"Drowse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the warm night which had fallen after the beautiful day breathed through the half-dropped window in a rich, soft air, as strange almost as the flying landscape itself. Mr. Erwin began to drowse, and at last he fell asleep; but Veronica kept her eyes vigilantly fixed upon Lydia, always smiling when she caught her glance, and offering service. At the stations, so orderly and yet so noisy, where the passengers were held in the same meek subjection as at Trieste, people got in and out of ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... perhaps, an hour later when Donald, just beginning to drowse before his little fire, heard someone approach and unlock his door, for the second time that night. In anticipation of any desperate emergency, the captive sprang to his feet, and retreated to a corner of the room farthest from the door, watching ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... Maine), where her early girlhood had been spent. At times it seemed that she was in the little, old, gray house in the valley, and that her father's sharp voice might come at any moment to break her delicious drowse. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... would 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 up ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... 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, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! 10 With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hemming in 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 ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... became, and glistering hair, Whom Cinara welcomed, that rapacious fair, As well you know, for his own simple sake, Who on from noon would wine in bumpers take, Now quits the table soon, and loves to dream And drowse upon the grass ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... 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 Winter soon ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which meal they habitually consumed in the cafe when the evening rush was over, the tables undressed, and the establishment had settled down to drowse away the dull hours ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... world. Perhaps we were too old to believe in Santa Claus, but even so, on this magic night might not a skeptic be at fault—might there not be a chance that the discarded world had returned to us? Once a year, surely, reason might nod and drowse. Perhaps if we put our noses on the cold glass and peered hard into the glittering darkness, we might see the old fellow himself, muffled to his chin in furs, going on his yearly errands. It was a jingling of sleigh bells on the ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... my wife comes there to speak to me . . . Sometimes the grey cat waves his tail around me . . . Goldfish swim in a bowl, glisten in sunlight, Dilate to a gorgeous size, blow delicate bubbles, Drowse among dark green weeds. On rainy days, You'll see a gas-light shedding light behind me— An eye-shade round my forehead. There I sit, Twirling the tiny brushes in my paint-cups, Painting the pale pink rosebuds, minute violets, Exquisite wreaths of dark green ivy leaves. On this ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... but I've never been good at boiling things down into descriptions, and when he found I was not disposed to talk, he fell silent and I was free to drowse over what I knew of the ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... it but to submit with a sigh to the ensuing hullabaloo. Rateau, somnolent and pacific in his lodge, became a demon when he got a broom in his hand. In this sedentary being, who could drowse all morning in the stale basement atmosphere heavy with the cumulative aroma of many meat-stews, a martial ardour, a warlike ferocity, then asserted themselves, and like a red revolutionary he assaulted the bed, charged the chairs, manhandled the picture frames, knocked the tables ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... wanderers of earth turned to her—outcast of the older lands— With a promise and hope in their pleading, and she reached them pitying hands; And she cried to the Old World cities that drowse by the Eastern main: "Send me your weary, house-worn broods and I'll send you men again! Lo! here in my wind-swept reaches, by my marshalled peaks of snow, Is room for a larger reaping than your o'er-tilled fields can grow; Seed of the Man-seed springing to stature ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... two children. She lost him; she lost the care of her children; rapidly she drifted away from them. The powerful narcotic helped to deaden her pain. When her anguish became unbearable a double dose of it would enable her to drowse away the hours. ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... 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
... saecula saeculorum. Storms drive over them, mists and rains blot them out; rarely they are shrouded in a fleece of snow. In spring the clouds and the light hold races up their flanks; in summer they seem to drowse like weary monsters in the still and fervent heat. They are never profoundly affected by such changes of Nature's face; grow not awful, sharing her wrath, nor dangerously fair when she woos them with kisses to love. They are the quiet and ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... Nor slept, nor wink'd, but with a steadfast spite Watch'd their wan looks and tremblings in the skies; And that he might not slumber in the night, The curtain-lids were pluck'd from his large eyes, So he might never drowse, but ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... dress parade, I was named to take charge of a police detail from the Sixty-first, which was to report at brigade headquarters the next morning at five o'clock. I had slept but little during the night. Toward morning I fell into a drowse, and was awakened out of it by the reveille. I hurried out of my tent and was getting my detail together, hoping that the colonel would not notice my tardiness. I got to the place of rendezvous the first of any one ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... constables hedge— Ship's corporals and the master-at-arms. "In brig there, I say!"—They dally no more; Like hounds let slip on a desperate boar, Together they pounce on the formidable Finn, Pinion and cripple and hustle him in. Anon, under sentry, between twin guns, He slides off in drowse, and the long ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... where the 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 fair creations of ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... enough To wish for further news thereof. Here, in this early autumn dawn, By windows opening on the lawn. Where sunshine seems asleep, though bright, And shadows yet are sharp with night, And, further on, the wealthy wheat Bends in a golden drowse, how sweet To sit and cast my careless looks Around my walls of well-read books, Wherein is all that stands redeem'd From time's huge wreck, all men have dream'd Of truth, and all by poets known Of feeling, and in weak sort shown, And, turning ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... homeward 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 ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... out over the dizzying whirl of the motors they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, "It is certainly astonishing weather for this season of ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... 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 hell. The one had lain within her reach; but she had ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... seemed to hear, In drowse or dream, more near and near Across the border-land of sleep The blowing of a blithesome horn, That laughed the dismal day to scorn; A splash of hoofs and rush of wheels Through sand and mire like stranding keels, As from the road with sudden sweep The Mail drove up the little steep, And stopped ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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
... several times 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 soft ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... she said at last, "and on an arbor-moss the sun shall drowse you, the flower-scents be your opiates, the birds your lullaby, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... wood, or the yelping of dogs; and not even the announcement of supper, and the partaking thereof, can stay his eloquence. The householder at times emits a sleepy grunt of approval, relapses apparently into a drowse, and after several hours, rolls into his mat and feigns sleep. At this juncture one of the visitors hastens down the notched pole and gets the silver-ferruled lance or silver-sheathed knife that has been left concealed near ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... grow, and attempt to wake her. But she sleep on, and I may not wake her though I try. I do not wish to try too hard lest I harm her. For I know that she have suffer much, and sleep at times be all-in-all to her. I think I drowse myself, for all of sudden I feel guilt, as though I have done something. I find myself bolt up, with the reins in my hand, and the good horses go along jog, jog, just as ever. I look down and find Madam Mina still asleep. It is ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... 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; ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... good eyes, strong limbs, nimble feet, and, above all, an alert mind. People who lack these qualities, especially the last, will not be likely to pursue the noble science of ornithology. The stupid sort will prefer to drowse in the shade, and the light-minded will care only for the gay round of social pleasures. Any bright and earnest person, however, can in good time become an expert student of the feathered creation, provided only that he feels a genuine interest ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... and 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
... as a prisoner, and treated him like a slave. Another sister and her husband were his special friends, and he relates that when he used to sit up with the Indians round their camp fire, listening to their stories, he would sometimes drowse; then this gentle sister and her husband would take him up in their arms and carry him to bed, and he would hear them saying, "Poor fellow! We have sat up too long for him, and he has fallen asleep ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... after nightfall ere 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 ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... fish. I went from one to the other on a zig-zag course, they being widely scattered, some mere dots to the glass on the horizon. The evening was still and clear with that astral Arctic clearness, the sun just beginning his low-couched nightly drowse. These sturdy-looking brown boats stood rocking gently there with slow-creaking noises, as of things whining in slumber, without the least damage, awaiting the appalling storms of the winter months on that tenebrous sea, when a dark doom, and a deep grave, would not fail them. ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... your mother and I return, you will have to depend on such food as the servants at home can spare you from their larder. Don't you dare order anything from the stores to be charged against me. Now, go home, drowse out your summer in the hot town and reflect on what a mean cad you have shown ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... which latter seems rather close behind our house, and yet takes a hard hour and a half to ascend—all this you can imagine since you know the environs of the town; the peace and quiet move me the most—And I fancy I shall drowse out the two months or more, doing no more of serious work than reading—and that is virtuous renunciation of the glorious view to my right here—as I sit aerially like Euripides, and see the clouds come and go and the view change in correspondence with them. It will help me to get rid of the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... fellows is the hero of the day and is much admired by the village girls. It is also thought to be very good for the eyes to stare steadily at the bonfire without blinking; moreover he who does so will not drowse and fall asleep betimes in the long winter evenings. On Midsummer Eve the windows and doors of houses in Silesia are crowned with flowers, especially with the blue cornflowers and the bright corn-cockles; in some villages long strings of garlands and nosegays are stretched across the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 to watch the ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... 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 the ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... chaise, a Dobbin 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
... emotion of church sounds will now and then steal away reason from the unbeliever, and take him drugged and dreaming. "Defend, O Lord, this Thy child!...." So it came out to us in the dream and drowse of summer, which the little ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... of lonesomeness, babbling strangely of that other war in which he had part and mixing his memories with the tags of history he had been taught to recite anent the Roman monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse of bees among the spring blossoms and looked out upon the silent field that once was the heart of Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people was to be tested in the agony of a merciless war, that even now the die was being ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... change as from one boarding-house to another, is caused by some definite force, some shock that overcomes the power of inertia. The eleventh of June Sommers had gone to meet Alves at their usual rendezvous in the thicket at the rear of Blue Grass Avenue. The sultry afternoon had made him drowse, and when he awoke Alves was standing over him, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... them. I do now drowse in my chair, and naught but the call to supper shall awake me. And then will I play so busily with my food that no words can escape me save pax vobiscum. This rascal innkeeper learns naught ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... of 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 ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... would say a mass for her, a year from now another, but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of life: with the fussy, excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would tell in her sharpish voice; with ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... on through Siberian gold chases and the prospecting of the placer benches of the 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 came with projects. ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... have consumed all the cream of tartar on the ship. I never have had hives like these before. I can't understand it. So long as I keep my lamp burning and read I am untroubled. The instant I put out the lamp and drowse off the irritation starts and the lumps on my skin begin ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... we twain 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 pain through ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... character develope itself in a new direction, displaying fresh life and strength, and unexpected resource in circumstances, in which statesmen of the most vigorous minds, and of the highest spirit, have been seen to "droop and drowse," to sink into indolence, sensuality, or the horrors ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... booths of street vendors; on cold wet nights, even in the mouths of the filthy drains. Fortunate is he when fine weather sends him to rest on the river banks. To seek rest; not to find it. O'Iwa stands beside him. When eyelids drowse Cho[u]bei is aroused, to find her face close glaring into his. Beg and implore, yet pardon there is none. 'Cho[u]bei has a debt to pay to Iwa. In life Cho[u]bei must repay by suffering; yet not what Iwa suffered. Think not to rest.' Some support ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... of the Noontide, the heather swims in the heat. Our helmets scorch our foreheads, our sandals burn our feet. Now in the ungirt hour—now ere we blink and drowse, Mithras, also a soldier, keep us true to ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... slowly, bringing the drowsy, hazy days of so-called Indian Summer. It was the season of threshing, and all day long to the drowse of the air was added, near and afar, all-pervading through the stillness, the sleepy hum of the separator. Typical voice of the prairie was that busy drone, penetrating to the ears as the ubiquitous odor of the buffalo grass to the nostril, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... dusk on the Lost Lagoon, And we two dreaming the dusk away, Beneath the drift of a twilight grey— Beneath the drowse of an ending day. And the curve of a ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... charms in vain; and all the eyes of Argus seemed to pale their ineffectual fire, as when Mercury, with his delightful music, in accordance with the command of Jupiter, and with Lempriere's dictionary, made them wink in a delicious drowse. And, thirdly, in the case of a game bantam, once my property, who flew up every morning to the top of a tall pump, and challenged Nottinghamshire to fight, I could not but admire the gawstering spirit, because he so thoroughly meant all that he said, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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' round ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... cedars; the twilight is creeping With shadowy garments, the wilderness through; All day we have carolled, and now would be sleeping, So echo the anthems we warbled to you; While we swing, swing, And your branches sing, And we drowse to your dreamy whispering. ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... 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— O you envy the blessed dead that ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... purpose, Brinnaria had been able to rest herself by dozing along the roadway and had remembered to keep up her strength with food and wine. After they had turned back she could not have swallowed anything, if she had thought to try, and the nearest she came to sleep was an uneasy drowse which seemed a long nightmare. The Cappadocians, famous for their strength, endurance and indifference to wakefulness, exertion, hunger or thirst, were also astute foragers. On their way from Rome the reliefs ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... weep, Those whose lips are set with care, Those 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 ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... 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 source of mental refreshment. He prized beyond measure the feminine inadequacy and ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... orchard boughs, That drop red leaves like coals into the grass. The golden arrows of the sunset fall; And on the vine-hung wall Great purple clusters in delicious drowse, Beakers of chrysolite and amethyst, Yet by the sun unkissed, Lean down to all the wooing lips that pass, Brimful of red, red wine Sweet as brown peasants ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... April when we left 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 ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin |
