"Stolid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? Is this the Thing, the Lord God made and gave To have dominion over sea and land; To trace the stars and search the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... anything unpleasing in the expression of his features; it was rather the total want of expression which they mechanically assumed when he was conversing, or when he was aware that he was observed, of which any one would complain. It was not a stolid look which he put on, but rather that of a person totally unconscious of what was passing around; indeed, so perfect was the composure of every muscle of his face, that it looked completely like a mask with a pair of bright eyes gleaming through it. ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... had managed to get transferred to a London Hospital, was now living at home. She had provided the house with new maids against her sister's return; and though Noel was relieved not to meet her old familiars, she encountered with difficulty the stolid curiosity of new faces. That morning before she left Kestrel, her aunt had come into her room while she was dressing, taken her left hand and slipped a little gold band on to its third finger. "To please me, Nollie, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... were now four to one, concluded that discretion was the better part of valor and ceased to struggle, though now and then I could see he glanced at Kennedy out of the corner of his eye. To every question he maintained a stolid silence. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful. Emma Byers' thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for her father and brother. She was ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... to a lower rock, and lying at Benicia's feet looked upward. The scene was all above him—the great mass of white rocks, whiter in the moonlight; the rigid cypresses aloft; the beautiful faces, dreamy, passionate, stolid, restless, looking from the lace mantillas; the graceful arms holding the guitars; the sweet rich voices threading through the roar of the ocean like the melody in a grand recitativo; the old men and women crouching ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... pieces of "jewelry" rock. When all the "color" in sight had been cleaned up, the Desert Rat produced a drill and a stick of dynamite from the pack, put in a "shot" and uncovered a pocket of such richness that even the stolid Cahuilla could not forbear indulgence in one of his infrequent Spanish expletives. It was a deposit of rotten honeycombed rock that was nine- tenths pure gold—what is known in the parlance of the prospector as ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... not be allowed to penetrate farther than the parlor, the very fact of his presence sent a thrill of excitement through the house. An English milord, a heretic, the grandfather of "cette chere Lisa," whom they were to lose so soon! No wonder the most placid of the nuns, the most stolid of the lay-sisters, tingled ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... answer him a word. He became enraged to such a pitch, that he so far forgot himself as to loosen the golden ear-rings from her ears, and threatened to take away all the finery he had given her. Even this was not sufficient to rouse the girl from her stolid calmness, and the valiant officer was, at last, obliged to retreat from ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the room with an appearance of stolid indifference and as he handed the picture to ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... their way into the fishing village, and one morning in the following spring, Janet met a young girl who frequently went to Braelands House with fresh fish. She was then on her way home from such an errand, and Janet fancied there was a look of unusual emotion on her broad, stolid face. ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... sent for him. Now I imagine that the Duke will wish our new secretary to live still at the 'Brand'—he preferred it in your case, as you will remember. Our new secretary is going to be my nephew. He is very stolid and honest, and fortunately not a chatterbox. He is going to be the nominal secretary, but I want you to be the one who really ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in strong contrast the two groups round the Cross—the stolid soldiers and the sad friends. The four legionaries went through their work as a very ordinary piece of military duty. They were well accustomed to crucify rebel Jews, and saw no difference between these three and former prisoners. They watched the pangs without a touch of pity, and only wished that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... right," said Amroth, "because the impressions of youth are swift and keen; but of course, here, age is not a question of years or failing powers. The old, here, are the wise and gracious and patient and gentle; the youth of the spirit is stupidity and unimaginativeness. On the one hand are the stolid and placid, and on the other are the brutal and cruel and selfish ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... little kitchen-maids bustled around, eager to help, hot and panting, with cotton sleeves well tucked up above the dimpled elbows, and giggling over some private jokes of their own, whenever Miss Sally's back was turned for a moment. And old Jemima, stolid in temper and solid in bulk, kept up a long and subdued grumble, while she stirred the stock-pot methodically ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... enough,' said the dairyman, and paused. He was a man noisy with his associates—stolid and ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... march; and the only type of Christian work then attemptable takes the form of a brief greeting in the name of Christ to the men who tramp beside us, though they are often too tired even to talk, and we are compelled to trudge on in stolid silence. ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were—so agile, so quick, so Protean—appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a creature appearing in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... me as usual, but her face was flushed, and she looked at me uneasily, as though she feared that I had overheard Leah's speech. I thought Leah looked sullen and stolid as she waited upon me. It was a most forbidding face. I was glad when Miss Darrell dismissed ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare. But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France, and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... suggested to him the possibility of obtaining a commission in the little army of the Duchy of Maasau. This hint set him on the right track. The regiments of Maasau, though few in number, carried splendid traditions. Their ranks were drawn from a stolid, silent peasantry, and officered by a wire-strung, high tempered aristocracy, born of a mixed race, it is true, but none the less frantically devoted to the freedom and independence of their shred of ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... ecstasy that possessed him. Then she looked at Richard, standing. with his back to her, his violin tucked under his chin, his body swaying in rhythm with the music. Unger sat next to him, his instrument between his knees, his stolid, shiny face unruffled by the glorious harmonies ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... mother in an apartment in Thirty-second Street. He loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy stolid looking man with grey eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop had a desk by another window. ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Jordan he went nearly to the end of the short street before they came to a rude lunch-counter, set under a canvas awning, where a thin, nervous little man and his fat, stolid wife set canned goods and coffee before them. Billy produced a yellow ticket to be punched, Conniston paid his two bits, and they strolled back to the office. When Conniston suggested that they take something to Garton, Billy told ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... alarm was passed along the front trench. One of the officers on duty was determined to make sure this time, and stopped the passing of the message. He made his way along the trench where the men by this time had assumed their gas helmets, until he came to one stolid, oldish man who was on sentry, staring truculently out in front without his gas protection on. "Jones," said the officer, "can you smell pineapples?" "What, sir," he grunted, "I could if I had a tin of 'em under ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... minutes, for one minute more of precious grace; negroes gone drunk on religious exhortation who died in a frenzy, sure of salvation, and shouting out halleluiahs; Indians upborne and stayed by a racial stoicism; Chinamen casting stolid, slant-eyed glances over the rim of the void before them and filled with the calmness of the fatalist who believes that whatever is to be, is to be; white men upon whom at the last, when all prospect of intervention ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... general indifference to that first opportunity of realizing what all those gentlemen had advocated so long; and, in looking back over the many intervening years, we still wonder at the stolid incapacity of all men to understand that woman feels the invidious distinctions of sex exactly as the black man does those of color, or the white man the more transient distinctions of wealth, family, position, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... train. They nearly all were dressed in some sort of fur coat, and all had the look of men accustomed to out-door life—powerful, loud-voiced, unrefined. They were, in fact, travelling men, business men, the owners of mills or timber. The stolid or patient ox-like faces of some Norwegian workmen, dressed in gay Mackinac jackets, ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and at the well-guarded bridges from one end of the city to the other. Backwards and forwards the battle raged for days and weeks, by day and night, with small time for rest and refreshment. Forward rode the Colonna, the stolid Germans, Henry himself, the eagle of the Empire waving in the dim streets beside the flag that displayed the simple column in a plain field. It is not hard to hear and see it all again—the clanging gallop of armoured knights, princes, nobles and bishops, with ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their Times. Mammas forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... behaved so queerly, he was not at breakfast; he went to Paris and I did not see him until the evening, when he was as stolid and quiet as usual, so it must have been a fit, and perhaps he went up to Paris to ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... he's got his servant with him, I guess," and Tom nodded toward a stolid German who was ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... narrow convictions, of punctilious etiquette—the epitome of respectable and respected mediocrity, save when, with a profound irony, the recurring blast of insanity transformed the personality of the stolid monarch, and shattered the complacency of the smug little Court. Within its shelter hovered the bevy of amiable Princesses, whose minutest word and glance yet lives for us in the searchlight of Fanny Burney's adoring scrutiny. Afar, the sons pursued their wild careers. The Prince of ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... horseman, but, like all Italians, he was by nature cruel. As he passed the gates the horse slid and stumbled to his knees; he was up instantly, only to receive a hard stroke between the ears. This unexpected treatment caused the animal to rear and waltz. This was not the stolid-going campaign mount, but his best Irish hunter, on which he had won prizes in many a gymkhana. There was a brief struggle, during which the man became master both of himself and the horse. They were just passing the confines of the villa when a man darted out suddenly from ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... attended by a cavalier in the person of a stolid young man of German extraction, as I thought at first glance, and this was confirmed by Blister's, "Let me make you acquainted with Miss Malloy," and "Shake hands with ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... suddenly presented himself. It was a man in miniature. The masculine shape, as it loomed up in the distance, gradually separating itself from the background of villa roofs and casino terraces, resolved itself into a figure stolid and sturdy, very brown of leg, and insolent of demeanor—swaggering along as if conscious of there being a full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger was accompanied by a whistle, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... yearning human heart which was being solaced by the beautiful story of Christ and the mother Mary, and which was filled with religious enthusiasm at the thought of this Virgin enthroned in the heavens, was growing weary of the set features and stolid look of the Madonna of Byzantine art, and dreaming mystic dreams of the beauty of the Christ mother as she must have been in real life. She became the centre of thought and speculation, prayers and supplications were addressed to her, and more than once did she appear in beatific ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... moment—alone, resolutely shutting one's eyes to the mistakes behind one, refusing to look at the blankness ahead. And this is more especially the case when the mistakes and the blankness have been caused by our own actions. There is not even stolid philosophy to come to our aid, a shrugging of the shoulders, a foisting of the blame on to fate. It may be that the majority of the incidents have been forced upon us, that we have not been free agents in the matter, but if we must of honesty say,—Here or there ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... cloak and slouched hat, and holding in his hands a wire fencing-mask, extinguished with it the red nose. The latter met his fate with stolid fortitude. All were perfectly still, but the twitching cheeks of most of the spectators betrayed a laugh retained with difficulty. The cloak then advanced, like a less beautiful Norma, to a bell in the portico, and struck three tragical strokes. A strong, pealing bass voice came ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... enough. This delighted me. I read my books to them by way of amusement; I sang my songs to them; I talked to them; I would even narrate the various histories out of the Bible to them, such as that of Joseph and his brethren, &c., and the stolid air with which the communications were received made me almost imagine ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... miners, who had preceded them to the shore. But the yellow men made no show of resistance, not even when some of their number were seized—and thrown into the water with their heavily weighted baskets; they crowded together like sheep, and gazed with stolid faces at the Customs officials remorselessly capsizing their baskets upon the ground, and kicking the contents apart in the search for opium. Bags of rice were cut open and the grain spilled upon the ground, to the delight of the white diggers, especially when a tin of opium ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... "Are those the Rocky Mountains?" she suddenly asked, appealing to the stolid porter. She told Belle long afterward, she knew ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... Berryer advanced another point. As might have been expected of so accomplished an advocate, he had little difficulty in demolishing the elaborate, but specious and unsupported, hypothesis built up by the other side. Hard facts did more with the stolid and unimaginative Rouen jury than ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of Pierrette Lorrain in the home of her cousins, who gazed at her with stolid eyes; she was tossed to them like a package, with no intermediate state between the wretched chamber at Saint-Jacques and the dining-room of her cousins, which seemed to her a palace. She was shy and speechless. To all other eyes than those of the Rogrons the little Breton ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... Surprise, astonishment, and confusion followed each other across his stolid countenance; and with quicker pace than he was ever known to use in his life before, he made his way to his seat. No sooner had the reading began again when once more the door clicked. True to his promise, the minister paused and cheerfully announced to his people: ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... pressure, to gain an entrance through the pane. So violent did its contortions become that I momentarily anticipated the yielding of the glass, and the excited assailant coming crashing through. Considerably to my relief the window proved more impregnable than seemed at one time likely. The stolid resistance proved, in the end, to be too much either for its endurance or its patience. Just as I was looking for some fresh manifestation of fury, it seemed rather to tumble than to spring off the sill; then came, once more, the same sound of quietly ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... over and over to himself that what other men could do, he could. It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those that passed him on the trail. At other times, resting, he watched and envied the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under heavier packs. They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a steadiness and certitude that were ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... America, or even—now that national costumes are dying out—from France and Germany. These attempts at art were intended to pass into the hands of children—not the favoured children reared on the charming fancies of Caldecott and Kate Greenaway; but homelier, more stolid, and easily satisfied children. Such art was also for the masses of the people who cannot pay for original art, save in its first uncertain developments, when the stagier it is, the blacker, the bolder, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... a case even obtuseness is in some sort a qualification; for it will enable one to sympathise with the vulgar insensibility to the offered delicacy, if only to substitute articulate rejection for simple stolid silence. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... he felt, perhaps, for Matthew's stolid face and small, twinkling eyes were not pleasant. He muttered something, and then went grumbling across the yard towards a wall, from behind which emanated an odour which ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... "TANNHAUSER", although he was called several times before the curtain at the first performances. The part of "Tannhauser" was sung by "Herr Jung", the husband of "Lucile Gran." He succeeded, in my opinion, better than the public here seemed to think, which is, as a rule, somewhat lukewarm and stolid. "Frau Dietz", whose figure and personality do not particularly fit her for "Elizabeth", sang the beginning of the second act with intelligence and feeling, but in the last act she was no longer up to the mark, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... turned halfway round, and the light of the candle fell full on his face. Jim saw the whole outline with the utmost clearness, even to the expression in the eyes, which was neither gay nor sad, but rather stolid and stern—just what he had been accustomed to see there. The dog crouched back against the wall, and after a brief halt near the stair-head, Captain Bywater turned the knob of his bed-room door and passed in. The dog followed, the door was closed, and once more ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... forward in his chair. He was in a state of extraordinary excitement. He quivered and jumped. Ted, standing by the wall, looked as stolid as ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... not quite see what Mrs. Butler's throat had to say to a clandestine wife of Captain Bertram's, stared at her friend with her usual round and stolid eyes. ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... many-wrinkled and unmistakably dirty, blinking at the devil-wagons and the ceaseless hurry of the white man. And being somewhat Indianized, as my husband once assured me I was, I could sympathize with that stolid old lady in ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... train drew up in a siding, where an officer with R.T.O. upon his arm made us welcome, and informed us that hot water was available for taking tea. Everybody had two days' rations in his haversack, so a large-scale picnic followed. From the horse-trucks emerged stolid individuals with canvas buckets—you require to be fairly stolid to pass the night in a closed box, moving at twenty miles an hour, in company with eight riotous and insecurely tethered mules—to draw water from the hydrant which ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... through the clinging brambles in Sir HENRY's coverts with his eye-glass in his eye and his Express at the trail. At every step his unfortunate legs had been more and more torn, until there was literally not a scrap of sound skin upon them anywhere. Even the beaters, a stolid lot, had roared when old VELVETEENS the second keeper had brought up to poor COODENT a lump of flesh from his right leg, which he had found sticking on a thorn-bush in the centre of the high covert. Suddenly Sir HENRY stopped and shaded his eyes with his hand anxiously. We all imitated him, ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... extended a tinted photograph. His gnarled fingers trembled as he handed it over, and there was a suspicious softness in the lines of his wrinkled old face, as he looked fondly at the likeness of the stolid, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... eyes of Andreas would kindle into something like intelligence, and a flush would warm his stolid countenance. He was a fair-haired young giant, white-skinned and well-featured, but dull, looking, with cold, hard eyes suggesting the barbarian that he was considered by the cultured Neapolitans, and that he certainly looked by contrast with them. Friar Robert supporting the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... close upon the buckboard that he might have touched either of its occupants with his rawhide quirt, rode the Mexican. When they discovered him he was leaning forward, his half-closed eyes mere slits with pin-points of black fire to mark them, and his repulsive face a stolid mask. Ford's hand went instinctively to the whip: it was the only available weapon. But the Mexican merely touched his flapping sombrero and rode on at the ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... ultimatum left her a little blank; but in the immediate excitement of removal, in the thrill of martyrdom that came with publicity, the blankness did not last. What the publicity was to her husband she could not understand. He received the protests of his family in stolid silence; when the venturesome great-aunt told him what she thought of him, he smiled; when his brother informed him that he was a fool, he said he shouldn't wonder. When the minister, egged on by distracted Hall relatives, remonstrated, ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... the measure of the quiet, stolid-looking Englishman. She had seen him long before Sylvia had done so, and had watched him with some attention, guessing almost at once that he must be the man for whom ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Sun, we found novelty and interest in every yard of the three miles that stretch between the station and the capital. The scrub-covered desert has given place to a wooded and cultivated valley, ringed by a chain of hills, sterile and steep. The white ribbon of the road, through whose dust plough stolid buffaloes and strings of creaking bullock-carts, is bordered by tall cactus and yellow-flowered mimosa on either side. Among the trees rise countless half-ruined temples and chatries; on whose whitewashed walls are frequent frescoes of tigers or elephants rampant, and of wonderful Rajput ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... intrusted to its care, it went on telling, in the midst of the ever-changing and bustling crowd, with a bold and unhesitating click, the simple fact it knew; and that there might be no mistake, it registered what it told in palpable signs transmitted through the features of its own stolid face. Mr Dent's great clock was by no means the least distinguished object in the collection of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... The stolid face of Jimmy recalled him to the present. He must give up the plantation and take a berth of some sort. From the sideboard he took a flask of liquor and poured out two ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... skins he invested in "Indian Goods"—colored cloth, beads, blankets, knives, axes, and musical instruments. His was the first store in New York that carried a stock of musical instruments. These he sold to the savages, and also he supplied the stolid Dutch the best of everything in this particular line, from a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... "stuck on," give them a rather comical aspect. You will find them inquisitive, too. Put your finger in front of their tank, and they will all flock to see what it is. On the contrary, other fishes, such as the pike and carp, will remain stolid and indifferent to any movement you may make, and some, like the timorous trout—for which Isaak Walton loved to angle above any fish,—will be so dreadfully upset at the appearance of your digit that they will dart off in ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... by, he was content with blunt, wistful ruminations upon her indistinct image. Jacob Sowerby's accusation, and several kindred innuendoes let fall by his mother, left him coolly incredulous; the girl still seemed to him altogether distant; but from the first sight of her face he had evolved a stolid, unfaltering conception of her difference from the ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... down upon Henry Chatillon's saddle. We tossed a piece of buffalo robe to Jack, who was looking about in some embarrassment. He spread it on the ground, and took his seat, with a stolid ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... city—walked directly between us, eyeing each of us with his red round eyes in a manner so ludicrous that we all broke forth in a fit of laughter that lasted for several minutes, while the ungainly bird stalked away with much the stolid air of one who has seen something ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly dissolves. The tufted tops of a sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and yellow bamboo, and the fan-shaped outlines of the traveller's palm become distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling hills, ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... breath of prayer, the soul, buried under the ashes of worldly cares, flamed up, and the air that fanned it made it glow like an inward fire, lighting up the thick cheeks, the stolid, heavy features. It smoothed out the crackled surface of wrinkles, softened in the younger women the vulgarity of chapped red lips, gave colour to the dull brown flesh, overflowed in the smile on lips half parted in silent ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Billy gave one of the monkeys a banana. He peeled it exactly as a man would have done, smelt it critically, and threw it back at her in the most insulting fashion. We saw also the rows of Hindu shops open to the street, with their gaudily dressed children of blackened eyelids, their stolid dirty proprietors, and their women marvellous in bright silks and massive bangles. In the thatched native quarter were more of the fine Swahili women sitting cross-legged on the earth under low verandas, engaged in different handicrafts; and chickens; and many amusing naked children. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... resentful when she stood upon the threshold and rang the bell. She presented a stolid countenance to the maid servant who opened the door and received her message. When she was at last taken to Miss Amory, she went with an unresponding bearing, and, being led into a cheerful room where the old woman sat, stood before her waiting, ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and the sky was dirty!.. To complete his gloom, a whole squad of the Salvation Army, who had come aboard at Beckenried, a dozen stout girls with stolid faces, in navy-blue gowns and Greenaway bonnets, were grouped under three enormous scarlet umbrellas, and were singing verses, accompanied on the accordion by a man, a sort of David-la-Gamme, tall and fleshless with crazy ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... classed as "superstition," we would rejoin by gleefully pointing to a leading article in the Irish Times of Jan. 27, 1914, which gives a short account of a lecture by Mr. Lovett on the folklore of London. Folklore in London! in the metropolis of the stolid Englishman! The fact is that the Irish people are not one whit more superstitious than their cross-channel neighbours, while they are surely on a far higher level in this respect than many of the Continental nations. They seem to be more superstitious because (we speak without wishing ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... checkstring before a tall block of buildings. She hurried inside, ascended two flights of stairs, and rang the bell of a door immediately opposite her. A very German-looking manservant opened it after the briefest of delays—a man with fair moustache, fat, stolid ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... knew well that he was dying, and saw these sad tidings reflected in every face. It was touching and terrible to see around his house, his door, in his chamber even, these old grenadiers of the guard, always stolid and unmoved till now, weeping and sobbing like children. What an atrocious thing war ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... to Leader-of-the-Opposition Bebel, the Prince said, "One thing at least, the Emperor is no Philistine," and proceeded to explain, rather negatively and disappointingly, that the Emperor possesses what the Greeks call megalopsychia—a great soul. One knows but too well the English Philistine, that stolid, solid, self-sufficient bulwark of the British Constitution. The German Philistine is his twin brother, the narrow-minded, conservative burgher. Other epithets the Prince applied to the imperial character were "simple," "natural," "hearty," "magnanimous," "clear-headed," and "straightforward"; ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... ground, His own conviction? Ardent as he is— Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old "Be it as God please" reassureth him. I probed the sore as thy disciple should: "How, beast," said I, "this stolid carelessness Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march To stamp out like a little spark thy town, Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?" He merely looked with his large eyes on me. The man ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... mistake. He knew who it was. His mates did not see the smile of irony, of sly ridicule, which stirred his lips as he bowed to the passer. Immediately his rather handsome effeminate face resumed a stolid vacuity. ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... mind the wonderful things that he intended "Mortimer Stant" to be. It was to concern a man of forty (in his confident selection of that age he displayed, most stridently, his own youth) and Mortimer was to be a stolid, reserved Philistine, who was, against his will, by outside forces, dragged ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... its habitat in the house of the president of the local Chamber of Commerce. As I was in this house, a tall young captain entered. He had long curly red hair and an unusually white face, though heavy and stolid, with large, steel-cold eyes and with beautiful, tender, almost girlish lips. But in his eyes there was such cold cruelty that it was quite unpleasant to look at his otherwise fine face. When he left the room, our ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... Brunswick moose that he was after. Nothing but the noblest antlers that New Brunswick forests bred could seem to him worthy of a place on those walls of his, whence the surly front of a musk-ox of the Barren Grounds glared stolid defiance to the snarl of an Orinoco jaguar, and the black, colossal head of a Kadiak bear was eyed derisively by the monstrous and malignant mask of a two-horned rhinoceros. With such a quest upon him, the Famous Hunter came, and naturally sought the guidance ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of his foes at his fingers' ends, and the most that he expected from these wild irregulars was that they might, perchance, stay an onset and worry the imperial army with dashing cavalry raids. But that they should hold their own with the incomparable infantry of Spain, or make head against the stolid valour of the German men-at-arms, was not contemplated by Barbarossa. In his Janissaries, in his hard-bitten fighting men from the galleys, he could expect much; but there were but some few thousands of these, while the disciplined host against ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... glance at the stolid back of John beyond the two empty seats in front of them. Although she knew he could not hear her words, instinctively ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... normally, has a stolid expression, redeemed slightly, perhaps, by its exchange often for a lugubrious one. I should feel disposed to predict for him the scoring of an immense success in the personation of such characters as those of the melancholy Dane; or of Antonio, in the Merchant ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... prominent dark eyes under sleepy lids, abundant iron-gray hair which was brushed until it shone, and a drooping moustache that was still as brown as it had been in his youth. He had an impressive though stolid bearing, an amiable expression, an engaging smile, and the manner of a weary monarch. It was his boast that he had never done anything for the first time without ascertaining precisely how it had been done by the highest authority before him. Devoid of even the rudiments of an ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... outside the station, and she had a momentary fear lest she should receive deferential recognition from the chauffeur. But he was as solid and stolid as any other portion of the car, and paid no more attention to her than he did to her baggage. The one was a nurse; the other, a box, both common nouns, and merely articles to be conveyed to Gleneesh ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... your brute as to a fellow galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he's an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of the voyager. What I required was something cheap and small and hardy, and of a stolid and peaceful temper; and all these requisites pointed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sudden transition, her thoughts went back to the early morning when Wyllard had driven away, and every detail of the scene rose up clearly in her mind. She saw him and the stolid Dampier sitting in the wagon, with nothing in their manner to suggest that they were setting out upon a perilous venture, and she felt his hand close tight upon her fingers, as it had done just before the vehicle jolted away from ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... in there?" asked Vassili of one waggoner who was dangling his legs lazily over the splashboard of his conveyance and flicking his whip about as he gazed at us with a stolid, vacant look; but he only made answer when we were too far off to catch what ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... on the great, stolid, comfortable class which forms the backbone of the novel-reading public. The best novelists do not find their material in this class. Thomas Hardy never. H.G. Wells, almost never; now and then he glances at it ironically, in an ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... years now John Carlson has been custodian of the refuge. No thought of disloyalty, I am sure, has ever entered his mind during all that time. To betray his trust would have been in his mind a thing undreamed. He was phlegmatic, stolid to such a degree that one could not but wonder how the Revolution had any meaning to him at all. And yet love of freedom glowed sombrely and steadily in his dim soul. In ways it was indeed good that he was not flighty and imaginative. He never lost his head. He could obey ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... in obtaining some details of the attitude of the two condemned men. Vaucheray observes a stolid sullenness and is awaiting the fatal event with no ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... to be fastened speechless upon a rack, and to be charged by uncomprehending souls with counterfeiting emotion. She was so constituted that she could not help laying up this speech of her husband's against him as one of many stolid misdoings which justified both contempt and aversion. In fact, his inability or unwillingness to comprehend her had always been, in her searching and sensitive eyes, his chief crime. To be understood, to be accepted at her full worth, was ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... efficiency in every line of her body. The other, a tall Polish girl, of perhaps 22, was also extremely neat, but her pretty brown hair was blown around her face and her blue eyes were fairly dancing with eagerness, in contrast to the stolid expression of the other woman. As I faced them, the older woman compressed her lips in a thin line, while the girl smiled at ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... man's face, as he stepped back a pace or two. I understood it afterwards; I felt it then. There was no resentment; there was no fire of anger, which I should have expected; there was no manly and no stolid disregard of what had been done. There was instead a slight smile, which to this day I cannot bear to recall; it spoke so much of patient and helpless humiliation; as of one wincing at the galling of a sore and trying not to show he winced. Preston took me off my horse, and began to speak. I turned ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... current of cool air that they had felt since entering the place had stopped for some time past, and still the water kept rising, and at last seemed to come through the narrowing opening with so horrible a gurgling rush that it affected even stolid Josh, who took his cap off and said that it was "a ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... swinish, base, brute, imbruted, sottish, unintellectual, beastly, carnal, insensible, stolid, unspiritual, bestial, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... that he forgot his manners and went into peals of laughter. And from that moment I ceased to exist as the bright particular star in Mr. Gibson's firmament of eligible young men: for in spite of the kink in my nose, and my stolid gravity, which was really and merely the result of my shyness, he had always looked upon me as an exceptionally presentable, proper, and goodly youth, and a most exemplary—that is, if my sister was to be trusted in the matter; ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... keen little Robinson eyes took in this saying with quick intelligence, and four stolid sets of shoulders straightened up importantly with four uplifted saucy chins. They would store these remarks away for future reference when the aunt in question arrived on the scene. They would ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Bud's eye. But the young Philistine kept his own counsel. He listened, but said nothing, and the eyes under his shaggy brows gave no sign. Ralph could not tell whether those eyes were deep and inscrutable or only stolid. Perhaps a little of both. When Monday morning came, Ralph was nervous. He ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... possibility of help from his frightened flock it was ended by this ill-timed blow. The Prior and his fellows on the dais made not a single motion; and save for an excited swaying and whispering, the monks sat stolid on their benches, either too frightened to flee or too indifferent to the Abbot's safety to care to aid him. For once had the habit of trembling obedience, yoked upon them by years of stern domination, been loosed by the spirit of fear or the hope ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... twenty years, the other for life. They had been in eighteen years. I watched their faces when their numbers were called; they stepped forward to the platform and were told of their pardon. There wasn't a sign of comprehension, not a movement of a muscle, the twitch of an eyelid—simply a dead stolid stare. The truth is, they were benumbed as to feeling, incapable of comprehending anything, of initiating anything, as I was till—till this afternoon; then I began to live, ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... its concentrated stolidity. They do not intend wrong—they intend rightly: in truth, they work against the entire human race. So wedded and so confirmed is the world in its narrow groove of self, so stolid and so complacent under the immense weight of misery, so callous to its own possibilities, and so grown to its chains, that I almost despair to see it awakened. Cemeteries are often placed on hillsides, and the white stones are ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... dear life; blue-bloused men in French caps, but bigger and blonder than Frenchmen, and less given to epigrammatic repartee, with mild, blue, beery eyes, a fleur de tete, and a look of health and stolid amiability; sturdy green-coated little soldiers with cock-feathered brigand hats of shiny black, the brim turned up over the right eye and ear that they might the more conveniently take a good aim at the foe ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... stolid black eyes full on the Elder, but made no reply. It was indeed an evil face. The Elder was conscious that impulses which he feared were unchristian were rising rapidly in his breast. He had wished a few ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the hospital a few months ago, when he looked calmly on without a groan or a wince, while the surgeon sawed off the ends of the bone of his fractured arm, drilled holes through them and screwed them together with a fastening of gold wire! That was physical bravery, or perhaps stolid exemption from pain: this was that moral bravery, in a bad cause, but none the less real, which could see wholesale and undeniable ruin fall without betraying one sign of agony to the observer most interested. Though ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... and chief engineer turned pale at this significant speech. The rest of the crew looked on in stolid wonder, for they understood no word ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... ages of oppression have damped its virility. Although some of our most notable prizefighters have been gipsies, it used to be well known in times when the ring was fashionable that a gipsy could not be relied upon “to take punishment” with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly, perhaps, because his more highly strung nervous system makes him more sensitive to pain. The courage of a gipsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt her, and yet she will allow ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... face close to you, star- gazing. If you have a visitor, you will see the door slowly open, and a black face protruded at least six times in a quarter of an hour. They are intensely curious, but otherwise as stolid ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... have felt some qualms of uneasiness as one humiliation followed another; but if he felt he did not show them. Conscious of his ability, and of his own great purposes, he seems to have borne his position with a sort of proud or stolid patience. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... obstinate resolve to remain amongst his tenants. In her alarm, Lady Louisa implored him to sell the property and buy one in Ireland, which was Lady Craikshaw's native country; and the list she contrived to run up of the drawbacks to the Ammaby estate would have driven a temper less stolid than ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... he was in khaki, but the contrast between the two officers was very striking. The one was lean and athletic in every line of his figure, with laughing grey eyes in a handsome face; the other, a stolid, fair-haired Fleming, whose square visage would have been rather colourless and commonplace but for the pleasant smile which showed his ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... The stolid heavy-natured colliers openly looked down upon 'th' parson.' A 'bit of a whipper snapper,' even the best-natured called him in sovereign contempt for his insignificant physical proportions. Truly the sensitive little gentleman's ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his back upon the advancing party in an unmistakable manner, and Stanton smoked with a stolid, impassive face that had anything but welcome in it. Sibley was just sufficiently excited by wine to act out ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... mulberry-trees, her whitewashed, red-tiled cottages, her light-hearted, easy-going, Latin-blooded peasantry; across the mountains is the solemn, austere German scenery, with savage peaks and gloomy pine forests, a region inhabited by a stolid, slow-thinking Teutonic people. The Trentino and the Tyrol have about as much in common as ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... he burst out, consternation in every line of his usually stolid countenance. "A dreadful thing has happened! How it's come about I can't for the life of me say, and how we're going to tell the General, ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various |
