"Stagnant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the cave, with its stagnant damp atmosphere and its mouldy unwholesome smells, to breathe the fresh sea-air on the beach without. Its story, as recorded by Sir Walter in his "Tales of a Grandfather," and by Mr. Wilson, in his "Voyage," must be familiar to the reader; and I ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... frozen food, soft food, unwholesome food, stagnant water, or drinking large quantities of water at one time, purgative medicines, or it may be associated with blood diseases, lung and intestinal affections, or produced by micro-organisms. Many horses, particularly slack loined, slight, "washy" animals, purge if worked or excited, as ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... height during the month of May that the cotton is sown. About fifty days prior to the sowing a manure is prepared consisting of chopped straw, straw ashes, green grass, rice, bran, and earth from the bottom of the stagnant pools. These ingredients are all carefully mixed together in equal proportions, and the manure thus made is allowed to stand till required for use. Ten days before the time fixed for sowing, narrow trenches, about one inch in depth, are dug in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... up the funds, and, in consequence, the Senorita Guilbert. They will relate further that Dona Isabel, her adventurous bark of fortune shoaled by the simultaneous loss of her distinguished admirer and the souvenir hundred thousand, dropped anchor on this stagnant coast, awaiting ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... of installing a further system of artificial drainage was immediately begun, and the Eaux des Suisses was created, to take the place of a former stagnant pool near by. Undoubtedly it was a stupendous work, like all the projects launched with regard to Versailles, but, like the others, it was brought to a speedy and successful conclusion. The details of the history of this royal vegetable garden are fully set ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... which, from its concave and impermeable bottom, the waters remain stagnant, rendering ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... prove an arid desert. I had, unfortunately, nothing in which I could carry water, so that I had to depend on the supply which I might find in my path. I pushed on as fast as I could. It was almost night, however, before I reached a pool of water. It was stagnant, and so bad tasted that I could only moisten my lips with it, after I had cooked and eaten one of my fish. A number of birch trees were growing near. I quickly built a shanty with their bark, and with the same ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... that when we got back to our camping-place we should be able to find some fresh water. Arrived at this pleasant spot, we rested under the beech-trees, and sent off two of the Serbs to look for water. After waiting some time one of them brought us some, but it was from a stagnant pool, alive with animalculae, quite unfit to drink. I never remember suffering so much from thirst. The heat was excessive, but happily before reaching the Danube we found a delicious spring gushing out from the limestone rock. It was an indescribable refreshment for thirsty ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... none but pleasant facts and characteristics! Life must, indeed, be slow in that little decaying hamlet amongst the chalk hills. After all, depend upon it, it is better to be worn out with work in a thronged community, than to perish of inaction in a stagnant solitude take this truth into consideration whenever you get tired of work ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... economy has grown an average of about 3% over the past six years, but GDP declined in 1998. However, population has increased at about the same rate over the same period, leaving per capita income nearly stagnant. The new government of Raul CUBAS Grau was pursuing an economic reform agenda, albeit with limited success because of in-fighting in the ruling party ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... modest piety of the young novice touched the sisterhood; she was endeared to all of them. Her conversion was an event that broke the lethargy of their stagnant life. She became an object of general interest, of avowed pride, of kindly compassion; and their kindness to her, who from her cradle had seen little of her own sex, had a great effect towards calming and soothing her mind. But, at night, her dreams brought ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... began to feel sick and faint in that tainted air, and would have rushed up the stairs if I could have seen them. But Finn was exploring that sewer horror with his lantern. As I came down I had seen a pool of stagnant, green-coated water somewhere near the foot of the stairs, and, being afraid to stir in the thick darkness, was forced to call my guide, and, frankly state the urgent necessity for an immediate return above. The matter-of-fact policeman came up, and cast the liberating light upon the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Regimental bearers on account of shrapnel. When we reached our own front line we found there was a small party of men along a water course still further out. Mainly for a "lark" we determined to go out to these to see if they had any wounded. The water course was dry except for green, stagnant pools, and coming on a deep and very filthy one I decided to mount the bank and make a rush for it. All made similar rushes, one at a time, and all of us were fired at at short range. We reached the small outpost of about ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... sea was always calm," said he, "it would pyson the univarse; no soul could breathe the air, it would be so uncommon bad. Stagnant water is always unpleasant, but salt water when it gets tainted beats all natur'; motion keeps it sweet and wholesome, and that our minister used to say is one of the 'wonders of the great deep.' This province ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... large party was found to have crossed a river within a mile of the camp, ferrying themselves on palm-trunks, according to their fashion. Deep swamps and scorching sands,—toiling through briers all day, and sleeping at night in hammocks suspended over stagnant water, with weapons supported on sticks crossed beneath,—all this was endured for two years and a half, before Stedman personally came ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... upland countries, the surplus water that falls in rain flows off in brooks and rivers to the sea; but in land that is below the level of the sea, there can be no natural flow of either brooks or rivers. The rain water, therefore, that falls on this low land would remain there stagnant, except the comparatively small portion of it that would be evaporated by ...
— Rollo in Holland • Jacob Abbott
... that eats a particular animalcule found in stagnant water, receives four times forty stripes save one. For eating an ant this penalty is five times repeated, and for eating a wasp it is ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... Stretches of deer-grass and ling, rolling endlessly to the feet of Cairnsmure and the circle of the eastern hills, cannot be good feeding for the least Epicurean of sheep, and sheep do not care for the lank and sour herbage by the sides of the "lanes," as the half-stagnant, black, deep, and weedy burns are called in this part of the country. The scenery is not unattractive, but tourists never wander to these wastes where no inns are, and even the angler seldom visits them. Indeed, the fishing is not to be called good, and the "lanes," which ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... houseless wretches, for many of the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were wrenched from their positions, to afford an aperture wide enough for the passage of a human body. The kennel was stagnant and filthy. The very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... drive me from the king— My father's favor? What requital hath A monk to give a father for a son? What compensation can the duke supply For a deserted and a childless age? Would'st thou be loved? Here in this bosom springs A fresher, purer fountain, than e'er flowed From those dark, stagnant, muddy reservoirs, Which Philip's ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... day before yesterday produced a glorious effect, I feel my spirits renewed and a warmer life courses through all my nerves. My situation in this solitude has drawn upon my soul the fate of stagnant water, which becomes foul unless it Is stirred up a little now and then. And I too hope to become necessary to ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... process. Among the best-known of syrphid flies are the drone-flies (Eristalis), often seen hovering over flowers, and presenting a curious likeness to hairy bees. The larva of Eristalis is one of the most remarkable in the whole order, the 'Rat-tailed maggot' found in the stagnant water of ditches and pools. It has a cylindrical body with the hinder end drawn out into a long telescopic tube, a more slender terminal section being capable of withdrawal into, or protrusion from, a thicker basal portion. At the extremity of the slender tube is a crown of sharp processes, ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... weather-beaten apartment house on the upper West Side. The pavements, as Fanny had scornfully observed, were not particularly clean; the air, in spite of the sharp wind which blew from the river, had a curiously stagnant quality; and the rumble of the elevated road, at the opposite side of the house, reached her in a vibrating undercurrent which was punctuated now and then by the staccato cries of the street. The ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Reinhold had filled to the brim and now insisted on his draining to the last drop. "Now here's long life to our excellent master," cried Reinhold, again filling the glasses and again compelling Frederick to empty his. Then the fiery juices of the wine permeated his veins and stirred up his stagnant blood until it coursed as it were triumphantly through his every limb. "Oh! I feel so indescribably happy," he whispered, the burning blushes mounting into his cheeks. "Oh! I have never felt so happy in all my life before." Rose, who undoubtedly ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... at this picture, his heart softened. He looked down at the sleeve of his soft and fleecy nightshirt, at his white, rounded arm, muscular yet fine as a woman's, and when he looked for the picture it was gone. Then came again the assertive odor of stagnant air, laden with camphor; he felt the springless bed under him, and caught dimly a few soap-advertising lithographs on the walls. He thought of his brother, in his still more in-hospitable bedroom, disturbed by the child, condemned to rise ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... fluids of high bactericidal value. Again, in tuberculous ascites the abdominal cavity is filled with a fluid practically devoid of anti-bacterial substances, so that the bacilli are able to thrive and work their will on the tissues. When the stagnant fluid is got rid of by laparotomy, the parts are immediately douched with lymph charged with protective substances, the bactericidal power of which may be many times that of the ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the Mosque inclosure and Mahdi's tomb. The infantry, guns, and Maxims preceded but a few paces in front. Vile beyond description was Omdurman, its dwellings, streets, lanes, and spaces. Beasts pay more regard to sanitation than dervishes. Pools of slush and stagnant water abounded. Dead animals in all stages of decomposition lay there in hundreds and thousands. There were besides littering the place camels, horses, donkeys, dead and wounded fresh from the battle-field. And there were many other ghastly sights. Dead and wounded dervishes lay in ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... Fountain of Oblivion was not far off. Even then the sound of falling waters was mingling with the roar of the pines above him; and ere long he came to a river, moving in solemn majesty through the forest, and falling with a dull, leaden sound into a motionless stagnant lake, above which the branches of the forest met and mingled, forming perpetual night. This was the Fountain of Oblivion. Upon its brink the Student paused, and gazed into the dark waters with a steadfast look. They were limpid ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... wears slowly away, as we crawl along past league upon league of wild steppe land. The coup d'oeil from our carriage-window is not inspiriting. It rests upon a bare, bleak landscape, rolling away to the horizon, of waves of drab and dirty-green land, unbroken save for here and there a pool of stagnant water, rotting in a fringe of sedge and rush, or an occasional flock of wild-fowl. At rare intervals we pass, close to the line, a Tartar encampment. Half a dozen dirty brown tents surrounded by horses, camels, and thin shivering cattle, the latter covered with coarse sack-clothing ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... A few stagnant pools at considerable distances apart saved him from death by thirst; but his was a pitiable state when finally he stumbled by accident upon a large river in a country where fruit was abundant, and small game ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a large Dutch town built in the tropics—that is to say, it has broad streets, with rows of trees in them, and canals in the centre of stagnant water, full of filth, and surrounded by miasma-exuding marshes. But the neighbourhood is healthy, and the merchants and officials mostly only come into the town in the daytime, and return to their country houses at night. Some seasons are worse than others, nobody ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... that he was under a spell or was growing old and feeble. Accordingly he was slain in the person of his representative, with all the ceremonies already described, in order that, born young again, he might infuse his own youthful vigour into the stagnant energies of nature. On the same principle we can understand why Mamurius Veturius was beaten with rods, why the slave at the Chaeronean ceremony was beaten with the agnus castus (a tree to which magical properties were ascribed), why the effigy of Death in some parts of Europe is assailed ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... said to Hsi Jen, "take these medicines and dissolve them in wine and then apply them on him, and, when the fiery virus from that stagnant blood has been dispelled, he'll be all ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the dreary lengths of years I must drag my weight with me; Or be like a mastless ship stuck fast On a deep, stagnant sea. A man on a dangerous height alone, If suddenly struck blind, Will never his home ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... disasters, or that they retarded the general advancement of the human race. In time the barbarians became civilized and fused with the peoples whom they conquered. They introduced, too, into communities which had grown stagnant and weakly, a fresh and invigorating atmosphere that acted as a stimulant in every sphere of human activity. The Kassite, for instance, was a unifying and therefore a strengthening influence in Babylonia. He shook off the manacles of the past which bound ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the stars, and the two walked forward into a wall of darkness which the rays of the priest's lantern pierced for a few yards ahead. Here in the valley the night air lay stagnant: scarcely a leaf rustled: their ears caught no sound but that of the brook alongside of which ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in a sky of spotless beauty. Now the heavens were shrouded in dense masses of black clouds that were whirling here and there in immense eddies, or careering across the sky as if driven by a fierce and mighty wind. But below, all was hushed and pulseless as the grave; and the stagnant air felt like the hot vapour over an immense furnace. The tavern-keeper would have paused and returned so soon as he became conscious of this fearful change, portending the approach of a wild storm; but his conductors seemed to know his thoughts; and ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... attends with keys To offer his submission gracefully. The streets are solitudes, the houses sealed, And stagnant silence reigns, save where intrudes The rumbling of their own artillery wheels, And their own soldiers' measured tramp along. "Moscow deserted? What a monstrous thing!"— He shrugs his shoulders soon, contemptuously; "This, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... key in the outer one. I sat down again; sat for a time in a kind of stagnant mood, so weary, emotionally, mentally, and physically, that I could not think beyond the point at which he had left me. The black window stared at me like an eye. At last with an effort I put out the light and got into the hammock. Very soon ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... floor of the dilapidated house, so gloomy and ill-smelling, with its atmosphere poisoned by stagnant water in the defective sinks and sewers, she hesitatingly entered the dingy room occupied ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... wound about among the rocks. The horses of both my dragoman and muleteer fell on this trip, but without serious results to either horses or riders. It was quite wearying to proceed thus, so when we finally reached a large sloping rock under which was a kind of stagnant pool—the only water we had seen since leaving Coefrinje—I was glad to know that there we would lunch, even though I could ...
— My Three Days in Gilead • Elmer Ulysses Hoenshal
... depression around each plant. The water will thus sink about them and more moisture be retained. Sour, undrained soils where the water stands should be raised a little above the level of the lawn, if for Asters, so that excess of water may drain off. They like moisture but not stagnant water. Whatever the character of the ground, spade it deep so that it may be mellow, and make it very rich. If the ground is to be spaded a foot deep, a 3-inch layer of rotted manure is about right to dig in. Rotted manure does not mean fresh or lumpy manure. It means that the fertilizing element ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... what it does in you. And the responsibility of hampering and hindering that power from working out its only adequately corresponding results lies at our own doors. 'A rushing, mighty wind'—yes; and in myself a scarcely perceptible breathing, and often a dead calm, stagnant as in the latitudes on either side of the Equator, where, for long, dreary days, no freshening motion in the atmosphere is perceptible. 'A fire?'—yes; then why is my grate full of grey, cold ashes, and one little spark in the corner? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... asphyxiated. After each attack you were more sensitive to the next, as a malaria patient grows worse if he remains in the swamp districts. It is remarkable that you did not guess the truth from the smell of decaying vegetation and stagnant damp which you admit accompanied the seizures! However, you did not; and in your condition the last three days of continuous fog brought on two attacks that nearly proved fatal. Now as to the character of your hallucinations, and their ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... a little shocked at the unimaginative and superfluous criminality in him that had turned old cramped and stagnant Fishbourne into a blaze and new beginnings. (I wish from the bottom of my heart I could add that he was properly sorry.) But something constricting and restrained seemed to have been destroyed by that flare. Fishbourne wasn't the world. That was the new, the essential fact of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... have intended to make on my pupil's communication, were checked by the plashing of large rain-drops on our faces and on the path, and by the muttering of a distant but coming storm. The warning obvious in stagnant air and leaden sky had already induced me to take the road leading back to Brussels, and now I hastened my own steps and those of my companion, and, as our way lay downhill, we got on rapidly. There was an interval after the fall ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... non perde ventura, Anzi rinnuova come fa la luna:— So thought Boccaccio, whose sweet words might cure a 330 Male prude, like you, from what you now endure, a Low-tide in soul, like a stagnant laguna. ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... country, it's a pleasant one to live for it; to know that you inhabit an impenetrable retreat, which no "Own Correspondents" ever invade, and where, if it was not for Williams, no sense of fear or alarm could come to disturb the tranquil surface of a stagnant existence. ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... who was as usual in the interval between her adventures, bored half to death with the monotony of her life at Hurricane Hall—and praying not against but wishing for—fire, floods or thieves, or anything to stir her stagnant blood, heard of the camp meeting, and expressed a wish to have a tent on the camp ground and remain there from the beginning to the end, to see all that was to be seen; hear all that was to be heard; feel all that was to be felt, ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... is; you are so involved you cannot judge. My boy, don't you see that the whole trouble lies in getting things you have never earned? The sort of joy you people indulge in and try to hold as your own is a state of mind and emotion from which no lessons may be learned—calm, stagnant pools of superlative surface pleasure. No one learns things worth while when he is too happy or too successful. That is why success is a wiser and more enduring thing when it comes at middle age. The young man or woman has not been tried out, has not had ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... meet here, and as the jungle was strictly preserved, we were never disappointed in finding plenty who gave us glorious sport. The jungles consisted of great grass plains, with thickly wooded patches of dense tree jungle, intersected here and there by deep ravines, with stagnant pools of water at intervals; the steep sides all thickly clothed with thorny clusters of the wild dog-rose. It was a difficult country to beat, and we had always to supplement the usual gang of beaters with as many elephants ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... a stagnant calm in a line almost vertical, had pierced the morning mists, and now swam emancipated in a heaven of exquisite blue. Below us, by some trick of eyesight, the country had grown concave, its horizons curving up ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a good sign. It means that poetry is interesting people sufficiently to make them wish to argue about it. Better a breeze—even a somewhat excessive breeze—than stagnant air. It is good both for poets and for the reading public. It prevents the poets from resting on their wings, as they might be tempted to do by a consistent calm of praise. It compels them to examine their work more critically. Anyhow, "fame ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... as she was gone, we looked at each other, and then without a word began to gaze after her. We saw her pick her dainty way in the little high-heeled shoes she always wore (because they had been in fashion in her youth), among the yellow pools of stagnant water that had gathered in the clayey soil. John Footman followed, stately, after; afraid too, for all his stateliness, of splashing his pure white stockings. Suddenly my lady turned round and said something to him, and he ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... forces in the northeast, where the plain slopes gradually into the Suwalki Province, must pass over a country dotted with lakes and lagoons, which farther on take on the character of marshes, stagnant ponds, peat bogs, with small streams flowing lazily from one to the other. Here and there are patches of stunted pine forests, with occasional stretches of fertile, cultivated soil. Throughout this section many rivers flow along broad, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... clouds with snap and buzz, and out of the luxurious stagnant marshes comes the ever-thickening chorus of the toads, while above them the kildees and the snipe shuttle to and fro in sounding flight. The blackbirds on the cat-tails sway and swing, uttering through lifted throats their liquid gurgle, mad with delight of the sun and the season—and ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of the marshes stretched away to the horizon and the border of the desert. Bitterns stood by the stagnant pools and jackals skulked through the low bushes; but there was no sign of the caravan of the ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... springs hard by lay here and there about the low ground, which are peopled as full of singers as ever the gallery of the old North Meeting-house was, and quite as melodious ones. Such performers I never heard, in marsh or pool. They are not the great, stagnant, bull-paddocks, fat and coarse-noted like Parson, but clear-water frogs, green, lively, and sweet-voiced. I passed their orchestra going home the other evening, with a small lad, and they were at it, all parts, ten thousand ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Kites and vultures are busy overhead, beating the ground for their repast of carrion; and the solemn-looking, stately-stepping Marabout, with a taste for dead fish, or men, stalks slowly along the almost stagnant channels. Groups of men and boys are searching diligently in various places for lotus and other roots. Some are standing in canoes, on the weed-covered ponds, spearing fish, while others are punting over the small intersecting streams, to ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... bearers of that ferocious liberty which had sprung from the fires in which all else for which men cherish their fatherland had been consumed. So swept that resolute but fantastic band along the placid estuaries of Zealand, waking the stagnant waters with their wild beggar songs ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the education of boys for the church. Italy affords one catalogue mention, of a Horace copied under Desiderius. Peter Damian was its man of greatest learning, but the times were intellectually stagnant. The popes were occupied by rivalry with the emperors. It was the century of Gregory the ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... find (neither of these streets being paved at the time of which we write) great mud-holes in that fine open quarter. Persons walked on planks laid down beside the houses and along the marshy gardens, or on narrow paths flanked on each side by stagnant water which sometimes turned ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... a steaming river. Vegetation grew savagely under the huge sun. The air, kept at almost constant temperature by the blanketing effect of the hot springs, was stagnant and heavy. ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... to the place he named, a narrow channel, through which soaked, rather than flowed, a small stagnant stream, mantled over with bright green mosses. Dinmont directed his steed towards a pass where the water appeared-to flow with more freedom over a harder bottom; but Dumple backed from the proposed ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... with snow, now bend the laboring trees, And with the sharpness of the frost the stagnant rivers freeze. Pile up the billets on the hearth, to warmer cheer incline, And draw, my Thaliarchus, from the Sabine ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... which creature Columbus assured them never went far from land. Notwithstanding, they became uneasy at the calmness of the weather, declaring that as the prevailing winds were from the east, and had not power to disturb the torpid stillness of the ocean, there was the risk of perishing amidst stagnant and shoreless waters, and being prevented by contrary winds from ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... night before, nothing of which contributed to make me less irritable. My head ached. The sun- glare on the water made my eyes ache, while I was suffering more than half a touch of mal de mer from the antic conduct of the outrigger on the blobby sea. The air was stagnant. In the lee of Waihee, between the white beach and the roof, no whisper of breeze eased the still sultriness. I really think I was too miserable to summon the resolution to give up the fishing ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... The exuberance of Pickwick, Micawber, Pecksniff, Sairey Gamp, Sam Weller and a host of others is perhaps the most normal thing about them; it is as the rattling of a safety valve, which speaks not of stagnant water but of a full head of steam. For Dickens deals with life, and you can exaggerate life as much as you please, since there is no end to either its wisdom or foolishness. Nothing but a question can be added to the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 'Without such criticism a force would become stagnant, and could never hope to keep level with those continental armies, which are ever striving amongst themselves for ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the same salinity throughout. In these waters a vertical circulation is kept up by convection currents. Beneath these layers are masses of salter water, through which a thermal wave of small amplitude is slowly propagated to the bottom by conduction. These strata are practically stagnant, deficient in oxygen and surcharged with carbonic acid. Their salter waters must have been originally derived from outside, and must therefore have passed over the plateau between Falster and Mecklenburg, but their horizontal extension is checked by the ridges separating the deep hollows ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... the name placeres is given to the layer of sand in stagnant water or alluvion which usually has particles of gold. The Placeres are in die western part of the Carolinas. See San Agustin's Conquistas, p. 67, and Montero y Vidal's El archipielago filipino (Madrid, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... few minutes we quitted the public way by an obscure path in the woods on our right. When we had followed this for two or three miles we turned to the left again and pressed as softly as we could into a low tangled ground where the air seemed stagnant and mosquitoes stung savagely. We wiped away the perspiration in streams. I pushed forward to Ferry's side and whispered my belief that at last we ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... we are informed, "that the field of electro-magnetic energy surrounding an electric charge in motion moves with it, and that the vibrations of light travel through this moving {74} field, instead of through an ocean of stagnant aether."[4] ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... supervision of health matters in Panama and Colon, and of the quarantine, and into the sanitary inspection department, which looks after the destruction of the mosquito by various methods, by grass and brush cutting, the draining of various swampy areas, and the oiling of unavoidable pools and stagnant streams. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... a breeze!" grumbled Pearse, breaking in on the frowning silence. "How much longer are we to drift around these stagnant seas, Venner?" ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; O raise us up, return to us again, And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power! ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians. It was difficult to realize, as we looked at the line of fine shops and stately business premises, that they really abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square which ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... means of brimstone matches being tied between his fingers and toes, and set fire to; and afterward, by having his flesh plucked off with red-hot pincers, till he expired; and Giovanni Barolina, with his wife, were thrown into a pool of stagnant water, and compelled, by means of pitchforks and stones, to duck down their heads ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... for their social laws, my impatience of all constraint. Among my books and my drugs in my lonely den at Mansie I could let the great drove of the human race pass onwards with their politics and inventions and tittle-tattle, and I remained behind stagnant and happy. Not stagnant either, for I was working in my own little groove, and making progress. I have reason to believe that Dalton's atomic theory is founded upon error, and I know that mercury ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... after so much desert, gladdened indeed our eyes. This was a fine sheet of water, of great extent, covered with a forest of luxurious trees. It was a genuine Soudan picture, and we gazed at it with delight. I nevertheless thought of the pestilential exhalations of the stagnant pools further on in Soudan. The ground holds the water tightly, for wells are sunk near it of some depth before water is reached. This pool, or lake, dries up during the heat of summer, as is proved by the existence of wells ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... description of the Arabs, he expected to see of surprising grandeur. His disappointment was therefore great, when he traversed the place. He found the houses nearly a quarter of a mile from the walls, and in many parts scattered into detached groups between large stagnant pools of water. Not an individual turned his head round to gaze at him, all being intent on their own business. The market-place was bordered to the east and west by an extensive swamp, covered with weeds and water and frequented ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... proud of her. His feeling for her was something more than brotherly love,—he was quite conscious that there were degrees in brotherly love, and that if she had been homely or stupid, he would never have disturbed her in the stagnant life of the house behind the cedars. There had come to him from some source, down the stream of time, a rill of the Greek sense of proportion, of fitness, of beauty, which is indeed but proportion embodied, the perfect adaptation of means to ends. He had perceived, more ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... down the spurs of the Apennines, the latter half through level sandy country, with pine woods here and there. The first half he covered on foot, the second by the parliamentary train, which drew its long black line snake-like and slow, through the dunes and the stagnant waters. He had but a few francs in his waistband, and could ill afford to ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... week the stagnant heat brooded over Santa Brigida, sucking up the citizens' energy and leaving limp depression. Steaming showers that broke at intervals filled the air with an enervating damp, and the nights were worse than the days. No draught crept through ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... 1987 agreement with the IMF, the government agreed to institute a reform program to reduce inflation, promote economic growth, and improve its external position. The reforms have been slow in coming, however, and the economy has been largely stagnant for the past four years. The addition of 1 million people every seven months to Egypt's population exerts enormous pressure on the 5% of the total land area available for agriculture. GDP: exchange rate conversion - $39.2 billion, per capita $720; real growth rate 2% (1991 est.) Inflation ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... dissension, which now and then arise, to affright the timid and faithless. The waters of all latitudes could not be blended in one element, and purified, without the tempests and cross-currents, which lash the ocean into fury. Nor would a stagnant calmness, blind attachment to the limited horizon of a homestead, or the absence of all irritation or attrition, ever make one people of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... might best lead them towards the route of Murray's party. At length they arrived upon the side of an eminence, which commanded a distant prospect over a tract of savage and desolate moorland, marshy and waste—an alternate change of shingly hill and level morass, only varied by blue stagnant pools of water. A road scarcely marked winded like a serpent through the wilderness, and the pedlar, pointing to it, said—"The road from Edinburgh to Glasgow. Here we must wait, and if Murray and his train be not already passed by, we ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... is found so inimical to animal life that those who attempt to occupy them become ill, and, sooner or later, almost all die of the consequences. This gas, being specifically much heavier than common air, descends into the bottom of such unoccupied fortresses, and remains stagnant like water in old reservoirs. The current of pure air continually passes over, without being able to carry off the mass of stagnant air below; and the only way to render such places habitable is to ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... a substitute for melody. While these docile victims of the worst of all quackeries (musical quackery) were still toiling through their first hour of endurance, a passing ripple of interest stirred the stagnant surface of the audience caused by the sudden rising of a lady overcome by the heat. She was quickly led out of the concert-room (after whispering a word of explanation to two young ladies seated at her side) by a gentleman who made a fourth member of the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... Nay, my dear daughter, all this tumult gives you opportunities of practising the dearest and most lovable of the virtues recommended to you by our Lord. Believe me, true virtue is not nourished in external calm any more than are good fish found in the stagnant waters ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... charm our weary hours, To rouse our stagnant hearts, And leave the sense of new-born ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... advantages of a gravelly soil or a southern exposure, and the word sanitation had it been spoken in his presence would have conveyed no meaning to his mind. He had never heard of germs, and he had as little prejudice concerning stagnant water as he had predilection for clear water. He knew in a general way that all water was wet, but further than this he ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... preferred for oranges in California is a rich, deep alluvium, avoiding hard-pan or adobe subsoils. Stagnant water in the subsoil is a fatal defect. Although they can be grown near the ocean at a lower level, an elevation of 600 to 1200 feet is generally desirable. While southern California is particularly adapted to orange culture, the fruit is successfully raised along the foot-hills of the San ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... and the birds began to twitter; day was breaking. The girl was worn out and panting; and when the sun rose in the purple sky, she stopped, for her swollen feet refused to go any farther; but she saw a pond in the distance, a large pond whose stagnant water looked like blood under the reflection of this new day, and she limped on slowly with her hand on her heart, in order to dip both her feet in it. She sat down on a tuft of grass, took off ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... astonishing growth and spread to the slave power: on these I cannot dwell. Sir, are you satisfied with these consequences of the agitation you have gotten up? I am. I thank God that the great deep of the American mind has been blown upon by the wind of abolitionism. I rejoice that the stagnant water of that American mind has been so greatly purified. I rejoice that the infidelity and the semi-infidelity so long latent have been set free. I rejoice that the sober sense North and South, so strangely asleep and silent, has risen up to hear the word of God and ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... who he previously was. Believing that all disease, of whatsoever nature, can be safely treated only through the blood, this ill to which human flesh is heir particularly must be treated in that way, for we know that a stagnant state of the blood in one spot, at least, is the cause of the patient's malady. Therefore I have been experimenting botanically to discover a remedium for the state in question—something that will act swiftly upon the blood, and ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... glance of smiling eyes, with a bobbing of his tail and a quick love-flattening of his ears, turned his nose shoreward again and resumed his reading of the jungle tale that was wafted to him on the light fans of the stifling and almost stagnant air. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... fever is also frequently produced by the putrid exhalations and stagnant air in prisons; but perhaps most frequently by contact or near approach of the persons, who have resided in them. These causes of malignant fevers contributed to produce, and to support for a while, the septic and antiseptic theory ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... two girls in this earthy family was anomalous. Leonora, the older sister, was like a water-lily in a pool of ooze and slime, delicately floating on the stagnant waters without a visible stain at a single point of contact. She had the Ellwell features, regular, angular, prominent; with her father's high forehead and finely tapering hands, and also her father's thin unwholesome skin. But instead of the livid tan complexion of the man who had beaten ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... not always wrong. It is a common inspiration often nerving men to attempt daring and noble deeds. Desire for distinction, with capacity for it, may often be regarded as the voice of God summoning to high effort. The world would soon be stagnant without ambition. The scholar working for a prize, the writer or speaker resolving to make a name, the man of business pressing onward past the indolent and the ne'er-do-weel, are not to be condemned, so long as they ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... civilisation arose in the East, advanced towards the West, and is now at its meridian; in a few centuries more it will probably be seen sinking below the horizon even in the new world, and there will be left darkness only where there is a bright light, deserts of sand where there were populous cities, and stagnant morasses where the green meadow or the bright cornfield once appeared. I called up images of this kind in my imagination. "Time," I said, "which purifies, and as it were sanctifies the mind, destroys and brings into ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... memories of my boarding-school life are monotonous and vague. It was a period during which, as it appears to me now on looking back, the stream of my spiritual nature spread out into a shallow pool which was almost stagnant. I was labouring to gain those elements of conventional knowledge, which had, in many cases, up to that time been singularly lacking. But my brain was starved, and my intellectual perceptions were veiled. Elder persons who in later years would speak to me frankly of my school-days assured ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... individuals. Observe the putrid state of inert water, the clear and sparkling beauty of the moving stream, bearing away by the force of its own motion aught that might contaminate it. Men more often resemble the stagnant water than the rivulet. A healthy social state enforces labour by natural laws, and banishes inertia as much as possible from the system. If the principles of some noisy English politicians were fully carried out, and all things ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... expressed such opinions during his term in Parliament. The path of the political pioneer is strewn with temporary defeats, but all reforms, based upon truth, are ultimately successful, or life would be a stagnant pool instead of ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... therefore, was suffering from mental growing pains. She struggled with new ideas which she had swallowed whole, without any previous elementary knowledge of the subject. Her brain was hungry, her life was stagnant, and she seized upon these sociological problems which Holman Sommers had placed before her, and worried over them, and wondered where Holman Sommers had learned so much about things she had never heard ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... correspond to that ideal'? A mile from the source the river is unfordable. How many miles from the source of our first experience do we stand? How many of us, instead of having 'a river that could not be passed over, waters to swim in,' have but a poor and all but stagnant feeble trickle, as shallow as or shallower than ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... The accumulations of stagnant or stagnating water originating in bogs are distinguished into Trask, stagna, and Tjernar or Tjarnar (sing. Tjern or Tjarn), stagnatiles. Trask are pools fed by bogs, or water emanating from them, and their bottoms are slimy; Tjernar are small Trask situated within the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... offers, instead of flourishing verdure, only an incumbered space pierced by aged trees, loaded with parasitic plants, lichens, agarics—impure fruits of corruption. In the low parts is water, dead and stagnant because undirected; or swampy soil neither solid nor liquid, hence unapproachable and useless to the habitants both of land and of water. Here are swamps covered with rank aquatic plants nourishing only venomous insects and haunted by unclean animals. Between these low infectious ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... other mortal diseases? Who cannot see that it is a foul, deep, and fatal injury inflicted on society? that it is in a high degree cruel and unjust? that it scatters the population of our cities, renders our business stagnant, and exposes our sons and our daughters to premature and sudden death? So manifestly is this the case, that the board of health of the city of Washington, on the approach of the cholera, declared the ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... into a canebrake, which formed the bed of a shallow and stagnant brook, and, crossing it, they entered a field full of stones and without the slightest ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... of the solid rock; arches thrown up by craftmen's hands, beautiful in proportion and elegant in form, but supporting nothing. Tunnels formed here—deep pits there. Yawning gulfs, where the fetid, stagnant waters threw up their baneful odours. Here the work is finished off, as if the mason had laboured with consummate skill to complete his work, so that all the world might see and admire, although no human eyes, save those of the master's, ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... agreement with the IMF, the government agreed to institute a reform program to reduce inflation, promote economic growth, and improve its external position. The reforms have been slow in coming, however, and the economy has been largely stagnant for the past three years. The addition of 1 million people every seven months to Egypt's population exerts enormous pressure on the 5% of the total land area available ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and England, Scotland, and Norway have reason to bless it too, for the same latitudes with these places in America have a rigorous winter extendin' over more than half the year. But what I was comin' to was this—there are, as you know, eddies and stagnant places in ornary rivers, where sticks, leaves, and other odds and ends collect and remain fixed. So, in this great ocean river, there are eddies where seaweed collects and stagnates, and where the ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... she was not mistaken. Berrand was much older than Mark. He looked about forty. He was thin, sallow, eager in manner, with shining eyes—almost toad-like—a yellowish-white complexion, and coal-black hair. His vivacity was un-English, yet at the back of his nature there lay surely a stagnant reservoir of melancholy. He was a pessimist, full of ardour. He revelled, intellectually, in the sorrows and in the ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in shiny green patches among them. The Southern moss dripping from the giant branches shrouded them in a weird drapery, soft as mist. There was something dreary and painful to a Northern eye in the scene; the tall and shrouded trees, the stagnant pools of water gleaming among them, the vivid green patches of moss, the barren stretches of sand. The very beauty in it all seemed the unnatural glory of decay, repelling the beholder. Here and there were cabins. One could not look at them without ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... have walked moorlands enough to know the look of them, you know well those flat spaces or causeways of bright green or golden ground between the heathy rock masses; which signify winding pools and inlets of stagnant water caught among the rocks;—pools which the deep moss that covers them—blanched, not black, at the root,—is slowly filling and making firm; whence generally the unsafe ground in the moorland ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... squelching and squashing in her shoes whenever she moved; with a rash of rain upon her classical visage; with a bonnet like an over-ripe fig; with all her clothes spoiled; with damp impressions of every button, string, and hook-and-eye she wore, printed off upon her highly connected back; with a stagnant verdure on her general exterior, such as accumulates on an old park fence in a mouldy lane; Mrs. Sparsit had no resource but to burst into tears of bitterness and say, 'I ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... at the time of settlement by the white man heavily wooded. Numerous ponds provided mill sites for manufacturing logs into wood products for the use of the colonists. Most of these mills are in varying stages of decay, but the ponds filled with stagnant water remain. There are also numerous lakes and marshes which are due to the fact that New ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... would need no long reflection to discover that all these great ships, these railways, these telegraphs, these factories, these printing presses, without which the whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism,—that all these pillars of our State are but the ripples and the bubbles upon the surface of that great spiritual stream, the springs of which, only, he and his fellows were privileged to see; and seeing, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... would benefit each alike) but for the sake of greater freedom of political action by our unfortunate fellow citizens who dwell there. Where one party has too long and secure power it becomes intolerant and the other party falls into contempt. Thus these states have become stagnant or corrupt. For the sake of free political action we wish that their political solidity might be broken, so that the whole conscience and character of their people might find full political expression. What ...
— The South and the National Government • William Howard Taft |
