"Lifeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gone, and a vast expanse of grass ran back to the horizon! But it was a dingy, grayish-white, and not green, as it had been in England. The sky was low and gray, too, and the only thing that broke the dreary monotony of lifeless color was the formless, darker smear of a birch bluff that rose out of the empty levels. Her heart throbbed unpleasantly fast as the few remaining minutes slipped away. She started when a dingy mass ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... he could not help laughing to behold these mighty men punishing each other for an offense which he himself had committed. In an incredibly short space of time (almost as short, indeed, as it had taken them to grow up), all but one of the heroes of the dragon's teeth were stretched lifeless on the field. The last survivor, the bravest and strongest of the whole, had just force enough to wave his crimson sword over his head and give a shout of exultation, crying, "Victory! Victory! Immortal fame!" when he himself ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tender sorrow ran through Lina's apparently lifeless frame, as a broken lily is disturbed by the wind, but she had no strength even for a sob; she heard his footsteps as he went out, but they sounded afar off, and, when all was still, she fell into ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... follow. Ah, poor Agellius! you have not risen yet to the pitch of triumph; and other thoughts must be let to range through your breast, other emotions must spend themselves, before you are prepared simply to rejoice, exult, and glory in the lifeless form which lies before you. You are upon a brave work, but your heart is torn while you set hand to it, and you ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... be procured until the old man confessed his guilt. To force him to confession they lighted some sticks of sulphur which they had brought with them for the purpose, and placed them under the old man's nose. In a few moments he fell down suffocated and apparently lifeless. They were all greatly alarmed; and thinking that they had killed the man, they carried him out and threw him into a neighbouring pond, hoping to make it appear that he had fallen in accidentally. The pond, however, was not very deep, and the coolness ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... his last rest, they found upon his bosom a small, plain miniature case, opening with a spring. It was the miniature of a noble and beautiful female face; and on the reverse, under a crystal, a lock of dark hair. They laid them back on the lifeless breast,—dust to dust,—poor mournful relics of early dreams, which once made that ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... this harangue, in order to conceal my rising disgust, I sat down on the grass and began to play with the goat. Mercanson turned on me his dull and lifeless eye: ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... limbs, but experience does not tell me distinctly as yet in how long time the worn-out bulbs of an Oncidium or a Cattleya, for example, would perish by natural death. One may cut them off when apparently lifeless, even beginning to rot, and under proper conditions—it may be a twelvemonth after—a tiny green shoot will push from some "eye," withered and invisible, that has slept for years, and begin existence on its own account. Thus, I am not old enough as an orchidacean to judge ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... forms of things in the hall, even the main features of the pattern of the tiles. The small panes in the glazed front door, whose varied tints repeated those of the drawing-room window in daytime, now showed a uniform dull grey, lifeless. The cellar was formidable below, and the stairs curved upwards into the formidable. But he climbed them. The house seemed full of inexplicable noises. When he stopped to listen he could hear scores of different infinitesimal sounds. His spine thrilled, as if a hand delicate ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... was then more than ever painfully fossilized, and altogether lifeless and out of sympathy with the spirit of the age. It needed to be quickened, adapted and applied to modern exigencies. The undue intrusion of metaphysics into the domain of positive knowledge needed checking; the value of consensus communis as a criterion required to be insisted on, defended, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... his whole body went limp and lifeless as the big log overrode the last rock barrier and was caught in the placid, slowly revolving water of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... for instance, who was an Anglo-Saxon. In Russia, among the people I knew, at least, one either smiled or not. here I found a peculiar kind of smile that was not a smile. It would flash up into a lifeless flame and forthwith go out again, leaving the face cold and stiff. "They laugh with their teeth only," I would say to myself. But, of course, I saw "real smiles," too, on Americans, and I instinctively learned to discern the smile of mere politeness from the sort that came from one's ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... and Raffles raised the lifeless trunk, I suppose by the armpits, and led the way backward into the night, after switching off the lights within. But the first stage of our revolting journey was a very short one. We deposited our poor burden as charily as possible on the gravel, and I watched ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... thou, Cleotos? Welcome to Rome!' she said at length, throwing from her shoulder the purple cloak, and approaching him. As she spoke, she held out her hand. He took it in his own, in a lifeless and mechanical sort of way, and gazed into her face with a strange look of inquiring doubt, which momentarily settled into an expression of deeper apprehension. The blackness of despair began to enter into his soul. Now that she was divested of her borrowed richness, she looked more ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... topics, or general principles of Prudence or Morality, on which the stress of his argument depended: and yet, I know not how, though he is allowed to have been the greatest Orator of his time, the Orations he has left are more lifeless, and have a more antiquated air, than those of Laelius, or Scipio, or even of Cato himself: in short, the strength and substance of them has so far evaporated, that we have scarcely any thing of them remaining but the bare skeletons. ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... from one to the other of the lifeless forms which still showed the agony of their death-throes, the chief of the scouts came across the bodies of two boys, both of whom had been scalped and shockingly wounded, besides being mutilated, yet, strange to say, both of them were alive. As tenderly as the men could lift them, they were conveyed ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... clear up this doubt, the end proposed will remain to our gaze an abstract and lifeless ideal. This is, then, the point which requires instant explanation. For there is a serious difficulty in which the very employment of the word "immediate" might ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... raise my gun above my head—at the parry. Suddenly his expression yields—a look as if of astonishment succeeds to fixed determination—and at the same instant his countenance passes through an indescribable change as the blood spouts from his forehead and he falls lifeless at my feet, slain by a ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... ball was necessary, for suddenly the head went down and a lifeless body rose and fell on the shining waves. The bear was stone dead, and all danger was ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... song reached Janina, or the merry tones of a hand organ, then again, a warm breath of wind, saturated with the raw odor of the river, fanned her feverish face. All these sights and sounds beat against her as against a lifeless statue and rebounded again without ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... sentence arrived, the dog, notwithstanding the guards, penetrated into the hall, where he lay crouched between the legs of his master. Again, at the hour of execution, the faithful dog is there; the knife of the guillotine falls—he will not leave the lifeless and headless body. The first night, the next day, and the second night, his absence alarmed his new patron, who, guessing whither he had retired, sought him, and found him stretched upon his master's ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... when the west wind blows, was now set, as though for ever, in a death-like fixity. The delicate features were drawn and pinched, the nostrils contracted, the colourless lips straightened out of the lines of beauty into the mould of a lifeless mask. It was the face of a dead woman, but it was her face still, and the Wanderer knew it well; in the kingdom of his soul the whole resistless commonwealth of the emotions revolted together to dethrone death's regent—sorrow, while the thrice-tempered ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... to himself, yea, to his servant; and doth base homage to that which should be the worst drudge. A lifeless piece of earth is his master, yea his god, which he shrines in his coffer, and to which he sacrifices his heart. Every face of his coin is a new image, which he adores with the highest veneration; ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... bishops, but none so regal, so august as he. His garb of fringed buckskin and ermine was no more grotesque than the vestments worn by the white preachers in high places; he did not carry a book or a shining golden symbol, but from his splendid shoulders was suspended a pure white lifeless dog. ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... body in his strong arms he dragged it clear of the weed, and laid it upon its back. Then he stood up and gazed down from behind his mask upon the lifeless face that gazed sightlessly ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... their continued existence, since, except for the universal genius-hunger of youth, the classics of almost all languages would have perished long ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth has explored those vast and mostly lifeless seas, it has found that the diseased oyster which bears the pearls is the rarest object in nature. But having once formed the taste for it, youth will have no other flavor, and it is at this moment that its danger of hardening into premature age begins. The conceit of having recognized genius ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... cruel thing supervened. The sight of Caroline's lifeless form, instead of pity or remorse, roused all the innate furies that belonged to the execrable race of La Corriveau. The blood of generations of poisoners and assassins boiled and rioted in her veins. The spirits of Beatrice Spara ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... now a dreary waste, I lanely wander sair depress'd, For cold and lifeless is that breast Where throbb'd the heart of Mary, My ain dear Mary; She 's gane to seats o' blissfu' rest, And I ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sweet commerce and reverberation of love which constitutes possession, the origination must be in His heart. 'We love Him because He first loved us.' The mirrors are set all round the great hall, but their surfaces are cold and lifeless until the great candelabrum in the centre is lit, and then, from every polished sheet there flashes back an echoing, answering light, and they repeat and repeat, until you scarce can tell which is the original and which is the reflection. But quench the centre-light, and the daughter-radiances ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... coiled up from the censer and bathed in the broad, slanting patch of sunshine which cut across the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the church. And it seemed as though the soul of the dead woman were soaring into the sunlight together with the smoke. The coils of smoke like a child's curls eddied round and round, floating upwards to the window ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... their first trip out of Colorado. The four uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed, until they were one color with the sagebrush and sandhills. The gray-and-yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of station houses, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... and horses in one trip. The roads are in many places thickly strewn with bones of dead animals, dropped by the way, and these are picked clean by the vultures. No sooner does an animal lie down to die than, streaming out of the infinite space, which a moment before has been a lifeless world of blue ether, there come lines of vultures, and soon white bones ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... passionately love is a murderer, the murderer of his father! The hand that penned those tender lines has been stained with blood. Shuddering, she let the flowers fall from her grasp. She turned, and met the mild beautiful eyes of his mother. The lifeless picture seemed to reproach her for daring for a moment to entertain such unworthy suspicions of her child, and she murmured for the hundredth time, since she first heard the tale of horror, "No, no, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... built, fifty-foot boat, scarred with usage, a squat and powerful craft. Lakeward stretched a smooth, unrippled surface. Overhead patches of white cloud drifted lazily. Where the shadows from these lay, the lake spread gray and lifeless. Where the afternoon sun rested, it touched the water with gleams of gold and pale, delicate green. A white-winged yacht lay offshore, her sails in slack folds. A lump of an island lifted two miles beyond, all cliffs and little, wooded hills. And the mountains surrounding ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... said I. 'Hustle him out!' cried he; 'hustle him out! he didn't get his liquor here: I've no room for such company!' I then endeavored to put my companion upon his feet, but his legs bent under him, and his whole body seemed as limber and lifeless as a wet rag. 'You can't do any thing with him in that way,' continued the landlord; 'if you want to get him home to-night, you must take him on your back and carry him there yourself. He'll be bright enough in the morning.' ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... minutes after was heard on the floor below the sound of a grand piano which the Commissary had not been able to carry off, owing to the general's interposition. His voice was soon heard above the chords that he was playing. It was rather a lifeless baritone, but he managed to impart an impassioned tremolo to his romance. The listening old man was now really affected; he did not understand the words, but the tears came into his eyes. He thought of his family, of the sorrows and dangers about them and of the difficulties surrounding ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... country and among people to whom such outward peace is a physical necessity. His feeling for nature, especially for her minutest and seemingly most insignificant phenomena, is closely akin to religion; there is an infinite charm in his description of the mysterious life of apparently lifeless objects; he renders all the sensuous impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... open country, where "Stuart's vigilantes" were swooping on nest after nest of the thieves, riders came with stories that might well have sent shudders down the backs even of innocent men. The newspapers were filled with accounts of lifeless bodies left hanging from countless cottonwoods in the wake of the raiders, tales of battles in which the casualties were by no means all on one side, and snatches of humor that was terrible against the background of black tragedy. Some of the stories were false, some ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... lifted them into the boat. The blood streamed down over Juergen's face; he seemed dead, but he still clutched the girl so tightly that they were obliged to loosen her by force from his grasp. And Clara lay pale and lifeless in the boat, that now made ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... dead," answered John, solemnly. In the next instant he held Carlen's unconscious form in his arms; and when Farmer Weitbreck, half dazed, reached the foot of the stairs, the first sight which met his eyes was his daughter, held in her brother's arms, apparently lifeless, her head ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... minutes, when two more balls in quick succession were fired through the door, then followed a tremendous punching with a log, the door gave way, and with a fiendish yell an Indian was about to spring in, when the unerring rifle fired by the old lady stretched his lifeless body across the thresh-hold of the door. The remaining, or more properly the surviving Indian fired at random and ran, doing no injury. "Now" said the old heroine to her undaunted daughter "we must leave." Accordingly with ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... him, but he left the tampered food untasted. Then they drew lots to assassinate him as he slept, but the one whose tablet was marked with a poniard was found lifeless the next day, with his weapon still clutched in his stiffened fingers, and none knew how he died. That day the eyes of Yu Chan grew sterner set than ever, as he gazed searchingly into the face of each bonze as they passed in a long procession before ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... their heads, settled into a listless and languid walk. The glare was so trying that I closed my eyes and let Pizarro go as he would. Open them when I might, the outlook was always the same, the same yellow earth and blue sky, the same lifeless, interminable plain, the same solitary sombrero palms dotting ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... has sent him, and the marvellous maiden of Russia who has not her like in all the world for her beautiful feminine spirituality, the roots of which lie buried in noble aspirations and boundless self-denial. In fact, compared with these types, the virtuous of other races seem lifeless, as does an inanimate volume when compared with the living word. Yes, each time that there arises in Russia a movement of thought, it becomes clear that the movement sinks deep into the Slavonic nature where it would but have skimmed the surface of other nations.—But why am I talking like ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... After the decline of Alexandrian magnificence Greek art never recovered its ancient glory, but the flame was not suddenly extinguished. While in Greece proper the works of the second and third centuries B.C., are for the most part weak and lifeless, like the Stoa of Attalus (175 B.C.) and the Tower of the Winds (the Clepsydra of Andronicus Cyrrhestes, 100 B.C.) at Athens or the Portico of Philip in Delos, there were still a few worthy works ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... sleep; once for a moment he looked up with a lively air, and said, "Many things were growing plain and clear to him!" Again he closed his eyes; and his sleep deepened and deepened, till it changed into the sleep from which there is no awakening; and all that remained of Schiller was a lifeless form, soon to be mingled with ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... was Anna now that really took the interest in the house. Mrs. Lehntman, now the thing was done seemed very lifeless, without interest in the house, uneasy in her mind and restless in her ways, and more diffuse even than before in her attention. She was good and kind to all the people in her house, and let them do ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... me," she said then, and her voice was as lifeless as his had been. "I am beginning to see now. It all happened so suddenly that I could not think. But if you love me you must not go on. It is impossible. I would rather suffer my own fate than have you do that. When we reach the other ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... had some interest of her own to serve. She was too lifeless to be suspected of impulsive compassion. It was impossible to think that Heyst had bribed her. Whatever means he had, he had not the means to do that. Or could it be that she was moved by that disinterested passion for delivering a woman to a man which in respectable ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the men soon brought the Indians from the camp about the hut; and perceiving the apparently lifeless body stretched on the floor, they raised a yell that was reverberated by the surrounding hills. "Revenge! revenge!" shouted every savage present. We mustered too strong, however, to permit their threats being put into execution without great ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... staring out at the dawn. The train was rushing through a region of bare hillocks huddled against a lifeless sky. It looked like the first day of creation. The air of the car was close, and she pushed up her window to let in the keen wind. Then she looked at her watch: it was seven o'clock, and soon the people about her would be stirring. She slipped into her clothes, smoothed ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... "Laetus" in May at one shilling. Gordon Browne doing well. Do you object to the ending of "Laetus"—to Lady Jane having another son, etc.? Do the Farrants? My dear love to them. This bitter—sunless, lifeless weather must have tried ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... onslaught which had overwhelmed Duke Leopold's glorious horsemen at Morgarten, they fell upon the nobles in a bloody melee in which horses, men and valets perished in a hopeless confusion. Three Gruyere knights were left lifeless on the battlefield and eighty-four others, who thus paid the price of their temerity in thinking to stem the already formidable confederation of citizens and free people in Switzerland. Undeterred by this defeat and continually menaced by the incursions of the Bernois, Count ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... By the old it is permitted forever. I shall be told, that however dangerous this mixture of powers may be in theory, it is rendered harmless by the dependence of Congress on the State for the means of carrying them into practice; that however large the mass of powers may be, it is in fact a lifeless mass. Then, say I, in the first place, that the Confederation is chargeable with the still greater folly of declaring certain powers in the federal government to be absolutely necessary, and at the same time rendering them absolutely nugatory; ...
— The Federalist Papers
... and C. Macdonaldiae, the famous Night-blooming cereuses, have white flowers which remain open only one night. They are, however, though so transient, a marvelous sight. Prone to strange tasks indeed is the hand of Nature which has fashioned these grotesque, clumsy, lifeless looking plants to accumulate nourishment and moisture for months from the niggardly desert sands, and to mature for a few hours' existence only these marvelously fashioned flowers which collapse with ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... love for the lower forms of social life was his besetting sin; Nature was his healing power. Burns compares himself to an Aeolian harp, strung to every wind of heaven. His genius flows over all living and lifeless things with a sympathy that finds nothing mean or insignificant. An uprooted daisy becomes in his pages an enduring emblem of the fate of artless maid and simple bard. He disturbs a mouse's nest and finds in the "tim'rous beastie" a fellow-mortal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... tempest. She has gone before me, and yet how long may it be ere I shall follow her? O solemn thought!—well might it sink deeply into my heart, and taking root there spring forth yielding fruits of repentance. Soon may Death, the great enemy of mankind, add one more ghastly victim to the lifeless piles that lie heaped together in every clime and on every shore; and when my death- knell shall sound will it be the signal of a spirit wailing in the regions of the lost, or rejoicing in the bright realms of everlasting bliss? It is for me, and me alone to decide. Perhaps it is for this ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... little thrill at the heart, and a brighter flush, the brilliant, proud Devereux—so handsome, so impulsive, so unfathomable—with his gipsy tint, and great enthusiastic eyes, and strange melancholy, sub-acid smile. But to him the room was lifeless, and the hour was dull, and the music but a noise and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Miserably, her face lifeless and pale as the face of one who has lain among the ashes of renouncement and repentance, she rose from the bed where she had flung herself weeping, and creeping to an old-fashioned oak bureau of heavy make, sat down before it and began to unlock its ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... had been seen in the neighborhood since;—seen, as she had heard, that very night. "Great G—d!" exclaimed Stanton, as he recollected the stranger whose demoniac laugh had so appalled him, while gazing on the lifeless bodies of the lovers, whom the lightning ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... efforts to become more gentle and tender we often would read an article in an old school-reader entitled "Sorrow for the Dead." In this the writer said words like these, to the best of our remembrance: "As we look upon the cold, lifeless form of some dear, departed friend, there will come rushing to our memory, the unkind acts and deeds and thoughts we have had toward them. This remorse of conscience," he said, "should cause us to be more true to the living." ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... multitude of words seemed struggling for utterance; but they gave place to a low moaning sound, and then to the silence of death. The one moment of happiness, that recompensed years of sorrow, had been her last. Her son laid the lifeless form upon the pillow, and gazed with fixed ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... high flung tree-roots thrash wildly as the released tree rolled in the water. She screamed a warning but too late. A root-stub, thick as a man's arm struck the Texan squarely on top of the head, and without a sound he sank limp and lifeless to the bottom of ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... realisation of the magnitude of that which had been achieved. It rested upon a fresh and independent study of the sources. It departed from the mechanism which had made the old treatises upon the history of doctrine formal and lifeless. Harnack realised to the full how many influences other than theological had had part in the development of doctrine. He recognised the reaction of modes of life and practice, and of external circumstances ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... you for treatment I was in a terrible condition. I was subject to severe headaches; was troubled with a tired, an almost lifeless feeling, and although I slept, I could not get rest. I was nervous and fretful, and could not do as much work as I wanted to do. To tell it all in a few words I was all run down. I had never wholly recovered from the grip, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... make that mirth in the service of God, as to elevate the hearts of the worshippers, so Christ can use these gifted men, as with them to affect the souls of his people in his church; yet when he hath done all, hang them by as lifeless, though sounding cymbals.[65] ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... emerging from the water at the very instant when the air escaped from my lungs in one long gasp. I quickly filled them again, looked to see what I had brought to the surface with me, and found that, as I expected, it was the apparently lifeless form of Master Julius. I had grabbed the lad by his ankle, so that he hung head downward in my grasp. That would never do; so, treading water vigorously, I shifted the position of the body until I had the head resting upon my shoulder; and ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... fancy, a lover's freak, I suppose. When we married the curtain was removed although the brass rod on which it hung was left by some oversight. On my return to England after my loss, however, I found that I could not bear to look upon this lifeless likeness of one who had been taken from me so cruelly, and I caused it to be replaced. I did more. In order that it might not be disturbed by some dusting housemaid, I myself made it fast with three or four tin-tacks which I remember I drove through the velvet stuff into the panelling, ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... "Leaves me not but with life! at once I lose "A double light. But fame shall not announce "To thee my death, for I myself will come. "Lest thou should'st doubt, thou shalt thyself behold "My death, and on my lifeless body glut "Thy cruel eyes. But, O ye gods above! "If mortal deeds ye view, remember me: "No more my tongue can dare to ask, than this, "That distant ages may my fortune know; "Grant fame to him, whom ye of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... and bear his wand. The years of stately plenty which he had foreseen, were already as last year's harvest. No wonder that the sheen of portrait and panel, the pride of echoing oak, were fled; or that the eyes with which he gazed on the things about him were dull and lifeless. ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... inarticulate exclamation, like the oath of a man devoid of speech, he ripped the sheer and ribboned silk from his wife's breast, as savagely as though he were tearing the flesh itself, and laid his hand upon the bared bosom. There, too, was the unfluttering stillness of a lifeless heart. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the control room, and across a passenger compartment that was filled with the crumpled, lifeless forms of almost a hundred men ...
— No Hiding Place • Richard R. Smith
... witness has been silenced, whose place has been vacated, even though the lifeless form remains, have we not seen such? And what is the safeguard against them, if not that found in the apostle's warning: "Quench not the Spirit?" The voice of the Lord must be heard in his church, and to the Holy Ghost alone has been committed the prerogative of communicating that voice. ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... hast no son, thou tender mother! No longer walk, thou lovely maid; Alas, thou hast no more a brother! No longer seek him east or west And search no more the forest thorough; For, wandering in the night so dark, He fell a lifeless corpse ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of a door or window in the street brought me before the curiosity-dealer's once more; I crossed the road and looked up at the house to assure myself that the noise had not come from there. No, it was black, cold, and lifeless as before. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Some speak of lifeless formulas; of these there are very few. A word, an idea, is a formula of possible action and of sentiments ready to pass into acts; they are "verbs." Now, every sentiment, every impulse which becomes formulated with, as it were, a fiat, acquires ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... elementary structure of the English language. Such troubles as David's were not for him; nor science nor doubt. His own age contained him as a green field might hold a rock. Not that this kind, faithful, helpful soul was a lifeless stone; but that he was as unresponsive to the movements of his time as a boulder is to the energies of a field. Alive in his own sublime way he was, and inextricably rooted in one ever-living book ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... I could not quite make out what I was looking at; then, to my astonishment, I saw that these stark, gray trees were indeed lifeless, and that what I had mistaken for dark foliage were velvety clusters of bats hanging there asleep—thousands of them thickly infesting and clotting the dead branches with a sombre and horrid effect ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... for one must lie Motionless, lifeless, beneath the sky; The pale stiff lips return no kiss To the lips that never brought love amiss; And the dark brown earth be heaped above The head that lay on the bosom ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... living time. I lose myself in that ethereal void, Till I have tired my wings and long to fill My breast with denser air, to stand, to walk With eyes not raised above my fellow-men. Sick of my unwalled, solitary realm, I ask to change the myriad lifeless worlds I visit as mine own for one poor patch Of this dull spheroid and a little breath To shape in word or deed to serve ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... just the proper second or she will be thrown back against the rocks and be killed. And he shouts to her, "Spring!" but she waited to kiss him and waited too long, sprang into the sea and was thrown back against the rock and drawn shoreward lifeless. Whether that story is true or not I cannot say, but it is an illustration of the present day to me. God is saying, "Now is the day of opportunity." May he ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... It would seem that lifeless faith does not become living, or living faith lifeless. For, according to 1 Cor. 13:10, "when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away." Now lifeless faith is imperfect in comparison with living faith. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... foregoing example in one dull, monotonous tone of voice, without regard to the sentiment expressed, would render the passage extremely insipid and lifeless. But by a proper modulation of the voice, it infuses into the mind of the reader or hearer the most ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... for a never very flourishing growth of heather had recently been burnt right down to the unkindly-looking earth, leaving a dwarf black forest of charred sticks very grim to the eye and heart; while the dull surface of a small lifeless-looking lake added the final touch to the Dead-Sea ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... shrub, not a flower, not a blade of grass relieved the monotony of the wilderness of rocks which emerged from the great Eocene sea. Not a lizard, horned toad, centipede, tarantula, chuckwalla, campamouche,* frog, tree-toad, turtle or snake was to be found on the long stretching areas of its lifeless shores. Not a chipmunk, prairie-dog, coyote, rat, mouse, porcupine, fox, bear, mountain-lion, badger, deer, antelope or other four-footed creature ran over its new-born surfaces. The sun shone unhindered; the rain beat with pitiless fury; the winds swept unhampered; the snows piled ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... he asks, and Mercury admits that the gods are subject to a power stronger than their own—the power of Fate. "Go, then," is the reply, "I do not serve vassals." After a brief soliloquy, in which Prometheus expresses the passionate wish that he might impart feeling to his lifeless images, Epimetheus appears as a second representative of the gods. Their offer, he tells Prometheus, is reasonable; let him but recognise their supremacy, and he will be free of the heights of Olympus, from which he would rule the earth. ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... a whole and a large army of disabled or lifeless soldiers! All that was intermingled with them bore an aspect of still more poignant horror ; for the Bonapartian Prisoners who were now poured into the city by hundreds, had a mien of such ferocious desperation, where they were marched on, uninjured, from ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... crushed to the earth: but I saw that they would soon lift their heads and rejoice again in the sun and air. Not so those on which my shadow had lain. The very outline of it could be traced in the withered lifeless grass, and the scorched and shrivelled flowers which stood there, dead, and hopeless of any resurrection. I shuddered, and ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... is based chiefly on faith, according to James 1:6, "But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering." Now faith is not sufficient for merit, as instanced in those who have lifeless faith. Therefore prayer is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... grass, with his face turned to the wall, lay a man, miserably clad and apparently lifeless; a handkerchief was tied round his head; near him lay a sickle that had fallen from his nerveless grasp; seated on the ground beside him was a woman, who, with her thin cheek resting on her emaciated hand, was gazing ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... the furrowed ground, as the shadowy fields are renewed, and the light breaks and adorns each blade of grass, I look towards the ravine. Below the quickening field and its high surges of earth and burned hollows, beyond the bristling of stakes, there is still a lifeless lake of shadow, and in front of the opposite slope a wall of ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... power was manifest on the ushering in of day. The auroral flame, which ordinarily greets us in the east with such a ruddy laugh, was now nothing better than a wan and dismal smile; and even the sun, as he struggled up from what seemed a bed of leaden mist, brought with him only a pallid, lifeless twilight. It was not that his rays were impeded by cloud or haze; he had lost his power to shine. He hung there in the heavens like a great white shield, and looked down on us as rayless and powerless and devoid of life as a dead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... a moment's pause, he decided to take the unfortunate girl back to her own apartment. Arrived at the door, he found it locked on the inside. After ringing for some time, it was opened finally by the King. At the sight of Susy apparently lifeless, her head hanging backward, the ...
— A Royal Prisoner • Pierre Souvestre
... forward and seized the knife, and had his arm already raised to stab Mr Knight in the back, when Frazer shot him dead. At almost the same instant, Luerson struck Mr Knight a tremendous blow on the head with his mallet, which felled him to the earth, stunned and lifeless. He next rushed upon Frazer, who had fairly covered him with the muzzle of his piece, and would inevitably have shot him, but just as he pulled the trigger, the man whom I had seen creeping round behind him, sprang upon him, and deranged his aim; two or three of the others, who had stood ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... the midst of sorrow and death! My poor good Uncle Cambridge breathed his last, without a struggle, at a few minutes before ten last night. I still saw him yesterday morning at one, but he did not see me, and to-day I saw him lifeless and cold. The poor Duchess and the poor children are very touching in their grief, and poor Augusta,[29] who arrived just five hours too late, is quite heartbroken. The end was most peaceful; there was no ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... biting air cleaned by leagues of lifeless barrens and voids of crackling frost till he ached with the exhilaration of a ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... dream, a boat pulled by Javanese sailors crossing the dark lane of water came alongside the brig. The white warrant officer in her, perhaps the gunner, climbed aboard. He was a short man, with a rotund stomach and a wheezy voice. His immovable fat face looked lifeless in the moonlight, and he walked with his thick arms hanging away from his body as though he had been stuffed. His cunning little eyes glittered like bits of mica. He conveyed to Jasper, in broken English, a request to come on ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Running to a little hill, he looked around and shouted again. No response! Then going to a precipice at some distance, he looked down, and there, upon the rocks and briars, he saw the mangled form of his loved child. He rushed to the spot, took up the lifeless corpse, and hugged it to his bosom, and accused himself of being the murderer of his child. While he was sleeping his child had wandered over the precipice. I thought as I heard that, what a picture of the church ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... from their sides, the shepherds hastened to inspect their charges, and a thin blue smoke began to stream from the cottages of the valley into the brightening air. The laird carried Phemie Irving in his arms, till he observed two shepherds ascending from one of the loops of Corriewater, bearing the lifeless body of her brother. They had found him whirling round and round in one of the numerous eddies, and his hands, clutched and filled with wool, showed that he had lost his life in attempting to save the flock of his sister. A plaid was ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... flooding upon Paris in the plain, We stood and drank of the last free air we never could love again; They had led us back from a lost battle, to halt we knew not where, And stilled us; and our gaping guns were dumb with our despair. The grey tribes flowed for ever from the infinite lifeless lands, And a Norman to a Breton spoke, his chin upon ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... employment had a hard time of it with their master in the shop. Something had upset Old Ronald. He ordered the shutters to be put up earlier that evening than usual. Instead of going to his club (at the tavern round the corner), he took a long walk in the lonely and lifeless streets of the City by night. There was no disguising it from himself; his wife's behaviour at parting had made him uneasy. He naturally swore at her for taking that liberty, while he lay awake alone in his bed. "Damn the woman! What does she mean?" The cry of the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... We had thought and dreamed of it; I had seen him in my mind's eye, my darling child, playing with a hoop, pulling my moustache, trying to walk, or gorging himself with milk in his nurse's arms like a gluttonous little kitten; but I had never pictured him to myself, inanimate, almost lifeless, quite tiny, wrinkled, hairless, grinning, and yet, charming, adorable, and be loved in spite of all-poor, ugly, little thing. It was a strange impression, and so singular that it is impossible to understand ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... lay flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood! A man all light, a seraph-man, On every ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... dead?" he exclaimed, stooping down. He could not discover the faintest breathing. He lifted an arm, it fell lifeless on the sand. "Voules, Voules!" he almost shrieked out; "speak but one ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... meet behind his back, and his fingers begin to twine about each other. I saw him look from Ruth to Golden Star, from the living woman who was his sister to her lifeless counterpart. Then came over him one of those swift changes of mood which we had so often seen before. All the cold cruelty of his long-chained-up passion vanished. His face, from being stone, became flesh again. The fierce glitter, as of a sword's point, died out of his eyes, and they ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... refracted on the light grey sandy carpet, and are reflected back with scorching power. Every living thing which does not quickly escape from their influence is devoted to certain destruction. No plant takes root in the burning soil, and no animal finds food on the arid lifeless surface. No bird, no insect moves in the burning atmosphere. Only in the very loftiest regions, the king of the air, the majestic condor, may be seen floating, with daring wing, on his way to the sea coast. Only ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... were both filled with horror, for both believed that they had killed her, as they gazed upon her pale and lifeless form. Either would lave sacrificed everything to have taken all back again, and restored her to life and happiness. Can this be thee, Petro Giampetti, trembling like a child-nay, a tear actually wetting that swarthy check, as you chafe the ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... knee-deep in the stream ready to push off, when along the reach of shore there came that sorry ending to the gallant venture,—Ridgar and the girl, staggering, stumbling, trying to make what haste they could, with swinging roughly between them the apparently lifeless body of the factor of Fort ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... forgotten as we talked, and I turned to see it dull and lifeless. "It hasn't gone out, however," I said, and coughed as I swallowed smoke. "There's no smoke without some fire," I poked the logs together. "That's an old saw; but it's ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... order, and space are good things, but it is a mistake to think that there is no virtue without them. There are more primary and essential things; things to which they should be added, but without which they are lifeless virtues. In one of Miss Loane's reports on the life of the English poor, she makes these ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... tremblin' and sick at heart with the agony and dread that wus rackin' their souls, as they would look over the cold fields of snow stretching on each side of the road, and thinkin' how that face would look if it wus lying there staring with lifeless eyes up towards the cold moonlight,—the face they had kissed, the face they had loved,—and thinkin', too, that the change that had come to it—was comin' to it all the time—was more cruel and hopeless ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... wholesome, and that our minister used to say is one of the 'wonders of the great deep.' This province is stagnant; it ain't deep like still water neither, for it's shaller enough, gracious knows, but it is motionless, noiseless, lifeless. If you have ever been to sea, in a calm, you'd know what a plaguy tiresome thing it is for a man that's in a hurry. An everlastin' flappin' of the sails, and a creakin' of the boombs, and an onsteady ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... now was terrible, and Mark held his breath, hardly daring to breathe, in dread lest the major should fire, for he could have laid the man lifeless without raising the ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... the fatal bite on the hinder part of its thorax; then retreating, patiently waits till the poison has taken effect. The virulence of this poison may be judged of from the fact that in half a minute I opened the mesh, and found a large wasp quite lifeless. This Epeira always stands with its head downwards near the centre of the web. When disturbed, it acts differently according to circumstances: if there is a thicket below, it suddenly falls down; and I have distinctly seen the thread from the spinners ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... hand to his heart. Emily sunk almost lifeless on his bosom, and neither wept, nor spoke. Valancourt, now commanding his own distress, tried to comfort and re-assure her, but she appeared totally unaffected by what he said, and a sigh, which she uttered, now and then, was all that proved she ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... morning, without a struggle, his spirit passed quietly away to his "eternal inheritance." "They that turn many to righteousness shall shine as the stars for ever and ever." I never, I believe, shall forget how forcibly came to my mind, as I sat beside his lifeless form, the words, "To this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that He might be Lord both of the dead and the living," and my thoughts turned on many a solemn and blessed trust implied ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice, he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now, ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... had stood near, much frightened by what he saw, ran home to tell the news. The agonized parents hastened to the spot, and all night they searched for the lifeless body of their lost darling. It was found the next morning; and who shall describe their feelings as they clasped the little form to their bosoms? Early piety had blossomed in his little life. He loved his ...
— Children's Edition of Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer • S. B. Shaw
... stillness and stifled air only now and then disturbed by the call or whir of the summer duck, the dismal ventriloquous note of the rain-crow, or the splash of a dead branch falling into the clear but lifeless bayou. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... looked so like myself, lay dead at the foot of the great Statue, her hands clasped on her breast, her eyes closed, her mouth smiling as in sleep, while beside her raved and wept her priestly lover, invoking her by every tender name, clasping her lifeless body in his arms, covering her face with useless passionate kisses, and calling her back with wild grief from the silence into which her soul had fled. And I knew then that she had put all thought of self aside in a sense of devotion to duty,—she had chosen what she imagined to be the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... round of solitude She used to haunt a dead sea-wood Where among boulders lifeless trees Stuck rigid fingers to the breeze— That stream of faint hot air that flits Aimless at noon. 'Tis there she sits Hour after hour, and as a dove Croons when her breast is ripe for love, So sings this exile, quiet, sad chants Of love, yet knows not what she wants; And singing there in ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... to the Capitol. Meanwhile three of Caesar's slaves placed their master's body upon a stretcher and carried it to his house on the south side of the Forum, with one arm dangling from the unsupported corner. In this condition the widowed Calpurnia received the lifeless clay of him who had lately been sovereign of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... resoundeth the noble Blanch's name. Nor shall I quickly wither like the rose-bud from the tree, My queen-like graces shining when my beauty's gone from me. But when the sculptur'd marble is raised o'er my head, And the matchless Blanch lies lifeless among the noble dead, This saintly lady Abbess hath made me justly fear, It nothing will avail me that I were ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of the existence of "dead" industrial organizations is something more than the ultimate loss to the stockholders, it is the deplorable stagnation in which the workers find themselves with their progress blocked by lifeless management. ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... from thy window look, Thou hast no son, thou tender mother! No longer walk, thou lovely maid; Alas, thou hast no more a brother! No longer seek him east or west, And search no more the forest thorough; For, wandering in the night so dark, He fell a lifeless corse in Yarrow. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... journey. The ground was marshy and sodden, and I sank deep into it at every step I took. My clothing was wet through and through, and my dog, which I carried over my shoulder, was a burden so heavy and inconvenient that only my love for my late companion and respect for her lifeless body gave me sufficient strength to bear it for so great a distance. And then the rain fell incessantly, and the wind ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... I deposited the coin in the slot, whereupon Julianna, with great delight, watched the opening of the front of the box, the exposure of the internals of the figure, and the jerky motions of the Sheik as he extended his mechanical arm over his lifeless legs to make ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... produce of that fermentation, instead of being agreeable, would be disgusting to the taste. By a rare accident we might get the true alcoholic fermentation, but the odds against obtaining it would be enormous. Pure air acting upon a lifeless liquid will never provoke fermentation; but our ordinary air is the vehicle of numberless germs which act as ferments when they fall into appropriate infusions. Some of them produce acidity, some ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... soldier might be seen to halt, take his writing utensils from his belt, and compose an ode,—and such papers were found afterward in the helmets or the breast-plates, when these were removed from their lifeless wearers. ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... his strength, what could they avail in such foolhardy strife? One jerk of the black snout, one flash of the white tusks, and, with a last yelping scream, the body of poor Shark goes whirling up into the air, and falls a bleeding, bisected, lifeless lump. Poor Shark! with all his faults, I think we ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the world," as they are emphatically distinguished, imagine that a man so lifeless in "the world" must be one of the dead in it, and, with mistaken wit, would inscribe over the sepulchre of his library, "Here lies the body of our friend." If the man of letters have voluntarily quitted their "world," at least he has passed into another, where he enjoys ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... knight how to behave so as to gain the favor of the fair, has these remarkable words:—"When your arm is raised, if your lance fail, draw your sword directly; and let heaven and hell resound with the clash. Lifeless is the soul which beauty cannot animate, and weak is the arm which cannot ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... stood at the outskirts of the crowd, seeing Denis apparently lifeless, thought he must have sworn falsely on the Donagh, and exclaimed, "He's dead! gracious God! Denis Meehan's struck dead by the Donagh! He swore in a lie, and is now a corpse!" Anthony paused, and calmly surveyed him as he lay with his head resting ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... the light had died; only for an instant had he seen the things that leaped upon Chet—but he knew! Never again could any man tell Spud O'Malley that the Moon was a lifeless globe ... and he knew that the life was of a form monstrous and horrible ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... pictures were generally half-length, against a background of gold leaf, which was at first laid on solidly, but which at a later period was adorned with tiny cherub figures. The folds of the drapery were stiff and heavy, and the whole effect was dull and lifeless. But no matter how inadequate such a picture may seem to us to-day, and no matter how much it seems to lack the depth and sincerity of reality, it possessed for the people of the Middle Ages a mystic charm which had its influence. These pictures ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... he carried at his side, placed it in the bird's mouth, and then carefully pulling out the arrow, put some into the wound, just as our Napo Indians had done when they shot our monkey, Nimble. We then went on, he carrying the apparently lifeless bird carefully in his arms. In a few minutes it began slowly to lift its head, and then to look about it as a hen does when carried in the same way. In a short time the bird seemed to be as well as if it had not received a wound, ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... meats, reeking to the sky. The child, who was concerned for the sorrows of one of [200] those Northern captives as he passed by, and explained to his comrade—"There's feeling in that hand, you know!" benumbed and lifeless as it looked in the chain, seemed, in a moment, to transform the entire show into its own proper tinsel. Yes! these Romans were a coarse, a vulgar people; and their vulgarities of soul in full evidence here. And Aurelius himself ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... of it all! That the famous old town, quietly asleep in its plain, should be shattered and ruined; that so many hopes and ambitions can be blasted in so few hours; that young bodies can be crushed, in a fraction of a second, to masses of lifeless, bleeding pulp! The glorious tragedy of Ypres will never be written, for so many who could have spoken are dead, and so many who live will never speak—you can but guess their stories from the dull pain in ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... manifest in all her indubitably aristocratic nature. In her very exterior there was no trace of the type characteristic of the German race; she recalled rather the children of the south. The excessively thick, lustreless black hair, the hollow, black, lifeless but beautiful eyes, the low, prominent brow, the aquiline nose, the livid pallor of the smooth skin, a certain tragic line near the delicate lips, and in the slightly sunken cheeks, something abrupt, and at the same time helpless in the movements, ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... little idea of the rate they were making in the lifeless sea. At the end of half an hour, when Leonard looked back at Hogan on the wall for signals, the dock still loomed above him, a vast glare of red in the dazzling sunshine. It seemed impossible to get away from it; the featureless red flare ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... you—we get him soon!" she exclaimed, and there was nothing lifeless about the way she gave Craig her hand, as Bennett, he and ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... him to the state of quiet becoming a tenant of the tomb. Having chanted the triumphant account of his contest and victory, this mangled conqueror fell dead before them. The body of Assueit was taken out of the tomb, burnt, and the ashes dispersed to heaven; whilst that of the victor, now lifeless and without a companion, was deposited there, so that it was hoped his slumbers might remain undisturbed.[19] The precautions taken against Assueit's reviving a second time, remind us of those adopted in the Greek islands and in the Turkish provinces ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... Evelyn had testified towards the sufferer: it had so evidently been her first gracious and womanly impulse to hasten to the side of this humble stranger. In that impulse, Maltravers himself had been almost forgotten; and as the poor woman lay pale and lifeless, and the young Evelyn bent over her in beautiful compassion, Maltravers thought she had never seemed so lovely, so irresistible,—in fact, pity in woman ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... real, so wonderfully disinterested and so wholly free from cant, already had kindled something in the girl's heart which she had believed to be lifeless, and for ever cold. Now, his swift intuition and the grave sympathy in his beautiful voice imposed too great a test upon the weakened self-control of poor Kitty. Without even a warning quiver of the lips she ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... utterances even possess a dramatic value, as where, bending over the seemingly lifeless form of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... turned a corner, and in front of them stretched the Downs. On their left the grim, frowning prison stood sombre and apparently lifeless, and as Joan passed it ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... engulfed,—while far, far above them flew the "White Eagle," gradually lessening in size through distance till it looked no bigger than a dove on its homeward way. Some priests watching by a row of lifeless men, women and children killed in the earthquake, chanted the "Nunc Dimittis" as the evening grew darker,—and the only one among them who had first seen the air-ship over the canon, where it fell, as it were in the deep gulf surrounded by ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... heart to us all, to see the lifeless creature in his white nightcap and eyes closed, lying with his yellow hair spread on the pillow; and we went out, that the women-folk might cover up the looking- glass and the face of the clock, ere they proceeded ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... the real events might have excited interest; but the wand of an enchanter is now waved over us. We feel the spell of the greatest writer that the world has seen in one department, or Scotland produced in any. How dull and lifeless will not the true facts appear when no longer embellished by the touching sorrows of Effie, or the heroic virtue of Jeanie Deans!" He refers, in a note, to chapter VI. of The Heart of Mid Lothian, by Sir WALTER SCOTT, and to "his excellent narrative" in the 2d series of the Tales of a Grandfather, ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... vine-dresser of the neighborhood named Garrigue, without doubt a descendant of Garrigou, has assured me that one Christmas night, finding himself a little so-so-ish, he became lost on the mountain beside Trinquelague, and behold what he saw! At eleven o'clock, nothing. All was silent, dark, lifeless. Suddenly, toward midnight, a chime sounded up above from a clock, an old, old chime which seemed six leagues away. Pretty soon, on the ascending road, Garrigue saw lights trembling in the uncertain shadows. Under the porch of the chapel somebody ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... the current would draw the little bark to the weir, and over the weir, and it would be dashed about by the swirling rush of water, capsized, and its occupant thrown out. And nothing more would be seen of poor Juliet but a white, lifeless ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... step to another. Therefore the object lesson must not be precipitated all in a heap upon the infantile intellects of the learners, but unfolded by degrees. Geologists assure us that so it was in the past; that first the lifeless strata were deposited; next, light was evolved; afterward, fishes, and marine reptiles, and birds; then came the carboniferous or plant era; afterward the mammalia; last of all man. You observe here an ascending scale of creation, beginning with first principles and simple forms, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... You had nothin' against that. I began to feel like the meadow when the fresh spring sun shines on it, that all the dead or sleepin' roots woke up, and are strong again, or as the heather, that seemed dry and lifeless, the buds come once more. But I knew it must not be, and I fought against it; and I went to Thor's Stone for that reason, and for ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... and defects imported from without counteracted to such an extent their own native dispositions and defects that all marks of individuality were effaced and nullified. The race tended to become more and more what it long continued to be afterwards,—a lifeless and inert mass, without individual energy—endowed, it is true, with patience, endurance, cheerfulness of temperament, and good nature, but with little power of self-government, and thus forced to submit to foreign masters who made use of it and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless method of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection. Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel Butler vehemently put it, "of mind ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... and a mall lay upon the ground apparently lifeless. He had been struck down by the lightning. His pale face was upturned to the sky, and the rain shaken free from the cloudy skirts of the retiring storm, was falling upon it. I continued to gaze upon the force of the prostrate man, until there came into it a flush of life. Then his limbs quivered; ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... institutions. The Roman emperors made Christianity an institution, and obscured its truths. And perhaps that is one reason why Providence permitted their despotism to pass away,—preferring the rude anarchy of the Germanic nations to the dead mechanism of a lifeless Church and imperial rottenness. Imperialism must ever end in rottenness. And that is one reason why the heart of Christendom—I mean the people of Europe, in its enlightened and virtuous sections—has ever opposed imperialism. The ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... thought of a neglected opportunity shot through Job's brain. However that might be, there was a quick scattering of the group, as two iron-shod heels flew up into the air, the brown head was playfully tossed from side to side, and Job, the feeble, the lifeless, went frisking away across the lawn, now galloping furiously up and down, with a lofty disregard of the holes he was tearing in the soft, dry turf, now stopping to roll on his back and kick his aged legs ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... are not doing all they can for me. I know that. I admit it. If I should meet my end here and if—to put the thing straight out—my lifeless body is found floating on the surface of this pond, I should like there to be documentary evidence of that much. They are trying their best. "This is Liberty Hall," Mrs. Beverly-Jones said to me on the first day of my visit. "We want you to feel that you are ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... Lifeless only for a time, however. Presently he breathes, and we carry him away into the evening sunshine and place him on the soft warm moss. He soon speaks, but is very ill and weak; yet our thanks to God for his preservation are very sincere. Surely there is a Providence around one ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... she went away! and even then the doctors gave no hope! It was almost as if they already saw her lying lifeless before them. ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... could see something white against the grey of the creature's sides. He felt in his pockets, still kneeling, struck a match, and when the blue of its flame changed to clear yellow he looked up to see what he had known he would see the face of Kathleen, white, stony, and lifeless. Her hair was white, too, and her hands, clothes, shoes everything was white, with the hard, cold whiteness of marble. Kathleen had her wish: she was a statue. There was a long moment of perfect stillness ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... Marie-Anne's dead body lay between her and the door, barring the passage. To leave the room it was necessary to step over the lifeless form of her victim. She had not courage to do this, and recoiled with ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau |
