"Spiritless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... personage of Brutus; but he could not fill out and perfect what he has thus sketched. He seems even to have had a propensity to bring the mountain and the hill to a level with the plain. Caesar is spiritless, and Cicero is ridiculous, in his hands. He appears to have written his Troilus and Cressida partly with a view to degrade, and hold up to contempt, the heroes of Homer; and he has even disfigured the pure, heroic affection which the Greek poet has painted as existing between ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... swinging at his sides. This time the sickening shock again visited her, it was, however, because a revealing flash of thought told her that it was not alone Lassiter who was thrillingly welcome, but also his fatal weapons. They meant so much. How she had fallen—how broken and spiritless must she be—to have still the same old horror of Lassiter's guns and his name, yet feel somehow a cold, shrinking protection in their law ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... wives to walk through such an experience as this into a condition of abject slavery—to waste their affection without return, until they have become poor, and spiritless, and mean. I have known them to lose their will—to become the mere dependent mistresses of their husbands—to be creeping cravens in dwellings where it should be their privilege to move as radiant queens. I have known them thrown back upon themselves, until they have ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... was written on every face. The singing was spiritless, and as the people filed out of church and gathered in knots about the door, the old-time head-shaking was resumed, and the ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... superior and inferior race come in contact the lower is annihilated. Every step of the white man's progress has been a step of the red man's decay. And now this tribe, once so warlike, is a nation of spiritless beggars, crouching near the white settlements for protection from their old foes, over whom in times past ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... to court insult, because it endures it? Is not this what men of the world would say of such a one? "Such a man is unfit for life; he has no eye for any thing; he does not know the difference between good and evil; he is tame and spiritless, he is simple and dull, and a fit prey for the spoiler or defrauder; he is cowardly and narrow-minded, unmanly, feeble, superstitious, and a dreamer," with many other words more contemptuous and more familiar than would be becoming to use in Church. Yet such is the character of which ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... which had been cut short by the rain, I went into a church. The evening service had only just begun, there were very few people; I looked round me, and suddenly, near a window, caught sight of a familiar profile. For the first instant, I did not recognise it: that pale face, that spiritless glance, those sunken cheeks—could it be the same Liza I had seen a fortnight before? Wrapped in a cloak, without a hat on, with the cold light from the broad white window falling on her from one side, she was gazing fixedly ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... that the flame of his indignation had died down, he had begun to feel wretchedly ill and spiritless with the reaction that comes ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... we might receive forgiveness and deliverance from the power of sin. And so your Kinsman, nearer to you than all else, has bought you back. Do not refuse the offered emancipation, but 'if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.' Be not like the spiritless slaves, for whose servile choice the law provided, who had rather remain bond than go out free. Surely when Christ calls you to liberty, you will not turn from Him to the tyrannous masters whom you have served, and, like the Hebrew slave, let them fasten you to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... fought, then, after the supreme indignity and outrage we had suffered, would have been to provoke every further wrong, and to furnish the means for its commission. It would have been to placard ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the spiritless race the proud labor-thieves called us. It would have been to die as a nation of freemen, and to have given all we had left of our rights into the hands of alien tyrants ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... barrels made the counter, up to which from time to time rather worn-looking, spiritless negro women and girls would come to make their purchases, and then shuffle off again in their listless way. Once in a while a sturdy negro would drop in for tobacco, with a more independent, well-fed air. The Englishman ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... their limbs purple with the cold, their faces pinched to the aspect of the wolf, their targets and muskets clattering about them. "There are Campbells to slay, and suppers to eat," the Major-General had said. It would have given his most spiritless followers the pith to run till morning across a strand of rock and pebble. They knew no tiring, they seemingly felt no pain in their torn and bleeding feet, but put mile ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... upon me as physical weakness increased. The grand and massive scenery which, on the upward journey, had aroused every enthusiastic impulse of my nature, was now tame and spiritless. My thoughts were turned in upon myself—upon the dreadful fate which apparently lay just before me—and the possible happiness of the existence beyond. All doubt of immortality fled in the light of present realities. So vivid were my conceptions of the future that at times I longed for death, not ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... first lineaments, that Time and Taste contrive to mould gradually into beauty. The following is the scene that introduces him to the audience, and no one ought to be disheartened by the failure of a first attempt after reading it. The spiritless language—the awkward introduction of the sister into the plot—the antiquated expedient [Footnote: This objection seems to have occurred to himself; for one of his memorandums is—"Not to drop the letter, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... came out into the open air, she found the servant seeking his comfort in the brandy-bottle, and the horses sunk in a spiritless stupor. She admonished him to take care of these, and charged him earnestly both with threats and promises of reward, to think about his employers and watch over their safety. She herself gave to her horse fodder and water, patting him the while, and speaking to him kind and ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... should certainly have fewer judgments correct *objectively; but they would be so, SUBJECTIVELY, at least; that is, they would contain in themselves the exact relation between the person giving the judgment and the object. We can perceive this by observing how modestly subdued, even spiritless and desponding, is the opinion passed upon the results of untoward events by those who have been eye-witnesses, but especially if they have been parties concerned. This is, according to our view, a criterion of the influence ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... carried him away. Oppressed and thoughtful, Banneker walked slowly across the blazing, cactus-set open toward his shack. There was still the simple housekeeping work to be done, for he had left early that morning. He felt suddenly spiritless, flaccid, too inert even for the little tasks before him. The physician's pronouncement had taken the strength from him. Of course he had known that it couldn't be very long—but only ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the equinox have their varieties, —sounds of wind-shaken woods and waters, creak and clatter of sign and casement, hurricane puffs and down-rushing rain-spouts. But this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem too spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above; reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... but dull and spiritless. I don't know what is the matter. They are tired with their journey perhaps, and forlorn in a strange place. Maybe they would feel better if they saw the doctor. I think such people ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... then that the size of a unit was immaterial, and indeed, given the manpower that the Army received from reenlistments and Selective Service, any black unit, no matter its size, would almost assuredly be an inefficient, spiritless group of predominately Class IV and V men. For in addition to its educational limitations, the typical black unit suffered a further handicap in the vital matter of motivation. The Gillem Board disregarded this ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... in coffee," said the young lady in a spiritless tone; and then she leaned her arm and head against the kitchen mantelpiece, and hung listlessly ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... close of the sixteenth century are called "Mannerists," which means that they adopted or imitated the manner or style of some great master who had preceded them—and this was done in so cold and spiritless a way that it may be said that true artistic inspiration was dead in Italy. No one lived who, out of his own imagination, could fix upon the wall or the canvas such scenes as would befit a poet's dream or serve to arouse the enthusiasm ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... of the reactionary movement in literature and art at the close of last century and at the beginning of this against the cold and spiritless formalism and pseudo-classicism that then prevailed, and was more regardful of correctness of expression than truth of feeling and the claims of the emotional nature; has been defined as the "reproduction in modern art and literature ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... artificiality and silken softness of aristocratic existence. Her style also possesses the needful lightness and grace, and she accordingly succeeds admirably in her sketches of high life, with all its elegant nullities and spiritless pomp. One of her best works is the romance of Cousinerna, (The Cousins,) which, as well as the other works of Knorring, Bremer, and Flygare, has been placed before the German ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... have begun to overtake the race long ago. History indicates that in ancient times they were fierce fighters, able to offer a stout resistance to the incomparably better armed and more civilized Japanese. To-day they are drunken, dirty, spiritless folk, whom it is difficult to suppose capable of the warlike role they once played. Their number, between 16,000 and 17,000, is virtually stationary. The Ainu are somewhat taller than the Japanese, stoutly built, well proportioned, with dark-brown ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... my house. I lead the life you see—a spiritless, womanish life, most men would account it—holding converse with Philosophy, with Plato, with Truth. From my high seat in this vast theatre, I look down on the scene beneath me; a scene calculated to afford much entertainment; calculated also to try a man's resolution ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... should have jeered at myself ever afterwards: "So you funked it, you funked it, you funked the REAL THING!" On the contrary, I passionately longed to show all that "rabble" that I was by no means such a spiritless creature as I seemed to myself. What is more, even in the acutest paroxysm of this cowardly fever, I dreamed of getting the upper hand, of dominating them, carrying them away, making them like me—if only for my "elevation of thought and unmistakable ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... troops, it must be likewise alleged, that they had yielded us far easier victories had their officers been wanting; for to them are they indebted for their conquests wherever they have been successful, and for their resistance wherever they have been with difficulty defeated; their soldiers are a spiritless herd, and were they not invigorated by the example of their leaders, and restrained by the fear of instant punishment, would fly at the approach of any enemy, without ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... triumphant. They have a great deal of decision of character, and a degree of courage which does not usually fall to the lot of the female sex. In these respects they are infinitely superior to the timid, spiritless men. In the various political revolutions of the country, the women have often taken an active, and, in some instances, a more decided part ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... following, it must be explained that the first draft of the first part of the Amateur Emigrant, when it reached me about Christmas, had seemed to me, compared to his previous travel papers, a somewhat wordy and spiritless record of squalid experiences, little likely to advance his still only half-established reputation; and I had written to him to that effect, inopportunely enough, with a fuller measure even than usual of the frankness which always marked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Richard de Bury's Philobiblon, by Mr. Inglis, printed in 1832 for the late Mr. Rodd, is an unsatisfactory performance. The version is bald and spiritless, and some of the best passages of the original are rendered in language that does no justice to the author's meaning. His style is so peculiar, so allusive, and so full of metaphor and quotation, and the work is luminous with "the sparks of so many sciences," ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... be reminiscences of Raphael's, Correggio's, Buonarroti's draughtsmanship. Yet they satisfied the patrons of that time, who required hasty work, and had not much money wherewith to reward the mature labors of a conscientious student. In relation, moreover, to the spiritless and insincere architecture then coming into vogue, this art of the Mannerists can scarcely be judged out of place. When I divulge the names of Giorgio Vasari, Giuseppe Cesari (Cav. d'Arpino), Tempesta, Fontana, Tibaldi, the Zuccari, the Procaccini, the Campi ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... call me prudent were I to strive with thee for cowering mortals, who like leaves sometimes are full of fire, then again waste away spiritless. Let us make an end of our quarrel; let ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... short, the unknown seemed to have imbued him with some hitherto unfelt attributes—invested him either with new powers, or awakened his hitherto dormant faculties. As before, by a few touches, the crude, spiritless mass became living and breathing under the master's hand. Not many hours elapsed ere a pretty head, respectably executed, appeared on the canvas. Conrad ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... into the ladies' saloon, as in spiritless quest of somebody; but, after some disappointed glances about him, seats himself upon a sofa with an air ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... which place Tommy B—h holds a principal share; his office is to write lyrics for the lottery, and gunpowder puffs for the Genuine Tea Company, paragraphs for Vauxhall, and spirited compositions in praise of spiritless wines: amid all these occupations it is no wonder, considering his bulk, that he invariably falls asleep before the dinner cloth is removed, and snores most mellifluously between each round of the bottle. The ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... pathetic in Mr. Mayhew's weary and disheartened manner. It was like that of a soldier who has suffered defeat, but who goes on with his routine in a mechanical, spiritless manner, because there is nothing else to do. He seemed to have no hope, nor even a thought of retrieving the past and of reasserting his own manhood. Accustomed as the young artist had ever been to a household in which affection, allied to ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... four o'clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... and spiritless, so unlike the woman of the morning that, albeit with an ill grace, he tacitly consented, and turned away to bring his blankets. But in the next moment she was at his side, following him like a dog, silent and wistful, and even offering to carry his burden. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... generation. This also is a numerous species, for there is not a member of the great army of Thames anglers who has not, in this manner, seen specimens during the first three or four hours of that day which witnesses the spiritless return of the bearer ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... not even tears. The blow had fallen. Fate had caught up with her. Its merciless onrush had overwhelmed her. She was crushed. She was broken under its sledge-hammer blow. She stood drooping, utterly, utterly broken and spiritless before the man's swift, brief ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... aching heads, foul breaths, bad tasting mouths on rising, clogged secretions, sense of inability to exertion, furred or yellow tongues, and the like, absolutely need the Tonic-Regulator, and not Blue Mass or Anti-Bilious Pills. Weak, nervous, spiritless, exhausted, debilitated, pale, ambitionless, easily tired, prone to become short of breath and have pain in side on running, who find it hard to get sleep, are restless, brood over their troubles, real or imaginary, start at loud noises or sudden jars, perspire too easily, flush too readily, are ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... conviction; and with this corroboration of it he grew so spiritless that he could offer no retort. He slid to a despondent sitting posture upon the door sill and gazed wretchedly upon the ground, while his companion went to replenish the licorice water at the hydrant—enfeebling the potency of the liquor no doubt, but making up ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... source. We were abreast of the forlorn little shack of a dry-farmer, weathered and patched, set a dozen yards from the road and surrounded by hard-packed earth. Before the open door basked children and pigs and a few spiritless chickens. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... will be equally hit. There is nothing sorrier, more spiritless or superficial than the large majority of our newspaper literature. If our stage in civilization and scientific attainments were to be gauged by the contents of that set of papers, it would be low indeed. The actions of men and the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... of society did its best to place the peccant husband above the suffering wife. Some called her a poor spiritless thing, and declared, that, with a little of her sister's spirit, she might have brought to reason any Sir Philip whatsoever, were it the termagant Falconbridge himself. But the greater part of their acquaintance affected candour, and saw faults on both sides; though, in fact, there only ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... and now the captain will blow the whistle in answer." But the captain did nothing of the kind, and the lady, after some more girlish effervescence, upbraided him for an old owl and an old muff, and so sank into such a flat and spiritless calm that she was sorrowful ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... of the army. In such scenes, Crockett, bursting with fun, the incarnation of wit and good nature, was in his element. Here he was chief. All did him homage. His pride was gratified by his distinction. Life in his lonely hut, with wife and children, seemed, in comparison, too spiritless to ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... colour; also the particular, rather smeary shade of blue in the eyes. He was not exactly a showy figure; his shoulders were high, his stature but middling—one leg slightly more bandy than the other. He shook hands, looking vaguely around. A spiritless tenacity was his main characteristic, I judged. I behaved with a politeness which seemed to disconcert him. Perhaps he was shy. He mumbled to me as if he were ashamed of what he was saying; gave his name (it was something like Archbold—but at this distance of years I hardly am sure), his ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... aware of but he did not see what had happened when the red headed woman started to give the alarm. The Senorita da Cordova was not a cowed and spiritless girl and in spite of the terror of her situation, when she saw the intention of her jailer she glided the length of the cell with remarkable swiftness and caught the arm of the woman. The senorita was not a delicate creature either, and in spite of her apparent pallor, she showed a lithe ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... Anglo-Saxon but breathes the saltness and the bitterness of the sea-air. To the old English the sea was something inexpressibly melancholy and desolate, mist-shrouded, and lonely, terrible in its grey and shivering spaces; and their tone about it is always elegiac and plaintive, as a place of dreary spiritless wandering and unmarked graves. When the English settled they lost the sense of the sea; they became a little parochial people, tilling fields and tending cattle, wool-gathering and wool-bartering, their shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, and coastwise sailing from port to port. ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Jefferson would gladly have accepted any sort of compromise which did not shut American vessels wholly out from some form of independent trade. But the enmity of the British shipowners and naval leaders and the traditional British commercial policy joined with contempt for the spiritless nation to prevent any such action until the fitting time ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... the forlornest of all created animals when it rains. Who can help laughing at sight of a flock of them huddled up under lee of a barn, limp, draggled, spiritless, shifting from one leg to the other, with their silly heads hanging inert to right or left, looking as if they would die for want of a yawn? One sees just such groups of other two-legged creatures in parlors, under similar circumstances. The truth is, a hen's life at best seems poorer than that ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... theatre; he used to laugh at my dreams, so that little by little I became down-hearted and ceased to believe in it too. Then came all the cares of love, the continual anxiety about my little one, so that I soon grew trivial and spiritless, and played my parts without meaning. I never knew what to do with my hands, and I could not walk properly or control my voice. You cannot imagine the state of mind of one who knows as he goes through a play how terribly badly he is acting. ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... moment one would hardly have recognized the sallow, spiritless face, that with all the delicacy of boyhood still, at times looked so exceedingly old. "No, no, Mr. Halifax, who ever heard of a man ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Gods! And she had also implored the brothers of Diogenes to continue their anvil chorus! This took the last stitch of starch from my manly bosom. Spiritless and spineless I bore all things, believed all things—but hoped ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... fortune of the Imperialists departed. The cavalry of the left wing, already beaten, and only rallied by his exertions, no sooner missed their victorious leader than they gave up everything for lost and abandoned the field of battle in spiritless despair. The right wing fell into the same confusion, with the exception of a few regiments which the bravery of their colonels Goetz, Terzky, Colloredo, and Piccolomini compelled to keep their ground. The Swedish infantry, with prompt determination, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... without vehicles, and probably most of the adults had children to carry or to lead. At one moment the houses were homes, functioning as such. An alarm, infectious like the cholera, and at the next moment the deserted houses became spiritless, degenerated into intolerable museums for the amazement of a representative of the American and the British Press! Where the scurrying families went to I never even inquired. Useless to inquire. They just lost themselves on the ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... still be a wonder how so heavy a book, written upon a subject in appearance so little instructive or diverting, should survive to three editions, and consequently find a better reception than is usual with such bulky spiritless volumes; and this, in an age that pretendeth so soon to be nauseated with what is tedious and dull. To which I can only return, that, as burning a book by the common hangman, is a known expedient to make it sell; so, to write a book that deserveth ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... who were frightened to death, communicated their fears to my comedians, and soon I heard nothing but weeping and sobbing. Every one of them was calling earnestly upon some saint, but not one single prayer to God did I hear. The bewailings of scaramouch, the dull and spiritless despair of Fastidio, offered a picture which would have made me laugh heartily if the danger had been imaginary and not real. Marina alone was cheerful and happy, because she did not realize the danger we were running, and she laughed ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... proper, no doubt, to get rid of what is tame and spiritless in art; and it must be owned that nearly everything that was done in architecture and decoration during the Georgian era was detestable. But it is one thing to reform, and another to revolutionise. Let us ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... long, white fingers, a network of pearls was all her head-dress. Her eyes had strange depths of passion, perfumes breathed from her skin, lustreless like dead ivory. Not thus came the maidens of Israel to wedlock, demure, spotless, spiritless, with shorn hair, priestesses of the ritual ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... stupidly and eventless as can be conceived. We had grown too spiritless and lethargic to dig tunnels or plan escapes. We had nothing to read, nothing to make or destroy, nothing to work with, nothing to play with, and even no desire to contrive anything for amusement. All the cards in the prison were worn ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... woman, and she was very solicitous concerning this her only son and his {52} possessions. So she took counsel with herself to leave the inhabited country, and to flee to the deserts and unfrequented wildernesses. And she permitted none to bear her company thither but women and boys, and spiritless men, who were both unaccustomed and unequal to war and fighting. And none dared to bring either horses or arms where her son was, lest he should set his mind upon them. And the youth went daily to divert himself in the forest, by flinging sticks and staves. And one day he saw his mother's ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 1 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... hand, the song set to the same tune in Bremner's collection of Scotch songs, which begins "To Fanny fair could I impart," &c., it is most exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic, one above the biases of prejudice, but a thorough judge of nature,—how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely methodical, compared with the wild warbling cadence, the heart-moving melody of the first!—This is particularly the case with all those airs which end with a hypermetrical syllable. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... playground at once, and put themselves under Firth, to be kept quiet; and that very little dinner had been eaten; and that, when the writing-master arrived, he was quite astonished to find everything so still, and the boys so spiritless: but that nobody told him till he observed how two or three were crying, so that he was ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... arguments on discipline and metaphysics were now what Buddhism represented. This religion was become, indeed, as much a skeleton as was the Brahmanism of the sixth century. As the Brahmanic belief had decomposed into spiritless rites, so Buddhism, changed into dialectic and idolatry (for in lieu of a god the later church worshipped Buddha), had lost now all hold upon the people. The love of man, the spirit of Buddhism, was dead, and Buddhism crumbled into the dust. Vital and energetic ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... ignominiously failed, have no interest for the reader of Gordon's life. It failed to accomplish the object which alone justified its being sent, and, it must be allowed, that it accepted its failure in a very tame and spiritless manner. Even at the moment of the British troops turning their backs on the goal which they had not won, the fate of Gordon himself was unknown, although there could be no doubt as to the main fact ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... personal touch was everything. If he put it to the men on the spot, with these strike-breakers up his sleeve, surely they must listen! After all, they were his own people. And suddenly he was overcome with amazement that they should have taken such a step. What had got into them? Spiritless enough, as a rule, in all conscience; the sort of fellows who hadn't steam even to join the miniature rifle-range that he had given them! And visions of them, as he was accustomed to pass them in the lanes, slouching along with their straw bags, their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the entrance of every person with an eager expectation, which was as often succeeded by evident disappointment. At dinner your departure was mentioned:—she spilt the wine she was carrying to her lips, and for the remainder of the day was spiritless and melancholy. I saw her ineffectual struggles to conceal the oppression at her heart. Since that time she has seized every opportunity of withdrawing from company. The gaiety with which she was so lately charmed—charmed her ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... the sea, With shoals of life rushing; or like the air, Benighted with the wing of the wild dove, Sweeping miles broad o'er the far southwestern woods With mighty glimpses of the central light — Or may be nothing — bodiless, spiritless." — Festus. ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... when I ought to, I have snoozed in my chair after dinner; I do not go in at the garden with my wonted vigour, and feel ten times as tired as usual with a walk in your absence; so you see, when you are not by, I am a person without ability, affections or vigour, but droop dull, selfish, and spiritless; can you ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the same evening. The hill near Kandy, on which the official residences of the Governor and Colonial Secretary are built, is covered in many places with the deserted nests of the white ants (termites), and these are the favourite retreats of the sluggish and spiritless cobra, which watches from their apertures the toads and lizards on which it preys. Here, when I have repeatedly come upon them, their only impulse was concealment; and on one occasion, when a cobra of considerable ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... such a man, so faint, so spiritless, So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone, Drew Priam's Curtain in the dead of night, And would have told him, half ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... him so silent, so spiritless, so mysterious. No effort could rouse him into cheerfulness or conversation, and for the first time for three years Charlie felt that Tom was sorry to see him. Naturally, he put it all down to the results ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... field of battle) O Sanjaya, the warriors of which side first advanced to battle cheerfully. Whose hearts were filled with confidence, and who were spiritless from melancholy? In that battle which maketh the hearts of men tremble with fear, who were they that struck the first blow, mine or they belonging to the Pandavas? Tell me all this, O Sanjaya. Among ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... having landed at Cyprus, met with brutal outrage at the hands of certain ruffians. Broken-hearted and disconsolate she determined to make her complaint to the king; but she was told that it would be all in vain, because so spiritless and faineant was he that he not only neglected to avenge affronts put upon others, but endured with a reprehensible tameness those which were offered to himself, insomuch that whoso had any ill-humour to vent, took occasion to vex or mortify him. The ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... they did leave their husbands sweltering behind, but there were several points to be taken into consideration in this case. In the first place, Mr. and Mrs. Vincent had not yet learned how to maintain a separate existence. Life apart from each other was a tame, spiritless thing, simply to be endured, not enjoyed; then, too, Uncle Joshua's home was not a Paradise, although he and Aunt Patty were kind and pleasant. Faith had vivid memories of a few weeks spent there soon after her marriage. They lived on their farm, two simple-minded old people, ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... his part like a man, wailed that his horse was dead lame and could not stir a step. The lawyer was sore, stiff, and beyond belief weary; and this last mishap, this terrible buffet from the hand of Fortune, left him cowed and spiritless. ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... thickest-skinned fellow in the world. Metellus is an excellent consul, and much attached to me, but he has lowered his influence by promulgating (though only for form's sake) an identical bill about Clodius. But the son of Aulus,[119] God in heaven! What a cowardly and spiritless fellow for a soldier! How well he deserves to be exposed, as he is, day after day to the abuse of Palicanus![120] Farther, an agrarian law has been promulgated by Flavius, a poor production enough, almost identical with that of Plotius. But meanwhile a genuine statesman ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... strive to put the very spirit of beauty into form and give it motion, it is for thy sake alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet! If my labor be thus thwarted, there will come vague and unsatisfied dreams which will leave me spiritless to-morrow." ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of spiritless bending to the yoke were over. It was a "Young Ireland" he belonged to and meant to lead. A "Young Ireland" with an inheritance of oppression and slavery to wipe out. A "Young Ireland" that demanded to be heard: that meant to act: that would fight ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... measures which it was willing to undertake, was better than to aid an opposition utterly nerveless and servile and altogether devoid of so much as the desire for efficient action. It was no time to stay with the party of weakness; it was right to strengthen rather than to hamper a man so pacific and spiritless as Mr. Jefferson; to show a readiness to forward even his imperfect expedients; to display a united and indignant, if not quite a hostile front to Great Britain, rather (p. 055) than to exhibit a tame and friendly feeling towards her. It was for these reasons, which had already controlled his action ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... give thee sixpence! I will see thee hang'd first,— Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance— Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded, Spiritless outcast! ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... existing in and for Himself; and the Soul, the One and Many, occupying the sphere of appearance or imperfect reality—God as action. Soulless matter, which only exists as a logical abstraction, is arrived at by looking at things "in disconnexion, dull and spiritless." It is the sphere of the "merely many," and is zero, as "the One who is ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... pear will, when next year returns, burst out again in bloom, But can it e'er be told who will next year dwell in the inner room? What time the third moon comes, the scented nests have been already built. And on the beams the swallows perch, excessive spiritless and staid; Next year, when the flowers bud, they may, it's true, have ample to feed on: But they know not that when I'm gone beams will be vacant and nests fall! In a whole year, which doth consist of three hundred and sixty days, Winds sharp as swords ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the wet sole of her shoe with beaming satisfaction. Her skirt, wet around the hem, was drawn up to her knees, her coat, well sprinkled, was on the back of a chair, and in her lap her hat lay limp and spiritless. ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... student could neither speak nor write Danish correctly, but he must be able to define the finest points in a Latin grammar of more than 1200 pages. Attendance at religious services was compulsory; but the services were cold and spiritless, offering little attraction to an ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... had reached the plateau night had put an end to the struggle. A sputter of rifles would break out now and then, followed perhaps by a spiritless hurrah. Occasionally a shell from a far-away battery would come pitching down somewhere near, with a whir crescendo, or flit above our heads with a whisper like that made by the wings of a night bird, to smother itself ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... those gray, heavy days of the early winter—one of the vacant, spiritless days of portent that wait hushed and numb before a coming storm. Not a crow, nor a jay, nor a chickadee had heart enough to cheep. But little Hyla, the tree-frog, was nothing daunted. Since the last week in February, throughout ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... imaginative—for argument is a different thing—it seems to me that the sun leaves the landscape, that I think away the whole vivacity and spirit of my original conception, and that the results are cold, tame, and spiritless. It is the difference between a written oration and one bursting from the unpremeditated exertions of the speaker, which have always something the air of enthusiasm and inspiration. I would not have young authors imitate ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... as soon as it gains a vogue, and incorporates it in the accredited standard of decency. The next step is to make this standard of decency the point of departure for a new move in advance in the same direction—for there is no merit in simple spiritless conformity to a standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a matter of course ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... camp was now alive and in motion, but the men were spiritless and taciturn. Conscious of the immense superiority of the enemy, they advanced to meet him with more of resignation than of hope. Not only were they out-numbered, but their foe was one whose every step was ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... sailor, or anything great. But he had good spirits, and he concealed about his person a heart of gold; and after he left Thetford Grammar School, boys found that somehow the games in the old playground seemed flat and spiritless. They said that things weren't as they used to ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... tame, spiritless books is no conclusive evidence of their merit. The poor children are given nothing else to read, and, of course, they take what they can get as better than nothing. An eager child, fond of reading, will read the shipping intelligence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Plotinus, the father of all mystical philosophy in Europe (unless, as he himself would have wished, we give that honour to Plato), mapped out the upward road as follows:—At the bottom of the hill is the sphere of the "merely many"—of material objects viewed in disconnection, dull, and spiritless. This is a world which has no real existence; it may best be called "not-being" ("ein lauteres Nichts," as Eckhart says), and as the indeterminate, it can only be apprehended by a corresponding indeterminateness in the soul. The soul, however, always adds some form and determination ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... than she could bear. Pepe's death, she felt, would have caused her a pain far less poignant—for she herself easily could have died, too. But Pepe lost to her arms, and won to the arms of such a poor, spiritless creature as this Pancha, was an insult that made greater the injury done her a thousand-fold. Her fierce love was turned in a moment to fiercer hate; and from hate is but a single step ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... with a general feeling of dissatisfaction with himself. He had not slept well. Several times through the night he awoke from unpleasant dreams, in which he always saw Sally Dawson's eyes raised to his through the darkness, and heard her spiritless voice as she bade him good-bye, and with bowed head moved away, after promising to return ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... does get so very pale, Miss Isabel," said the housekeeper. "He wasn't white, not like that when he come first to Llanfeare." To this Isabel made no reply; but she, too, had remarked how wan, how pallid, and how spiritless he ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... always a poor, spiritless fellow, Bob," said the young lady, contemptuously, as she bounced into the drawing-room in her riding-habit, after a hunting breakfast, from which Robert had absented himself, preferring a cup of tea in my lady's boudoir; "but this year I don't know what has come to you. You are ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... hole had been knocked in the ship's side, were in continual apprehension that she would fill and sink. To drown all such gloomy anticipations we sang several songs, among others the appropriate one, "Isle of Beauty, fare thee well." The voices rapidly grew more faint and spiritless as we stood farther out to sea, a failure which might have been attributed to grief at leaving old friends on the chance of making new ones, had not hints and questions been speedily interchanged, such as "Do you like the sea?" "Are ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... all your work: it is useless for you to defend yourself," said she, tossing away her husband's hat from the arm-chair, and then throwing herself in a spiritless manner into it. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... about it. Clemency appeared at the dinner-table, but she looked pale and forlorn, and said good evening to James without lifting her eyes. When her uncle asked if her head was better, she said, "Yes, thank you," in a spiritless tone. She ate almost nothing. After dinner, James had a call to make, and, on his return, entered by the office door. He found Gordon fast asleep in his chair, with the dog at his feet. The dog started up at sight of James, but he motioned him down, ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... do, my boy; and you shall soon. Now, if, instead of kicking against hospital routine, you took to it in a mean, spiritless sort of way, and lay there waiting to be roused up to speak, I should feel uncomfortable about you, for I should know it was a bad sign.— You'll be all ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... idea of Nina Gordon's brains. She seemed to have no mind of her own; a good thing, perhaps, in some cases, but a more spiritless person to talk to never vexed the heart of man or woman either. She had no answer for the simplest question without first asking it from her mother, and away from her mother's side she was ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... expedition of William the Conqueror, is curious and valuable as an historical monument, though it cannot be proved to be contemporary. As a work of art it is singularly spiritless, and devoid of merit of any kind. One of the fancy figures on the border reveals the indelicacy of the ladies (a queen, perhaps, and her handmaidens) who wrought it in a way which would be startling to any one who had taken the manners ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... which Gideon had sprung—the underworld where welters the overwhelming mass of the human race—there are three main types. There are the hopeless and spiritless—the mass—who welter passively on, breeding and dying. There are the spirited who also possess both shrewdness and calculation; they push upward by hook and by crook, always mindful of the futility of the struggle of the petty ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... movement—think, for instance, of the former Reichstag—we shall certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples; against laziness; ignorance, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... unhappy Clara! what must not she have gone through, ere a mind, naturally buoyant and elastic as hers, could have been crushed into a state of such utter dejection, such calm, spiritless despair! her only wish, to die—her only hope, to find in the grave a place "where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest!" But brighter days were in store for her—it should be my ambition ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... groomed; and he will do well to acquire so much of stable lore as will enable him to judge of these points himself. In a general way, where a horse's coat is habitually rough and untidy, there is a sad want of elbow-grease in the stable. When a horse of tolerable breeding is dull and spiritless, he is getting ill or badly fed; and where he is observed to perspire much in the stables, is overfed, and probably eats his litter in addition to ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... makest my feet like hinds' feet,' what he is thinking about is that light and easy, springing, elastic gait, that swiftness of advance. What a contrast that is to the way in which most of us get through our day's work! Plod, plod, plod, in a heavy-footed, spiritless grind, like that with which the ploughman toils down the sticky furrows of a field, with a pound of clay at each heel; or like that with which a man goes wearied home from his work at night. The monotony of trivial, constantly recurring doings, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... former. Whether Monsieur Quesnel thought them the same, or not, he would readily have sacrificed his sister's peace to the gratification of his own ambition; and, on her marriage with St. Aubert, expressed in private his contempt of her spiritless conduct, and of the connection which it permitted. Madame St. Aubert, though she concealed this insult from her husband, felt, perhaps, for the first time, resentment lighted in her heart; and, though ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... that the "conservatism" of the American workingman will cause him to patiently endure all this is to brand him a spiritless slave, deserving not only slavery, but the shackles and the knout. He will not endure it much longer, and when his patience reaches its utmost limit— when he tires of filling his belly with the East wind supplied him in such plentitude ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... spiritless position in the eyes of the Vindictives! A different opportunity to lay hold of public opinion he made the most of. And yet, here also, he spoke in that carefully guarded way, making sure he was not understood ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... ceased to arouse in him the old buoyant energy, and he had lost the zest of muscular exertion which had done so much to sweeten his labour in the fields. It was as if a clog fettered his simplest no less than his greatest emotion; and his enjoyment of nature had grown dull and spiritless, like his affection for his family. With his sisters he was aware that a curious constraint had become apparent, and it was no longer possible for him to meet his mother with the gay deference she still exacted. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... vengeance, without exclusion of entire parties, with so little definiteness in point of doctrine that it could be accepted, and the consequences could be left to work themselves out. The Act itself was narrow, spiritless, confused, tame, and unsatisfactory. It was perfectly compatible with the oppression of class by class, and of the country by the State, as the agent of a ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... England, enmeshed and benetted With spiritless villainies round, With counsels of cowardice fretted, With trammels of treason enwound, Is yet, though the season be other Than wept and rejoiced over thee, Thine England, thy lover, thy ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the histories of other old men and women whose memories go back as far as hers, supplemented by a little reading in the newspapers of that day, I can understand how it came about that these poor labourers, poor, spiritless slaves as they had been made by long years of extremest poverty and systematic oppression, rose at last against their hard masters and smashed the agricultural machines, and burnt ricks and broke into houses to destroy and plunder ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... burst 255 Forth like a Polar summer: every word They uttered was a dart, by counter-winds Blown back upon themselves; their reason seemed Confusion-stricken by a higher power Than human understanding, their discourse 260 Maimed, spiritless; and, in their weakness strong, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... standing on the porch in front of his cabin, gazing at the western sky. A royal mantle of purple enwrapped the shoulders of mighty Pisgah against a background of lucent gold. The expression of anxiety and of spiritless longing left the man's face as he watched the ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... Persians. They were equally unskilled in the arts of constructing, besieging, or defending regular fortifications. They trusted more to their numbers than to their courage; more to their courage than to their discipline. The infantry was a half-armed, spiritless crowd of peasants, levied in haste by the allurements of plunder, and as easily dispersed by a victory as by a defeat. The monarch and his nobles transported into the camp the pride and luxury of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... assumption of their disputed or their defrauded liberties. They industriously dispersed their remonstrance, and the king replied by a declaration; but an attack is always more vigorous than a defence. The declaration is spiritless, and evidently composed under suppressed feelings, which, perhaps, knew not how to shape themselves. The "Remonstrance" was commanded everywhere to be burnt; and the effect which it produced on the people ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... once, that the key, which was in her possession, should not pass into his hands that day. "No," she continued, "nor sorra the ring you'll put on the same girl with my consent. Aren't you a purty young omadhaun, you spiritless creature, to go to marry sich a niddy-nauddhy, when you know that the best fortunes in the glen would jump at you! Yes, faiks! to bring home that mane, useless creature, that hasn't a penny to the good! ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... precluded extensive or concentrated development. Politically Phoenicia was divided among five cities, and her artistic strength was distributed in a similar manner. Such art as was produced showed the religious and decorative motives, and in its spiritless materialistic make-up, the commercial motive. It was at the best a hybrid, mongrel art, borrowed from many sources and distributed to many points of the compass. At one time it had a strong Assyrian cast, at ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... the most furious and ungovernable of any. I think even a female conscription might be advisable in the present condition of France, if I may judge of her soldiers from the specimens I saw. Small, spiritless, inferior-looking men, all of them. They were like Number Three mackerel or the last run of shad, as doubtless they were,—the last pickings and resiftings ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... raised, "Will nobody help us?" It is a spiritless, hopeless cry. It is sometimes a cry of revolting meanness, especially when it issues from those who with a little self-denial, sobriety, and thrift, might easily ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Queen, "you must go with us, for if the spirit you have called up sinks from men's memories, our actions will be worse than spiritless. You must go." ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... seventeen pounds. This had now become insufficient. As they advanced up the Sweetwater, the mountains on either side took on snow. Frequent wading of the streams chilled them. Morning would find them numb, haggard, spiritless, unfitted for the march of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... see how much our chance acquaintance had brightened the perspective for her, and how eagerly she had repaired all her illusions; and I thought how much better it would have been if she had been left to the dull and spiritless resignation in which I had first seen her. From that there could no fall, at least, and now she had risen from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... unlike any Priscilla of any one of her moods that he had ever seen before. Her eyes were red, her eyelids heavy with tears, her face was pinched and narrower, the corners of her mouth had a most piteous droop, her very hair, pushed back off her forehead, seemed sad, and hung in spiritless masses about her neck and ears. "Mein liebes Kind," stammered poor Fritzing; and his hand shook so that he ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim |
