"Drowse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... length of the road. After, perhaps, an hour and a half's driving, Brunow woke me by calling impatiently to the cabman, and I came to the full possession of myself in time to see the vehicle swerve suddenly to the right. My prolonged drowse half refreshed me, and the cold, wet air which blew up from the river through the window Brunow had opened fell freshly on my cheek. I could see the river gleaming ahead, with spaces of liquid blackness in it, and a red or green light burning here and there. It was still raining, and ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... Vilna. We had not slept any the night before. Fannie and I spent the long hours in playing various quiet games and watching the clock. At last the long expected hour arrived; our train would be due in a short time. All but Fannie and myself had by this time fallen into a drowse, half sitting, half lying on some of the many baskets and boxes that stood all about the room all ready to be taken to the station. So we set to work to rouse the rest, and with the aid of an alarm clock's loud ringing, we soon had ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin
... were together; and Love seemed that it had made a truce with Death in the air about us, that we be undisturbed; for there came a drowse of rest even upon my tense heart, that had known nothing but a dreadful ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... He seemed to drowse into a kind of half-sleep, in spite of his too obvious and audible suffering. She sat beside him, sponging and fanning him, listening to his shallow, jerky, wheezy respiration, watching for the subtle something in ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... eleven when Josiah and me got to bed agin. And then jest as I was gettin' into a drowse, I heered the cat in the buttery, and I got up to let her out. And that roused Josiah up, and he thought he heered the cattle in the garden, and he got up and went out. And there we was a-marchin' ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... naked sword lies on the grass, Heavy with gold, and Time itself doth drowse; The little stream, too indolent to pass, Loiters below the cloudy willow boughs, That build amid the glare a shadowy house, And with a Paradisal freshness brims Amid cool-rooted reeds with glossy blade; The antic water-fly above it skims, And cows stand shadow-like in the green shade, ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... forward towards the customer, and talked to him in a soft confidential monotone, like a portrait painter, the razor would go slower and slower, and pause and stop, move and pause again, till the shave died away into the mere drowse ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... the night slipped along. After a while they began to drowse, until one by one the little groups became quiet and fell asleep. Only the glowing, flickering pine knots stayed awake ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... to sleep; all else had the effect to keep his tense nerves vibrating. As the cold intensified, the crickets ceased to cry, and the pony, having filled his stomach, turned tail to the wind and humped his back in drowse. At last, no friendly sounds were left in all the world, and shivering, sore, and sullen, the youth faced the east ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... stuff for dreams. The one excogitated in spring-time, when Nature was taking her break-of-day drowse, previous to getting up and going about business; the other suggestive of Nature indulging in a half-light reverie in a sort of crimson and scarlet dressing-gown, previous to putting on her night-cap ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... silent, a misty figure in a lap-robe. The rain streaked the mica lights in the side-curtains. A distant train whistled desolately across the sodden fields. The inside of the car smelled musty. The quiet was like a blanket over the ears. Claire was in a hazy drowse. She felt that she could never ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... upper Kuskokeem, to darker things that were mentioned only in whispers. And Captain Tom regretted the temporary indisposition that prevented immediate departure with them, and continued to sit and drowse more and more in the big chair. It was Polly, with a camaraderie distasteful to her uncle, who got these men aside and broke the news that Captain Tom would never go out on the shining ways again. But not all of them ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... your drowse by the Seven famed Hills, Thought you to find all just the same Here shining, as in hours of old, If you ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... and brooding over The Place as though they loved it. In the winter evenings there was the huge library hearth with its blaze and warmth; and a disreputable fur rug in front of it that might have been ordained expressly for tired dogs to drowse on. And there were the Mistress and the Master. Especially the Mistress! The Mistress somehow had a way of making all the world ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... fire," said Tommie. "We're all tired to-night and it will be good to drowse and dream. Good-night, Charlemagne. The ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... brought him stark awake and eager for the conference. He had begun to drowse after a good home dinner and sixty hours without sleep, but this acted like an electric shock. He was keen and alert, for he knew that this was the night of his destiny. Either he should triumph as he had in the grueling race, or he should have to face the ignominy of transfer ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... a crimson crown Of glittering sunset glows; The roofs of brown in the distant town Are bathed in a blush of rose; The radiant ripples shine and shift In shimmering shreds of gold; The seaweeds lift and drowse and drift, And ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the sky towered the Great Pyramid, and over its apex hung the moon. Like a wreck cast ashore by some titanic storm, the Sphinx, reposing amid the undulating waves of grayish sand surrounding it, seemed for once to drowse. Its solemn visage that had impassively watched ages come and go, empires rise and fall, and generations of men live and die, appeared for the moment to have lost its usual expression of speculative wisdom and intense disdain—its ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... on the gardens; not our live humming warmth but the stale exhalation of dead summers. The very statues seemed to drowse like watchers by a death-bed. Lizards shot out of the cracked soil like flames and the bench in the laurustinus-niche was strewn with the blue varnished bodies of dead flies. Before us lay the fish-pond, a yellow marble slab above rotting secrets. The villa looked across ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... shake up the cushion for the Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least, as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable half-drowse, planning the business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age has made upon him, fifteen years or twenty—yes, or perhaps ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... united, filling the sky, not racing along in threatening ranks suggesting energy of an overbearing destructive kind, but forming a bland, mild, laving bath. The cloudless days are calm, pearl-gray, and brooding in tone, inclining to rest and peace; the islands seem to drowse and float on the glassy water, and in the woods scarce a ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... morning and watch its rose unfold; To drowse with the noontide lulled in its heart of gold; To lie with the night-time and dream the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... miles from the town over the grass brittle and hot, from which the clapping grasshoppers rose in swarms, and dropping down on the point of a mesa I relived again in drowse the joys of other days. It was plain to me that goldseeking in the Rocky Mountains was marvellously simple and easy compared to even the best sections of the Northwest, and the long journey of the Forty-niners was not only incredibly more splendid and dramatic, but ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... their passions clearly foresee that, should the final disposition of Fiume prove unacceptable to the Jugoslavs, they will almost certainly divert the trade of the interior to some Slav port, leaving Fiume to drowse in idleness beside her moss-grown wharfs and crumbling warehouses, dreaming dreams of her ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... the pathetic or he could never have done what he did—sell to the old gentleman, on the strength of the knowledge he had imparted to him, a house and lot upon terms so easy that he might drowse along for a little time and then wake to find himself both homeless and penniless. This was the promoter's method, and for so long a time had it proved successful that he had now grown mildly affluent and had set up a buggy in which ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... blanched lilies of the vale And violets and yellow star-flowers teem, And pink and purple hyacinths exhale Their heavy fume, once more to drowse and dream My head would sink, from many an olden tale Drawing imagination's fervid theme, Or haply peopling this enchanting spot Only with ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... bare knoll the pointed cedar shadows Drowse on the crisp, gray moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows; 45 The single crow a single caw lets fall; And all around me every bush and tree Says Autumn's here, and ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... the activity in the store of Stibbs with the drowse that hung over another shop in the North Country where, in earlier years, I used to buy my supplies. Doctor Mayhew kept the shop, which flourished until a pushing Scandinavian set up a more pretentious establishment; after which the Doctor's shop faded away like the grin of Puss ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... passage a little drowse fell upon the two charter members. They had lunched more richly than was their wont. "Oh, these distressing, heavy lunches!" as Aldous Huxley cries in one of his poems. But Lawton was still of bright vivacity. At that time the ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... sharpened ear which caught the first answering cry, and her hands which steered the intricate course to the heaving berg where the sailor crouched, for, at their approach, Captain had yielded to the drowse of weariness and, in his relief at the finding, the blade floated from ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... beyond the rambling, mellow kind, that drowse in poetic languor amidst flowering vines and trees. These trees, that also line the streets, meeting in cathedral arches overhead, might be stately elms of New England, poplars of the middle-west, or live-oaks of the south; for it must be strictly ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... there was any variation of the monotonous quiet; and indeed the tall clock had just announced the usual bedtime of the family when Clarion's bark made the squire sit up from his drowse before the fire, and set all listening. Presently came the now familiar sound of hoof-beat and sabre-clank; springing to his feet and seizing a candle, Mr. Meredith was at the front door as a troop trotted ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... tenderness, Uncle Alec worked over his new patient till she declared she was all right again. He would not let her get up to dinner, but fed her himself, and then forgot his own while he sat watching her fall into a drowse, for Aunt Plenty's cordial ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... we?" She lay back with her head against Beatrice's shoulder. "You always were so clever, Beaty. I'm sure it will be all right. You'll see your poor mother through." The eyelids sank; she dropped into a drowse of complete mental and physical breakdown, and for a moment no one spoke. Mrs. Carmichael had shifted from her defiant attitude, and her hard, set face expressed a grim satisfaction ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down their throttle. But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... gray Had brought him here to spend the day. Now his old aunt and uncle drowse; No chick nor child is in the house— No cat, no dog, no bird, or mouse; No fairy picture-book to spell, No music-box of ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... it's lovely in summer to drowse on the deck that's all warm with the sun, and see the trees and the fields and the little houses slipping by on either side.... If there weren't so many old people.... All the boys go away to the cities.... I hate old people; they're so dirty and slow. We mustn't ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... be a capital excuse for lying in bed; for she still liked to cuddle and drowse in her cosey, warm nest. But she was curious to know where the curious place was; so she got ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... most potent enemy of all who do and dream. He had had a long day, coming after the skull-smiting of the night before; it was only the frosty air at the lifted sash that kept him at all awake. He had fallen into a half drowse when he heard footsteps coming down the ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... placed in your path, you think of these after the journey is done, but they seldom haunt your fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping car and feel yourself hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only that you can endure it; and some such ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... calm! O tired lark descending on the wheat! Lies it all peace beyond that western fold Where now the lingering shepherd sees his star Rise upon Malvern? Paints an Age of Gold Yon cloud with prophecies of linked ease— Lulling this Land, with hills drawn up like knees, To drowse beside her ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... on the wall above the gateway was disturbed, one cool September morning, by a party coming down the street in noisy conversation. He gave one look, then settled into his drowse again. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... frowned as they passed a closed carriage and pair. The body of this comfortable vehicle sagged slightly to one side; the paint was old and seamed with hundreds of minute cracks like little rivers on a black map; the coachman, a fat and elderly darky, seemed to drowse upon the box; but the open window afforded the occupants of the cutter a glimpse of a tired, fine old face, a silk hat, a pearl tie, and an astrachan collar, evidently out ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... of happy travelling is contrast. Suffer, that you may drowse thereafter: grill, that you may have a heat on you worth assuagement. Wherefore, to the Italian wanderer, it will be worth while to endure the fierceness of the Lombard plain, even the gilded modernisms ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... a sudden, many a voice along the street, And heel against the pavement echoing, burst Their drowse; and either started while the door, Push'd from without, drave backward to the wall, And midmost of a rout of roisterers, Femininely fair and dissolutely pale, Her suitor in old years before Geraint, Enter'd, the wild lord ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... and did so at her ease. She took possession while its lord Was absent on the dewy sward, Intent upon his usual sport, A courtier at Aurora's court. When he had browsed his fill of clover And cut his pranks all nicely over, Home Johnny came to take his drowse, All snug within his cellar-house. The weasel's nose he came to see, Outsticking through the open door. 'Ye gods of hospitality!' Exclaim'd the creature, vexed sore, 'Must I give up my father's lodge? ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... between the kitchen and the toilette. No amusement is sought, except from drum-beating and the attendant dance. Thus time lapses with these black citizens. As for the foreign merchants and traders, they, too, drowse away the period of their residence in this sleepy city. They sell their goods in a lump, on trust, to the Sarkee, and then compose themselves to slumber whilst he goes forth on a razzia, and brings them slaves in payment. The thick, heavy atmosphere—at any rate ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... wealth, and wine, the hours of night In sombre Babylon may dispense delight. These revellers, slumber-scorning, Radiant and well-arrayed, will stop, and stop, Till waiters drowse. But then, yon slaves of Shop ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... the baby was a quiet child. Apparently he shared his mother's apathy towards all things, and he lay by the hour in a sluggish drowse, leaving his mother free to allow her thoughts to wander at will. They did wander, too. Lying there, passive, in her luxurious room, Beatrix's mind scaled the heights of heaven, sounded the depths of ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... the buffalo out, but open up the land with the plough, and make a thousand live where one lived before. It is peace you want, my mother, peace and solitude, in which the soul goes to sleep. Your days of hope are over, and you want to drowse by the fire. I want to see the white man's cities grow, and the armies coming over the hill with the ploughs and the reapers and the mowers, and the wheels and the belts and engines of the great factories, and the ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... more, arranging things to his satisfaction and then threw himself upon the bed, disposed to keep his watch all night, if it was necessary. He did not wish to sleep. No, he ought not to drowse.... And half an hour later he was slumbering profoundly without knowing at what moment he had slid down the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a less troubled brow, Raven took Nan upstairs to the great west room made ready for his sister with a fire roaringly active. There he installed her, and when she reminded him that the room had been wakened from its winter drowse to this exhilaration for Amelia, he bade her "hush up and stay put." Two facts were paramount: she was the first comer and this was the best room. But, Nan said, she wasn't going to stay over night. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... garden where a thin white haze was rising. If, in taking this coign of vantage, I had any subtler purpose than to seek a draught against the warmth of the night, it did not fail of its reward, for just as I had begun to drowse, the gallery steps creaked as if beneath some immoderate weight, and the noble form of Keredec emerged upon my field of vision. From the absence of the sound of footsteps I supposed him to be either barefooted or in his stockings. His visible costume consisted of a sleeping jacket tucked into a ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... sofa. He began to nestle and drowse, but presently spoke like one talking in his sleep, and said: "Did I hear horses' feet? Have ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... whose brows are smooth and fair; Mourners whom the dawning light Shall grapple with an old distress; Lovers folded at midnight In their bridal happiness; Pale watchers by beloved beds, Fallen a-drowse with nodding heads, Whom sleep captured by surprise, With the circles round their eyes; Maidens with quiet-taken breath, Dreaming of enchanted bowers; Old men with the mask of death; Little children soft as flowers; Those who ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... seen, To touch, across the ages, touch with tears The ferns that hide thee with their fairy screen, Or only hear them rustling in the dawn; And—as a dreamer waking—in thy words, For all the golden clouds that drowse between, To feel the veil of centuries withdrawn, To feel thy sun re-risen Unbuild our shadowy prison And hear on thy fresh boughs ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... go on, as he did at some length, and began to drowse, while he amused himself with a gross parody of things she had said during the past four days. In those years while their wedded bliss was yet practically new, Colonel Kenton found his wife an inexhaustible ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... resented, for a whole silent evening, his absorption in other people, sometimes grew pettish and unresponsive and offended because he could keep neither eyes nor hands from her. And there were evenings when they seemed to have nothing to talk about, and Billy, too tired to do anything but drowse in his big chair, was confronted with an alert and horrified Susan, sick with apprehension of all the long evenings, throughout all the years. Susan was fretted by the financial barrier to the immediate marriage, too, it was humiliating, at twenty-six, to be affected ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire's old song— ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... exhaustion. He slept, not a refreshing sleep, but one in which the excited spirit kept up its exercises, so as totally to neutralize what nature designed as compensation in his slumbers. His sleep was the drowse of incapacity, not the wholesome respite of elastic faculties. It was actual physical imbecility, rather than sleep; and, while the mere animal man, lay incapable, like a log, the diseased imagination was ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... weary of gazing at the same endless diversity of grain-fields, vineyards, rows of trees, &c., though the bright moon was now shining, and, shutting out the chill night-air, I disposed myself on my old great-coat and softest carpet-bag for a drowse, having ample room at my command if I could but have brought it into a straight line. But the road was hard, the coach a little the uneasiest I ever hardened my bones upon, and my slumber was of a disturbed and dubious character, a ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... limp When laid in his chest; Yea, limp; and why But to signify That the grave will crimp Ere next year's sun Yet another one Of those in that house - It may be the best - For its endless drowse!" ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy |
