"Languor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... across the grass plots. A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz: and when the side door closed again the listener could hear the faint rhythm of the music. The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day's unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before. His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... tent, that is, his caleche. He, too, was exhausted, and closed his eves with a sense of delicious languor. The night air, blowing about his temples, refreshed his fevered brow, and he gave himself up to dreams such as are inspired by the silvered atmosphere, when the moon, in her pearly splendor, looks down upon the troubled earth, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... felt a plaintive languor, a vague uneasiness steal over him; St. Severin delighted him, aided him more than other churches on some days to gain an indescribable impression of joy and pity, sometimes even, when he thought of the filth ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... thy clear keen joyance Languor cannot be; Shadow of annoyance Never came near thee; Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... the most precious that could be and withal she was of passing beauty and loveliness, a model of symmetry and seemliness, of elegance and perfect grace, with waist slender and hips heavy and dewy lips such as heal the sick and eyelids lovely in their languor, as it were she of whom the sayer spake ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... emotions. If she had said in words: "Stop, or I shall die," she could not have spoken more plainly. She remained for a moment with her eyes in d'Arthez's eyes, expressing in that one glance happiness, prudery, fear, confidence, languor, a vague longing, and virgin modesty. She was twenty years old! but remember, she had prepared for this hour of comic falsehood by the choicest art of dress; she was there in her armchair like a flower, ready to blossom at the first kiss of sunshine. True ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... tapestry. I was compelled to confess that the effect of heat upon the wings of a fly is totally different from that it exerts upon the brain of a paleographical archivist; for I found it very difficult to think, and a rather pleasant languor weighing upon me, from which I could rouse myself only by a very determined effort. The dinner-bell then startled me in the midst of my labours; and I had barely time to put on my new dress-coat, so as to make a respectable appearance before ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Perhaps it was the cool peace of the place that made them all feel how hot and tired they were: conversation flagged; and the general languor finally betrayed itself in a silence so absolute that every leaf-whisper seemed to become ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... human status as a member of the race he deserved pity and help. The humanitarian philosophy, therefore, had the simplest task and the most direct application. Dio Chrysostom declared the evil effects of slavery on the masters, sensuality, languor, and dependence. He pointed out the wide difference between personal status and character,—the possible nobility of a slave and the possible servility of a freeman.[794] Seneca especially taught the abstract philosophy of liberalism, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... meet all the ills of life, without fearing and without braving them. Her children cluster about her, full of health, turbulence, and energy: they are true children of the wilderness; their mother watches them from time to time with mingled melancholy and joy: to look at their strength and her languor, one might imagine that the life she has given them has exhausted her own, and still she regrets not what they have cost her. The house inhabited by these emigrants has no internal partition or loft. In the one chamber of which it consists, the whole family is gathered for the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and simple hat, seemed to be moving in a world of her own, into which her companion's chatter but rarely penetrated. She walked with a slow and delicate grace, not without a characteristic touch of languor. Once or twice she looked around her—one might almost have imagined that she was seeking escape from her companion—and on one of these occasions her eyes met Maraton's. She stopped short. They were within a few feet of one another, ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... at marriage, or after the marriageable time,—or, rather, that is what interests the women who sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... she had seemed to change, so had the aspects of the canyon undergone some illusive transformation. The beauty of green foliage and amber stream and brown tree trunks and gray rocks and red walls was there; and the summer drowsiness and languor lay as deep; and the loneliness and solitude brooded with its same eternal significance. But some nameless enchantment, perhaps of hope, seemed no longer to encompass her. A blow had fallen upon her, the nature of which only time ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... all the teeming life of the plain rushed up into the sky and blazed there in a million friendly stars. After the languor of the sleepy afternoons, it was like a fresh awakening—the dawn of those white May nights. The wide plain stirred softly through all its miles of sage. The river's cadenced roar paused beyond the bend and outbroke again. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... I was tired and hot—it really called for a grimmer resolve than mine to shovel sand through the languor of a Leeward Island afternoon. Instead, I slept in my hammock, and dreamed that I was queen of a cannibal island, draped in necklaces made of the doubloons now hidden under the sand in the cabin of ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... pale and quiet the day after the dance, and it was not merely the languor of the girl who has fatigued herself in having a ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... perennes, Languor, anxietas, amaritudo; Aut si triste magis potest quid esse, Hos tu ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... worry me about them: you'll never effect any good by that. Have patience with me, and bear with my languor and crossness a little while, till I get this cursed low fever out of my veins, and then you'll find me cheerful and kind as ever. Why can't you be gentle and good, as you were last time?—I'm sure I ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... their wondrous ingenuity. But her contrivance and dispensation of milk alone is sufficient to prove nature's wonderful care and forethought. For all the superfluous blood in women, that owing to their languor and thinness of spirit floats about on the surface and oppresses them, has a safety-valve provided by nature in the menses, which relieve and cleanse the rest of the body, and fit the womb for conception in due season. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... river, a new place to obtain picturesque dinners at a grotesque price. He swung out of his office, with his long-legged, easy stride, and nearly ran me down, as I was plodding up-town through the languor of a late spring afternoon, on one of those duty-walks which conscience offers as a sacrifice ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... instinctively her brain noted every detail of the view outspread before her. The golden stillness of morning rested on hill and valley like a benediction. Green cornfields, white watercourses, granite promontories, and black patches of forest—all were bathed in warmth and light without languor. The breath of the snows was still ice-cool, and exhilarating as wine; its freshness penetrated and enhanced by the faint sweet scent of Banksia roses, that clothed the rickety woodwork in a fairy garment of green and ivory-white. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Gerald's languor had vanished, and a glint had appeared in his eye that would have reminded Orde of Miss Bishop's most mischievous mood could he ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... only changed its character to something far more touching and impressive than health itself with all its blooming hues could have bestowed. Her features were certainly thinner, but there was visible in them a serene but mournful spirit—a voluptuous languor, heightened and spiritualized by purity and intellect into an expression that realized our notions rather of angelic beauty than of the loveliness of mere woman. To all this, sorrow had added a dignity so full of melancholy ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... about ten o'clock, and which had increased in force with the increasing power of the sun, would flag and finally die away. The heat and electric tension of the atmosphere would then become almost insupportable. Languor and uneasiness would seize on every one, even the denizens of the forest, betraying it by their motions. White clouds would appear in the cast and gather into cumuli, with an increasing blackness along their lower portions. The whole eastern horizon would become almost suddenly ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... the languor of illness and the gloomy day. The post had brought her a letter from Ovid—enclosing a photograph, taken at Montreal, which presented him in his ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... leaders to death, and reigns the feudatory of the Emperor. The interest of the play is almost entirely political, and patriotism is the chief passion involved. The main personal attraction of the tragedy is in the love of Galeazzo and his wife, and in the character of the latter the dreamy languor of a ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... sudden, shy flame. Love is a blush which mounts to the cheek, and then leaves it pale. Love is the trembling pressure of hands which, for a delicious moment, meet by stealth. Love is sometimes the deep drawn sigh, the languor that steeps the senses, the sudden trembling to which no name can be given. Minnie was in love. The hero of her childhood was the hero of her womanhood. She loved Donald modestly but passionately; but she constantly said to ...
— The Hunted Outlaw - Donald Morrison, The Canadian Rob Roy • Anonymous
... fall over his knees again. As the day was only the second of the industrial week, the apron was almost clean; and even the office towel, which hung on a roller somewhat conspicuously near the door, was not offensive. A single gas jet burned. The workshop was in the languor of repose after toil which had officially commenced ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... wonder he eyed the man with a spiteful hatred, as he waited for him, leaning against the fence. With his subtle Gallic brain, his physical spasms of languor and energy, his keen instincts that uttered themselves to the last syllable always, heedless of all decencies of custom, no wonder that the man with every feminine, unable nerve in his body rebelled against this Palmer. It was as natural as for a delicate animal to rebel against and hate and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the heart of two lovers, the roses of pleasure multiply within them in a manner which causes them to be astonished that so much joy can be contained, without anything bursting. Bertha and Jehan would have wished in this night to have finished their days, and thought, from the excessive languor which flowed in their veins, that love had resolved to bear them away on his wings with the kiss of death; but they held out in spite of these ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... dirt that had soiled him when he fell. The Wairoa man was regarding him in blank astonishment. Clearly, Dandy Jack was an entirely new species of the genus homo to him. Thus spake the bull-fighter, with elaborate affectation of languor and softness— ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... dinner was announced, and that amidst a babel of tongues he was being led by, or was leading, Lady Durwent into the dining-room. He heard the resolutionist and Dunckley both talking at once, and felt the melancholy languor of Pyford floating like incense through the air. He had an obscure recollection of sitting down next to his hostess; that the table, like Arthur's, was a round one; that Johnston Smyth was seated beside Miss Durwent ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... come up to Praeneste, to recover herself after the exertions of a score of fashionable suppers, excursions on the Lucrine Lake, and the attendant exhausting amusements. When her brother-in-law entered the room, she raised her carefully tinted eyebrows, and observed with great languor:— ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... supreme lord's) name is Pranava (i.e., Om); its muttering (should be made) and reflection on its signification; thence comes the knowledge of the transcendental spirit and the absence of the obstacles (such as sickness, languor, doubt, &c., which obstruct the mind of an ascetic). But they indicate, at the same time, the further course which superstition took in enlarging upon the mysticism of the doctrine of the Upanishads. For, as soon as ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... will be understood, were the mere dreamy suppositions of Redclyffe, in the idleness and languor of the old mansion, letting his mind run at will, and following it into dim caves, whither it tended. He did not actually believe anything of all this; unless it be a lawyer, or a policeman, or some very vulgar natural order of mind, no man really suspects ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with a hot sulphur and cold ferruginous spring. The former has proved useful for its diuretic and laxative qualities, and efficacious in cases of languor following long illnesses: the latter is very rich in iron, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Some hurried from the dock, making for a lodging-house or for The Asiatics' Home. Some hurried into the dock, with that impassive swiftness which gives no impression of haste, but rather carries a touch of extreme languor. An old cargo tramp lay in a far berth, and one caught the sound of rushing blocks, and a monotonous voice wailing the Malayan chanty: "Love is kind to the least of men, EEEE-ah, EEEE-ah!" Boats were loading up. Others were unloading. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... fancy in the disguise of pity, the nerveless languor that passes for beauty—such is the dominant note of the song upon men's lips in the troublous times of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... New York about ten days when he awoke one morning near noon. An immense languor possessed him. He had been with Julia the night before and never had she been more charming, more abandoned.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} He ordered his breakfast to be sent up, and then stretched out in bed and lit an expensive Russian ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... long, long adventure bound—these were hidden things to the travellers left behind in this murky segment of life. But to the strained senses of the men upon whom, as yet, had hardly fallen the upas languor of accepted defeat, before whose eyes, whether shut or open, yet passed insistent visions of last night's events, like an echo, like a shade, old presences made themselves felt. Swinging lanterns dimly lit the cabin of the Mere Honour, and in ranks ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... over the ledge, a pine tassel in his hand, his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphant intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... enterprising, prompt in military exercises, and the uniform sat upon him with a manly grace. There was no braver officer—no more gallant cavalier. Though the expression of his countenance was gentle, rather than energetic and imperious—though there was an habitual languor in his looks, often dashed with thought, no doubt the soldiers would love him for his frank bearing, his honest and hearty speech, his small figure, resembling his uncle's, and the imperial lightning which the passion of the moment kindled ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... Fifth Muse," as Fred. Verne had dubbed her, now entered from the conservatory, and throwing aside a scarlet wrap, also joined in the conversation. She was a slight creature, with some pretension to good looks; but there was a sort of languor in her manner that disappointed one ere she had uttered half a dozen sentences. In order to sustain the character her name suggested, she was continually soaring into immensity of space and deducing celestial problems for the ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... light upon the vapour of this liquid is, at first, more languid than upon iodide of allyl; indeed many beautiful reactions may be overlooked, in consequence of this languor at the commencement. After some minutes' exposure, however, clouds begin to form, which grow in density and in beauty as the light continues to act. In every experiments hitherto made with this substance the column of cloud filling the experimental tube, was divided into two ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... stretched out in front of him, and his gaze directed upward to the ceiling. Then he took down from the rack the old and oily clay pipe, which was to him as a counselor, and, having lighted it, he leaned back in his chair, with thick blue cloud wreaths spinning up from him, and a look of infinite languor in his face. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... could be wished for a number of days after steaming out of the Golden Gate. It was in the month of September, when a mild, dreamy languor seemed to rest upon everything, and the passage across the Pacific was like one long-continued dream of the Orient—excepting, perhaps, when the cyclone or hurricane, roused from its sleep, swept over the deep with a fury such as strews the shores with wrecks and ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... a Massachusetts Sergeant, worn out with heavy marches, wounds and camp disease, died in —— General Hospital, in November, 1863, in 'perfect peace.' Some who witnessed daily his wonderful sweet patience and content, through great languor and weariness, fancied sometimes they 'could already see the brilliant particles of a halo in the air ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... like a forced effect, and Truda, remarking it, frowned, for of late she found herself impatient of forced effects. She was a pale, slender, brown-haired woman, with a small clear, pliant face, and some manner of languor in all her attitudes that lent them a slow grace of their own and did not at all impair the startling energy she could command for her work. While she looked out at the city there came a tap at the door ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... was almost cloudless again when Natalya came into the garden. It was full of sweetness and peace—that soothing, blissful peace in which the heart of man is stirred by a sweet languor of undefined desire ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... this passion with his brush and created it afresh in his pictures. No one else has so marvellously rendered the infinite shades, the freshness, the transparency, the softness, the grace, the modesty, the languor, the thousand hidden beauties, all the appearances of the noble and delicate life of the pearl of vegetation, of the darling of nature, the flower. The Hollanders brought to him all the miracles of their gardens that he might copy them; kings asked him for flowers; his pictures were sold ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... voluptuous [14] thought, The beauteous forms of nature wrought, Fair trees and gorgeous [15] flowers; 135 The breezes their own languor lent; The stars had feelings, which they sent ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... momentary alliance with Armenia.) But all the elements of disorder had in that quarter re-combined themselves into severe unity: and thus was Rome, upon her eastern frontier, laid open to a new power of juvenile activity and vigor, just at the period when the languor of the decaying Parthian had allowed the Roman discipline to fall into a corresponding declension. Such was the condition of Rome upon her oriental frontier. [Footnote: And it is a striking illustration of the extent to which the revolution ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... was over. A cloud appeared in the hitherto serene heaven of the royal lovers. Proserpine became unwell. A mysterious languor pervaded her frame; her accustomed hilarity deserted her. She gave up her daily rides; she never quitted the palace, scarcely her chamber. All day long she remained lying on a sofa, and whenever Pluto endeavoured to console her ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... is illustrated by the laborious agriculturist, who, in consequence of too severe toil while gathering the products of the field, frequently diminishes his weight several pounds in a few weeks. Exercise, either for pleasure or profit, may fatigue, yet it should never be protracted to languor or exhaustion, if the individual ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... excitement brought back a vivid colour to her cheeks, and rekindled the lustre of her large dark eyes. The painter had seized that moment to depict her glowing form—the enthusiasm was but momentary—her angel face soon lost its lovely tint, and her beautiful eyes sunk again into languor. The castle was thronged with noble guests—sick at heart the wretched Isabel wandered abstractedly amid the gay assembly—her large floating eyes seemed straying vacantly around, until they met the bridegroom's look of joy. Then came the madness of recollection; with a convulsive shuddering she ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... drolly said, indeed, though with his usual languor, and no other intervention would have stopped the exit. She graciously consented to return to her seat, and Colonel Manners immediately and absurdly fell on his knees before her, offering to kiss her shoe like the Pope's, if she would but ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... unbounded regions of imagination. Some charitable dole is wanting to these, our often very unhappy brethren, to fill the gloomy void that reigns in minds which have nothing on earth to hope or fear; something to relieve in the killing languor and over-labored lassitude of those who have nothing to do; something to excite an appetite to existence in the palled satiety which attends on all pleasures which may be bought, where Nature is not left to her own process, where even desire is anticipated, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... peacetime year, was here at hand, an ever-ministering angel to them and to their hero; yet they never included him and Flora in one thought together but to banish it, though with tender reverence. Behind a labored disguise of inattention they jealously watched lest the faintest blight or languor should mar, in him, the perfect bloom of that invincible faith to, and faith in, the faithless Anna, which alone could satisfy their worship of him. Care for these watchers brought the two much together, and in every private moment they talked ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... limbs, and in the whole body, by contraction of the throat, by twitchings in the hypochondriac and epigastric regions, by dimness and rolling of the eyes, by piercing cries, tears, hiccough, and immoderate laughter. They are preceded or followed by a state of languor or dreaminess, by a species of depression, and even ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness. Mingled with this horror, I felt the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... a period of great political languor. The burden of the war was severely felt. The blaze of freedom, it was said, that burst forth at the beginning had gone down, and numbers, in the thirst for riches, lost sight of the original object. (Independent ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... stormy days at each clap of thunder. She could not believe it possible; the walls would fall in and crush them all. Then, when she saw the two sitting together peacefully, she suddenly accepted it as quite natural. A happy feeling of languor benumbed her, retained her all in a heap at the edge of the table, with the sole desire of not being bothered. Mon Dieu! what is the use of putting oneself out when others do not, and when things arrange themselves to the satisfaction ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... quit, this lone isle lends me no roof-tree, Nor aught issue allows begirt by billows of Ocean: 185 Nowhere is path for flight: none hope shows: all things are silent: All be a desolate waste: all makes display of destruction. Yet never close these eyne in latest languor of dying, Ne'er from my wearied frame go forth slow-ebbing my senses, Ere from the Gods just doom implore I, treason-betrayed, 190 And with my breath supreme firm faith of Celestials invoke I. Therefore, O ye who 'venge man's deed with penalties direful, Eumenides! aye wont to bind with viperous ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... warm and fine weather. The pleasant sunshine warmed the grass; the water shone like a mirror; and Simon enjoyed for some minutes the happiness of that languor which follows weeping, desirous even of falling asleep there upon the grass in the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... has lost a quantity of blood, which loss has decreased the heart's action sufficiently to produce the languor under which she now ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... of languor. The bushes stood up straight. The leaves hung motionless. The forest, which was always to Henry a live thing, seemed no longer to breathe. A leaf could have been heard had it fallen. Then out of that deadly stillness came a sudden note, a strange, wild song that ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Sleep, but refused to him. None the less are they his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically and punctually to that claim. Awake and at work, without drowsiness, without languor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his day mind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest in dreams, but are night's as well as sleep's. The powers of the mind in dreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake; it is the hour ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... bent over him,—a face so ghastly, with haunting doubts, and a hopeless presentiment of coming evil,—a face so piteous in its infinite weariness and envy of death, that the dying man was touched, even in the languor of dissolution, with a pang of compassion; and the cynical smile ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... on a side, loaded with all sorts of devilish stuff, and wore her round, and, keeping as close into the bamboo village as he could, gave them both broadsides, slam-bang into the midst of the houses and people, and stood out to sea! As his excitement passed off, headache, languor, fever, set in,— the deadly coast-fever, contracted from the water and night-dews on shore and his maddened temper. He ordered the ship to Penang, and never saw the deck again. He died on the passage, and was buried at sea. Mr. Channing, who took care of him in his sickness and delirium, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... said that in the dull languor of our summer collapse we felt none of your fierce Northern excitements, I should have excepted the Anthony suffrage case. That touched nearly if not deeply. The ark of the holy political covenant resting here—the sacred mules that draw it being stabled in the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... perfect sweet Suppleness and languor meet,— Arms that move like lapsing billows, Breasts that Love would make his pillows, Eyes where vision melts in bliss, Lips ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... . . . even if it could not last for ever. . . . But while it lasted! After all, imagination had its uses. It helped to prolong as well as create. . . . She sank back and closed her eyes, succumbing to an ineffable languor. ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... bestowed by the court on the dramas of these two poets, was one obstacle to the formation of a national drama. Another was, the pertinacious attachment of the Portuguese to pastoral poetry, and nothing could be more contrary to dramatic life than the languor, sentimentality, and monotony ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... what zeal will do for me. It has enabled me to keep drowsiness, fatigue, and languor at bay during a long night. Converse with thee, heavenly maid, is an antidote even to sleep, the most general and inveterate ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... her first languor and weariness were over, and she was beginning again to feel and look like herself. The weather was hot and the city disagreeable now, for it was the end of June; but they had pleasant rooms upon the Battery, and Fleda's windows looked out upon the ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... work which gives flavor to life. Mere existence without object and without effort is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor, and ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... smooth and eventless an existence Captain Winstanley's presence came like a gust of north wind across the sultry languor of an August noontide. His energy, his prompt, resolute manner of thinking and acting upon all occasions, impressed Mrs. Tempest with an extraordinary sense of his strength of mind and manliness. It seemed to her that ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... to encourage, with quite a contrary effect; but the other two, both married, were both more handsome than the average of women. And Clarisse? What shall I say of Clarisse? She waited the table with a heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow; her great grey eyes were steeped in amorous languor; her features, although fleshy, were of an original and accurate design; her mouth had a curl; her nostril spoke of dainty pride; her cheek fell into strange and interesting lines. It was a face capable of strong emotion, and, with training, it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... effect this vapouring might have had in hot scented rooms, or in the languor of some rich garden; but up on that cold hill-top it was as unsubstantial as the mist around us. It sounded not even impressive, ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... hand, and where the sunlight only found an entrance through an aperture in the roof, which admitted the rain as well, I came back to life again, the pain in my head all gone, and nothing left save a delicious feeling of languor, which prompted me to lie quietly for several minutes, examining my surroundings, and speculating upon the chance which brought me there. That I was a prisoner I did not doubt, until the man at my side said to me, cheerily: ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... dreamy eyes Where our reflection lies Steeped in the sea, And, in an endless fit Of languor, smile on it And its sweet mimicry. Where ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... called it in conversation) a torso, being only the first drama in a trilogy or series of three dramas, each having a separate plot, whilst all are parts of a more general and comprehensive plan. It may be charged with languor in the movement of the action, and with excess of illustration. Thus, e. g. the grief of the prince for the supposed death of his daughter, is the monotonous topic which occupies one entire act. But the situations, though not those of ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the fair young countenance had given place to a dreamy languor, and the dark lashes drooped heavily, when a long shadow fell upon the grass, and simultaneously the peacock sounded its shrill alarm. Rising quickly the girl found herself face to face with one upon whose ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... felt myself borne up and up in that effortless ascension, my senses awake and my reason still half-dormant, an exquisite sense of languor pervaded my whole being. Presently meseemed that the surface was gained at last, and an instinct impelled me to open my eyes upon the light, of which, through closed lids, ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... and promised seven hundred years of plenty to her best-beloved daughter. Then came the most formidable of all, the Child, weeping at her knees, and saying, 'Wilt thou leave me, feeble and suffering as I am? oh, my mother, stay!' and he played with her, and shed languor on the air, and the Heavens themselves had pity for his wail. The Virgin of pure song brought forth her choirs to relax the soul. The Kings of the East came with their slaves, their armies, and their women; the Wounded asked her for succor, the Sorrowful stretched forth their hands: ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... at these rich natures very often in a way one would hardly at first think of. It loves vitality above all things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept under by the laws of good-breeding,—but still it loves abundant life, opulent and showy organizations,—the spherical rather than the plane trigonometry of female architecture,—plenty of red blood, flashing eyes, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor bore the mark of his mind. The best jestbook in the world is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... everything, unless it were the correspondence with Fontenoy. As to the notion that all the languor could be due merely to an unsatisfied craving for Letty Sewell's society, when it presented itself he still fought with it. The Indian climate might have somehow affected him. An English winter is soon forgotten, and has to be re-learnt ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lawn the roses bowed and tossed wild arms. A silvery gleam of sunlight fell on the turf, glistened, and was gone. Mrs. Weston sat with her hands in her lap and her needle at rest in a half-worked piece of linen. A veil of languor had fallen upon the wistfulness of her face. Her bosom hardly stirred. The sound of the opening door broke her dream, and she picked up her work and began to sew eagerly. It was Susan Burford who came in, royally neat in her riding-habit, for all the storm. She walked in her leisurely, ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... was ill, it was with the certainty that her languor would be admired: if she boasted she was well, it was that the spectator might admire her glowing health: if she laughed, it was because she thought it made her look pretty: if she cried, it was because she thought it made her look prettier still. If she scolded her servants, it was ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... shoulder held considerably lower than the other, to the point that Joe would have thought it the result of a wound hadn't the other obviously never been a soldier. The newcomer, office pallor heavily upon him, but his air of languor obviously assumed and artificial, darted his eyes around the room, to Holland, Nadine, and then to Joe where they rested for ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... attracted to her by this air of freedom and joyousness which distinguished Totty. It was a character wholly unlike her own, and her imaginative thought discerned in it something of an ideal; her own timidity and her tendency to languor found a refreshing antidote in the other's breezy carelessness. Impurity of mind would have repelled her, and there was no trace of it in Totty. Yet Lydia took very ill this recently-grown companionship, holding her friend Mary Bower's view of the girl's character. Her prejudice was enhanced ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... spent the nights stretched upon his side with his wide-open eyes boring into vacancy and a drab future, that he heard the wind whine over the ridgepole of the squat bunk-house and knew that it had risen from a dead calm since bedtime. The languor of nervous exhaustion was pulling his eyelids down over his tired eyes, and he knew that it must be nearly morning; for sleep never came to him now until after Applehead's brown rooster had crowed for ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... high-ceiled, white-walled room with French windows opening on a terrace where olea fragans blossoms expanded round the base of a statue by Canova. At last a feeling of incompleteness penetrated her languor. She rose to pace the mosaic floor on which appeared a ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... refined and leisurely means: one is not shocked by the unseemly sights of a battlefield, and the wielder of the weapon has time to watch its effects as they develop: he can see the victim going through the successive stages of misery—debility, languor, exhaustion—until the final point is reached; and as his scientific curiosity is gratified by the gradual manifestation of the various symptoms, so his moral sense is fortified by the struggle between a proud ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... appeared to her, as she walked home that afternoon, to be the last touch needed to push her into a state of utter despondency. The oppressive languor of the day had exhausted her strength, and when she left Dinard's she felt too indifferent, too spiritless even for the drive in the Park. It was still light when she got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street, and while ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... too would shortly be nothing but a solid block of ice, like my companions. My legs, my arms were already congealed. Horror-stricken as I was at the approach of such a hopeless, ghastly death, my sensations were accompanied by a languor and lassitude indescribable but far from unpleasant. To some extent thought or wonderment was still alive. Should I dwindle painlessly away, preferring rest and peace to effort, or should I make a last struggle to save myself? The ice seemed ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... danger. We had not sailed more than one hundred miles on the Atlantic before it blew a strong head wind, and several on board with myself were greatly affected by the motion of the ship. It threw me into such a state of languor, that I felt as though I could have willingly yielded to have been cast overboard, and it was nearly a week before I was relieved from this painful sensation and nausea, peculiar to ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... All this languor of atmosphere and light, in which things seemed to lose their substance and reality, oppressed the young man with an infinite weariness, an inexpressible sense of discontent, of discomfort, of solitude, emptiness and home-sickness, mostly, no doubt, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... received that letter. Then fever had come, and with it, delirium. Which was merciful. For weeks she lay closer to death than to life.... Now she was better; and yet far from well. Violet eyes were sad—dull. Brown-gold flesh was pallid. She moved with languor. ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... it is not in our faith to believe that foreign courts can bear the rare fruit of ideal truth and beauty.—Then there was Blumenthal, the composer, who talked Buckle in admirable English, and played his own Reveries most daintily,—Reveries that are all languor, sighs, and tears, whose fitting home is the boudoirs of French marquises. Blumenthal is a Thalberg in small.—We have pleasant recollections of certain clever Oxonians, "Double-Firsts," potential in the classics and mathematics. A "Double-First" is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... in Italy, Leghorn with its growing trade, its bales of merchandise, its atmosphere filled with the breath of the salt sea mixed with the smell of pitch and tar, seemed mean and vulgar after the refinement and world-old beauty of Florence. He acknowledged that the languor and repose of towns which glory simply in their collections and recollections, were far more suited to his feelings than the activity and tumult of towns whose glory lies in their commercial enterprises. This preference is not uncommon among cultivated ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... companion to take his arm. She did so, readily; for she needed it, not so much because the long gnarled roots of the trees crossed the path from time to time, and offered slight impediments, for usually her foot was light as air, but because she felt an unaccountable languor upon her, a tremulous, agitated sort of unknown happiness unlike any thing else she ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... time. You may be sure the militia of New Jersey and this State were called upon to turn out, and defend their country in this hour of distress. Alas, our internal enemies had, by various arts and means, frightened many, disaffected others, and caused a general languor to prevail over the minds of almost all men, not before actually engaged in the war. Many are also exceedingly disaffected with the constitutions formed for their respective States, so that from one cause ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... ride," said the doctor, as he crowded in beside his fashionable lady companion, and took up the loose reins. He noticed that she sat up erectly, and with scarcely a sign of the languor that but a few minutes before had so oppressed her. "Lean back when you see Mrs. McFlimsey's carriage, and draw your veil closely. She'll never dream that ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... physician and scientist, asserts that the misery of the women of the poorer classes of the population in England is more than doubled by the use of tea, which only soothes or stimulates to intensify the after-coming depression and languor. ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... the course of 1658 Pascal’s old illness returned with redoubled severity, and the last four years of his life became in consequence years of great languor and interruption of his projected work. The practice of continuous composition failed him. Hitherto he had been wont to develop his thoughts completely,—to write them out, as it were, mentally before committing them to paper; but now he began the ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... one of those children who could not weep; who learn that only with manhood. At such a time when I should have wept, I only felt as if some worm were gnawing into my heart, as if some languor had seized me, which deprived me of all feeling expressed by the five senses—my brother wept for me. Finally, he kissed me and begged me to recover myself. But I was not beside myself. I saw and heard everything. I was like a log of wood, ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... slowly awoke, and under the influence of the delightful vision, raised her eyes in the dewy light of voluptuous languor to the blue sky above her, the sunbeams that were heralding in another day cruelly dispelled the enchanting illusions of a warm and excited fancy, and Nisida found herself alone on the sea-shore ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... of the Admiralty, people calling on him as late as even 10 or 11, P.M., were told that his lordship was riding in the park. On this account, partly, but more pointedly with a malicious reference to the contrast between his languor and the fiery activity of his father, the first earl, he was jocularly ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... quiet, began to feel abominably dull. It was, as thou say'st, as if the Quakers had put the sun in their pockets—all around was soft and mild, and even pleasant; but there was, in the whole routine, a uniformity, a want of interest, a helpless and hopeless languor, which rendered life insipid. No doubt, my worthy host and hostess felt none of this void, this want of excitation, which was becoming oppressive to their guest. They had their little round of occupations, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... was so mild that it filled them with its soft languor. Side by side they trod the deserted paths of the Bois de Boulogne. The buds, which were beginning to swell on the tips of the slender black branches, dyed the tree-tops violet under the rosy sky. To their left stretched the fields, dotted with clumps of leafless trees, and the houses of Auteuil ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... Occasionally it reaches 125 deg., and is then fearfully oppressive. Fierce gusts laden with sand sweep over the plain, causing vegetation to droop or disappear, and the animal world to hide itself. Man with difficulty retains life at these trying times, feeling a languor and a depression of spirits which are barely supportable.10 All who can do so quit the plains and betake themselves to the upland region till the great heats are past, and the advance of autumn brings at any rate ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... hung just above the luminous lawn. The garden was not the one that she knew, but another garden, sombre, mysterious, that, suddenly approaching, closed round her. Her brain reeled. She drew back, and with strange languor, freed herself ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... been able to render to the rare combination of powers exhibited in the works we have enumerated. We have left unnoticed the wonderful extent and accuracy of the learning, the compass and profundity of the thought, the inexhaustible spirit, ever preserving the happy mean between mental languor and nervous excitement. In these twenty-seven volumes of criticism, scarcely an error has been detected, scarcely a single repetition is met with; there is scarcely a page which a reader, unpressed for time, would be inclined to skip. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Moreover, he knew that to this mysterious stranger—the hermit of the cliff, as the fishermen called him—he was indebted for his life, and such a man must necessarily be his friend. Robert was, besides, in that condition of physical languor when, if he had felt disposed, he would have found it very difficult to make resistance to the ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... stress of apprehension. Apparently there was no hope. The old New England spite and prejudice against General Schuyler had stirred up now a fierce chorus of calumny and attack. He was blamed for St. Clair's pusillanimous retreat, for Congressional languor, for the failure of the militia to come forward—for everything, in fact. His hands were tied by suspicion, by treason, by popular lethargy, by lack of money, men, and means. Against these odds he strove like a giant, but I think not even he, with ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... she felt a touch of languor. Fort Enterprise was a little dull in early summer. The fur season was over, and the flour mill was closed; the Indians had gone to their summer camps; and the steamboat had lately departed on her ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands and arms that hung there, slender, inert and frail. He admired these things so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only beauty but a certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which appealed to him ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... nap, his amends for the vigils of the previous night. Grace was enchanting in her light clinging draperies, which made her lovely form tenfold more beautiful, because clothed in perfect taste. The heat had deepened the flush upon her cheeks, and brought a soft languor into her eyes, and as she stood under an arch of the American woodbine, that mantled the supports of the piazza roof, she might easily have fulfilled an artist's dream of summer. Hilland's eyes ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... as in former periods, to invert the common order of things: by day he read, refreshed himself with the aspect of nature, conversed or corresponded with his friends; but he wrote and studied in the night. And as his bodily feelings were too often those of languor and exhaustion, he adopted, in impatience of such mean impediments, the pernicious expedient of stimulants, which yield a momentary strength, only to waste our remaining fund of it more speedily ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... homage paid to Princess Zairoff, for she possessed that rare and delicate mixture of indifference, languor, and disdain that is in itself a distinction, and makes ordinary womanhood and beauty suddenly feel coarse ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... speaking Katherine straightened herself up, and moved a little from him though still holding his hand. Her languor passed, and her eyes grew large ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... grinding, jarring, lurching, grating, shrieking—an infernal public chariot. Sommers wondered what influence years of using this hideous machine would have upon the nerves of the people. This car-load seemed quiescent and dull enough—with the languor of unexpectant animals, who were accustomed to being hauled mile by mile through the dirty avenues of life. His attention was caught by the ever repeated phenomena of the squalid street. Block after block, mile after mile, it ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... it in Titian's pictures, it will denote calm contemplation or piercing sagacity, without anything of meanness or fear of being observed. In other cases it may imply merely indolent, enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely's portraits of women. The languor and weakness of the eyelids give the amorous turn to the expression. How should there be a rule for all this beforehand, seeing it depends on circumstances ever varying, and scarce discernible but by their effect on the mind? Rules are applicable to abstractions, but expression is ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... by so many nations? What being had greater claim to the homage of men, than the day-star, who enlightens, warms, and vivifies all beings; whose presence enlivens and regenerates nature, whose absence seems to cast her into gloom and languor? If any being announced to mankind, power, activity, beneficence, and duration, it was certainly the Sun, whom they ought to have regarded as the parent of nature, as the divinity. At least, they could not, without folly, dispute his existence, or ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... he been asked beforehand he would have said that nothing could awake him before morning. Nevertheless he awoke before midnight, and it was a very slight thing that caused him to come out of sleep. Despite the languor produced by food and heat a certain nervous apprehension had been at work in the boy's mind, and it followed him into the unknown regions of sleep. His body was dead for a time and his mind too, but this nervous power worked on, almost independently of him. It had noted the sound ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... former he counted foul smells, disgusting habitations, bad workshops and workshop-customs, scarcity of light, air, and water, in short the absence of all easy means of decency and health; and among the latter, the mental weariness and languor so induced, the desire of wholesome relaxation, the craving for some stimulus and excitement, not less needful than the sun itself to lives so passed, and last, and inclusive of all the rest, ignorance, and the want of rational mental training, generally applied. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... little from pain and anxiety; but this did not deter her from going out with the first daylight in the morning to rake among the snow near the door, although her throat was sore beyond concealment, her jaws stiff, and the pleasant languor and quick-wittedness had ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... faint outlines of purple hills breaking the vacant curve of the horizon. A delicious fragrance from tropic flowers fills the air—the perfumes of the jessamine, the magnolia, the cereus. A sweet, delicious languor creeps over me. I feel a vague sense of rest and happiness, which, to my onlooking self, seems almost unaccountable; for, there am I, still all alone on the ocean, swept onward towards the purple hills in the distance, over the ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and it is reasonable to suppose that, notwithstanding all his fortitude, the spirits of the youth were depressed, and his faculties chilled by such humiliating neglect, and such reiterated disappointments. Who is he that would not, under such circumstances, sink into languor? It cannot be doubted that dejection every day detracted from his powers, and that by a kind of irresistible gravitation, he descended like a falling body in the physical world, with accelerated velocity, till at last he reached the very bottom of the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... dull smoke rises out of pot or pan; but dark-browed and silent, their limbs slack, like the ropes above them, entangled as they are in those inextricable meshes about the patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed sable sail. What a majestic sense of service in all that languor! the rest of human limbs and hearts, at utter need, not in sweet meadows or soft air, but in harbour slime and biting fog; so drawing their breath once more, to go out again, without lament, from between the two skeletons ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... sentiments corresponding to God's designs over her. She should nourish her soul with the vivifying substance of the words it contains, and look therein for light to dispel her doubts, and for consolation in her troubles. In them she will also find a cheering hope in her languor, a powerful prayer in temptation, an acceptable act of thanksgiving, and a hymn of joy and triumph ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... afternoon, cool and sunny. The delicious haze of Indian summer wrapped every distant object in its soft, purple veil; the dim vistas of the forest ended in misty depths; the very air, in its dreamy languor, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... pride, As her sweet infants wanton'd by her side, 'Twas my sad fate to see for ever close On life, on love, the world, and all its woes; To watch the slow disease, with hopeless care, And veil in painful smiles my heart's despair; To see her droop, with restless languor weak, While fatal beauty mantled in her cheek, Like fresh flow'rs springing from some mouldering clay, Cherish'd by death, and blooming from decay. Yet, tho' oppress'd by ever-varying pain, The gentle sufferer scarcely would ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Polly's expressions of extasy: his joys were more silent: but soon broken murmurs, sighs heart-fetched, and at length a dispatching thrust, as if he would have forced himself up her body, and then the motionless languor of all his limbs, all shewed that the die-away moment was come upon him; which she gave signs of joining with by, the wild throwing of her hands about, closing her eyes, and giving a deep sob, in which she seemed to expire in ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... before the general reader our two early poetic masterpieces — The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queen; to do so in a way that will render their "popular perusal" easy in a time of little leisure and unbounded temptations to intellectual languor; and, on the same conditions, to present a liberal and fairly representative selection from the less important and familiar poems of Chaucer and Spenser. There is, it may be said at the outset, peculiar ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... some who even pride themselves on this, that 'I, forsooth, am a learned man. I lie idle, and they are fools to give themselves trouble.' Yes! even such persons as these do exist among us; not that I say this with reference to you; such persons as will spend all their life in a certain languor of ennui, and get accustomed to it, and exist in it like—like a mushroom in sour cream" (Mikhalevich could not help laughing at his own comparison). "Oh, that languor of ennui! it is the ruin of the Russian ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... The languor was gone. She shivered and sat erect, he watching her in an agony of apprehension. She looked slowly ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... with the others, to viands artfully iced, to the slow circulation of precious tinkling jugs, to marked reserves of reference in many directions—poor Fanny Assingham herself scarce thrusting her nose out of the padded hollow into which she had withdrawn. A consensus of languor, which might almost have been taken for a community of dread, ruled the scene—relieved only by the fitful experiments of Father Mitchell, good holy, hungry man, a trusted and overworked London friend and adviser, who had taken, for a week ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... recommended you not to take up the volume unless you had leisure to finish it at a sitting. It had given one writer more pleasure than he had had for many a long day—a sentence which had a melancholy resonance, suggesting a life of studious languor such as all previous achievements of the human mind failed to stimulate into enjoyment. I think the collection of critical opinions wound up with this sentence, and I had turned back to look at the ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... countrywoman that the folk had gone. "And a guid riddance," said the woman. "The Blairs was aye a cauld and oppressive race, and they were black Prelatists forbye. But I whiles miss yon hellicat lassie. She had a cheery word for a'body, and she keepit the place frae languor." ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... he was speaking, but at this point Rachel plunged into the conversation with the sister, Vera, which required an effort, since the elder Miss Venables was a young lady who had cultivated languor as a sign of breeding and sophistication. Rachel, however, made the effort with such a will that the talk ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... said the Chinese are addicted. The preparation of the liquor of life is their philosopher's stone; and, in all probability, is composed of opium and other drugs which, by encreasing the stimulus, gives a momentary exhilaration to the spirits; and the succeeding languor requiring another and another draught till at length, the excitability being entirely exhausted, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... your account of 'warm days.' It is warmer with us to-day, but we have had snow on all the mountains, and poor Isa has been half-frozen at her villa. As for me, I have suffered wonderfully little—no more than discomfort and languor. We have piled up the wood in this room and the next, and had a perpetual blaze. Not for ten years has there been in Florence such a November! 'Is this Italy?' says poor Fanny Haworth's wondering face. Still, she likes Florence ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... A deadly languor came over him, which was not the forerunner of sleep; it crept into the limbs and closed the heavy eyelids. He fought it off bravely, but it would return again and again as the icy air grew colder. He knew what it meant and ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... Cunningham manuscript):"..."many were the wrecks of most interesting plants, and especially those of soft herbaceous duration, which had some time since fallen a sacrifice to the apparent long-protracted drought of the season; but it was impossible, amidst the sad languor of vegetation, not to admire the luxuriant and healthy habit of an undescribed species of pittosporum (oleifolium, Cunningham manuscript) which formed a small robust tree, ten feet high, laden with ripe fruit. We could perceive no traces either of remains of fires, or ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... just where we are until morning," said Grandma Padgett. "The night's pleasant and warm, and there are just as few mosquitoes here as in the tavern. I didn't sleep last night." She felt stimulated by the tea, and sufficiently recovered from the languor which follows extreme anxiety, to linger up watching the fire, allowing the children to linger also, while J. D. Matthews put his cupboard ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of the periodic eclipses undergone by Assyria after each outburst of her warlike spirit. The country was now forced to pay for the glories of Assurishishi and of Tiglath-pileser by falling into an inglorious state of languor and depression. And ere long newer races asserted themselves which had gradually come to displace the nations over which the dynasties of Thutmosis and Ramses had held sway as tributary to them. The Hebrews on the east, and the Philistines on the southwest, were about to undertake the conquest ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... ever beheld her but in dreams. Radiant in all its girlish beauty, the angelic face smiled down upon him with life-like fidelity. The rose that decked her dark floating locks, less vividly bright than the glowing cheeks and lips of happy youth; the large black eyes, "half languor and half fire," that had wept tears of unmitigated anguish over his forlorn infancy—rested upon his own, as if they were conscious of his presence. Anthony continued to gaze upon the portrait till the blinding tears hid ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... become very composed. She appeared annoyed at herself for her languor during the walk. Finding herself near the hotel, she recovered her energy as though in ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... down on thousands of people in the orchestra below, up at a vast golden dome lighted by glowing spheres hung with diamonds, forward at a towering proscenic arch above which slim, nude goddesses in bas-relief floated in a languor which obsessed her, set free the bare brown laughing nymph that hides in every stiff ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and stern face. In truth, even that impression was hazy, for the drink I had taken from the Swede's bottle a moment before proved to be surprisingly potent. No sooner did I set foot upon the deck than I commenced to feel a heavy languor overcoming my body ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... where we had left her; but her whole figure showed languor, and she more than leaned against the bedpost behind her. As I looked up from the tray and met her eyes, she shuddered and seemed to be endeavoring to understand who I was and what I was doing in her room. My premonitions in regard to her ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... a light, and, finding it hard to set fire to the tobacco, she began to stamp impatiently with her foot. Then a feeling of languor took possession of her; and she remained motionless on the divan, with a cushion under her arm and her body twisted a little on one side, one knee bent and the other leg ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... mind in a tumult, and permitted him to sleep but little. The next day he decided on admitting Bartle to his confidence, and reposing this solemn trust to his integrity. He was lying on his back in the meadow—for they had been ricking the hay from the lapcocks—when that delicious languor which arises from the three greatest provocatives to slumber, want of rest, fatigue, and heat, so utterly overcame him, that, forgetting his love, and all the anxiety arising from it, he fell into ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night, the strength is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a song-bird's heart that you bring back with you when you return ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said George Morris, when lunch was over, "which is it to be? The luxurious languor of the steamer chair or the energetic exercise of the ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... to behold what they might have enjoyed, instead of what they must suffer.' With this I was left alone. Whether the result of the terrible fright through which I had passed I know not, but now I became stupified. A dull languor took fall possession of my frame. My strength departed from me. My limbs longer refused to support my body. Overcome, I now sank down a helpless mass. Drowsiness now took control of me. Half awake, half asleep, I seemed to dream. Far above me and in the ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds |
