still strong ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... Jove!" said the lieutenant, aroused from his languor for once. "It was a deucedly lucky thing, and well ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... while sweet languor wanders Through all the pulsing veins, And, wrapt in dewy slumber, The heart at ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz: and when the side door closed again the listener could hear the faint rhythm of the music. The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day's unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before. His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... In lazy languor—motionless, We lie and dream of nothingness; For visions come From Poppydom Direct at our command: Or, delicate alternative, In open idleness we live, With lyre and lute And silver flute, The life ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... happiness was to vanish; that her lips burning for kisses yet unborn, might soon unbend and voice deepest anguish and piteous appeal; that those eyes which betokened unsolved depths of fondest affection, of laughter, love and life, might soon lose their lustre and dreamy languor, in an ocean of tears..... There two people drifted silently along, conscious only of the fact that they were supremely happy in each other's company .... But lo! out of the quiet a storm is born: why had they not noticed that the moon ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind." Always ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... a new writer, a new painter, a new view from some old wharf by the river, a new place to obtain picturesque dinners at a grotesque price. He swung out of his office, with his long-legged, easy stride, and nearly ran me down, as I was plodding up-town through the languor of a late spring afternoon, on one of those duty-walks which conscience offers ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... then penning a Catch or a Ditty, instead of inditing Odes, and Sonnets, the Gentlemen of the Bon Goust in the Pit would never have been put to all that Grimace in damning the Frippery of State, the Poverty and Languor of Thought, the unnatural Wit, and inartificial Structure of his Dramas. I am, SIR, Your very ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... afterward, when we were hoisting the main-top-mast stun'-sail, and the Lieutenant of the Watch was reprimanding the crowd of seamen at the halyards for their laziness—for the sail was but just crawling up to its place, owing to the languor of the men, induced by the heat—the Captain, who had been impatiently walking the deck, suddenly stopped short, and darting his eyes among the seamen, suddenly fixed them, crying out, "You, Candy, and ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... appearance of AEneas at Carthage, the love of Dido, the summons of Mercury, AEneas' departure and the passion and death of Dido, are depicted in a series of scenes of such picturesqueness and power, such languor and pathos, as surely cannot be matched outside the finest pages of Wagner. A time will certainly come when this great work, informed throughout with a passionate yearning for the loftiest ideal of art, will receive the recognition which is its ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... in all the limbs, and in the whole body, by contraction of the throat, by twitchings in the hypochondriac and epigastric regions, by dimness and rolling of the eyes, by piercing cries, tears, hiccough, and immoderate laughter. They are preceded or followed by a state of languor or dreaminess, by a species of depression, and even ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... death, and reigns the feudatory of the Emperor. The interest of the play is almost entirely political, and patriotism is the chief passion involved. The main personal attraction of the tragedy is in the love of Galeazzo and his wife, and in the character of the latter the dreamy languor of a ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness. Mingled with this horror, I felt the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... crevice at length becomes depressing, and the mind, which is never satisfied with anything long, begins to wonder what the world is like beyond the enclosing cliffs, and the desire to climb them and to look forth under a wider range of sky grows stronger. Such change is needed, for when there is languor within, the impressions from without are dull. The country through which I now passed was very beautiful with its multitude of chestnut-trees, the pale yellow plumes of the male blossom still clinging to them and hiding half their leaves; but here again was the sad spectacle of abandoned, weedy, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... they could not, and did not,—and their general submission, of course in very trifling matters, to the sort of bullying directions addressed to them in a loud peremptory tone; to which they replied with the sort of stupefied languor of persons half asleep or under the influence of opium. I did not quite understand how they were thrown into this curious condition by the mere assumption of an immovable attitude and fixed gazing at a piece of coin; an experience of my own, however, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... shadows of light clouds cool the arid mountains in the distance; the olives roll into silvery undulations; a palm in full, rejoicing plumage rustles over your head; and the huge spatulate leaves of a banana in the nearest garden twist and split into fringes. There is no languor in the air, no sleep in the deluge of sunshine; the landscape is active with signs of work and travel. Wheat, wine, olives, almonds, and oranges are produced, not only side by side, but from the same fields, and the painfully ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... English fashion. Brandt left also a daughter, who is living, and who would not disgrace the fashionable circles of Europe. Her face and person are fine and graceful: she speaks English, not only correctly, but elegantly; and, both in her speech and manners, she has a softness approaching oriental languor. She retains so much of her national dress as to identify her with her people; over whom she affects no superiority, but with whom she seems pleased to preserve all the ties and duties of relationship. She ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... its commemoration of his first success, would act as a stimulus to service and to hope. No doubt the Apostle, like the rest of us, had his times of indolence and languor, and his times of despondency when he seemed to have laboured in vain, and spent his strength for nought. He had but to say 'Paul' to find the antidote to both the one and the other, and in the remembrance of the past to find a stimulus for service for the future, and a stimulus ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... hell which filled the fancies of the faithful were material and glowing, equally so were their conceptions of paradise. On this world of the blessed were lavished all the charms so fascinating to the Oriental luxuriousness of sensual languor, and which the poetic Oriental imagination knew so well how to depict. As soon as the righteous have passed Sirat, they obtain the first taste of their approaching felicity by a refreshing draught from "Mohammed's Pond." ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... but look on thee; But at the sight, my senses fly, I needs must gaze, but gazing die; Whilst trembling with a thousand fears, Parch'd to the throat, my tongue adheres. My pulse beats quick, my breath heaves short, My limbs deny their slight support. Cold dews my pallid face o'erspread, With deadly languor droops my head. My ears with tingling echoes ring, And life itself is on the wing; My eyes refuse the cheering light, Their orbs are veil'd in starless night: Such pangs my nature sinks beneath, And ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... refreshing bath, whose frothy margin was the threshold of their dwellings. Others still, like birds, built their nests among the sylvan nooks of the elevated interior; whence all below, and hazy green, lay steeped in languor the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... was both weird and dismal. The small clearing, densely walled in by the forest where the trees sprang nearly two hundred feet in the air, seemed to be stifling under the compression, though the feeling was but the resulting languor of a tropic night without a breeze. Sundry strange and melancholy calls issued in varying cadences from the wilderness, and an occasional splash from the river denoted the passage of some huge marine animal. Crocodiles ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... him to carry with it a great silence. He had been so hot and tired there always in the mills! The years had been so fierce and cruel! There was coming now quiet and coolness and sleep. His tense limbs relaxed, and settled in a calm languor. The blood ran fainter and slow from his heart. He did not think now with a savage anger of what might be and was not; he was conscious only of deep stillness creeping over him. At first he saw a sea of faces: the mill-men,—women he had known, drunken and bloated,—Janey's ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... that stream of tourists and travellers which tends to make Switzerland not only more celebrated but more opulent every year. It, is one of the few romances written in the epistolary form that do not oppress the reader with a sense of languor and unreality; for its creator poured into its pages a tide of passion unknown to his frigid and stilted predecessors, and dared to depict Nature as she really is, not as she was misrepresented by the modish authors and artists of the age. Some persons ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... out of her window a little later, Soeur Angelique was almost sure that through the closed shutters in Phebe's room, she saw a dim shadow of the girl's head laid down listlessly on her folded arms on the sill. But when the epidemic reached its height, Phebe seemed suddenly to awaken from her languor and rouse herself to action. Here was something worth doing at last. Once more her soft, sweet whistling sounded bird-like through the house. The spring came back to her step, the brightness to her eyes, and more than the old tenderness to her voice, as she went from ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... camp-stool or two, you know. We had brought his belated correspondence, and a lot of torn envelopes and open letters littered his bed. His hand roamed feebly amongst these papers. I was struck by the fire of his eyes and the composed languor of his expression. It was not so much the exhaustion of disease. He did not seem in pain. This shadow looked satiated and calm, as though for the moment it had had its fill of all ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... "In the dust I write My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears." Yet why evoke the spectres of black night To blot the sunshine of exultant years? Why disinter dead faith from mouldering hidden? 5 Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden, And wail ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... bittock of the reader's brain from the all-important sense underlying the sound-symbols. But in works of imagination mar. wants a treatment totally different, a style which, by all or any means, little mattering what they be, can avoid the imminent deadly risk of languor and monotony and which adds to fluency the allurement of variety, of surprise and even of disappointment, when ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... age of thirteen to Margaret of Scotland, who led a mournful existence at the French court, where she felt herself a desolate alien. Her death at the age of twenty was possibly due to slander. "Fie upon life," she said on her deathbed, when urged to rouse herself to resist the languor into which she was sinking. "Talk to me no ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... have said that they oozed with a monstrous slowness out from between the crepuscular tree-trunks and across the open space toward the brook. Gray leaves, creeping forward with a curious dogged languor. And when they came to the brook they paused on its farther edge and stopped, and the ones behind came pushing up to them. And looking down upon them, they might have been the backs of wounded men in gray, dragging themselves on ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... walk, they reached a grove of trees, bearing a different leaf from any to which they were accustomed. They did not appear to produce fruit of any kind, but were comely and afforded a grateful shade. This was the more appreciated, because the sun had begun to make its heat felt, and a feeling of languor diffused itself over all. ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... Rationalis (1674), was one of the first to attempt to do justice to both sides of the coffee question. At best, he thought it a somewhat risky beverage, and its votaries must, in some cases, be prepared to suffer languor and even paralysis; it may attack the heart and cause tremblings in the limbs. On the other hand it may, if judiciously used, prove a marvelous benefit; "being daily drunk it wonderfully clears and enlightens each part ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... silken coverlet of the bed was red, and the only place where living, brilliant color was not seemed to be the pale shrunken face on the pillow, a little paler and more delicate than usual: the hands, too, clutching each other on the red blanket, had a look of languor ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... indifferent to its calculations, lost to its joys, and submitting without effort to its sorrows. I have never seen her smile, but I have never heard her complain. Delicate and weak, the paleness of her face, the languor of her appearance, betray a physical suffering she ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... was highly agreeable. There was, however, a certain air of languor about him, caused partly by failing health, but far more, no doubt, by that 'softened remembrance of sorrow and pain' which my readers can by this time understand better than any of those who then surrounded him. His conversation, ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... with alacrity, and the moment he was gone all appearance of languor vanished from Miss ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... for a moment deprived of the use of his senses, when he had fixed his eyes on those of Astarte, which now began to open again with a languor mixed with confusion and tenderness: "O ye immortal powers!" cried he, "who preside over the fates of weak mortals, do ye indeed restore Astarte to me! at what a time, in what a place, and in what a condition do I again behold her!" ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... Finding that Mrs. Jessop took the matter on the whole amiably, he felt considerably relieved in mind, and began placidly to smoke his pipe over the Times. The leading article was stupid, soporific, the tobacco soothing, the fire hot; he was just hovering in delicious languor upon the very borders of dreamland when a knock at the door roused him abruptly. Of course, he ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... Some dim knowledge of the sickness and death in the village had crept in to him through Noll's and Hagar's talk, and a sudden fear chilled him lest his nephew, too, was to be stricken down with the lingering fever. What if it should be so? What if even now the boy was oppressed with the languor and depression which precedes illness? With this thought torturing him, he called to Noll one afternoon from the library window, as the boy was idly walking up and down the frozen sand. After a few ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... superficies of brick against which they were perched. Jaffery said something about a nest midway on a cliff side overlooking the sea. He also, in bass incoherence, formulated the opinion that in such a nest might he found true happiness. The pretty languor of early summer laughed in the air. Their situation, 'twixt earth and heaven, had a little ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... process was unjust, an outrage. Mexico Mullins's warning recurred to him. And yet—. He shifted slowly as he talked till his back was to the door of the big tent. They were watching him carefully, for all their apparent languor and looseness in saddle; then as he started to leap within and rally his henchmen, his mind went back to the words of Judge Stillman and his niece. Surely that old man was on the square. He couldn't be otherwise with her beside him, believing in him; and a suspicion of deeper plots behind ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... was slightly heavier, as her goddesslike build had foretold, her athletic erectness of carriage, and the girlish transparency of her expression, remained unchanged: but for the slight languor that Archer had lately noticed in her she would have been the exact image of the girl playing with the bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her betrothal evening. The fact seemed an additional appeal to his pity: such innocence was as moving as the trustful clasp ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... should be so very odd and yet so very good-natured." Well, it all came to the same thing—it was so wonderful that SHE should be so simple and yet so little of a bore. He accepted with gratitude the theory of his languor—which moreover was real enough and partly perhaps why he was so sensitive; he let himself go as a convalescent, let her insist on the weakness always left by fever. It helped him to gain time, to ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... and who had been raised to the grandeur of a transfiguration; so tender he would not bruise the broken reed, so gentle his yoke was rest; raying out with compassion and love wherever he went; healing alike the pangs of grief and the languor of disease; whom some believed to be the Messiah, and others thought a prophet; whom the masses followed, and the priests feared;—this is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... with ornaments the most precious that could be and withal she was of passing beauty and loveliness, a model of symmetry and seemliness, of elegance and perfect grace, with waist slender and hips heavy and dewy lips such as heal the sick and eyelids lovely in their languor, as it were she of whom the sayer spake ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... eminently a festive one. Men luxuriate in the cafe, or spend their evenings in worse places. A brief period of the morning only is given to business, the rest of the day and night to melting lassitude, smoking, and luxurious ease. Evidences of satiety, languor, and dullness, the weakened capacity for enjoyment, are sadly conspicuous, the inevitable sequence of indolence and vice. The arts and sciences seldom disturb the thoughts of such people. Here, as in ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... almost step from the steamer into its streets. Meantime, the long, bright afternoon, so rich in manifold impressions, draws on; cypresses and mulberry-trees announce the approach to Avignon. A golden softness in the evening sky, a heavy warmth and languor in the air, proclaim the South. Every inch of the way is varied and rememberable. Feudal walls still crest the distant heights, as we glide slowly between reedy banks and low sandy shores towards the ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... surprised he should do so," continued Mrs. Dinks, with extraordinary languor, as if she should undoubtedly fall fast asleep before the present interview terminated. And yet ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Brazenose students sing, The grass-plot chains in boding notes to ring; E'en then we mark'd, where, gleaming through the night, Aerial crosses shed a lurid light. Those wrestlers, too, whom naked we behold Through many a summer's night and winter's cold, Now changed appear'd, his pristine languor fled, Expiring Abel raised his sinking head, While with fix'd eyes his murderer seemed to stand, The bone half dropping from his nerveless hand. So, when of old, as Latian records tell, At Pompey's base the laurel'd despot fell, Reviving freedom ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... with the strongholds of aristocratical influence, Newark, and Stamford, and Hertford, and St Alban's? Never did any people display, within the limits prescribed by law, so generous a fervour, or so steadfast a determination, as that very people whose apparent languor had just before inspired the enemies of Reform with a ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Roxmouth, with courteous languor, "At least, not to ME! To Miss Tabitha!" and he waved his hand expressively. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of this sort are suggested by melancholy, or by the effects of that very languor and inoccupation into which we would willingly sink, under the notion of freedom from ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the most vigorous and effectual measures to be ready for an early and decisive campaign the next year. My greatest fear is that Congress, viewing this stroke in too important a point of light, may think our work too nearly closed, and will fall into a state of languor and relaxation. To prevent the error, I shall employ every means in my power; and if, unhappily, we sink into that fatal mistake, no part of the blame ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of particular crisis in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct perception, perhaps, of a living God's existence, swept in and overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... contemptuous; and he is then certainly dignified, ardent, and emphatic; but it is apt, I should think, to impress those who hear him, for the first time, with an idea that he is a very supercilious personage, and this unfavourable impression is liable to be strengthened by the elegant aristocratic languor ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... burdensome recurrences. Insensibly to herself she was becoming dependent on his timid devotion, his constant attention; and he, lover-like, once so attracted, in spite of his judgment, by her liveliness and piquancy, now doted on her languor, and thought her silence more ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... emotional excitement, to be never content unless when passing from fervour to fervour. No life can long endure this strain. This is specially seen in such poets as Byron and Shelley, who speedily fell from the heights of passion to the depths of languor and despondency. The same quick using up of the power of enjoyment produces the too common product of the blase man and the cynic. Wordsworth early perceived that all, even the richest, natures have but a very limited capacity ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... to us from without. Now, in our still very badly organised world, an enormous number of people are condemned by the tyranny of poverty or the tyranny of fashion, to be, when the day's work or the day's business is done, in just such a condition of fatigue and languor, of craving, therefore, for the baser kinds of pleasure. We all recognise that this is the case with what we call poor people, and that this is why poor people are apt to prefer the public-house to the picture gallery or the concert-room. ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... The languor and the stir, the warmth and weight and the strong feel of life from the deep centres of the earth that comes always with the early, soaking spring, when it is not answered with an active fervent joy, gives always anger, irritation ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... brilliant as the flowers, the Duchess, like them, passed swiftly away. Her pregnancy, by reason of toilsome rides, hunting parties, and other agitations, became complicated. From the eighth month she fell into a fever, into exhaustion and languor. The terror that took possession of her imagination caused her to desire a sojourn in a convent as a refuge of health, where God would see her nearer and, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Rye," in chapters which justify to the full Mr. Birrell's enthusiastic admiration when he wrote: "The delightful, the bewitching, the never sufficiently to be praised George Borrow—Borrow, the Friend of Man, at whose bidding lassitude and languor strike their tents and flee; and health and spirits, adventure and human comradeship, take up the reins of life, whistle to the horses ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... knees again. As the day was only the second of the industrial week, the apron was almost clean; and even the office towel, which hung on a roller somewhat conspicuously near the door, was not offensive. A single gas jet burned. The workshop was in the languor of repose after toil which had officially commenced ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Van Dorn spoke up manfully, "Well, don't you try sharing it. I want all of it, every bit of it." He played with her hair, and relaxed in a languor of ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... The languor was gone. She shivered and sat erect, he watching her in an agony of apprehension. She looked ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... neglige that fell round her in loose, graceful folds. She wore no flowers, jewels, or ribbons, but the dark masses of her hair were unfastened, and hung round the white neck; there was a warm, bright flush on her face, with the least touch of languor in her manner. She threw herself back in her lounging chair, ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... to go after him," muttered Joe Emson; and, casting off the feeling of languor which had impelled him to call others instead of acting himself, he braced himself up, left the scorching iron house behind, and trotted after Dyke, scaring a group of stupid-looking young ostriches into a ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... her tones frightened her, however; she might have woke Jeanne, and she bent down over the bed. But no; the child was sound asleep, with rosy cheeks, and a vague smile playing round her lips. The air of the quiet chamber was charged with languor. The whilom drowsiness, as if born again of relief, once more seized upon the curtains, furniture, and littered garments. Everything was steeped restfully in the early morning light as it entered through ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... vivid realities. Prominent among the fair faces that look out upon us at every turn, from court and salon, is that of the Duchesse de Longueville, sister of the Grand Conde, and heroine of the Fronde. Her lovely blue eyes, with their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings," turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman and priest. We trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth, her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for La Rochefoucauld, the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... from this second attack. Even when she was pronounced wholly out of danger, there were the weariest days to be passed, relapses, weakness, languor. Flowers bloomed and faded in the garden below, the scent of the roses perfumed the air, the red-tipped vine-shoots growing upwards narrowed the space of blue sky seen through the little window, till the sun shone in softened by a screen of glowing green ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... the surface. We have even drunk from the same cup of wine, because she preferred me hers yester-night, saying, 'To our gallant recruit Monsieur Inverey, and to his gallant nation, les Ecossais.' Ah, the laughing witch! You should have seen the languor in her eyes, the blushing red of her lips, the delicate contour of her arm, as she raised her glass to me and then bade ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... and, while it is practically certain that the writer knew the Scudery romances, the contrast of this "burning" quality becomes so striking as almost to justify, comparatively if not positively, the accusations of frigidity and languor which have been somewhat excessively brought against the earlier performances. There is not the passion of Atala—it would have been out of place: and there is not the soul-dissection of Rene, for there is nothing morbid enough to require the scalpel. But, on the other hand, there is the bustle—if ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... than resolution and he had fallen asleep. What good or bad angel came in a dream to rouse him from his state of crime, who shall say? Without a movement, without a sound, in the profound silence and the languor of the late afternoon, some invisible messenger of fate touched with unsealing finger the eyes of his consciousness—whispered into the ear of his spirit the mysterious awakening word which no human lips ever have spoken, no human memory ever has recalled. He quietly raised his ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... expressed by a note of exclamation, set ironically, Mahony felt constrained to second Turnham's enthusiasm. And it was indeed a lovely picture: the gracious, golden-haired woman, whose figure had the amplitude, her gestures the almost sensual languor of the young nursing mother; the two children fawning at her knee, both ash-blond, with vivid scarlet lips.—"It helps one," thought Mahony, "to understand the mother-worship of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... appearance the next day, it was evident that he had thrown from his heart a load of cares; and though they had left a languor upon his face, content was in his voice, in his manners, in every word and action. Far from seeming to retain any resentment against his ward, for the danger into which her imprudence had led him, he appeared rather ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... Learning, in the most general sense, is meant the intellectual awakening of Europe after the languor and depression of the first mediaeval centuries. In a narrower sense, however, the phrase is used to designate that wonderful renewal of interest in the old Greek and Latin authors which sprung up in Italy about the beginning of the fourteenth century. We shall use ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the most popular in the language, with some of the most exquisitely poetical, it reminds us of the difficulty a young writer without connexions experiences in obtaining the public ear; and of the languor of poetical connoisseurs who sometimes suffer poems, that have not yet grown up to authority, to be buried on the shelf. What the outraged feelings of the poet were, appeared when some time afterwards he became rich enough to express them. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... tired, my heart and I! Though now none takes me on his arm To fold me close and kiss me warm Till each quick breath end in a sigh Of happy languor. Now, alone, We lean upon this graveyard stone, Uncheered, unkissed, my ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... during the winter and spring of 1777, as it had been in the previous autumn, was that of trying to keep in the field Virginia's quota of troops, and of trying to furnish Virginia's share of military supplies,—no easy task, it should seem, in those times of poverty, confusion, and patriotic languor. The official correspondence of the governor indicates the unslumbering anxiety, the energy, the fertility of device with which, in spite of defective health, he devoted himself to these ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... and what follows? His blood is not properly oxygenated: his nervous energy is depressed, his digestion impaired, especially if his occupation be sedentary, or requires much stooping, and the cavity of the chest thereby becomes contracted; and for that miserable feeling of languor and craving he knows but one remedy—the passing stimulus of alcohol;—a passing stimulus; leaving fresh depression behind it, and requiring fresh doses of stimulant, till it becomes a habit, a slavery, a madness. Again, there is an intellectual side to the question. The ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... was not only the sight of that slow-rising smoke, there was the odour which floated to their nostrils, and set them off running in a way which seemed to suggest that their swim had washed away all the stiffness and languor ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... conscious that dinner was announced, and that amidst a babel of tongues he was being led by, or was leading, Lady Durwent into the dining-room. He heard the resolutionist and Dunckley both talking at once, and felt the melancholy languor of Pyford floating like incense through the air. He had an obscure recollection of sitting down next to his hostess; that the table, like Arthur's, was a round one; that Johnston Smyth was seated beside Miss Durwent and was ogling one of Lady Durwent's ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... 90 deg. to 100 deg. of Fahrenheit. Occasionally it reaches 125 deg., and is then fearfully oppressive. Fierce gusts laden with sand sweep over the plain, causing vegetation to droop or disappear, and the animal world to hide itself. Man with difficulty retains life at these trying times, feeling a languor and a depression of spirits which are barely supportable.10 All who can do so quit the plains and betake themselves to the upland region till the great heats are past, and the advance of autumn brings at any rate cool ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... up the river, and whose conduct throughout this disastrous affray was most admirable. The ball could not be extracted, and Lander felt convinced his career would soon be terminated. When the state of excitement to which his feelings had been wrought, gave place to the languor which generally succeeds powerful excitement of any kind, the invalid's wound pained him exceedingly, and for several hours afterwards, he endured with calmness the most intense suffering. From that time he could neither sit up, nor turn on his couch, nor hold a pen, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... air. Some hurried from the dock, making for a lodging-house or for The Asiatics' Home. Some hurried into the dock, with that impassive swiftness which gives no impression of haste, but rather carries a touch of extreme languor. An old cargo tramp lay in a far berth, and one caught the sound of rushing blocks, and a monotonous voice wailing the Malayan chanty: "Love is kind to the least of men, EEEE-ah, EEEE-ah!" Boats were loading up. Others were unloading. Over all was the glare of arclights, and ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... dreamy and thoughtful than ever. The dim smile still dwelt upon his lips, and though his countenance had as much of the forest Indian character as ever, there was a languor about the drooping eyelids, with their long lashes, and a stoop in the usually erect neck, which betrayed the existence in the boy's mind of some ever-present sadness. His costume was just what it had always been—moccasins, deerskin leggings, a shaggy forest paletot, and fringed ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... the dull languor of our summer collapse we felt none of your fierce Northern excitements, I should have excepted the Anthony suffrage case. That touched nearly if not deeply. The ark of the holy political covenant resting here—the sacred mules that draw it being stabled ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... white of skin, and red of lip. Like San Francisco she has Latin blood which makes her love and preserve the carnival spirit; but she is more voluptuous than San Francisco, for not only is she touched with the languor and the fire of her climate, but she is without the virile blood of the forty-niner, or the invigorating contact of the fresh Pacific wind. In my imaginary picture I see her yawning at eleven in the morning, when her negro maid brings black coffee to her bedside—such wonderful black ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... symptoms of over-effort. Sleepiness, languor, a vacant expression, forehead wrinkled, eyebrows knit, eyes dull, sunken and surrounded by dark rings, twitchings, restlessness, or loss of appetite are all warnings that the pace is too strong ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... a glory glimmers here Thro' veils and distance from the space remote, A faintest far vibration of a note Reaches to us and seems to bring us near; Causing our face to glow with braver cheer, Making the serried mist to stand afloat, Subduing languor with an antidote, And strengthening love almost to cast out fear: Till for one moment golden city walls Rise looming on us, golden walls of home, Light of our eyes until the darkness falls; Then thro' the outer darkness burdensome I hear again the tender voice ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... one thing happened which made her prudence coincide with her desires; one of the children sickened with a languor that was the precursor of disease, and the doctors said that only country air could bring back strength. And then fate itself took the whole matter out of my control. Something happened in the city—I know not what—and the ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... dirt that had soiled him when he fell. The Wairoa man was regarding him in blank astonishment. Clearly, Dandy Jack was an entirely new species of the genus homo to him. Thus spake the bull-fighter, with elaborate affectation of languor ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... when absorbing a first-rate soporific of this nature remind me of the symptoms of catalepsy enumerated in a treatise of forensic medicine which I once read. The influence is even physical. It is generally associated with a recumbent position, repeated yawning, and excessive languor. Loss of memory, too, is only one of the consequences of reading a dozen ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... its regulations, inattention to its recommendations, if not disobedience to its authority, not only in individuals but in States, soon appeared with their melancholy consequences— universal languor, jealousies, rivalries of States, decline of navigation and commerce, discouragement of necessary manufactures, universal fall in the value of lands and their produce, contempt of public and private faith, loss ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... was bare to greedy spoil Of hungry eyes which n'ote therewith be fill'd. And yet through languor of her late sweet toil Few drops more clear than nectar forth distill'd, That like pure Orient perles adown it trill'd; And her fair eyes sweet smiling in delight Moisten'd their fiery beams, with which she thrill'd Frail hearts, yet quenched not; like starry ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... eyes met his in a long gaze. The languor of the music was still in them, but he saw another expression growing there, a grave and womanly sweetness. "I wonder—" The hand under his turned so that the ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... reverberating light of the sun, the white facades, the slate roofs, and the granite wharves glowed dazzlingly. In the distance arose a confused noise in the warm atmosphere; and the idleness of Sunday, as well as the melancholy engendered by the summer heat, seemed to shed around a universal languor. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... of toil and languor, lo! a chariot-driver came, Loosely hung his scanty garments, and a staff ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... amusement tend to polish the mind, to improve the style, to give variety to conversation, and to lend a grace to more important accomplishments. He who can effect this has surely done something. Is no useful end served by that writer whose works have soothed weeks of languor and sickness, have relieved the mind exhausted from the pressure of employment by an amusement which delights without enervating, which relaxes the tension of the powers without rendering them unfit for future exercise? I should not be surprised to see these observations refuted; ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... all that could be wished for a number of days after steaming out of the Golden Gate. It was in the month of September, when a mild, dreamy languor seemed to rest upon everything, and the passage across the Pacific was like one long-continued dream of the Orient—excepting, perhaps, when the cyclone or hurricane, roused from its sleep, swept over the deep with a fury ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... "Sleep is dearest to the Muses;" and when the child of the Muses does not get his regular nine hours' rest (which he fails to do in warm weather), then his verse and prose are certain to bear traces of his languor. It is true that all children of the Muses do not require about double the allowance of the saints. Five hours was all St. Jerome took, and probably Byron did not sleep much more during the season when he wrote "Childe Harold." The moderns who agree with the Locrians in erecting altars to Sleep, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... things." In the music of MacDowell there is no hint of these matters; there is rather the infinitely touching emotion of those rare beings who are in their interior lives both passionate and shy: they know desire and sorrow, supreme ardour and enamoured tenderness; but they do not know either the languor or the dementia of eroticism; they are haunted and swept by beauty, but they are not sickened or oppressed by it. Nor is their passion mystical and detached. MacDowell in his music is full-blooded, but ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... trivialties which repels us in some of his other works. And there is real vitality in the theme, both from our anxiety to know the course of such a mind, and from the effect of an absorbing interest in himself excluding that languor which sometimes seized him in his efforts to impart or attribute interest to themes possessing little or none in themselves. Its mere narrative, though often very homely, and dealing in too many words, is often characterized ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... must be regarded, however, as only a part of the entire scheme proposed by Sir Robert Peel, and judged of accordingly, with reference also to the necessity of his position, arising from the last acts of his predecessors—from the spirit and temper of the age. The long-continued languor and prostration of our commerce, undoubtedly required some decisive, but cautious and well-considered movement, in the direction of free-trade. How far we shall be met, in the same spirit, by France, Germany, Russia, and America, as has been long confidently predicted by those whose opinions have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... attacked with inward inflammation, he at length reached Paris. Philippe de Champagne received him, and watched over him like a brother until he recovered. A great degree of weakness and languor still depressed him; the air of Paris weighed on him like lead. He sighed for his native breeze at Andelys, and still more for his mother's embrace—his good and tender mother, whose letters to him were so ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... view outspread before her. The golden stillness of morning rested on hill and valley like a benediction. Green cornfields, white watercourses, granite promontories, and black patches of forest—all were bathed in warmth and light without languor. The breath of the snows was still ice-cool, and exhilarating as wine; its freshness penetrated and enhanced by the faint sweet scent of Banksia roses, that clothed the rickety woodwork in a fairy garment of green ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... two experiences did not break Thackeray, but they bowed him. They help to explain the languor, the melancholy, the gentle pessimism, as if life had no more sunrises, of which we are vaguely conscious in reading The Virginians ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... languor; a subtle essence of perfume floated through my senses. A gentle touch of some kindly hand was bathing my temples. Fearful lest this sweet illusion vanish with the others, I kept my eyes firmly closed, and soon abandoned myself wholly to the subduing ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... was offered him as a source of salutary discipline. The moment for such a lesson might strike him as strange, in view of the quite special and independent opportunity for exercise that his spirit had during the last three days enjoyed there in his hotel bedroom; but evidently his languor of charity needed some admonition finer than any it might trust to chance for, and by the time he at last, Winch's residence recognised, was duly elevated to his level and had pressed the electric button at his door, he felt himself ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... better than words, that curtain of foliage which masks our thought. Pierre allowed himself to be cradled by this humming. Such the song of a golden wasp that floats through the chiaroscuro of one's thought. His days became numb things in this new languor. That solitary and naked heart dreamed of the ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... man whose simple dress and subdued air strongly contrasted the artificial graces and the modish languor of Mr. Vernon; but though wholly without that nameless distinction which sometimes characterizes those conscious of pure race and habituated to the atmosphere of courts, he had at least Nature's stamp of aristocracy in a form eminently noble, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
