"Somnolent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the frauelein's fingers, Deidrick nodded a resigned acquiescence, and at the finish was fast asleep. Every evening after that Deidrick proposed in perfect good faith, the girl repeated her objections with equal candour, and they were received with somnolent approval. Love-making is very agreeable, and by the usuage of long years it becomes a confirmed habit. In less than a decade it became impossible for Katrina to enjoy her supper without the regular proposal, and Deidrick could not sleep of a night ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... the vibra-currents through the liquids of the huge tanks where he had lain somnolent for untold aeons. It was pleasant, caressing. For a moment he floated there, enjoying to the utmost this strange sensation as the renewed thought-life-force set his every convolution ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... Average Jones' clean cut, agreeable, but rather stolidly neutral face underwent a subtle transformation. Another personality looked out from the deep-set, somnolent, gray eyes; a personality resolute, forceful and quietly alert. It was apparently belied by the hesitant drawl, which, as all who had ever seen the Ad-Visor at his chosen pursuits well knew, signified awakened or intensified interest in the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... downfall of proofs, queries, and scribbled sheets which descended upon his desk from all sides. For a time he struggled manfully: for a time thereafter he wallowed desperately. Then he sent out a far cry for help. The cry smote upon the ear of McGuire Ellis, "Hoong!" ejaculated that somnolent toiler, coming up out of deep waters. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... he entered to find it deserted save for the somnolent old gentleman and the hospitable Pete, but for whom P. Sybarite would probably never have known the delirious joy of that internal celebration or found the courage ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... could be. Money in the hands of the individual is continuously and feverishly on the search for opportunities, i. e. for creative and productive use. In the hands of the Government it is apt to lose a good deal of its fructifying energy and ceaseless striving and to sink instead into placid and somnolent repose. ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... gradually and sensibly vanishing away for about three years; some months before it had entirely perished, though I stood motionless, everything which I looked at seemed in motion to and fro. A stiff cloudy vapour seemed to have settled on my forehead and temples, which usually occasions a sort of somnolent pressure upon my eyes, and particularly from dinner till the evening. So that I often recollect what is said of the poet Phineas in ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... ludicrous: witness the indecent exposures of themselves made by Voltaire, La Harpe, and many billions beside of bilious people. Whereas, of all the shameful people (equally billions and not less bilious) that have presumed to quarrel with Milton, not one has thought him ludicrous, but only dull and somnolent. In 'Lear' and in 'Hamlet,' as in a human face agitated by passion, are many things that tremble on the brink of the ludicrous to an observer endowed with small range of sympathy or intellect. But no man ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... too, that the following noon—this day being a Sunday, warm, clear, and somnolent—Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave sat upon the lawn before Matocton, and little Roger Musgrave was with them. In fact, these two had been high-handedly press-ganged by this small despot to serve against an enemy then harassing his majesty's ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... so early abroad—a curse to which I responded with a sonorous "Pax Domini sit tecum" the still somnolent sentinel opened the post and let us pass. I was glad in the end that we had waited and thus avoided the necessity of showing my ring, for should inquiries be made concerning two monks, that ring of mine might have betrayed ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... train, at this hour?" murmured Mr. Welles. His voice was sunk to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his waistcoat moved slowly and rhythmically with his breathing. It was evident that he did not in the least care whether it was ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... held a mighty sage, and physical speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangerous touch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold folk, and had the courage of their opinions more than most men. So even in Lichfield, cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability that quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendants of a single similar original form, and even that 'one and the same kind of living filament is, and has been, the cause ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... your advice, which I am following, having got Lord Malmesbury's Diary; but I am relapsing into my natural dawdling, lazy, and somnolent habits, and can with difficulty get through the leaders ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... himself. Extreme heat after extreme cold always has a somnolent effect on those who ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence, he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a peering suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the other silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an amazing and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken black hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage properties of a stupid and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... body of a woman from out the gutter, and the messenger from the Oasis of Khargegh strode through the gateway of the hotel and kicked the somnolent ghafir or watchman, who coughed discreetly behind ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... of a certain village in northern India; crows were packed everywhere, taking no notice for the nonce of the feast of filth and garbage spread invitingly around them, and in which sprawled the disgusting, distorted bodies of somnolent water buffaloes; inside the houses hags, matrons, maidens, and little maids slept through the terrific heat of the noonday hours; in the distance the Himalayas, supreme and distressing, like a ridge across eternity, lay behind the ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... the other end of the street, where Cousin Tryphena's tiny, two-roomed house stood, we always laid bare the secrets of her somnolent, respectable, unprofitable life; we always informed our visitors that she lived and kept up a social position on two hundred and fifteen dollars a year, and that she had never been further from home than to the next village. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... people, are so indolent and so somnolent that Antonio gets away with all our wild birds, then do we ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... Something somnolent seemed to be here, and he wondered. It was like a deep, heavy, yet soft prison where, without sin, one may ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... skulking affrighted somewhere in the grim and sullen purlieus of the sky? She listened, thinking to hear the stir of horses in their stalls, some sound from barn or byre, the wakening of the restless poultry, all snugly housed; but the somnolent stillness of the muffled earth continued unbroken, and only the frantic wind screamed and ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... scheme into effect than that which at that moment presented itself to me. I quietly emerged from my place of concealment and, once more crouching low among the ferns, crept slowly and with infinite caution toward the somnolent Jose, gradually working my way round until I could just see him clear of the corner of the capstan-house. Some twenty minutes of this work brought me right up to the gable end of the building, from which position I again reconnoitred ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... the automobile down into Harrimay only ten minutes later. It was a pretty but rather somnolent place, just a string of white-painted, green-blinded houses and two or three stores along both sides of an oiled highway. It was a long ten-minute jitney ride from the ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... landscape dotted with one man ploughing with a dun mule. Nobody was dragging the creek; no couriers dashed hither and yon, bringing tidings of no news to the distracted parents. There was a sylvan attitude of somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view. "Perhaps," says I to myself, "it has not yet been discovered that the wolves have borne away the tender lambkin ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... night the sereno pauses before our balcony, and after assuring the somnolent, in recitative, that it is 'three-quarters past eleven and nu-bla-do!' approaches me, and in a mysterious whisper enquires whether I carry 'contradanos,' or charms against evil, about my person. Finding that I do ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... success is no more than that which is the ordinary lot of mortal man. He never reflects that all the old married fogies whom he knows and despises, have just as much ground for pride, if such pride were enduring; that every fat, silent, dull, somnolent old lady whom he sees and quizzes, has at some period been deemed as worthy a prize as his priceless galleon; and so deemed by as bold a captor ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... song-bird's mute— The very air seems somnolent and sick: The spreading branches with o'er-ripen'd fruit Show in the sunshine all their clusters thick, While now and then a mellow apple falls With a dull sound within ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... not well. He has a slight stricture, of which he makes a great deal, and a bad cold. He seemed somnolent; but I have ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... forty years before, bought the ranchos surrounding them from the Moreno grandees. Gone were the Morenos from all but the archives of California, but the willows and Dr. Hiram Webster were full of years and honors. The ranchos were ranchos no longer. A somnolent city covered their fertile acres, catching but a whiff at angels' intervals of the metropolis of nerves and pulse and ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Phyllis was glad to be alone. She had tried to send her lover away cheerfully; but there is always the afterward. The "afterward" to Phyllis was an extreme sadness that was almost lethargy. Many crushed souls have these fits of somnolent depression; and it does no good either to reproach them, or to point out that physical infirmity is the cause. They know what the sorrowful sleep of the apostles in the garden of Olivet was, and pity them. Phyllis wept slow, heavy tears until she fell into a deep slumber, and she did not awaken ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... transfigured, lit up from within as it were, when his drooping eyelids were raised and his eyes awoke to life. In the son's case, the father's ponderousness had turned to gravity. This big fellow, Eugene, usually preserved a heavy somnolent demeanour. At the same time, certain of his heavy, languid movements suggested those of a giant stretching his limbs pending the time for action. By one of those alleged freaks of nature, of which, however, science is now commencing to discover the laws, if physical resemblance to Pierre was perfect ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... breathing of the lungs, the red, resilient blood in the veins, the supple obedience of all the members. And—without words, without thoughts, without consciousness—one was drawn on this night to be running without raiment in the somnolent forest, to be sniffing hurriedly the tracks of some one's feet on the dewy grass, with a loud call to be summoning ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... arrived which was to bring the final test of strength. Picture the large, ponderous structure of black granite—erected at the expense of millions and suggesting somewhat the somnolent architecture of ancient Egypt—which served as the city hall and county court-house combined. On this evening the four streets surrounding it were packed with thousands of people. To this throng Cowperwood has become an astounding figure: his wealth fabulous, his heart iron, his intentions ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... retain one's hold of the prize, which is not difficult in somnolent darkness. Any Cicada encountered by the fierce Locustid on her nocturnal rounds is bound to die a lamentable death. This explains those sudden agonized notes which grate through the woods at late, unseasonable hours, when ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... the dogs you are!' cried the Captain"—with feet perched high she swooped down the slope, her heart pounding with excitement, narrowly escaping collision at the bottom with an empty van, crawling through the heat, manned by a somnolent, huddled driver. Its hollow, cumbrous rattling pointed sharply the loneliness of the silent road, almost bare now of houses, for they were on the very outskirts of the village, and in a flash Caroline knew it for ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... been presenting the explanation for over forty years to my pupils. The sensibility to hypnotic phenomena is due to the anterior portion of the middle lobe of the brain—to the portion which is developed one inch behind the external angle of the eye, by exciting which we bring on the somnolent condition. The predominance of this region renders the person liable to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... sojourn, had wine, tea, coffee, meat, and bread, all wholesome and plentiful, yet dysentery continued and in most patients had assumed a typhoid character. [Footnote: The word typhoid means "resembling typhus," and in Europe this term is correctly employed to designate a somnolent or other general condition in all kinds of feverish diseases which remind one of typhus symptoms. What English and American physicians call typhus or typhus fever is known to European physicians under the name of exanthematic or petechial typhus, indicating a symptom by which it ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... moon. The soft glow of a few misty, somnolent stars gave no light among the trees, no light shone from the house. Mackenzie recalled the night he had first approached that door and come suddenly around the corner into the pale beam of Hertha Carlson's lantern. Now the kitchen door might be shut, and there ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... town of S——, a comfortable place very slightly disturbed by the fact that it had been already the scene of four battles; there was just this effect, as it seemed to me, that the affairs of the day were carried on with a kind of somnolent indifference.... "You may order your veal," the waiter seemed to say, "but whether you will get it or no is entirely in the hands of God. It is, therefore, of no avail that I should hurry or that you should ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... yellow in the sun, brown in the shadow—great hay-boats came by, their sails scarce filled with the light breeze; standing high, they sailed slowly and picturesquely, with men thrown in all attitudes; somnolent in sunshine and pungent odour—one only at work, wielding ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... discontented started for Chili. Hernando Pizarro, who was appointed governor of Cuzco, held young Manco in close confinement, and everything outwardly was as fine and lovely as a summer day. There was growing, however, a tremendous uprising in which hitherto somnolent Fate was about to lay her belated hands upon nearly all the actors of the great drama which had heretofore been so ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... long been sitting with half-closed eyes, and hands which bestowed no encouragement upon his somnolent steeds save an occasional flicking of the reins against their flanks; whilst Petrushka had lost his cap, and was leaning backwards until his head had come to rest against Chichikov's knees—a position which necessitated his being awakened with a cuff. Selifan also roused himself, and apportioned ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... less than twenty different languages, and may be said without the faintest risk of contradiction, to have been the busiest instrument of Buddhist propaganda for many a day in the annals of that long somnolent dharma. The least that learned Buddhists of Ceylon can do to repay the debt of gratitude they owe to Colonel Olcott and other members of the Theosophical Society who have worked for them, is to bestir themselves to throw some light on their own ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... movement in the crowd, which parted. At the farther end of the lane thus made, a flashy young gypsy was seen, with a somnolent old mare on ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... liberate ourselves from such inconvenience, by abandoning as far as we can a fleshy diet? and let us remember, that even on the score of comfort, the pain of indigence is much milder than that which is produced by repletion. We should thus free ourselves at once from a heavy and somnolent condition of body, from many and vehement diseases, from the want of medical assistance, from "the crassitude of the corporeal bond," and above all, from that savage and unnatural strength which incites to base actions, so as to escape an Iliad ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... little to be admired. As a general rule, the members speak shamefully ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and so are the fines. The Ballot Question—oldest of dialectic nightmares—is often found astride of a somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of GENERAL-UTILITY men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and they fill as many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the 'Princess's,' which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in Peru, a haunt ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... even for the day. He was entirely incapable of earning a living and had been successively an actor, a lecturer, a preacher, and a pedagogue. He was a fine scholar of Latin and could quote Terence, Horace, and Plautus in a way that could stir the somnolent soul even of a school-boy. His chief enemy, next to laziness, was drink. He would disappear for days at a time into his study, and afterward explain that he had been engaged in the preparation of his magnum opus, which periodically was just on the point of ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... the field of letters still further aroused Haynerd's interest. The peacefully somnolent Social Era, he thought, might awaken to new things under the stimulus of such fresh writing as hers. Perhaps life did hold something of real value after all. Would she furnish him with a column or two on the peculiar ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... weather-beaten church or public building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood- red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled"; Burntisland where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reform which were worth all others; that those administrative establishments in Downing Street are really the Government of this huge ungoverned Empire; that to clean out the dead pedantries, unveracities, indolent somnolent impotences, and accumulated dung-mountains there, is the beginning of all practical good whatsoever. Yes, get down once again to the actual pavement of that; ascertain what the thing is, and was before dung accumulated in it; and what it should and may, and must, for the life's sake of this ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... made a stiff compliment to Corona on her youthful appearance. The men were almost all grandees of Spain of the first class and wore their ribbons by common consent, which lent the assembly an imposing appearance; but several of them were of a somnolent disposition and nodded after dinner, which did not contribute to prolong the effect produced. Orsino thought their stories and anecdotes very long-winded and pointless, and even the old prince himself seemed oppressed by the solemnity of the affair, and rarely laughed. Corona, with serene ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... Marshall in the boat calmly awaiting his return; and this feeling presently grew so strong within him that he could scarcely credit his eyes when, upon passing through the screen of concealing foliage, he saw only the three seamen curled up in the boat. They roused themselves from their semi-somnolent condition and sat up to receive him, with glances of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... made the acquaintance of a great blonde man, who talked incessantly about beautiful women, and painted them sometimes larger than life, in somnolent attitudes, and luxurious tints. His studio was a welcome contrast to the spitting and betting of the tobacco shop. His pictures—Doré-like improvisations, devoid of skill, and, indeed, of artistic perception, save a certain ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... be no less than Claggett Chew's cabin, the door of which had been left open so that Osterbridge Hawsey could watch the fight with the least possible discomfort. He sat, somnolent, in a comfortable chair, his long legs stretched out before him, smoking a clay pipe. His attention wandering, as it so often did, he failed to see the mouse who ran under his legs into the shadow beneath them. ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... was just shaking the man gently by the shoulder to rouse him when the still night air was rent by a most heart-shaking yell, instantly followed by several shrill screams of agony in quick succession. As Frobisher started to his feet in horror he saw the somnolent sentries at the gap in the very act of falling under the flashing blades of a horde of yelling, shouting, ferocious savages who, at the first wild rush, had broken into the fort, and were now spearing the hapless Chinese seamen, who, scarcely half-awake, were blindly searching ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... as I stretched my legs—"Hamilcar, somnolent Prince of the City of Books—thou guardian nocturnal! Like that Divine Cat who combated the impious in Heliopolis—in the night of the great combat—thou dost defend from vile nibblers those books which the old savant acquired at the cost ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... of Tinkletown is a slow-going, somnolent sort of place in which veils are worn by old ladies who wish to enjoy a pleasant snooze during the sermon without being caught in the act. That any one should wear a veil with the same regularity and the same purpose that she wears the dress which renders the remainder ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... cotton and naval stores. This business activity was not immediately apparent to my unaccustomed eyes. Indeed, when I first saw the town, there brooded over it a calm that seemed almost sabbatic in its restfulness, though I learned later on that underneath its somnolent exterior the deeper currents of life—love and hatred, joy and despair, ambition and avarice, faith and friendship—flowed not less ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... had been lounging semi-somnolent with an extinct cigarette in her jewelled fingers, sat up and said in the uncertain voice of an inexperienced girl who has ceased to count ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... but I believe my words are pretty correct. When Lord Brougham had delivered this emphatic utterance, he proceeded with his address, which was a dull affair and did not inspire the least enthusiasm. It was, indeed, a somewhat somnolent discourse, and his audience hardly seemed to wake up till he reached his peroration, which closed with a telling quotation from ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... At somnolent Cordoba I left the line to Vera Cruz for that to the southward. The car was packed with the dirty, foul-tongued wives and the children and bundles of a company of soldiers recently sent against the rebels of Juchitan. Ever since leaving Boca del Monte the day before I had been coming precipitously ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... weakness extends westward from the Lesser Antilles across the Gulf of Mexico into Mexico proper, where are located some of the loftiest volcanoes of the globe, Popocatepetl and Orizaba, both now in somnolent condition, and including the more westerly volcano of Colima, which has been almost continuously in ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... that was not nearly so profound as that of the coal-shovelling. But there was a difference. When I went coal-shovelling my mind had not yet awakened. Between that time and the laundry my mind had found the kingdom of the mind. While shovelling coal my mind was somnolent. While toiling in the laundry my mind, informed and eager to do and ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... to one evening after dinner, but the debates, as delivered by the Duke, had generally a somnolent effect upon his wife. She had a faint idea of the beginning, and struggled heroically to discover what the speakers were talking about; then came a soft confusion of sound, like the falling of waters; and the middle ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... Somnolent, vast, inert, the darkness lay Waiting for dawn. Across the ocean stirred A luminous haze, not light, but whispering light, So softly yet, the islands had not heard. The mystery of sleep was in the trees And on the weary stars. ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... who were still missing the reason for their absence was simple enough. As soon as Suarez had parted from his somnolent companion, the thought occurred to him that since the latter, only a single man, was so careful of his life, he, being married, and with a family, had still greater reason for being careful of his. Having given his companion a proof of his courage, which had cost ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... have waned; But I will right that. We've good chances still. You must return foot-hot to Quatre-Bras; There Kellermann's cuirassiers will promptly join you To bear the English backward Brussels way. I go on towards Fleurus and Ligny now.— If Blucher's force retreat, and Wellington's Lie somnolent in Brussels one day more, I gain that city ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... stewards and other members of the crew were sent round to arouse the people. Some utterly refused to get up. The stewards had almost to force the doors of the staterooms to make the somnolent appreciate their peril, and many of them, it is believed, were drowned ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... bringing fresh light to bear upon our investigations. After the luncheon interval, I was pleased to observe that for one cause or another—I repeat, for one cause or another—he was distinctly—shall I say somnolent, gentlemen? Yes, I will say somnolent. And I wish to inform him that the more somnolent he remains, the better we ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... as they solemnly let the hours drift past them. During a whole sunny afternoon, which I once spent in those pastoral surroundings, I can scarcely remember the slightest movement taking place among the somnolent herd. There was a gentle breeze that made waves in the silky sea of grass and sometimes stirred the fresh green leaves of the trees overhead. The birds were singing sweetly, and the distant tolling of the cathedral bells at Carentan added a richness to the sounds of nature. Imagine ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... "The excitable weakness of the old man brings him into great danger of becoming a criminal. The excitability is opposed to slowness and one-sidedness in thought; he is easily surprised by irrelevancies; he is torn from his drowse, and behaves like a somnolent drunkard.... The very old individual is a fanatic about rest—every disturbance of his rest troubles him. Hence, all his anger, all his teasing and quarreling, all his obstinacy and stiffness, have a single ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Mediterranean, even in the calmest weather, a light pleasant breeze springs up after sunset; this and the cloudless sky, and unobscured brilliancy of the stars, are attractions sufficient to allure the most somnolent and unromantic mortal to ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... watching through the bank window, saw the young man lead his horse across the street and once more disappear within the courthouse. Then for some minutes he continued in somnolent contemplation of the courthouse front. At ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... is very late, and he is in a gently, kindly, somnolent state, born of the arm-chair and his pipe,—"I wonder if one was to give in to them entirely, would ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... behind the laziness was concealed a huge force, an unconquerable force, as yet unconscious of itself, not having, as yet, created for itself clear desires and aims. And the absence of consciousness in this half-somnolent existence cast upon its whole beautiful expanse a shade of melancholy. Submissive patience, the silent expectation of something new and more active was audible even in the call of the cuckoo, as it flew with the wind from the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... affair compared with action. The whole set of events that I have narrated occupied but a few minutes. When I unbolted the parlor door and found a somnolent navvy waiting to be shaved, I realized with astonishment how brief the ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... that she could explain, she turned into the lower and quieter spur of Madison Avenue, climbing and descending Murray Hill. Here she was almost alone. Motor-car traffic had practically ceased; foot-passengers there were none; on each side of the street the houses were somber and somnolent. The electric lamps flared as elsewhere, but ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... three hours of hard exercise a day. From that moment the lazy brutes led a dog’s life. Water and the detested “Spratt“ biscuit, scorned in happier days, formed their meagre ordinary; instead of somnolent airings in a softly cushioned landau they were torn from chimney corner musings to be raced through cold, muddy streets by a ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... which the bird paid to everything that passed, and the presence of the old lady as well, did for a time interfere with their conversation. But, after awhile, the old lady was asleep, and the bird, having once or twice attempted to imitate the somnolent sounds which his mistress was making, seemed also to go to sleep himself. Then Reginald, beginning with Lady Ushant and the old Morton family generally, gradually got the conversation round to Bragton and the little bridge. He had been very stern when he had left her there, and he knew ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... was human, and this is tantamount to saying that he was not capable of ignoring the somnolent influences of human nature. To his own extreme surprise his head fell forward with an abrupt nod while he was engaged in the act of depicting Big Waller's nose, and he found, on resuming work, with an imbecile smile at what he deemed his weakness, that ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... says, "to watch the Assyrian dawn, and Paphian sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill." From its clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of theological association—a vague reverberation of old Calvinistic sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent quality. The three years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should suppose, among the happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently genial. In the American Note-Books there is a charming passage ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... and she handed the man the key. The detective who had done the speaking passed into the bedroom, and the girl heard him pulling out the drawers. She did not move from where she stood confronting her late employer, still preserving his attitude of somnolent detachment. ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... my lovely seneschal! so somnolent, so statuesque! Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... demanded by the expeditionary force. In order to provide for the quantities of essential supplies and to avoid the congestion of the chief ports of France, certain ports were especially allotted to our army, of which the most important were St. Nazaire, Bordeaux, and Brest. The first, a somnolent fishing village, was transformed by the energy of American engineers into a first-class port with enormous docks, warehouses, and supply depots; Brest rose in the space of twelve months from the rank of a second-class port to one that matched Hamburg in the extent of its shipping. In all, more than ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... A comfortable, rather somnolent feeling settled upon the school. A long stand at cricket is a soothing sight to watch. There was an absence of hurry about the batsmen which harmonised well with the drowsy summer afternoon. And yet runs were coming at a fair pace. The hundred went up at five o'clock, the hundred and fifty at ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... of torpor of the soul, a somnolent sense of comfort in spite of the pains which still continued, but which, however, had ceased to make themselves felt. It was one of those sensations which we are willing to endure and not any of those frightful wrenches against which our tortured ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... on Bucephalus's back and he slowed to a walk. Inside the governess-cart all was somnolent peace. Behind us the car was already beginning to make remarks on one of those abusive press-the-button horns. "You FOOL! You FOOL! Get OUT o' the way! Get OUT o' the way!" it said. Then we heard the car slow down and pandemonium broke loose. The horn was reinforced by an ordinary hooter, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... commiserating murmur indicated that Mrs. Harkutt was receiving her guests. The cool breath of the wet leaves without slightly stirred the white dimity curtains, and somewhere from the darkened eaves there was a still, somnolent drip. Presently a hurried whisper and a half-laugh appeared to be suppressed in the outer passage or hall. There was another moment of hesitation and the door opened suddenly and ostentatiously, disclosing Phemie, with a taller and slighter young woman, her elder sister, at ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... at the lower levels. While Karstens and Tatum were tossing uneasily in the bedclothes, the writer sat up with a blanket round his shoulders, crouching over the primus stove, with the thermometer at -21 deg. F. outdoors. Walter alone was at ease, with digestive and somnolent capabilities proof against any invasion. It was, of course, broad daylight all night. At three the company was aroused, and, after partaking of a very light breakfast indeed, we sallied forth into the brilliant, clear morning with not a cloud in the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... a shout behind me; and, glancing back, saw my pursuers, three now, with my full-bodied cousin for whipper-in—change their course as I leapt a brook and headed for the crowded enclosure. A somnolent fat man, bulging, like a feather-bed, on a three-legged stool, dozed at the receipt of custom, with a deal table and a bowl of sixpences before him. I dashed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... painfully aware of a somnolent tendency in Frederick (which had no existence out of his own imagination), and after dinner, when Frederick had withdrawn, privately apologised to Mrs General for the poor man. 'The most estimable and affectionate of brothers,' he ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... indeed, they have been swarming in since Prague came into her own some few years ago and became the capital of a free and independent republic. In former years, when Prague was still accounted a small provincial town of somnolent habits, there were only two or three hotels that counted at all as accommodation for foreigners; now there are many yet inadequate to the number of visitors. As to those that are drawn to Prague, their numbers may be accounted for by the fact that most of them are native Bohemians who ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... plump, light-coloured person, with a smooth fair face, a somnolent eye, and an elaborate coiffure. Miss Sophy was a girl of one-and-twenty, very small and very pretty—what I suppose would have been called a lively brunette. Both of these ladies were attired in black silk dresses, very much trimmed; they had an air ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... allowed to sink into a somewhat somnolent condition owing to its immunity from direct attack, has been now rudely awakened. Fires commencing in earnest yesterday, after a few half-hearted attempts made previously, have been raging in half a dozen different places in this huge compound; and one incendiary, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... read, peruse lie, prevaricate hearty, cordial following, subsequent crowd, multitude chew, masticate food, pabulum eat, regale meal, repast meal, refection thrift, economy sleepy, soporific slumberous, somnolent live, reside rot, putrefy swelling, protuberant soak, saturate soak, absorb stinking, malodorous spit, saliva spit, expectorate thievishness, kleptomania belch, eructate sticky, adhesive house, domicile eye, optic walker, pedestrian talkative, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... semi-unconscious, semi-somnolent state, half syncope, half sleep, and there was nothing to be gained by rousing her just then, so we wrapped her up warmly in shawls, sent for my dogcart, and lifted her on the back seat, where I supported her as best I could, while my man ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... a cigarette, he essayed for the second time to arouse the Baron; but getting nothing but the most somnolent responses, he set out for a stroll, visiting the gardens, stables, kennels, and keeper's house, and even inspecting a likely pool or two upon the river, and making in the course of it several useful acquaintances ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... any spoken or published statement. The exultant hope of to-day was dashed to-morrow. The despair of the morning was lightened by gleams of hope before night closed, and was darkened and lightened again and again. Great cities and towns aroused themselves from a half-somnolent belief in security. Village by village England awakened to what she faced in common with an amazed and half incredulous world. The amazement and incredulity were founded upon a certain mistaken belief ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... at all, 'twas in the symbol of the old Apostle, "in Him we live and move and have our being." She recalled that God had been defined in the consciousness of the race as Love. Deep draughts of new existence whelmed her. No longer life coursed somnolent through unconscious veins. Life ran riotous of gladness tingling to a living joy so poignant it became pain. Was it fool-joy born of swifter pulse and time-old inheritance in the flesh? Was it the rhapsody of self-hypnotism, which ancients would have called vision? ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... meant a lot more'n what it let on, pointin' up this way!" Casey muttered, staring down upon a somnolent wilderness blanketed with hushed midnight. "If it thinks it's got Casey whipped, it better think agin and think quick. I'll give it somethin' to point at, 'fore I ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... how many ghosts and other miraculous apparitions are seen at night, and when the mind is in a more or less somnolent condition, the idea is forcibly suggested that a good proportion of these visions are the debris of dreams. In some cases, indeed, as that of Spinoza, already referred to, the hallucination (in Spinoza's ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... and down, redressing grievances like an Eastern monarch, and rejoicing in the abasement of the evildoer. Nor was the spirit of his adventure bounded by the ocean. More than once he crossed the seas; the Hague knew him, and Amsterdam, though these somnolent cities gave small occasion for the display of his talents. It was from Scilly that he crossed to the Isle of Man, where, being recommended to Lord Derby, he gained high favour, and received in exchange for his jests a comfortable ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... trouble them. They were always relieved when, at last, he would creep into a corner and fall asleep from sheer weariness, for his anxiety made him more and more somnolent as he grew older. ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... are; when distant cows low at gates and fences; when sheep-bells tinkle faintly; when the weary toiler, seated sideways on his weary horse, fares, homewards, nodding sleepily with every plodding hoof-fall, but rousing to give one a drowsy "good night," then who can resist the somnolent charm of the place, save only the "Bull" himself, snorting down in lofty contempt—as rolling of eye, as curly of horn, as stiff as to tail as any indignant bull ever ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... compression. Many of the best episodes of the Ramayana are quite omitted by Kalidasa: for example, the story of the jealous humpback who eggs on Queen Kaikeyi to demand her two boons; the beautiful scene in which Sita insists on following Rama into the forest; the account of the somnolent giant Pot-ear, a character quite as good as Polyphemus. Other fine episodes are so briefly alluded to as to lose all their charm: for example, the story of the golden deer that attracts the attention of Rama while Ravana is stealing his ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... but a certain distortion displayed the reaching of limits beyond which human power could not go, even in suffering. It was a merciful nature asserting itself. Her eyes closed, slowly, gently, with a drowsy helplessness. Once her elbow slipped from the sill of the window and awoke her. A somnolent thought that she would go to bed passed dully through her mind. But she did not act upon it. She propped her head upon her hand once more, and, in a moment, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... wonder of the time, how the north had streamed, and the neighboring houses had been rosy red. But at this hour of the brooding, sultry fall, there was a bitter fragrance in the air, and the world seemed tuned to the somnolent sound of crickets, singing the fields to sleep. That one little note brooded over the earth, and all the living things upon it: hovering, and crooning, and lulling them to the rest decreed from of old. The homely beauty of it smote upon him, though ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... to have been overcome by the same somnolent influence that had subdued Nature, for they all lay about the deck sleeping or dozing in various sprawling attitudes, with the exception of the captain and ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action, of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with struggle and travail. The spirit of the place was the spirit of the peace of the living, somnolent with the easement and content of prosperity, and undisturbed by rumors of ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... his, that he might have to leave it. He had his spring work and his autumn work; in the winter he ordained various small indoor jobs for himself; and in the summer, in common with the rest of the place, he grew somnolent. He sat by the hacked and stained kitchen-table (which he seldom scrubbed, and on which he tried his knife, sawed bones, and chopped meat) and slept the afternoons away in the ceaseless ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... Lake Drummond, that placid pool in the somnolent shades, and Mr. P. put up at the house of a melancholy man, with a fur cap, who lived in a cabin on the edge of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... all somnolent old ladies, it may not be amiss to enter a little more fully into detail. The attack commenced by her sitting bolt upright in her chair, with her eyes so very particularly open, that it seemed as if, in her case, Macbeth or some other wonder-worker had effectually "murdered sleep". By ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... intention of marching upon Rome, an echo woke in many a poet's heart "by rose hung river and light-foot rill," but left Ibsen simply disconcerted. If Rome was to be freed from Papal slavery, it would no longer be the somnolent and unupbraiding haunt of quietness which the Norwegian desired for the healing of his spleen and his moral hypochondria. In October the heralds of liberty crossed the Papal frontier; on the 30th, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... would realize the fatigue of roasting, boiling, baking, and fabricating the choicest dishes known to the modern cuisine, and in my disturbed slumber's would enjoy with epicurean relish the food thus furnished even to repletion. Alas! there was more luxury than life in these somnolent vagaries. ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... but the smile, so full of wit, mischief, and even gaiety, is gone in an instant, quicker than I have ever seen a smile flash out of sight, and immediately the fine scholarly face sinks back into somnolent austerity which for all its aloofness and immemorial calm suggests, in some fashion for which I cannot ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... of bygone times, in which the clerk flourished in all his glory, would be complete without some reference to the important person who occupied the second tier in the "three-decker," and decked in gown and bands delivered somnolent sermons from its upper storey. Curious stories are often told of the careless parsons of former days, of their irreverence, their love of sport, their neglect of their parishes, their quaint and irreverent manners; but such characters, about whom ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... madness of my pride!" she said sadly. "Hardly had I gone, already I had repented. But when I returned, I found you, oh, so altered! wearing already that mask of somnolent indifference which you have never laid aside until . . ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... The long somnolent game was suddenly awakened by two blissful errors, which gave the audience something to jeer at. A tally slipped home for Boston. A sharp double play redeemed the errors and closed the inning. The first man up for the Yankees drove a clean ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... was still in this half-somnolent, semidetached frame of mind that he rode into a sudden white-hot whirl ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... to rouse. The heavy eyes, the languid stretch, the unmeaning contemplation of the noontide sunlight, the slow struggles of a somnolent brain. These things were suggested in the gradual stirring of the place to a ponderous activity. The heavy movement of weary diggers as they lounged into camp for their dinner had no suggestion of the greedy passion which possessed them. They had no lightness. Whatever ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the sun, they flew aimlessly about the tree. But after a while from the lower opening there stole out, like lightning, a real tenant, in the person of a monstrous boa, who evidently, digesting the remnants of the last feast in a semi-somnolent state, had not become aroused and did not think of safety until the smoke curled in his nostrils. At the sight of the strong body, which, like a monstrous spring, darted out of the smoking interior of the tree, Stas grabbed Nell in his arms and ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... darkness and the larger silence of darkness, the veldt awoke. Animals that had dozed through the hot hours and grazed through the cooler hours in somnolent content now quivered alert. There were runnings here and there, the stamp of hoofs, sharp snortings as taut nerves stretched. Zebras uttered the absurd small-dog barks peculiar to them; ostriches boomed; jackals yapped; unknown birds uttered hasty wild calls. Numerous hyenas, near and far away, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... might have remained in this somnolent condition if left to himself, it is impossible to state, for a vigorous alarm upon his door cut short his slumbers, and startled ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... away and dwindle as the silhouette of the embarcadero receded. On the electric train they were whizzed among many sleepy folk into a sleeping town, Oakland, drowsing and silent. Gratton summoned a somnolent taxi-driver and they were whisked through the cool air to a garage. He left her a moment, sitting in the taxi, while he ran in ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... are occupied in their apartments with the preparation of food, and in the labors of the loom and spindle; while young children, half-naked, play around the house doors and through the lanes with an activity in strong contrast with the prevailing tone of grave and somnolent repose. ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... or otherwise (the amatory ones were the worst), usually faded slowly, like the light from the setting sun or an exhausted coal in the grate, about the end of Puffin's second tumbler, and the gentlemen after that were usually somnolent, but occasionally laid the foundation for some disagreement next day, which they were too sleepy to go into now. Major Flint by this time would have had some five small glasses of whisky (equivalent, as he bitterly observed, to one in ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Brunswick, did not look particularly merry at two o'clock of a late September morning. There was an easterly haze driving in from the Baie des Chaleurs and the darkness was so saturated with chilly moisture that an honest downpour of rain would have been a relief. Two or three depressed and somnolent travelers yawned in the waiting room, which smelled horribly of smoky lamps. The telegraph instrument in the ticket office clicked spasmodically for a minute, and then relapsed into a gloomy silence. The imperturbable station master was tipped back against the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... If New York embodies the romance of Power, Mexico represents to perfection the romance of Picturesqueness. To pass from the United States to Mexico is like passing at one bound from the New World to the Old. Wherever it has not been recently Americanized, its beauty is that of sunbaked, somnolent decay. It is in many ways curiously like its mother—or rather its step-mother—country, Spain. But Spain can show nothing to equal the spacious magnificence of its scenery or the picturesqueness of its physiognomies and its costumes. And then it is the ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... heartfelt thanksgiving) the young man chanced upon a somnolent and bedraggled hack, at rest in the stenciled shadows of the Third Avenue elevated structure. Its pilot was snoring lustily the sleep of the belated, on the box. With some difficulty he was awakened, and Maitland dodged into the musty, dusty ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... fled from Stella's room leaving the overturned fairy lamp to bring about the climax of that evening, her one thought was to get to bed, and hardly had she tumbled into it than sleep brought oblivion of all else. Lily Pearl was a somnolent ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... in the drawing-room for a quiet hour before dinner and lit a cigar. He had hardly realised his pleasantly tired and rather somnolent condition when his daughter entered carrying a large Teddy-bear, two dolls, a toy trumpet and a box containing a wooden tea-set. She dropped several of these articles just inside the door. "Come ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... especially—in the light of what has been said above—temperance in drink, are all incidentally of value as aids to the maintenance of purity. So also is the avoidance of the habit of lying in bed in a semi-somnolent condition after true sleep has finally departed. A Christian's body is meant to be a temple of the Holy Ghost, and no other spirit, whether of impurity or of sloth, should be allowed to have domination ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... have assumed for the nonce the attributes of that unaccountably somnolent Fate, and brought him to a terrible end, I am sure abundant justification will be found in the recital of his mythical misdeeds, which, I repeat, were not a circumstance to his real transgressions. Indeed, one has to go back to the most cruel and degenerate of the Roman emperors ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Norman one morning as James Thompson entered her room. He looked across at her quickly, a keen flash of interest in his somnolent brown eyes. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... to give voluble utterance to some startling samples of barrack-room profanity. Its shrill invective would have awakened the dead. The whistling, regular snores of the sleeper suddenly wound up with a gasping gurgle; he opened his eyes and, in a strong cereal accent gave vent to a somnolent peevish protest. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... diplomatist, the artist, the student of statecraft and of military tactics, the political theorist, the merchant, the man of laws, the man of arms, and the churchman turned for precedents and precepts. The nations of the North, still torpid and somnolent in their semi-barbarism, needed the magnetic touch of Italy before they could awake to intellectual life. Nor was this all. Long before the thirst for culture possessed the English mind, Italy had appropriated and assimilated all that Latin literature contained of strong ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Jack Meredith, lying comfortably somnolent on the outskirts of life, heard light footsteps, but hardly heeded them. He knew that some one came into the room and stood silently by his couch for some seconds. He lazily unclosed his eyelids for a moment, not in order to see who ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... our Dana shall raise On a futile foundation of hope, And its glories shall blaze In the somnolent haze Of the mythical lake ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... hard which she was not acquainted with, and he had certainly done so, but the long, iron winter, when there was nothing that could be done, had proved too much for him. It was very dreary sitting alone evening after evening beside the stove, and the company of the somnolent Sproatly was not much more cheerful. Now and then his pleasure-loving nature had revolted from the barrenness of his lot when he drove home from an odd visit to a neighbour, stiff with cold, through the stinging frost, and, arriving in ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... reply. When she turned her eyes toward him he appeared to be listening almost drowsily to something that she could not hear, or else, since his sensitive-looking nostrils were dilated, to be relishing some sweet odor—perhaps the smell of the roses. She received an impression of deliberate, yet somnolent, sensuous enjoyment; and she recalled having seen long ago, in a doorway in Tunis, this same expression on the face of a beggar who ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Hubert and Winifred with their books, looking about for the most suitable place to read. Somnolent sounds from the couch in the library warned them not to locate there. They decided on a cool window-seat in the drawing-room overlooking the garden. There they settled themselves and found their places. It was decided to begin at the point Hubert had reached, which was the ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... drawing-room. There was one particularly long poem which he had read aloud to my mother and father; a seemingly harmless thing, from which they never recovered. Out of the mentions made of this effusion I gathered that it was like a moonlit expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool, and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness, often glowed upon Alcott's features and trembled in his voice. I believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy which pictured to him all high aims as possible ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... streaked with rain, its shutters drearily flapping in the wind, and the floor bearing the imprint of many boots burdened with the red clay of the region. The sound of slow strolling feet in the brick-paved hall was monotonous and somnolent. ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... only know Complete submission on the henchman's part To him who momentary at the helm Doth guide the ship of state through calm and storm. To think in words, disloyalty proclaims; But act subservient fealty do prove. (Exit Printus) Quezox: Most noble Sire, thy courage I admire But Somnolent doth wait without the door. Francos: Ha! He doth quickly to my call respond, But bid him enter. I will quick despatch The matter which thy urgent hopes demand. (Enter Quezox and Somnolent) Quezox: ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... routine of life amused these votaries of fashion—nothing roused them from their attitude of somnolent placidity, except perhaps some peculiarly bloody combat in the arena—one of those unfettered orgies of lust of blood which they loved to witness and which have for ever disgraced the glorious pages ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... animation of face and alertness of body; but even Dandie slouched like a rustic. The rest of the congregation, like so many sheep, oppressed him with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day following day - of physical labour in the open air, oatmeal porridge, peas bannock the somnolent fireside in the evening, and the night-long nasal slumbers in a box-bed. Yet he knew many of them to be shrewd and humorous, men of character, notable women, making a bustle in the world and radiating an influence from their ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... porche, dans l'ombre. L'homme posa sa malle par terre, je le payai, et il s'en alla bien vite.... Derrire lui l'norme porte se referma lourdement, lourdement.... Bientt aprs, un portier somnolent, tenant la main une grosse ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... well. He tossed restlessly in the caressing softness of his bed. He turned a knob in the head panel of his bed, tried to yield to the soothing music that seemed to come from nowhere. He turned another knob, watched the marching, playing, whirling of somnolent colors on the domed ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... though, there wa'n't many somnolent hours in it. But in spite of all the trouble he'd got into, I couldn't figure him out as anything more'n playful. Course, rough housin' in rathskellers until they called out the reserves, and turnin' the ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... only received three or four intimate friends that day, Saint Mars Montalvin, Tom Sheffield, and his cousin, Madame de Rhouel, a Creole, who laughed as incessantly as a bird sings. It was growing dusk, and the distant rumbling of the carriages in the Avenue of the Champs-Elysees sounded like some somnolent rhythm. There was a delicate perfume of flowers; the lamps had not been brought in yet, and chatting and laughing filled the room with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... newspaper" and, after indulging in some humorous remarks, concluded quite seriously with the statement that "its evident sincerity, clean contents and typographical neatness render the Millville Daily Tribune worthy a better setting than the somnolent country village whose census is too low to be ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... with the springy confident step of youth; and that same spring and confidence of gait carried him past the usually vigilant porter. A marble staircase led him to the lordliest smoking-room in London. He frowned, perceiving that his favourite arm-chair was occupied by a somnolent Judge of the High Court, and catching up the Revue des Deux Mondes, settled himself in a window-bay commanding the great twilit square of the Horse Guards and the ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Russia. "At Narva they were 80,000, we 8,000; and what became of them!" cry the Swedes always. Yes, my friends, but you had a Captain at Narva; you had not yet shot your Captain when you did Narva! "Faction of Hats," "Faction of Caps" (that is, NIGHT-caps, as being somnolent and disinclined to France and War): seldom did a once-valiant far-shining Nation sink to such depths, since they shot their Captain, and said to Anarchy, "THOU art Captaincy, we see, and the Divine thing!" Of the Wars and businesses of such ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... repose of a dog. As the night wore on, such a sense of heaviness oppressed my eyelids that it was literally impossible for me to open them—such a masterful languor possessed all my muscles that I could no more move on my pillow than if I had been a corpse. And yet, in this somnolent condition, my mind was able to pursue lazy trains of pleasant thought. My sense of hearing was so acute that it caught the faintest sounds made by the passage of the night-breeze through the rushes ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... the city of towers, The city of a thousand gates, Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers, Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates, The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls, With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls. On one side purples the lustrous dusk of the sea, And dreams in white at the city's feet; On one side sleep ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... care, there was no doubt of that. Imogene, whom he liked and who liked him, declared that "that young one had more jump in him than a sand flea." The very afternoon of his arrival he frightened the hens into shrieking hysterics, poked the fat and somnolent Patrick Henry, the pig, with a sharp stick to see if he was alive and not "gone dead" like the kitten, and barked his shins and nose by falling out of the wheelbarrow in the barn. Kenelm, who still retained his position ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled": Burntisland, where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between tide-marks, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Col. John James Waldron," continued Old Grumps, with a groan which was very somnolent, as if it were a twin to a snore. "That's the ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... he would have beat a retreat almost at once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits. Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday in June. He was unannounced, as had ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This because Benoit, M. de Kercadiou's old seneschal, had accompanied his seigneur upon this soft adventure, and was installed—to ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... the middle of the road, turned, and waited. His action attracted little attention. Coldstream was indoors, somnolent with the afternoon heat. Across the street the proprietor of the general store ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... water. Under the planks of the deck the engines toiled without ceasing. Steam hissed and panted. At intervals the engine-room bell jarred upon the car. At intervals, also, the tiller-chains slid to and fro with a dull, rattling sound. Yet, owing to the somnolent stillness settled upon the river, these sounds escaped, failed to ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... of acrid smoke bathed, drowned them, and they seemed to sink into a somnolent and sad inebriety, in that taciturn and morose intoxication peculiar to men ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... and unusual charms in the quaint old towns, each seeming for some reason quainter than the preceding one. Here on this occasion it looked so tranquil, so somnolent, that we tarried all unwilling to lose its flavor of the unusual. There were old weather beaten walls of ancient brick, mossy in places, and here and there little flights of steep steps leading down into the water; broad ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... George self-consciously, not knowing what to say. He nearly blushed as, in an attempt to seem at ease, he gazed negligently round at the rows of chairs and marble tables, and at the sparse traffic of the somnolent Place. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... vanity and a strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson |
