"Turgid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be, without being either supersonic or turgid. Fast is necessarily that amount of speed that will not be the most nor the least, yet will be sufficient unto the demands of fast ..." Duke quoted directly from the Earthworm Manual, a book that was not prescribed learning in the Academy, but woe unto the Earthworm who did not know it by heart ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... the seaside, the springs, the summer mountains, the cataracts, the theatres, the panoramas of islet-fondled rivers speeding by strange cities. I was condemned to look upon them all with mercenary eyes, to turn their gladness into torpid prose, and speak their praises in turgid columns. Never nepenthe, never abandonne, always wide-awake, and watching for saliences, I had gone abroad like a falcon, and roamed at home like a hungry jackal. Six fingers on my hand, one long and pointed, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... same essentials: there is a texture of colouring, a style in Literature, and an appropriate technique for harmony in every branch of Art, just as there is an harmonic scheme in Music. This may be airy, light, and gossamer, or turgid and obscure: it may be commonplace or ponderous. Like Nature, it may have a thousand or a myriad shades to mirror as many moods and tenses. It may have the misty filminess of steam, the limpid deeps of water, or the cold weight and icy ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... ode, though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines, really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect which the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France, is only ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... weaknesses. That of Ludwig of Bavaria was that he was a poet. He was so sure of this that he not only produced yards of turgid verse, defying every law of construction and metre, but he even had some of it printed. A volume of selections from his Muse, entitled Walhalla's Genossen, was published for him by Baron Cotta, and, like the Indian shawls of Queen Victoria, did regular duty as ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... disengaged itself from the Vapours, it may have sound and fit Organs to make Use of. As often as you hear your Child crying, think this with yourself, he calls for this from me. When you look upon your Breasts, those two little Fountains, turgid, and of their own Accord streaming out a milky Juice, remember Nature puts you in Mind of your Duty: Or else, when your Infant shall begin to speak, and with his pretty Stammering shall call you Mammy, How can you hear it without blushing? when you have refus'd to ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... the blank-verse reads like that of one accustomed to rhyme, and unable to get out of his wonted rut. And the versification runs, throughout, in a stilted monotony, the style being made thick and turgid with high-sounding epithets; while we have a perfect flux of learned impertinence. As for truth, nature, character, poetry, we look for them in vain; though there is much, in the stage noise and parade, that might keep the multitude from perceiving ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... merit. Their chief interest is as the last survival of the urbanus sermo in Latin poetry. They are written in iambic senarii, in the fluent and studiously simple Latin of an earlier period, not without occasional vulgarisms, but with a total absence of the turgid rhetoric which was coming into fashion. The Fables are the last utterance made by the speech of Terence: it is singular that this intimately Roman style should have begun and ended with two authors of servile birth and foreign blood. But the patronage of literature ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... from the trench. There was a roar higher up the ravine, and a turgid flood, streaked with frothy lines, came pouring down the new channel, bearing with it small nut bushes and great clumps of matted grass. By degrees it subsided, and the men, gathering about the edge of the muskeg, ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... years Now first has passed the seed (engendered Within their members by the ripened days) Are in their sleep confronted from without By idol-images of some fair form— Tidings of glorious face and lovely bloom, Which stir and goad the regions turgid now With seed abundant; so that, as it were With all the matter acted duly out, They pour the billows of a potent stream And ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... visitor's while to walk by the broad muddy Rhone, and observe the clumsy picturesque vessels moored there, or gliding down the turgid stream. So clumsy is the construction that some are provided with two rudders, one being found insufficient to direct the course of ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... same one mad moment, revealed to him the depths of her love. Then the second's weakness was gone; he was once more quiet, firm, the man of action, accustomed to meet danger boldly, to rule and to subdue the most turgid mob. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... conjunctivae; the lips were livid, the tongue tumefied, but pallid, the skin ashy pale, the cutaneous tissues apparently devoid of elasticity. There was an oblique depressed mark on the neck, more evident on the left side; the small veins and capillaries of the surface of the body were turgid with coagulating blood the surface temperature was extremely low. She was pulseless at the wrists and temples. There was no definite beat of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... was wondrous bad, and he paused at all the specially turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for he was proud of those sentences, as I knew ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... work has been censured by some shallow criticks as involved and turgid, and abounding with antiquated and hard words. So ill-founded is the first part of this objection, that I will challenge all who may honour this book with a perusal, to point out any English writer whose language conveys his meaning with equal ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... dramatis personae are like so many statues "stept from their pedestal to take the air." They come on the stage only to utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays every thing prostrate before him. This style is better suited to his imitations of the two satires of Juvenal. Of ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the Marseillais that some day the turgid Rhone may be made to empty itself at the foot of the famous Cannebiere, and so add to the already great prosperity of the most cosmopolitan and picturesque ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... as if she were trying to realize something. The room was growing greyer as she read on through the turgid catalogue of the heathen gods, so packed with stories and pictures, so unaccountably glorious. At last the light failed, and Mrs. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Europe. Yet do you not feel with me that while Shakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to make them appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same or similar words have become tumid, turgid? ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the vacant space, unbuilt upon as yet, was becoming an immense human reservoir, into which turgid streams with threatening sounds were surging from the south. His eyes could separate the tumultuous atoms into ragged forms, unkempt heads, inflamed faces, animated by some powerful destructive impulse. Arms of every ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... night and the pure glory of the stars received him on the threshold. He looked round him, breathing deep of earth's plain fragrance; he looked up into the great array of heaven, and was quieted. His little turgid life dwindled to its true proportions; and he saw himself (that great flame-hearted martyr!) stand like a speck under the cool cupola of the night. Thus he felt his careless injuries already soothed; the live air of out-of-doors, ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The merit of these works may be ascertained in some measure, by the rules we have already established. We need only to add further on this head, that among many beauties we meet with examples of the turgid and bombast in the work of Ariosto; from which that of the Greek Poet is wholly free. The two first lines of ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... prose writers, we must not forget the classical poets of our own country. Make yourself familiarly acquainted with Shakspeare, Milton, and Pope. The more you read of Young and Cowper, the better. Young is sometimes turgid, with a good deal of bad taste; but he abounds in real poetry, and in strong truths most forcibly expressed. Cowper sometimes carries simplicity to the verge of being prosaic; but he is generally graceful, often pathetic, and sometimes approaches to sublimity. ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... Spanish province, and that all that was possible to hope for was separation and an alliance with Spain. He was on intimate terms with the separatist leaders of all shades, and broached his views to them as far as he thought fit. His turgid oratory was admired in the backwoods, and he was much helped by his skill in the baser kinds of political management. He speedily showed all the familiar traits of the demagogue—he was lavish in his hospitality, and treated ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... physical anguish permeate in every part. I rally my self-reverence, my nobility of soul. I make efforts. By day I visit spots of natural beauty and objects of art. But these refuse to gratify me. My thought is too turgid to receive the impress of them. Concentration is impossible to me. Feverish agitation perverts my imagination. My ideas are fugitive. I endure a chronic delirium. This by day," he extended one hand with a despairing gesture, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... as lurid and as turgid a picture as things seen in nightmare or remembered from mythology—this turmoil of emergency effort through a fire-lit night of storm and flood; figures thrown into exaggeration as the flames leaped or ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... "Count Basil" and "De Montfort" are her best plays, and are well termed by Sir Walter Scott a revival of the great Bard of Avon. Forcible and energetic in style, her strain never becomes turgid or diverges into commonplace. She is masculine, but graceful; and powerful without any ostentation of strength. Her personal history was the counterpart of her writings. Gentle in manners and affable in conversation, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Relatio de Standardo. This last is an account of the Battle of the Standard (1138), better blown than the similar account by Richard of Hexham, but less trustworthy, and in places obscured by a peculiarly turgid rhetoric. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... panting beside me, clinging to me in mid-air. The glare was dying around us; the din was lessening. We were choking in the chemical fumes of the released, half-burned gases. Turgid darkness was coming to the wrecked room, with little hissing flares spitting ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of specifying,—the true secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never turgid. Tasso begins finely with ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... his chair and stared at the turgid, bulging forehead and hard eyes before him. What could be behind them? Had the war brought out a twist in his father's brain? Why were ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... notice by his personal beauty and by the rather turgid eloquence which was his chief talent. In 1342 he took the most prominent part in an embassy from the citizens to Clement VI; and though he failed to induce the Pope to return to Rome, which at that time he seems to have regarded as the panacea for the evils of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... may say of somebody, "This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate." Now, in what other language than ours, can a string of words anything like the following, come so near to a fair and literal translation of this long sentence? "This exceeding trifling ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... 1693, Parris was banished from Salem; others, except Stoughton, who remained obdurate, made public confession of error. But Cotton Mather, the soul of the whole iniquity, shrouded himself in a cuttle-fish cloud of turgid rhetoric, and escaped scot-free. So great was the power of theological prestige in New ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... once making a long speech in the Irish Parliament, lauding the transcendent merits of the Wexford magistracy, on a motion for extending the criminal jurisdiction in that county, to keep down the disaffected. As he was closing a most turgid oration by declaring "that the said magistracy ought to receive some signal mark of the Lord-Lieutenant's favor," John Egan, who was rather mellow, and sitting behind him, jocularly whispered, "and be whipped at the cart's tail."—"And be whipped at the cart's tail!" ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... from Townsend was turgid thought conveyed, I will not say in commonplace language, for his style could never be that, but in the language of sobriety, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... works are not easy reading; his German style, though grammatical and idiomatic, is generally very involved and obscure, often turgid. There is a want of self-discipline about the thought, and he is too hasty in committing ill-digested thoughts ill-arranged to print, while his style is full of tedious mannerisms, such as his constant use of futile superlatives for positives, the constant occurrence ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... columns pour Of turgid efflorescence, Describe in language that would floor Our Cayleys, Rouths, and Besants, How Oxford oars as levers move, While Cambridge mathematics, Though excellent in theory, prove Unstable ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... native pride and indolence from climbing the ascent of learning or greatness, taught by political opinions to say to the vain pomp and glory of the world, "I hate ye," seeing the path of classical and artificial poetry blocked up by the cumbrous ornaments of style and turgid common-places, so that nothing more could be achieved in that direction but by the most ridiculous bombast or the tamest servility; he has turned back partly from the bias of his mind, partly perhaps from a judicious policy—has ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... mid-air a vast sheet of water which the howling wind flapped to and fro in the gorge terrifically; while the blinding lightning and crashing thunder seemed to issue together from the mountain itself. The creek, before clear and placid, quickly became turgid and agitated. It began to creep up the banks. Presently a dark, strange-looking mass came floating down—it was a soldier's knapsack! The rain fell, if possible, in increased torrents. The stream continued to rise ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... of the Admiralty. Now his time was come, and he threw himself into the enjoyment of opportunity with almost pathetic vigour. It was eleven o'clock when he rose, and the debate must needs stand adjourned at midnight. When twelve o'clock struck, Sir Ellis was still in the full flow of his turgid eloquence. His speech was constructed on the principle of, and (except, perhaps, in the matter of necessity) resembled, the long bridge ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... this astounding city jutting jaggedly into the clouds, and through whose streets poured in a never-ceasing, turgid flow all the peoples of the earth. And, more astounding than waterful sea and peopleful city, was the last, crowning bit of news: Peter was going to be married! And he didn't know the young lady he was to marry, except that she was a Miss Anne Simms. He knew no more about his ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... been shown by Mosso, and many others, that in men with defects of the cranial wall the volume of the brain decreases during sleep. At the same time, the volume of any limb increases as the peripheral parts of the body become turgid with blood. In dogs, the brain has been exposed, and the cortex of that organ has been observed to become anaemic during sleep. It is a matter of ordinary observation that in infants, during sleep, the volume of the brain becomes less, since the fontanelle ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... by Italian songsters, though every jackal in India delivers them gratis to his customers all night, and sometimes gets shot for them, and always deserves it—so there were no cadences and fiorituri, the trite, turgid, and feeble expletives of song, the skim-milk with which mindless musicians and mindless writers quench fire, wash out colour, and drown melody and ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... never minded much of what race—I have the trick of tongues rather strangely developed—but I like the feeling of human beings around me. I like the smell and sound and atmosphere of a great city. Then all my senses are awake, but life becomes almost turgid in my veins during the dreary hours of passing ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... disadvantage, and could only reach the hands of learned persons, and those to whom they were really of interest, by the merest chance. Further, Froebel, as has already abundantly appeared, was but a poor author. His stiff, turgid style makes his works in many places most difficult to understand, as the present translators have found to their cost, and he was therefore practically unreadable to the general public. In his usual self-absorbed fashion, ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... he was attempting to convert. He did not even spare the one figure which was almost a part of the Southerner's religion, the Confederate general, especially that particular type who used his war record as a stepping stone to public office, and whose oratory, colourful and turgid in its celebrations of the past, Page regarded as somewhat unrelated, in style and matter, to the realities of the present. The image-breaking editor even asserted that the Daughters of the Confederacy were not entirely a helpful influence ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... strongly. He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt that she was in his power, and he was generous. The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge. But she was waiting in ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... very many species do not assume their ornamental dress until they arrive at maturity, or they assume it only during the breeding-season, or the tints then become more vivid. Certain ornamental appendages become enlarged, turgid, and brightly coloured during the act of courtship. The males display their charms with elaborate care and to the best effect; and this is done in the presence of the females. The courtship is sometimes a prolonged affair, and many males and females congregate at an appointed place. To suppose ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... chamber'd haven to the woes Whose daily tempest overwhelms my soul! From shame, I in Heaven's light my grief control; Thou art its fountain, which each night o'erflows. My couch! that oft hath woo'd me to repose, 'Mid sorrows vast—Love's iv'ried hand hath stole Griefs turgid stream, which o'er thee it doth roll, That hand which good on all but me bestows. Not only quiet and sweet rest I fly, But from myself and thought, whose vain pursuit On pinion'd fancy doth my soul transport: The multitude I did so long defy, Now as my hope and refuge I salute, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... the bannister and began to mount wearily, but never once trusting herself to glance towards Bernadine and the bread, lest something should be seen in her face which she chose to conceal. From that vision Beth would fly down the steps to the sands, and escape it in a healthy race with the turgid waves that came cresting in and broke on ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... any Spanish poet of to-day without thinking now and then of Ruben Dario, that prodigious Nicaraguan who collected into his verse all the tendencies of poetry in France and America and the Orient and poured them in a turgid cataract, full of mud and gold-dust, into the thought of the new generation in Spain. Overflowing with beauty and banality, patched out with images and ornaments from Greece and Egypt and France and Japan and his own Central America, symbolist and romantic and Parnassian all at once, Ruben Dario's ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... speaks in the highest terms, though it is possible that in his admiration for the severe and truly Roman sentiments it inculcated, he may have been indulgent to its artistic defects. The few lines that have come down to us resemble that ridiculed by Persius [13] for its turgid mannerisms. A good instance of the excellences which a Roman critic looked for in tragedy is afforded by the praise Cicero bestows on the Niptra, a play imitated from Sophocles. The passage is so interesting that it may well be added here. [14] ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... traveler dropped down into the wide valley, in the midst of which he first came into touch with the higher reaches of Suffering Creek. Here it flowed a sluggish, turgid stream, so sullen, so heavy. It was narrow, and at points curiously black in tone. There was none of the freshness, the rushing, tumultuous flow of a mountain torrent about it here. Its banks were marshy with a wide spread of oozy soil, and miry reeds grew in abundance. The trail cut ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... the plants. He had planted in rows only twelve to fourteen inches apart with a hill every eight inches in the row. The vines stood strong, straight, fourteen inches high and as even as a trimmed hedge. The leaves and stems were turgid, the deepest green and as prime and glossy as a prize steer. So close were the plants that there was leaf surface to intercept the sunshine falling on every square inch of the patch. There were no potato beetles and we saw no signs of injury but the gardener ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... river steamer and got back at half-past one. There had been a blissful hour of drifting black shadows, of gleaming ripples, and the heavy sonorous exhaust of benign boilers, spent on the topmost step of the pilot-house stairs, with a moon that dipped and swam in a turgid sea of drifting clouds. The rest had been rattle and bang of jazz and chatter, and bumping about on a hot, swaying floor into obstreperous shoulders, and the smell of sweetened popcorn and fresh paint and sickly perfume. Wednesday they went for a ride again ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... affectionate in their manner to their father this particular afternoon, and the latter had more than once brushed accidentally with the back of her head against the front of her father's trousers, and on the last occasion distinctly felt his prick, which was evidently in a slightly turgid state, and his trousers also slightly projected in the most ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... Marx's discussions of Beethoven's last works will be found of interest and value, though written in that turgid, vague, confused style—"words, words, words"—which the Germans denominate by the expressive term, Geschtwaetz. This is especially the case with his essays upon the great "Missa ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... make more trials of this nature, as the Indians and other nations have done on their palmes; and trees of several kinds, to their great emolument. The mystery is no more than this: About the beginning of March (when the buds begin to be proud and turgid, and before they explain into leaves) with a chizel and a mallet, cut a slit almost as deep as the very pith, under some bough or branch of a well-spreading birch; cut it oblique, and not long-ways (as a good chirurgion would make his orifice in a vein) inserting a small ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... 89. The act (July 7) is drawn up with admirable precision and force. On comparing it with the vague, turgid exaggerations of their adversaries, it seems to measure the intellectual distance between the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Des," he said, his weary eyes roving out over the turgid, yellow stream, "and she has been kind to you, though, God knows, you have played a man's part in all this. She has placed in your possession something for which at least five men have died in vain, something that has filled my thoughts, ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... Yellow River. They were agricultural, and had already reached a fairly high level of civilization—much higher than that of any other part of Eastern Asia. The Yellow River is a fierce and terrible stream, too swift for navigation, turgid, and full of mud, depositing silt upon its bed until it rises above the surrounding country, when it suddenly alters its course, sweeping away villages and towns in a destructive torrent. Among most early agricultural nations, such a river would have inspired superstitious awe, ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... Turgid Talmage must likewise unload; Talmage, who presumes to teach not only theology but political economy; who interlards his sermons with strange visions of Heaven, dreams of Hell, and still more wonderful hints on how to make a people terrestrially prosperous. He, like thousands ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the turgid, prostrate forms. He had flung off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and taken from his pocket the instrument of salvation. It was a small tube or trochar, with a lance passing down the inside; and ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... other's desperate clutch, but as he did so his foot caught against one of the rails and he slipped and fell to his knees. In the intervals of his own labored breathing, he heard the flow of the river, a dull ceaseless roar, and saw the flashing silver of the moon's rays as they touched the water's turgid surface. Langham no longer sought to force him from the bridge, but bent every effort to thrust him down between the ties to a swift ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... acres, extends from Saltley to Tyburn, two and a half miles, and who have now to deal with the sewage brought there from 188 miles of main sewers, extending as far as King's Norton and Selly Oak, Harborne, Smethwick, &c. The whole of the black and turgid stream of liquid filth brought down by the sewers is utilised upon the farm, some 200 cubic yards of mud being lifted daily from the settling tanks, to be dug in, while the overflow is taken by carriers to the most distant parts, and allowed to filtrate through the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... most charming qualities of the human mind. Though sometimes lax in points of grammar, as was much the custom in his day, he wrote as delightful a style as is to be found in all English literature, and that too when the stilted, verbose, and turgid habit was tediously prevalent. He was a man who impressed his ability upon all who met him; so that the abler the man and the more experienced in judging men, the higher did he rate Franklin when brought into direct ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... you done any better, I'd like to know? I've always used to get up with the lark, till I came under the petrifying influence of your turgid intellect." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... day. Clothed in the purple, Karl—Peter Van Dorn, he was, now—expanded. Turgid emotions surged through his new being. He was a new man. In his rightful place. He was delighted with the companionship of his new friend of the purple, Leon Lemaire. An euphonious name! A fine fellow! Fool that the Zar must be, to leave him in the care of so amiable a man. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... seizes them. They take to drink; they beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... graveyard of Tullichettle and falls into the Earn at the village of Comrie. It is compounded of two Gaelic words—ruadh (red), and tuill (flood). Ruadhthuill, therefore, is the red flood, and any one who has seen the red turgid waters of the Ruchill in time of flood will see that the name is significant of the thing itself. The word occurs in a shorter form—Ruel, a river in Argyllshire, which gives its name to the valley through which it flows—viz., Glendaruel. In the good old days when our Highland glens and straths ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... quite comfortable at this biography. He glanced nervously at me and was going to begin some kind of explanation, when Miss Doria cut him short. 'Remember our rule, Launcelot. No turgid war ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... immediate effect of opening the flood-gates of his wife's poetic temperament, for she replied at once to her spouse's effort with an epistle conceived in the terza rima employed by Dante, and though the poem is turgid in diction and shallow in thought, full of classical names and allusions, "a parade of all the treasures of the school-room," it exhibits the graceful ease and high scholarship which mark all Vittoria's writings. Meanwhile, unblest ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... I, smiling at the turgid sentiment which was so really and deeply felt. "And had you written folios upon the character of your countrymen, you could not ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tiny Lowland Republic of Nareda, which only five years ago came into national being as a protectorate of the United States. Its territory lies just north of the mountain Highlands of Haiti, Santo Domingo and Porto Rico. A few hundred miles of tumbled Lowlands, embracing the turgid Nares Sea, whose bottom is the lowest point of all the Western Hemisphere—some thirty thousand feet below ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... Dark Days of 1899-1900, if you had watched these turgid waters flow by, your eyes would have seen tinges of red like blood; and following the stain of red, gashed lifeless things, which had been torn from the ranks ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... withered brown stubbles, does animal life abound in India; but the rivers, lakes, and creeks teem with fish of every conceivable size, shape, and colour. The varieties are legion. From the huge black porpoise, tumbling through the turgid stream of the Ganges, to the bright, sparkling, silvery shoals of delicate chillooahs or poteeahs, which one sees darting in and out among the rice stubbles in every paddy field during the rains. ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... foremost man in the Republican party not by consistency in the stand that he made, but by his mastery of New York political machinery; Sumner of Massachusetts, the friend of John Bright, kept up a continual protest for freedom in turgid, scholarly harangues, which caught the spirit of Cicero's Philippics most successfully in their personal offensiveness. Powerful voices in literature and the Press were heard upon the same side—the New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley, acquired, as far as a paper in so large ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... high-sounding names, which they adopted and discarded in turn, as one after the other was discovered and brought into undesired prominence. The titles and grips and passwords of these secret military organizations, the turgid eloquence of their meetings, and the clandestine drill of their oath-bound members, doubtless exercised quite as much fascination on such followers as their unlawful object of aiding and abetting the Southern cause. The number of men thus enlisted in the work of inducing ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... an actor awaiting his cue in the wings of some turgid drama the plot of which he did not know. Venza was near the head of the incline. Some of the women and children were on it. A woman screamed. Her child had slipped from her hand; bounded up over the rail and fallen. ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... turgid clauses, with their enormous Latin substantives, seem to carry the reader forward through an immense succession of ages, until at last, with a sudden change of the rhythm, the whole of recorded time crumbles and vanishes before his ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... incompatible with the doleful character I was to assume, and I proceeded to cast them from me. I neglected my hair. I avoided my playmates. I frowned abstractedly. I didn't eat as much as was good for me. I took lonely walks. I brooded in solitude. I not only committed to memory the more turgid poems of the late Lord Byron—"Fare thee well, and if forever," &c.—but I became a despondent poet on my own account, and composed a string of "Stanzas to One who will understand them." I think I was a trifle too hopeful ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Is the light he brings commensurate with the darkness? What could he know? What does he tell? He tells so little that the question as to the value of his authorities is reduced to nearly nothing; and, of that little which we learn from his wordy and turgid pages, the smallest fraction only is of any ethnological interest. Indeed, Gildas is most worth notice for what he leaves unsaid. The rebellion of Maximus he mentions; but he is not answerable for the migration from Britain to Brittany, on which (as already stated) so much turns. The Saxons, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers, whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence carried, for the moment, all before them,—his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... woman are multiple, and to the clitoris must be added the nipples, the vulva, and even, it is said, the neck of the womb. In man the parts round the anus may also, besides the glans penis, form an excitable region. At the acme of erection the glans is turgid, and is applied directly against the neck of the womb (Fig. 18). In this way the sperm is ejaculated directly against the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... their eyes. The strange craft swung around the bend, and continued to keep edging toward the west side of the river. A broad expanse of turgid water met their eyes, broken here and there with a ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... already, in fact. It quite puts Sally in spirits—the rapid crescendo of the hissing steam, the gleaming boiler-dome that might be the fruitful mother of all the helmets that hang about her skirts, the sudden leaping of the whole from the turgid opacity behind and equally sudden disappearance into the void beyond, the vanishing "Fire!" cry from which all consonants have gone, leaving only a sound of terror, all confirm her view of the fog as a lark. For, you see, Sally believed ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... lack of all imagination admirably fitted him. There, at any rate, "Reuben Hallard" was, ready to face all the world, to go, perhaps, to the farthest Hebrides, to be lost in all probability, utterly lost, in the turgid flood of contemporary fiction. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... and less pleasing character. Although in blank verse, it is, in fact, a lyrical effusion; an ode on the rapid progress and final triumph of the Gospel. It looks like the composition of a young man: harsh and turgid in parts, but interspersed with some rather beautiful touches. The opening lines ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... It is, moreover, written in a style so opaque that it obscures her images from view as effectually as a piece of ground glass. To describe the approach of twilight—an hour beloved by writers of romance—she attempts a turgid paraphrase of Gray's Elegy: ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... without being reminded of the incantations in Macbeth. Banquo's Ghost again is 'romantic,' but so are Seneca's ghosts. For the swelling of the style in some of the great passages—however immeasurably superior these may be to anything in Seneca—and certainly for the turgid bombast which occasionally appears in Macbeth, and which seems to have horrified Jonson, Shakespeare might easily have found a model in Seneca. Did he not think that this was the high Roman manner? Does not the Sergeant's speech, as ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... between the hills, flowed a tortuous stream, by courtesy called a river. It sometimes rose in a turgid flood, but more often it sank and delivered up its ghost to such an extent that a man could have held it in his hat. Nevertheless some greenery flourished ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... well—clear, methodical, and argumentative; but his eloquence, like himself, is not so graceful as it is upon the whole manly; and there is a little tendency to verbosity in his language, as there is to corpulency in his figure; but nothing turgid, while it is entirely free from affectation. The character of respectable is very legibly impressed, in everything about the mind and manner of his lordship. I should, now that I have seen and heard him, be astonished to hear such a man ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... Ross's nerves, made Karara suddenly reach out and clasp fingers about the wrists of the two men she walked between; it was a crushing sensation of age, of a toll of years so long, so heavy, as to make time itself into a turgid flood which tugged at their bodies, mired their feet as they trudged after the Foanna. This sense of age, of a dead and heavy past, was so stifling that all three ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... thirty miles wide toward the mouth, its muddy current discolors the ocean's blue forty miles out in the Pacific, I am told. In fact, I think {139} it must have been that distance that I last saw the great turgid stream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow the river becomes very rough on windy days. Consequently, when I wished to go across to Wuchang, I found that the motor boat couldn't go, so tempestuous were the waves, but a rather rickety looking ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... him, I cannot say; but I know him well, and consequently expect nothing. As a lawyer, he was mediocre; as a statesman, vacillating and without any fixed principles; as an orator, (for some had claimed him to be such,) he was turgid and verbose—sometimes he was sarcastic, but only when the malignity of his nature found vent in the bitterness of words. His private conduct has, in every situation, been bad. He was one of the Lee and Gates faction to displace Washington from the command of the army. He decried ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... him, freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own unworthiness. Also he was handicapped in another way. He had himself never been in love before. He had liked women in that turgid past of his, and been fascinated by some of them, but he had not known what it was to love them. He had whistled in a masterful, careless way, and they had come to him. They had been diversions, incidents, part of the game men ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... induced the Ebionites to reject all St. Paul's Epistles? Despair. For while those Letters kept their credit, the custom of circumcision, which these men had reintroduced, was set aside as an anachronism. What induced that crime-laden apostate Luther to call the Epistle of James contentious, turgid, arid, a thing of straw, and unworthy of the Apostolic spirit? Despair. For by this writing the wretched man's argument of righteousness consisting in faith alone was stabbed through and rent assunder. What induced Luther's whelps to expunge off-hand from ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... two red lines slowly defined themselves across his face. The theatrical quality of the scene and the turgid rhetorical bathos of the boy's speeches attested his youth and the unformed violence of his emotions. Did they also indicate a rehearsal, or had the boy merely been goaded to vague action by implicit belief in a woman's vagaries? Orde did not know, but the incident brought home to him, as nothing ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... And at his feet The world passed on—the surging crowd Of men and women, passionate, turgid, dense, Keenly alert, lethargic, or obese. (Those ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... whativer becomes of all the wather?" exclaimed Jimmie, as they passed the mouth of the Ohio, and could see the great flood of turgid water that was pouring into the Mississippi, there having evidently been something of a rain ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... and vulgar: let it be, in short, what the lowest may understand; and, at the same time, the most learned cannot but approve. The whole may be adorned with figure and metaphor, provided they are not turgid or bombast, nor seem stiff and laboured, which, like meat too highly seasoned, ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... root all over Germany, and put Wagner back many years. At the death of Mendelssohn, the Philistines heralded the coming of a new German national school, founded on his principles (formalism), one that would clarify the artistic atmosphere of the turgid and anarchistic excesses of Wagner and Berlioz and their followers. These critics found already that Beethoven's melodies were too long and his instrumentation too involved. They declared that the further music departed from ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... to my lot to dine in the City, as the guest of the Honourable Company of Tile-Glazers and Mortar-Mixers. As I swam forlornly through a turgid ocean of turtle-soup and clarified punch towards an unyielding continent of fish, irrigated by brown sherry, mechanically rehearsing to myself the series of sparkling yet statesmanlike epigrams with which I proposed to reply to the toast ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... obscure by his turgid and florid style, was to explain the religious doctrines of Archbishop Leighton and the early Puritans, which he held as orthodox, by means of the momentous distinction between Reason and the Understanding, which he borrowed from the Critik der Reinen ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a stronger proof of the charms of harmonious elocution, than the many, even unnatural scenes and flights of the false sublime it has lifted into applause. In what raptures have I seen an audience, at the furious fustian and turgid rants in Nat. Lee's Alexander the Great! for though I can allow this play a few great beauties, yet it is not without its extravagant blemishes. Every play of the same author has more or less of them. Let ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that Mr. Laing had proved Ossian an impostor, but that the merit of MacPherson's work remained, although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch mountain "Lachin Y Gair," has two Ossianic lines ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... that the moderately tight ligature renders the veins turgid and distended, and the whole hand full of blood, I ask, whence is this? Does the blood accumulate below the ligature coming through the veins, or through the arteries, or passing by certain hidden porosities? Through the veins it cannot come; still less can it come through ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... days, it seemed, Altar Valley was a bright and green expanse, where dust clouds did not rise. Forlorn River ran, a slow, heavy, turgid torrent. Belding never saw the river in flood that it did not give him joy; yet now, desert man as he was, he suffered a regret when he thought of the great Chase reservoir full and overflowing. The dull thunder of the spillway was not pleasant. It was the first time in his life ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... modern poems of the Ayreshire ploughman, we may see many instances of the effect of simplicity. To preserve our pupil's taste from a false love of ornament, he must avoid, either in books or in conversation, all verbose and turgid descriptions, the use of words and epithets which only fill up ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... year of Eadgar's reign. He took much of his material from a Saxon Chronicle, like that of Winchester, but he has also matter peculiar to himself; and this raises a question whether he took such matter from a Saxon Chronicle now lost. He is grandiloquent and turgid to an extent which often obscures his meaning. In him we perceive all the word-eloquence of Saxon poetry, striving to utter itself through the medium of a Latinity at ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... library should occasionally be weeded out and overhauled. The libraries which were formed in past generations cannot be expected to suit present-day requirements. In a great many country-house libraries there is little else than a great mass of turgid theology, but very often buried among these are really valuable books. Upon the death of the head of a family, the library should be carefully gone over in order that the new owner may get an idea of the books—a ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... been rejected by this little girl upon whose head he had meant to shower the blessing of marital protection, the regard of a soul that was not quite indifferent, after all. What was this dull pang somewhere in his symmetrical, well-kept body? Was it the night that made his pulses heavy and turgid? ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... company, and Norman B. Ream are but representatives of Marshall Field, whose name has never been identified with the property he so largely owns and controls." That fulsome writer, with the usual inaccuracies and turgid exaggerations of "popular writers," omitted to say that although Field was long the controlling figure in the management of the Pullman works, yet other powerful American multimillionaires, such as the Vanderbilts, had also ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... a pretty revenge. Out of oration of fifty-five minutes duration, he appropriated twenty-five to general observations prefacing exposition of clauses of Bill. Just the same kind of pompous platitude conveyed in turgid phraseology, at which, in old times, Members used to laugh and run away. But CHAPLIN had them now. Like the wedding guest whom the Ancient Mariner button-holed—though as PLUNKET reminds me, the A.M. was meagre ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... overthrown every hope that Macpherson's Ossian might prove the translation of a series of poems complete in themselves; but while the imposture is discovered, the merit of the work remains undisputed, though not without faults—particularly, in some parts, turgid and ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... cluster around his name. Magic, the children will get from these tales but little else. But if the tales should succeed in taking a child with them in their strange exploits into a strange land, they would surely fail to take him into the turgid human drama they picture. And as surely we should wish them to fail. The sagas, like most genuine folk-lore deal with the great elemental human facts, life and death, love, sexual passion and its consequences, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood. ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... And rich with fruits, lay bounded for his own; Deep thro the centre spreads a branching bay, Full sails ascend and golden rivers stray; Bright palaces arise relieved in gold, And gates and streets the crossing lines unfold. James furrows o'er the plate with turgid tide, Young Richmond roughens on his masted side; Reviving Norfolk from her ashes springs, A golden phoenix on refulgent wings; Potowmak's yellow waves reluctant spread, And Vernon rears his rich and radiant head, Tis here the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... in a short and chopping sea. A turgid sea indicates its constraint. Even in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by the boiling-like appearance of the waves. And thus it was, for they were unconsciously coasting Aurigny. Between ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Seneca, the declaimer. Be the author of them who he may, there can be but one opinion on the merit of the compositions. The style is nervous and replete with beauties, but, according to the corrupted taste of the time in which they were written, abounds too much with ornament, is often turgid and inflated. Those tragedies, however, contain much good morality, conveyed in brilliant sentences and illustrated ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various |
