"Lethargical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the loss of a most affectionate brother, with whom I had always lived in the closest friendship. My brother John died last Friday night, of a fit of the gout, which he had had for about a month in his hands and feet, and which fell at last upon his stomach and head. As he grew, toward the last, lethargic, his end was not painful to himself. At the distance which you are at from hence, you need not go into mourning upon this occasion, as the time of your mourning would be near over, before you ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the nurse came down, she was bidden to go back to bed again, if she liked. Hour after hour passed. He threw himself on the sofa, but it was not to close his eyes. And yet all seemed going well in the sick-room. Both the doctor and he had convinced themselves that Lionel was now asleep—no lethargic stupor this time, but actual sleep, from which everything was to be hoped. Maurice would not speak; he wrote on slips of paper when he had anything to say. And so the long night went by, until the window-panes slowly changed from black to ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... sky, and all the multitudinous sounds in the neighbourhood of the water-hole had long subsided into complete silence, that the watchers felt at liberty to cease their vigil and snatch an hour or two of much-needed rest. Meanwhile, Grosvenor remained completely sunk in the lethargic sleep which had resulted from the saturation of ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... imagination delights; but it is immediately followed by the fall of the rhythmus, re-establishing its languid repose. The frequent use of half notes induces a predominance of the minor key, and this, with the constant recurrence of the rhythmical fall, imparts to Semitic and Hindoo music that melancholy, lethargic uniformity which expresses in a striking manner the benumbed energies and undeveloped spirit of the people among whom it is found. When a race has substituted habit and custom for national feeling, its music is necessarily monotonous and characterless, for the stronger the national feeling of any ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... showed a small fracture, the contemplation of which aroused considerable interest in all present, with the exception of the patient. Don Mike was still dizzy; because his vision was impaired he kept his eyes closed; he heard a humming noise as if a lethargic bumble bee had taken up his residence inside the Farrel ears. Kay, observing him closely, realized that he was very weak, that only by the exercise of a very strong will had he succeeded in sitting up during the journey in from the ranch. His brow was cold and wet ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... fur of mammals, from the carapace of tortoises to the armour of armadillos. In other cases, it is hardly necessary to say, the difficulties may be met in other ways, as frogs meet the winter by falling into a lethargic state in some ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... slept. The Indian sleeps at the stake in the intervals between his tortures; and mental torments, in like manner, exhaust by long continuance the sensibility of the sufferer, so that an interval of lethargic repose must necessarily ensue, ere the pangs which they ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... with tense eyes and protruding notebooks darted feverishly in and out; nor, in the course of his long wait, had he seen so much as one specimen of that invariable concomitant of all screen journalism, the long-haired poet with his flowing tie and neatly ribboned manuscript. Even the office "boy," lethargic, neutrally polite, busy writing on half-sheets of paper, was profoundly untrue to the pictured type. Banneker wondered what the managing editor would be like; would almost, in the wreckage of his preconceived notions, have accepted a woman or a priest in that manifestation, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and mince pie," said a well-known after-dinner orator, "always puts us in a lethargic mood—makes us feel, in fact, like the natives of Nola Chucky. In Nola Chucky one day I said ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... Maupassant and the applause of such connoisseurs of technique as Walter Pater and Henry James. From his mother's Norman ancestry he inherited the physique of a giant, tainted with epilepsy; a Viking countenance, strong- featured with leonine moustaches; and a barbaric temper, habitually somewhat lethargic but irritable, and, when roused, violent and intolerant of opposition. He had a private education at Rouen, with wide desultory reading; went to Paris, which he hated, to study law, which he also hated; frequented the theatres and studios; travelled in Corsica, the Pyrenees, and the ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... was daylight; she knocked at the door of the comtesse—all was still;—she opened it and went in. The comtesse, exhausted by long watching, had fallen asleep in her chair, with her little girl in her arms. The child had sunk into a dull lethargic state never to be broken. Alas! Monsieur—alas! the little one was dead! Agathe ran and called me. I came in. What a spectacle!... Which of us should arouse the unhappy comtesse? or should we disturb her? Were it not better gently to ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... had followed him in, and was standing just behind his chair, head hanging, ears lopping, lethargic patience showing in every contour of ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... Austria plumped her brutal ultimatum upon little Serbia. There were no vivid debates, no pronounced current of opinion one way or the other, not much public interest in the prolonged discussions at the Consulta; just a lethargic iteration of the belief that sooner or later war must come with its terrible risks, its dubious victories. Given the Italian temperament and the nearness of the brink toward which the country was drifting, one looked for ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... with powerful human passions in no lethargic way. It may horrify by its brutality, and its assault on ordinary morality may well be considered startling: yet it counts for something that M. Artzibashef does not display the common fear ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... But Beaudoin's persistently lethargic condition evidently alarmed him. He inspected the contrivance that had been applied by the field attendant to check the flow of blood, which was simply a cord passed around the leg outside the trousers and twisted tight with the assistance ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of his art, how we were with him when he laid the foundations of the world, and the song is unfinished, the fingers grow listless. As we receive these intimations of age our very sins become negative: we are still pleased if a voice praises us, but we grow lethargic in enterprises where the spur to activity is fame or the acclamation of men. At some point in the past we may have struggled mightily for the sweet incense which men offer to a towering personality; ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... last mistakes, in the campaign against the league, Charles, whether as a soldier or statesman, is seen at his best. When once the drums beat to arms there was an end to irresolution. He had that reserve of energy upon which an indolent, lethargic nature can sometimes at a crisis draw. The Netherlands seemed threatened from east to west; yet in perfect calm he ordered his agitated sister Mary to watch her frontiers, but to send every man and gun that could be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... at Ippenburen, he was quite lethargic; his hand fell down as if lifeless, and his tongue hung out of his mouth. He gave, however, signs enough of life by continually crying out, as well as he could ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... meant to convey an apology for my incapacity to write, seems to have been taken by you in too serious a light. It was only my way of telling you I had a severe cold. The fact is I have been insuperably dull and lethargic for many weeks, and cannot rise to the vigour of a Letter, much less an Essay. The London must do without me for a time, a time, and half a time, for I have lost all interest about it, and whether I shall recover it again I know not. I will ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the fatigue of attending a long cabinet-council on this event, had such an effect upon the queen's spirits and constitution, that she declared she should not outlive it, and was immediately seized with a lethargic disorder. Notwithstanding all the medicines which the physicians could prescribe, the distemper gained ground so fast, that next day, which was the thirtieth of July, they despaired of her life. Then the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... it was not more than a whisper as compared with what they were receiving from our side of the line. The German artillery came into lethargic action after the American barrage had been in constant operation for thirty minutes and then the enemy's fire was only desultory. Only an occasional shell from Kulturland came our way, and even they carried a rather tired, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... is often indicated orthographically. For example, vol.334, letter from Galon-Boyer, Brumaire 18, year II. "The public spirit is generally bad. Those who claim to be patriots know no restraint. The rest are lethargic and federalism ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... nearest kinsman, the king of Scots? Being then advised by the archbishop of Canterbury to fix her thoughts upon God, she replied, that she did so, nor did her mind in the least wander from him. Her voice soon after left her and senses failed; she fell into a lethargic slumber, which continued some hours; and she expired gently, without further struggle or convulsion, in the seventieth year of her age, and forty-fifth of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... a low dressing table, when at the same time one of the several doors of the apartment opened, admitting the jestress, Jacqueline, whose long, flowing gown of dark green bore no distinguishing mark of the motley she had assumed the night before. The dreamy, almost lethargic, gaze of the princess rested for a moment upon the ardent eyes of the maid who ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... of a slimy eel or a blundering bullhead or a lethargic sucker is bad enough, but the rush in of the pickerel is the advent of the devil himself. Until he is got rid of, all the delicate machinery for the calculation of chances is hopelessly disturbed; and no one ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to no less than eighty-six. Yet even the former comparatively low mortality; of which the counsel speaks with so much satisfaction, as a proof of the kind and compassionate treatment of the slaves, even this indolent and lethargic destruction gives to the march of death seventeen times its usual speed. It is a destruction, which, if general but for ten years, would depopulate the world, blast the purposes of its creation, and ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... Elizabeth, by whom Barnave had been much esteemed ever since the journey from Varennes, were both inconsolable. I really believe the Queen entirely owed her instantaneous recovery from that deadly lethargic state, in which she had been thrown by her grief for the destined sacrifice, to the exuberant goodness of the King's heart, who instantly resolved to compromise his own existence, to save those who had forfeited theirs for ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... less, applying cui bono? to mental much as the city man applies it to bodily exertion, and therefore achieving, I think, a finer degree of inanition. The tame eagle, the pelicans, were nothing to him, and when I saw his lethargic, gentle countenance my own curiosity about them seemed to die away in haze, as though I had breathed in an invisible opiate. He came, he went, and that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... of the landscape was depressing. Nature herself seemed in a lethargic trance, and her ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... truth was that, though her bereavement had been the cause of a most genuine and durable sorrow, it had been a relief to her. When Constance was over fifty, the energetic and masterful Sophia had burst in upon her lethargic tranquillity and very seriously disturbed the flow of old habits. Certainly Constance had fought Sophia on the main point, and won; but on a hundred minor points she had either lost or had not ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... in medical books. Sometimes, without any apparent cause, I sank, little by little, into a condition of hemi-syncope, or half swoon; and, in this condition, without pain, without ability to stir, or, strictly speaking, to think, but with a dull lethargic consciousness of life and of the presence of those who surrounded my bed, I remained, until the crisis of the disease restored me, suddenly, to perfect sensation. At other times I was quickly and impetuously smitten. I grew sick, and numb, and chilly, and dizzy, and so fell prostrate at once. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... he was a veritable torrent, a wild beast that could only be stopped by the death of himself or his foe. So many affronts, so many pinpricks, day after day, had made his heart quiver, lodging in it to sleep the sleep of lethargic vipers, and they now were awaking to shake and hiss with fury. The hisses resounded in his ears with the jesting epithets of the professor, the phrases in the slang of the markets, and he seemed to hear blows and laughter. A thousand schemes for revenge rushed into his brain, ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... their hooked jaws, as with steel forceps. This kind abounds in damp places, and is usually met with on the banks of streams. We have not heard of their actually killing any animal except the Python, and that only when gorged and quite lethargic, but they soon clear away any dead animal matter; this appears to be their principal food, and their use in the economy of nature is clearly in the ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... an insufferable vulgarian. On the return of the guileless satirist to England the writer of the letter of introduction inquired how he had fared with the consul, and great was his surprise to hear him drawl out, in his habitual lethargic manner: ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... complain because it has no voice, it does not move because it is lethargic, and you say that it does not suffer because you haven't seen how its heart bleeds. But some day you will see this, you will hear its complaints, and then woe unto those who found their strength on ignorance and fanaticism! Woe unto those who rejoice in deceit and labor during the night, believing ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... forgetfulness on the part of Milton; and in many generations of readers, however alive and awake with malice, a corresponding forgetfulness not less astonishing. Two readers only I have ever heard of that escaped this lethargic inattention; one of which two is myself; and I ascribe my success partly to good luck, but partly to some merit on my own part in having cultivated a habit of systematically accurate reading. If I read at all, I make it a duty to read truly and faithfully. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... had been either discouraged or at the least lethargic, the pretender Tien Wang had been busily engaged in establishing his authority on a sound basis, and in assigning their respective ranks to his principal followers who saw in the conferring of titles and posts, at the moment of little meaning or value, the ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... recourse to the only means that are congenial to guilt: I will compel you to be silent." Freedom in this matter, as in all others, will engender activity and fortitude; positive institution (Godwin's term for law and constraint) makes the mind torpid and lethargic. It is hardly necessary to reproduce Godwin's vigorous arguments for unfettered freedom in political and speculative discussion, against censorships and prosecutions for religious and political opinions. Even were we secure ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... he called to Barney to aid him. The little hillock was made into a couch by means of the saddles, and the groaning veteran carefully laid upon the by no means uncomfortable refuge. As Jack held the light above him, Jones's eyes closed and he sank into a lethargic sleep. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... flood is like those serpents which fascinate before they strike. The monotonous rain failing ohne Hast, ohne Rast, the dead immutable murk of the sky, the rush of gray wave after wave, induced a state of dull lethargic wonder: the feet—the foot more, would it accomplish that? Already the floor of the ranch-house was under water. But there was soon a sufficient dashing about of riders in long yellow oil-skin coats, and all was done that the situation seemed to demand or admit of. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... called to inquire for her health. Hour after hour she seemed to be slowly failing. On the morning of the 28th she fell into a lethargic sleep, which lasted for five hours, and her case was pronounced hopeless. Eugene and Hortense were at her side. The death-hour had come. The last rites of religion were administered to the dying. The Emperor Alexander was also ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... waited at Paris. It was well known how the King's illness must end. No one, save the Queen, professed to entertain any hope of his amendment; but Catherine appeared to be too lethargic to allow herself to be roused to any understanding of his danger; and as to the personal womanly tendance of wife to suffering husband, she seemed to have no notion of it. Her mother had never been supposed to take the slightest care of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... running order. Peyton's drowsiness wrapped him closer and closer. Presently he was remotely aware of the opening of the door, the tread of light feet on the floor, the swish of skirts. But he had now reached that lethargic point which involves total indifference to outer things, and he did not even ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... were not favoured with so energetic conductors, and in our third we had unfit horses. So we had occasion to be glad of our excellent start. Thus, between good horses and bad, live postilions and lethargic, smooth roads and rough, we fared on the whole rather well than ill, and felt but the smallest apprehension of being caught. To speak metaphorically, the coast of France was ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... recalled. No fighting men have been more ready for war, yet so indifferent to military glory, more imbued with patriotism, yet so prone to fight for themselves alone, more courageous, yet so careful of their lives, more lethargic, or even languid by nature, and yet so capable of the most strenuous activity. Such were the Boers of the veld. In one particular they had never been surpassed by any troops. No Boer but was a bold horseman ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... hand, that the English Government had known much about the Afrikaner Bond menace, it is singular that precautionary measures had halted with that bare effort of making military observations. The only way to account for this apparent lethargic inaction is the assumption that a persevering patience and friendly attitude was expected in time to effectually dissipate all trouble in South Africa, and that a display of anxiety or of force would have frustrated such ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... obliged to inform him of the Marshal's presence. "Sire," said Caulaincourt, "the Duke of Tarantum has brought for your signature the treaty which is to be ratified to-morrow." The Emperor then, as if roused from a lethargic slumber, turned to Macdonald, and merely said, "Ah, Marshal! so you are here!" Napoleon's countenance was so altered that the Marshal, struck with the change, said, as if it were involuntarily, "Is your Majesty ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the quiet of the town was not disturbed in any great degree. It was only when a vessel from Mexico, arrived, when the Governor of the province visited them, or when news of an Indian uprising was brought, that the town awoke from its almost lethargic calm. All this Apolinaria found out later. Today, however, the undisturbed quiet of the place suited her best, and she would not have had it otherwise, surprised as she was at first to find it thus, so different from the bustle attending any event, even ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... of the catch was much diminished) until some fisherman of genius conjectured that the cod lived only too contentedly in those tanks, and suffered from the atrophy of calm. The cod is by nature a lethargic, torpid, and plethoric creature, prone to inactivity, content to lie in comfort, swallowing all that comes, with cavernous mouth wide open, big enough to gulp its own body down if that could be. In the tanks the cod rotted at ease, rapidly deteriorating in their flesh. So, as ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... in high delight. She had not for weeks heard so many words, not to say words of such strength and reason, from her father's lips: day by day he had been growing weaker and more lethargic. He was so much exhausted, however, after this effort, that he asked for another piece of bread and more wine, and fell fast asleep the moment ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... her marvellous facility in writing seems really to have been accompanied with no corresponding readiness of speech and reply. Probably it was only, as she herself states, when she had a pen in her hand that her lethargic ideas would arise and flow in order as they should. And the need of self-expression felt by all those who have not the gift of communicating themselves fully and easily in speech or manner, a strong need in her case, from her having so much ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Bennington, and the New Yorkers shattered another at Oriskany and Fort Schuyler. The country people turned out in defense of their invaded homes and poured into the American camp. Burgoyne struggled and advanced, fought and retreated. Gates, stupid, lethargic, and good-natured, did nothing, but there was no need of generalship; and Arnold was there, turbulent and quarrelsome, but full of daring; and Morgan, too, equally ready; and they and others did ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... faces of his old Jackson county troop, and seeing only tawny visages through the smoke and hearing only foreign yells, he felt a queer twinge of homesickness. But he was at once ashamed, for the humble little chocolate centaurs whom he had been set to train were dying about him with lethargic cynicism, just as they were bidden. Wearing a charm, either the Virgin's picture in a tin frame, or the cross, they might have worn the crescent. They were as effective as ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... musician, who was as fat as a hog and as red as a beet, was slowly digesting his breakfast, while his lethargic gaze slowly wandered over the magnificent panorama of the Mediterranean,—the Straits of Gibraltar, the accursed rock from which they take their name, the neighboring peaks of Anghera and Benzu, and the distant snows of the Lesser Atlas—when he heard hasty steps on the stairs ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... off a lethargic spell and decided he had better set about several by no means small tasks, if he wanted to get them finished before the hot months. He made a trip to the Sonoyta Oasis. He satisfied himself that matters along the line ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... not LOOK FORWARD—which is of the essence of fear—to pain in the future. Fear and self-consciousness are closely interlinked. Similarly with animals, we often wonder how a horse or a cow can endure to stand out in a field all night, exposed to cold and rain, in the lethargic patient way that they exhibit. It is not that they do not FEEL the discomfort, but it is that they do not envisage THEMSELVES as enduring this pain and suffering for all those coming hours; and as we ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... Teutonic forest of the fifth century. Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society the small stability that it needs, amid all the oscillation of a gelatinous cosmos, to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without their dreams men ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... better evidence of the character and influence of Washington upon the American mind than what has transpired during and since the war. Look, sir, at the South of which you spoke! She was largely a lethargic people prior to the war. She lived in luxury; she was in the midst of a condition which yielded to her abundant support, and eliminated from her life the necessity of hard labor and earnest effort. The war came. We were bound around with ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... than light to awake him from his almost lethargic sleep, and Boone threw bone after bone at him, till the brute woke up, growled with astonishment at the unusual sight before him, and advanced lazily to examine it. The young man had caught up his rifle by the barrel; he took a long and ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... man threw himself into a chair in a paroxysm of frenzied agony. For more than an hour he sat in the same posture, until he became gradually hardened into a stiff, lethargic insensibility, callous and impervious to feeling, reason, or religion—an awful transition from a visitation of conscience so terrible as that which he had just suffered. At length he arose, and by walking moodily about, relapsed into his ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... arguments, however, may perhaps awaken some few of these who are less lethargic than the rest, from the sleep of sense, and enable them to elevate their mental eye from the dark mire in which they are plunged, and gain a glimpse of this most weighty truth, that there is another world, of which this ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... seldom more strikingly out of place than under such circumstances, and the penalties imposed took account not only of Penrod's tardiness but of his supposititious defiance of authority in declining to speak. The truth was that Penrod did not know why he was tardy, and, with mind still lethargic, found it impossible to think of an excuse his continuing silence being due merely to the persistence of his efforts to invent one. Thus were his meek searchings misinterpreted, and the unloved hours of improvement in science and the ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... dancing very graceful - even so graceful as that of the German Sugar Bakers, whose assembly, by the Minories, we stopped to visit - but there is watchful maintenance of order in every house, and swift expulsion where need is. Even in the midst of drunkenness, both of the lethargic kind and the lively, there is sharp landlord supervision, and pockets are in less peril than out of doors. These houses show, singularly, how much of the picturesque and romantic there truly is in the sailor, requiring to be especially addressed. All the songs (sung in a hailstorm ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... but my old complaint (though strange, 'tis true) Was banished from my system by a new: Just as diseases of the side or head My to the stomach or the chest instead, Like your lethargic patient, when he tears Himself from bed, and at ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... lethargic disposition, young Bulldogs are somewhat liable to indigestion, and during the period of puppyhood it is of advantage to give them a tablespoonful of lime water once a day in their ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... threats so far as to undergo the "initiation" he proposed, at the time we were helpless in his hands—of that I have little doubt. I cannot suppose that he would have wasted much time over me, once I had fallen lethargic. When Hewitt burst in he would have found me lying dead, with the Red Triangle on my forehead. It would have saved Mayes a lot of noise and ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... had never taken an oath of fidelity to their king, whose interest is inseparable from that of his people, but had sworn to support the ruinous projects of abandoned men (of whatever faction) must rouse the most lethargic, if honest, soul. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... for his residence. He had made repeated efforts to obtain from the Council some positive proclamation or declaration, affirming the freedom of the Indians as a natural and inalienable right, and at this time, he succeeded in moving that somewhat lethargic body to express a desire for more explicit information on this subject, before reaching a decision. In response to an order from the Council, Las Casas wrote his treatise entitled, The Liberty of the Enslaved Indians (De la libertad de los Indios que ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... I for a moment forgot my companions, and fell into a sort of lethargic stupor. I fancied that I too was dead or dreaming—I fancied that I was in hell—the Avernus of the ancients. In my youth, I had the misfortune to be well schooled in classic lore—to the neglect of studies more useful—and ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... said, "to tell you that all is safe. Also to bid you good-bye. As soon as I can get employment I shall go down to Thorn to stir them up there. They are lethargic at Thorn." ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... on the subject of the "sanctions" which France threatened to apply. The Bavarian is too lethargic, slow, and easy-going to be readily frightened—in temperament he has little in common with the high-spirited, nervous Prussian. Bavarians spoke of Germany and Germany's war-debt with an aloofness as of neutrals. It did not trouble them deeply. They were sceptical as to France's ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... before God, so long as life shall last, and afterwards break that vow, confusion and chaos result from their perjury, and all the pestilential furies attending on a wrong deed whip them to their graves! In these times of ours, when wars and rumours of wars shake the lethargic souls of too-exultant politicians and statesmen with anxiety for themselves if not for their country, we hear every day of men and women breaking their marriage vows as lightly as though God were not existent,—we read of princes whose low amours are a disgrace to the world—of dukes ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... and consumed the wine, Richard's exhaustion assumed the form of a lethargic torpor. To sleep was now his overmastering desire. She fetched him rugs and pillows, and he made himself a couch upon the floor. She had demurred, of course, when he himself had suggested this. She could not conceive of any one sleeping anywhere but in a bed. But Dick ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... again. They take up the slack, as it were, and move on again in that remarkable pas de flexion that is so oddly tireless. It is a difference of method; probably the best thing for men who are Gallic, temperamental. A more lethargic army is better governed probably by ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... finding both Madame de Gramont and Count Tristan at home. The former received him with as much cordiality as her constitutional stiffness permitted, but the latter appeared to be in a half-lethargic state; he scarcely rose to welcome his visitor, spoke feebly and indistinctly, and, as he sank back in his seat, leaned his flushed face upon ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... The act of sitting up made me conscious of the fact that I had been lying down. Conscious, too, that I was feeling more than a little dazed. It seemed as though I was waking out of some strange, lethargic sleep—a kind of feeling which I have read of and heard about, but never ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... lethargic moments of a seaman's life. Days of toil bring nights of drowsiness; and the repose of nature presents a constant temptation to imitate her example. The reaction of excitement destroys the disposition to indulge in the ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... fro between our little table and the kitchen. She looks pretty, she smiles. The slowness of her movements is no longer lethargic; it simply exhales an air of repose, a perfume of peace that suits her beauty. Her eyes have fastened on me at once and, as in the ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... bear passes the cold months in lethargic sleep; yet, in all but the coldest weather, and sometimes even then, its slumber is but light, and if disturbed it will promptly leave its den, prepared for fight or flight as the occasion may require. Many times when a hunter has stumbled on the winter resting-place of a bear and has ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... that she was a very handsome woman, and that her physical type—that of the more lethargic and heavily built Neapolitan—suggested very happily the mad and melancholy Queen. She had superb black hair, eyes profoundly dark, a low and beautiful brow, lips classically fine, a powerful head and ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... active man, and one that could easily be wakened; he was not like some Turks, an hour in recovering their lethargic senses. He was quick in decision and action; and his slaves resembled their master. He despatched a messenger immediately to the grand vizier, that the sultan's safety might be secured, and sent others to the magistrates in each quarter ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... rushed out to meet the new-comer—men and dogs, the little black-and-tan children, and even Williams' fat and lethargic wife. For a few moments there was a scene of wild disorder, of fighting Malemutes buried under a rush of angry huskies, while men shouted, and the yelling Frenchman leaped about and cut his caribou- gut in vicious slashes over the wolfish horde ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... that if the soul had not already quitted this inert, sluggish, lethargic body, it had at least retreated and concealed itself in depths whither the perceptions of the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... this kind, which in a less sincere society restricts its expression to innuendo or forced politeness, left the rustic Ira only dumb and lethargic. He moved slowly and abstractedly around the room, accenting his slight lameness more than ever, or dropped helplessly into a chair, where he sat, inanely conscious of the contiguity of his wife ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... created by the meeting of the two vessels had aroused Gascoyne from the lethargic state of mind and body to which he had given way. Coming on deck, he was amazed to find himself close to the Talisman. A boat lay alongside the Foam, into which he jumped, and, sculling towards the frigate, he stepped over ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... Here he was to remain till he died, which was an event expected every moment; but passing from an atmosphere heated, stagnant, and filled with miasma, into fresher and purer air, which was renewed every instant, he gradually revived from his lethargic state. His recovery dated from the day when he quitted the middle deck; and as it often happens in medicine that the same facts are cited in support of systems diametrically opposite, this recovery ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... out always exists, but it is not always equally visible. In some ages governments seem to be imperishable, in others the existence of society appears to be more precarious than the life of man. Some constitutions plunge the citizens into a lethargic somnolence, and others rouse them to feverish excitement. When government appears to be so strong, and laws so stable, men do not perceive the dangers which may accrue from a union of church and state. When governments display ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... eldest son of Pierre Rougon, was educated at Plassans and Paris, and was called to the Bar. He practised in the local Court for a number of years, but with little success. Though of lethargic appearance, he was a man of ability, who "cherished lofty ambitions, possessed domineering instincts, and showed a singular contempt for trifling expedients and small fortunes." With the Revolution of February, ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... of picked men. I understood their speech, but beyond ribald jests at our expense they said nothing. It was all swift, unreal. Owls hooted in the woods and dogs snarled at us. The groups that remained by the fire peered in our direction, but were too lethargic to come near. I tried for a word with Starling. I ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... because they have no voice; if they don't revolt, it is because they are lethargic; if you say they do not suffer, it is because you have not seen their heart's blood. But the day will come when you will see and hear. Then woe to those who base their strength on ignorance and fanaticism; woe to those who govern through falsehood, and ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... this background of spiritual and national indifference that the towering figure of Grundtvig must be seen. For it was he, more than any other, who awakened his people from their lethargic indifference and started them upon the road toward a ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... in undescribable tortures. Toward midnight, the sufferer exclaimed, "O God, O just and merciful God, help me to support this agony!" The whole of the ensuing day she continued to endure great anguish. In the evening a kind of lethargic stupor came on. Miss Robinson, approaching the pillow of her expiring mother, earnestly conjured her to speak, if in her power. "My darling Mary!" she faintly articulated, and spoke no more. In another hour she became insensible ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... horse—who seemed startled at some sound from the forest. Almost at the same instant, I heard a responsive neigh, as if it were an echo from behind me. I heeded neither the one nor the other. I saw that the birds were aroused from their lethargic attitude. Some of them appeared as if pressing upon their limbs to spring upwards from the tree. The deadly ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... the young man needed looking after, and the adroit host, skilled in managing all kinds of people and in every condition, induced him to return to his room, under the pretence of wishing to taste his fine old brandy, and then kept him there until the lethargic stage set in as the result of his excess. And so an affair, which might have created much scandal, was smuggled out of sight and knowledge as far as possible. Mrs. Mayhew had been so occupied with whist that she had not observed that anything was amiss, ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Dick to me, as once at College We argued on the use of knowledge;— 'In old King Olim's reign, I've read, There lay two patients in one bed. The one in fat lethargic trance, 5 Lay wan and motionless as lead: The other, (like the Folks in France), Possess'd a different disposition— In short, the plain truth to confess, The man was madder than Mad Bess! 10 But both diseases, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... transparent air, breathing silently white mists of steam, lay like a mirage wonderfully touched with purplish shadows. The great steel works rose to the south, visibly near, mysteriously remote. The ribbons of fiery smoke from their furnaces were the first signs of the city's awakening from its lethargic industrial sleep. The beast was beginning to move along its score of miles of length. But out here in the vacancies of the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... terrible fastnesses were caravans on which Domini looked with a heavy and lethargic interest. Many Kabyles, fairer than she was, moved slowly on foot towards their ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... extinct. But her virtue was without a blemish—some said from pride, some said from coldness. Her wit was keen and court-like—lively, yet subdued; for her French high breeding was very different from the lethargic and taciturn imperturbability of the English. All silent people can seem conventionally elegant. A groom married a rich lady; he dreaded the ridicule of the guests whom his new rank assembled at his table—an Oxford clergyman gave ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made us all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed off, myself, in considering the question whether I ought to restore a couple of pounds sterling ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the reaction from the stormy excitements of the Great Awakening, nothing had seemed to arouse the New England churches from a lethargic dullness; so, at least, it seemed to those who recalled those wonderful days of old, either in memory or by tradition. We have a gauge of the general decline of the public morals, in the condition of Yale College at the accession of President Dwight in 1795, as described ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... they continue on shore, they feed on the grass and other plants which grow near the banks of fresh-water streams; and, when not employed in feeding, sleep in herds in the most miry places they can find. As they seem of a very lethargic disposition, and are not easily awakened, each herd was observed to place some of their males at a distance, in the nature of centinels, who never failed to alarm them when any one attempted to molest, or even to approach ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... said that a minister is greatly handicapped to-day in all his efforts for two reasons: First, that the times are spiritually lethargic, that men are so engrossed by material aims, indifference, or sin that a pastor can get no hold upon their hearts. Second, that he is bound hand and foot by conditions existing in the organization and personnel of his church, and hence ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... so comfortably regulated at the present day that Robin Greve, looking back at his trip by air from Croydon Aerodrome to the big landing-ground outside Rotterdam, acknowledged that he had more excitement in his efforts to stir into action a lethargic Dutch passport official in London, so as to enable him to catch the air mail, than in the smooth and uneventful voyage across the Channel. He reached Rotterdam on a dull and muggy afternoon and lost no time in depositing his bag at the ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... indeed down to a period only fifty years ago, the world, looked at from the present vantage-ground, must appear to have been in a dull, lethargic state, with hardly any pulse and a low circulation. As for nerve system it had none. The changes which the Post Office has wrought in the world, but more particularly in our own country, are only to be fully perceived and appreciated by the thoughtful. Now the heart of the ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... alternate nights, this night it being the father's regular turn to perform that duty; but his trip of twenty-five or thirty miles had fatigued him so much that it was judged best for his wife to relieve him,—his slumbers being usually so profound as to be almost lethargic, so that, when once fairly asleep, the loudest noises even in the same room would fail to arouse him, and it being feared, therefore, that the little patient might suffer, if left to his care in his present state of weariness. In the same room slept a young negro girl, whose duty it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... of 1821, Napoleon began to grow lethargic. He had generally spent the day in pacing up and down his apartment, and dictating conversations and political recollections. But he now sat for hours listlessly and perfectly silent on the sofa. It required the strongest persuasion to induce ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... believed, that Henry was sincere in subscribing conditions so humiliating; nor can his easy and lethargic temper account for his so readily relinquishing the pretensions of the Princess Joanna, whom, notwithstanding the popular imputations on her birth, he seems always to have cherished as his own offspring. He was accused, even while actually signing the treaty, of a secret collusion with the marquis ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... Royal patient alone, she hurried forward in some trepidation in order to excuse herself, when the apparition vanished away. She returned terrified to the chamber, but there lay the Queen still in the same lethargic slumber in ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... as only a woman so liberally endowed could suffer, and over a long period of years. She had known despair and humiliation and bewilderment, lethargic hopelessness, and finally a complete sacrifice of self. His imagination, in spite of his rebellious soul, had furnished the background ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... been sitting by her tomb In torpor one dark night; When fitful tremours shook the doom Of cold lethargic settled gloom, That weighed upon ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... vote its taxes; those necessary for public services and to satisfy (pay in full) the assistance North America and the corporations, organizations and individuals who help us to rise out of our lethargic state, are rendering us; taking care at the same time to abolish all those which have for basis a social vice or an immoral action, like the lottery, the tax on gambling dens, on galleras (arenas for fights of game cocks) and the farming out ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... what the nation needs to-day, and women must wake up to the consideration that they, too, have duties as well as rights in the State. A splendid audience greeted me in the Opera House, and I gave "Our Girls," bringing many male sinners to repentance, and stirring up some lethargic femmes coverts to a state of rebellion against the existing order ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... not a very easy matter to rouse him: so lethargic and heavy were his slumbers. Regaining his faculties by slow and faint glimmerings, he at length sat upright; and, displaying a very yellow face, a very red nose, and a very bristly beard: the joint effect of which was considerably heightened by a dirty white handkerchief, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens |
