"Sluggish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... slothful or slow, more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a house—mark you, the sea does the building—he dies, and he leaves his house behind him—and a reputation for industry, beside which the reputation ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... I stole through the dusk, and for a long time heard nothing but our own breathing and the beating of our hearts. But coming to a sluggish stream, as quiet as the wood through which it crept, and following its slow windings, we at last heard a voice, and in the distance made out dark forms sitting on the earth beside that sombre water. ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... noble art not through necessity, but through a true love of the art itself. This man, who was one of the disciples of Donato, although I have placed him before his master because he died long before him, was a somewhat sluggish person, but modest, humble, and kindly in his dealings. There is by his hand, in Florence, the S. Philip of marble which is on a pilaster on the outside of the Oratory of Orsanmichele. This work was at first allotted ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... clean-washed sky behind it; the headland intercepted the heavy sea that had been occasioned by the squall, and the tide, which had been running so fiercely up the river (for we were now in the mouth of a river), was sluggish before it turned, so we floated quietly, and before the moon went down managed to bail out the boat thoroughly and get her a little ship-shape. Leo was sleeping profoundly, and on the whole I thought it wise not to wake him. It was true he was sleeping in wet clothes, but the night was now so warm ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... but the object of his daring deeds had been his own other self; that never satisfied nature of humanity, which, continually cries for more, that unreasonable element of our existence, that is not content, when we have dipped our trembling hands in the sluggish, sullied waters of sin and shame, to gather the little bright deceptive flower they craved to hold, something that looks so tempting and precious on the dangerous water's edge, but which when gathered becomes offensive, and ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... then as I leaped to my feet something in my look seemed to frighten him, for without a word he turned and fled. But all my attention was centred in the boat, which was drifting slowly into mid-stream with Lisbeth still fast asleep. And as I watched its sluggish progress, with a sudden chill I remembered the weir, which foamed and roared only a short half-mile away. If the boat once got ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... heard,' said he, 'was drawn by such heavy and sluggish animals. Strange it is indeed to be carried to adventures in an ox-cart, instead of flying through the air on a griffin or a cloud! Yet, mayhap, the new chivalry, of which I am the first knight, may have new ways'; and with that he contented ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... quite white on the horizon, with exquisitely delicate blue and pink tints. The pale sun seemed like a great silver lamp, casting a shower of bright rays into the Durance. And the broad, sluggish river, expanding lazily over the red sand, extended from one end of the valley to the other, like a stream of liquid metal. To the west, a line of low rugged hills threw slight violet streaks ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... direct the movements of his party. Gregson never got into one intentionally; but when he did, he showed that he was as steady and fearless as any one; but his tactics were to keep moving about, to be ready to assist his chief, or to take up the ball when it approached the goal. Some called him the sluggish player; but Lemon's party found it difficult enough to send the ball through the goal when he was to be found anywhere near it. Dawson and three or four other big fellows had got the ball between them, and were ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... the twilight on to the stone pavement. Mummy-cases leaned against all the walls, and on smooth polished slabs lay bodies covered with coarse cloths. A rat scudded now and then across the floor, and from the wide cracks between the stones sluggish ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 19th of June our little fleet landed at Willow Point. There was a rude jetty, or wharf, at this place, below the little trading village referred to, at which loaded boats discharged. Formerly they could ascend the sluggish and shallow channel connecting the expansion of the Heart River, called Buffalo Lake, with the head of Lesser Slave Lake, a distance of about three miles, and as far as the Hudson's Bay Company's post, around which another trading village had gathered. This temporary fall in the water ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... resource failed him. He stared at the woman for whom he cared not the snap of a finger, and who, he knew, cared not the snap of a finger for him, aghast at the havoc he had wrought. If he had set out to arouse emotion in these two sluggish breasts he had done so with a vengeance. He had thought he was amusing himself with a toy cannon, and he had fired a ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... was really scared. Another inch, and the fisher would have won the game, but he was in such a hurry that he grew careless and reckless, and did not notice that he had wheeled half-way round, and that his hind-quarters were alongside the Porcupine's. Now, sluggish and slow though a porky may be, there is one of his members that is as quick as a steel trap, and that is his tail. Something hit the fisher a whack on his flank, and he gave a cry of pain and fury, and jumped back with half a dozen spears sticking in his flesh. He must have quite ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... On a certain sluggish noon hour in August, Dickie, as far as the kitchen door with a tray balanced on his palm, realized that he had forgotten this man's order. He hesitated to go back. "Like as not," reasoned Dickie, "he didn't rightly know what the order was. He never does look at his ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... away from the oracle, and thought himself no wiser than when he came thither. Caring little what might happen to him, he took the first path that offered itself, and went along at a sluggish pace; for, having no object in view, nor any reason to go one way more than another, it would certainly have been foolish to make haste. Whenever he met anybody, the old question was at ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... the effect of a decorative panel. He carried the epistle about with him all day, and observed the weather with solicitous attention, but no change occurred. The turquoise sky remained without a cloud. Fires from burning leaves sent up sluggish pillars of smoke, that spread out equilaterally above the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... with several other people. The moon had broken through the clouds. Its light upon the cold, sluggish water produced the effect of polished steel. It reminded him of the grey surface of an ancient suit of armour. The crossing was slow. He could not repress a shudder when he looked downstream and saw lights that seemed to be ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... her girlish manners, she had been undecided and rather sluggish; she walked languidly, and had a tired smile, but now she became animated and merry, and was always ready for pleasure. Men paid her marked attentions, and she was amused at their talk, and made fun of their gallantries, as she felt sure that she could resist them, for she was rather disgusted ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... how the big winds, that cleaned the woods and fields elsewhere, crawled here with difficulty through the dense foliage that protected The Towers from the North and West and East. They were ineffective, sluggish currents. There was no real wind. Nothing happened. I began to realize—far more clearly than in my sister's fanciful explanation about "layers"—that here were many contrary influences at work, mutually destructive ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... vain the people tried To push from power, here is laid aside. Death only from the bench could ever start The sluggish ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... that man lives not by bread alone, viii. 3. It knows that wealth and success tend to beget indifference to religion, viii. 13ff., and that chastisement, when it comes, is sent in fatherly love, viii. 5; and it presses home upon the sluggish conscience the duty of kindness to the down-trodden and destitute, with a sweet and irresistible reasonableness—"Love the sojourner, for ye were sojourners in the land ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... pale and more tense than was perhaps desirable, peered back at him from the toilet glass. He laid the brushes down, and was not satisfied. He took them up again and brushed, brushed mechanically—forgot himself in that occupation. The tumult of his thoughts ended in a sluggish flow of reflection, such as, after the outburst of a volcano, the almost imperceptible progress of a stream of lava, creeping languidly over a convulsed land and pitilessly obliterating any landmark left by the shock of ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... two heads, but is equally thick before and behind; and, like some caterpillars, furnished with a kind of protuberance at its tail, which, to a superficial observer, may pass for another head. They are of a red colour, sluggish, and resemble a long sausage. The Wall-snake climbs a wall with great agility, and is small and spotted. The bite of all these serpents is attended with great danger; indeed I believe there is not one of this ...
— Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives • John Gottfried Haensel
... smoked his pipe in the snug little oak-wainscoted parlour at the Grange, while his passion grew day by day, until it did really become a very absorbing feeling, second only to his love of money and Wyncomb Farm. These dull sluggish natures are capable of deeper passions than the world gives them credit for; and are as slow to abandon an idea as they are ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... to emulation. He saw his rival, weak, sickly, wounded, swimming the river, struggling through the mud, leading the charge, stopping the flight, grasping the sword with the left hand, managing the bridle with a bandaged arm. But none of these things moved that sluggish and ignoble nature. He watched, from a safe distance, the beginning of the battle on which his fate and the fate of his race depended. When it became clear that the day was going against Ireland, he was seized with an apprehension that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... way of getting even with his tormentor. The words that burn or rankle or corrode are not the words to stimulate. No doubt Socrates said that he was the gadfly of the State and stung that noble animal into action, but what may be good for a sluggish old coach-horse is not necessarily good for a thoroughbred colt ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... is as tender as a baby's, and he is snuffed out by a blow that would hardly bewilder for a moment any other forest animal, unless it be the skunk, another sluggish non-combatant of our woodlands. Immunity from foes, from effort, from struggle is always ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... they multiply with the fostering aid of the spawning-box! We are not deep in the mysteries of the angle, but we believe English waters do not boast the catfish. They ought to acquire him. He is almost as hard to extirpate as the perch, would be quite at home in these sluggish pools under the lily-pads, and would harmonize admirably with the eel in the pies and other gross preparations which delight the British palate. He hath, moreover, a John Bull-like air in his broad and burly shape, his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the porosity of plates and separators decreases, circulation and diffusion of electrolyte are made difficult, chemical actions between plates and acid take place very slowly, and the whole battery becomes sluggish, and acts as if it were numbed with cold. The voltage and capacity of the ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... lay down on their arms with orders to attack at daylight. Dark clouds had swirled their storm banks over the sky before sunset and the heavens were opened. The rain fell in blinding torrents, until the sluggish little stream of the Chickahominy had become a rushing, widening, treacherous river which threatened to sweep away the last ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... turning and vanishing fast and faster down the valley, tortured him with its solicitations. He spent long whiles on the eminence, looking down the rivershed and abroad on the fat lowlands, and watched the clouds that travelled forth upon the sluggish wind and trailed their purple shadows on the plain; or he would linger by the wayside, and follow the carriages with his eyes as they rattled downward by the river. It did not matter what it was; everything that went that way, were it cloud ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... was she needed it; and in the same dejected way she sipped it slowly; and then there was a long silence—the silence of a fatigue, like that of fever, near which sleep refuses to come. But she sat in that waking lethargy in which are sluggish dreams of horror, and neither eyes nor ears for that which ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... enticed into thoughtless dissipation, and, after a brilliant start, finds that he is at the mercy of the cleverer villains who surround him; that he has been bought and sold like a sheep; that his character is gone, and his imagination become sluggish; and, finally, he has to escape from utter ruin by scarcely describable degradation. He writes a libel on one of his virtuous friends, who is forgiving enough to improve it and correct it for the press. In order to bury his ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... into a broad deep basin with rocky shores, and commanding the noblest mountain scenery. It is rarely that the pond-lily and the speckled trout are found together,—the fish the soul of the purest spring water, the flower the transfigured spirit of the dark mud and slime of sluggish summer streams and ponds; yet in Moxie they were both found in perfection. Our camp was amid the birches, poplars, and white cedars near the head of the lake, where the best fishing at this season was to be had. Moxie has a small oval head, rather shallow, but bumpy with ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... successful for the cases that assumed a typhoid character, with dry, cracked tongue, sordes on the teeth, and low sluggish pulse, were Baptisia and Bryonia, given every two hours, alternately. Nitric acid given internally and injected into the rectum, when bloody discharges ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill
... was, he raised the body and nursed the almost severed head. He muttered hoarsely, and his face was bent low till his own dripping wound shed its sluggish tide to mingle with the blood of the man he ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... as he talked evidenced itself in audible breaths and growing smiles upon every face. The encouraging words acted as the stimulant of a hypodermic in sluggish veins, eyes brightening and cheeks flushing at the mental pictures conjured up by the prospect of getting their ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... between the snowy peaks, the peaks themselves, had been the theatre of hideous scenes of human cruelty, of human lust and greed, of human egoism. Day by day a slow terrible stream of humanity had wound like a dark and sluggish river through these passes, bringing with it sweat and toil and agony, torture and suffering and death. As long as the brilliant sun in the placid azure of the summer heavens above had guided them, bands of men had ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... stalwart form down through the summer haze, coming with his springy stride through the wheat. Yet—the words—mortally wounded! They had burned into her thought so that when she closed her eyes she saw them, darkly red, against the blindness of sight. Pain was a sluggish stream with source high in her breast, and it moved with her unquickened blood. If Dorn were really dead, what would become of her? Selfish question for a girl whose lover had died for his country! She would work, she would be worthy of him, she would never pine, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... while in place of the languid transfer from place to place, taking place at first weekly, then twice or thrice a week, we by-and-by get daily transfer, and finally transfer many times a day—the original sluggish, irregular rhythm, becomes a rapid, equable pulse. Mark, too, that in both cases the increased activity, like the greater perfection of structure, is much less conspicuous at the periphery of the vascular system. On main lines of railway, we have, perhaps, a score trains in each ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... on Tweed, with the holds of Eital, Chillingham, and Ford, which he made his headquarters, and awaited the approach of Surrey and the levies of the Stanleys. On September 5th he demolished Ford Castle, and took position on the crest of Flodden Edge, with the deep and sluggish water of Till at its feet. Surrey, commanding an army all but destitute of supplies, outmanoeuvred James, led his men unseen behind a range of hills to a position where, if he could maintain himself, he was upon James's line of communications, and thence marched against ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... in her chair, with heightened color and brightening eyes: her breath came a little more quickly than usual, as if her pulses were quickened. There is nothing so catching as emotion. Oliver's sluggish pulses began to stir at the sight of her. That soft and tender face seemed more beautiful to him than the sparkle and vivacity of Ethel Kenyon's. If it had not been for Ethel's twenty thousand pounds, he did not know but what he would have preferred Lesley. Rosy had said that ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... glory of Prince Maurice thrills my sluggish blood; again I taste the wild joys of conflict; the clashing steel, the battle shouts, the cries of dying men—-yea, even the death scream of those sorely stricken comes as a balm to soothe my droning age. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... you see it there, whether looking out in quiet majesty from a lonely point over a silent lake, or leading him in his terrific rush through the startled forest, will your heart ever jump and your nerves tingle in that swift thrill which stirs the sluggish blood to your very finger tips, and sends you quietly back to camp with your soul at peace—well satisfied to leave Umquenawis where he is, rather than pack him home to your admiring friends in a ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... But I see. Slowly, surely, creeps Day by day o'er me the conviction—here Was life's prize grasped at, gained, and then let go! —That with her—may be, for her—I had felt Ice in me melt, grow steam, drive to effect Any or all the fancies sluggish here I' the head that needs the hand she would not take And I shall never lift now. Lo, your wood— Its turnings which I likened life to! Well,— There she stands, ending every avenue, Her visionary presence on each goal I might have gained had we ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... acquire a foreign language which seemed likely to be useful to him, he had been obliged to abandon it on account of alarming cerebral symptoms. This man has immense vigour and energy, but the digestive functions, in this instance, are sluggish. However, when he abandoned study, the cerebral inconveniences disappeared, ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... further influx of water to the cabin; but the heavy washing sounds that came up from below told me that my efforts were already too late to be of any service, for the cabin seemed to be flooded to almost half the height of the companion ladder, and the sluggish motions of the ship told me eloquently enough that she was perilously near to a foundering condition. I therefore rallied the men and bade them get to work at the pumps forthwith; and it was then that I discovered, to my horror, that, of our complement of sixty, we had lost no fewer than fourteen, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... With a shock she realized that there she was standing like a dolt, quietly watching Lyveden cudgelling his brains for the password back to Insanity. Any second he might stumble upon it. For once, mercifully, his memory was sluggish—would not respond. And there he was flogging it, to extract that hideous fatal delusion that he was pledged ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the sluggish current of hyaline material issuing from globules of most primitive living substance. Persistently it followed its way into space, conquering, at first, the manifold resistances opposed to it by its watery medium. Gradually, however, its energies became exhausted, till ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... part of speakers to ask direct questions of the audience. Frequently the rhetorical question—which is one asked because the answer is the quite apparent fact the speaker wants to impress upon his hearers—is an effective method of making a seemingly personal appeal to sluggish intellects or lazy wills. The interrogative form has the same disadvantage as the exclamatory. Except when its answer is perfectly plain it transfers no meaning. It would be easily possible for a speaker with no ideas at ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... grandmother, for your estimate of my capacities and of the sluggish manner in which my blood courses through my veins. Doing nothing was all very well in dead-alive, by-gone days, but it does not suit the present age of activity and progress. In our time everything that has heart and spirit feels that labor is a law of life. Some men till the earth, some ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... that helps a man in the world so much as purpose and persistent industry. To the feeble, the sluggish and purposeless, the happiest accidents avail nothing,—they pass them by, seeing no meaning in them. But it is astonishing how much can be accomplished if we are prompt to seize and improve the opportunities for action and effort which ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... admired many women in the bright years of his youth, and had fancied himself desperately in love more than once in his life; but it is doubtful whether the mighty passion had ever really possessed the Captain's heart, which was naturally cold and sluggish, rarely fluttered by any emotion that was not engendered of selfishness. Horatio had set up an idol and had invented a religion for himself very early in life; and that idol was fashioned after his own image, and that religion had its beginning and end in ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... of the deceased, instead of that Mrs. Grundyfied view of him which the clergyman is so painfully elaborating in his prayer? Remove the pendulum of conventional routine, and the mental machinery runs on with a whir that gives a delightful excitement to sluggish temperaments, and is, perhaps, the natural relief of highly nervous organizations. The tyrant Will is dethroned, and the sceptre snatched by his frolic sister Whim. This state of things, if continued, must become either insanity or imposture. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... though his voice was silent, being stopped by the intensity of his feelings, his heart within him sang for joy; and when the Gospel for the day was read, the sound of it was more than he could well bear. This brightness of his mind communicated itself to all the objects round him, to the sluggish waters of the Ouse, to dull, fenny Huntingdon, and ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... terrified one far less timid than the queen. Ravens, screech-owls, and many another bird of evil omen filled the air with harsh cries. Far off could be espied a mountain, from the slopes of which there flowed the tears of all hapless lovers. Its sluggish stream was fed by every ill-starred love. The trees had neither leaves nor fruit, and the ground was cumbered with briars, nettles, and rank weeds. The food, too, was such as might be expected in such a horrid clime. A few dried roots, horse-chestnuts, ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... he let in the fresh morning breeze and took in at a glance the rich Southern landscape. Immediately below him, and sloping in well kept terraces to the banks of the Coosa, was a trim garden, filled with flowers, among which, in fine bloom, were numerous varieties of the rose. The sluggish waters of the Coosa flowed without a ripple between its well wooded banks, the trees on opposite sides often interlocking their branches. Beyond the river was a wilderness of forest; the slaves were going to their labor in the ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into 'plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, hoping ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... are just as provokingly sluggish as our own Chicago River,—what wouldn't I give for a sight of its dirty face sometimes when—when you're away! Now, be honest. Don't you know he never could have sent all that way for all those ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... be killed in the European war than are killed in a borderland skirmish. There were a larger number of people involved in the one case than in the other, but that is all. Multiplying the number of cases makes a greater appeal to a sluggish imagination, but it adds nothing substantial to the fact. Feeling, whether it be pleasant or painful, is a matter of individual experience, and that being so it is not the number of people who suffer through no fault of their own, and, so far as one can see, without any benefit proportionate to ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... to her father. She implored him to rescue her from this place, come or send for her. "Her uncle, Matanesse Van Wibisma," she said, "seemed to be a sluggish messenger; he had probably enjoyed the evenings at her aunt's, which filled her, Henrica, with loathing. She would go out into the world after her sister, if her father compelled her to stay here." Then ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to the use of the subject, believing that the opera of his young rival would assuredly fail. At the same time he wrote to a friend in Rome, asking him to do all in his power to compass a fiasco for the opera. The young composer's enemies were not sluggish. All the whistlers of Italy, says Castil-Blaze, seemed to have made a rendezvous at the Teatro Argentina on the night set down for the first production. Their malicious intentions were helped along by accidents at the outset of the performance. Details of the story ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... their ordinary trades. It numbers very nearly as many men as it would if it were a conscript army; that is with the necessary margin of men unable to serve or needed to serve otherwise. Ours is a country in which that democratic spirit which is common to Christendom is rather unusually sluggish and far below the surface. And the most genuine and purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been the enlistment for this war. By all means say that such vague and sentimental volunteering is valueless in war if you ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... in the new home of persons just married. The reading aloud of an interesting work, the one to the other, is a delightful entertainment, and gives a new charm to life. Every effort must be employed to keep the mind from becoming sluggish and barren. We need information, the thoughts of the good and great and richly endowed, to make our ...
— The Wedding Day - The Service—The Marriage Certificate—Words of Counsel • John Fletcher Hurst
... insurmountable aversion for all the required tasks, he was indifferent to the charms of Greek themes or Latin translations, and history alone had the power of stirring him and awakening his appetite for knowledge. He was habitually sluggish and stupid in the eyes of his masters, but what a formidable, unknown work was going on in the brain of ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... against cold winds and snow; much hardening of hands and gross stoutening of bodies in all this; gross jovialities of harvest homes and Christmas feasts, which were to be the reward of it; rough affections, and sluggish imagination; fleshy, substantial, ironshod humanities, but humanities still; humanities which God had his eye upon, and which won, perhaps, here and there, as much favor in his sight as the wasted aspects of the whispering monks of Florence (Heaven forbid it should not be ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... specimens have been captured, and sent to the New York Aquarium, where they lived for satisfactory periods. The indoor life and atmosphere did not seem to injure the natural vitality of the animals. In fact, I think they were far more lively in the Aquarium than were the sluggish creatures that Mr. Ward saw on the Triangle reefs, and described in his report ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... to a certain spot and to induce them to feed. Without it very little can be done with shy and large fish of these species. Early rising is necessary because they only feed freely, as a rule, from daybreak till about three hours after sun-rise. The heat of a summer or early autumn day makes them sluggish, but an hour or two in the evening is sometimes remunerative. The bait for them all should usually lie on the bottom, and it consists mainly of worms, wasp and other grubs, pastes of various kinds; and for carp, and sometimes bream, of vegetable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... a hill, and, very soon, to a wooden bridge which spanned a creek some twenty feet below. The colonel paused for a moment beside the railing, and looked up and down the stream. It seemed narrower and more sluggish than his memory had pictured it. Above him the water ran between high banks grown thick with underbrush and over-arching trees; below the bridge, to the right of the creek, lay an open meadow, and to the left, a few rods away, ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... undeserved. I judged, as one accustomed to English splendour, and English neatness, and I scarcely gave Tours all the credit it deserved. When I compare the clear, rapid, sparkling Loire—shallow though it be—with the ugly waters of the sluggish Garonne, I feel that it is indeed superior to most other French rivers; and when I recollect the long, broad, extensive street which divides Tours into two parts, is paved throughout, and connects it with a bridge of noble proportions and most splendid approach, I am not surprised that Tours ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... away, hastening with the Martian velocity of motion until as the sun hung in the zenith, we had reached a hillside sloping upon a meadow space through which passed the clear but sluggish waters of a wide stream. A tulip-like grass was distributed in the heavy luxuriant growth of the meadow, which bore upon pendant threads a blue bell-like flower. A gentle wind, rising and falling, swept over them, lifting and blowing out the cups as it passed ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... something sluggish and viewless, dormant and deadly, had been suddenly upstirred to furious life by the wind of robes and tread of myriad dancing feet,—by the crash of cymbals and heavy vibration of drums! Within a ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... plumbed the depths of dignity and purpose in Woman till it saw her chained to a railing, clasping the hated constable like a lover, a hoarse example to her sluggish sisters, so it can never realize her capacity for foolishness till it has seen her waiting through weary years, hoping against reason, the victim of illogical constancy to a mere young man. Sweet and gracious Ellen Berstoun, so slender and pretty and charming, ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... full mastery of the suit's controls, and soon he was gliding cleanly through the hollows created by the mammoth outthrusting treetops in a course crazy and twisted, but one which kept him pointing always towards Porno. Presently he found an easier highway and a faster—a sluggish, dirty yellow stream, quite broad, which ended, he was sure, in a swamp within ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... shore, shouting to him, throwing chips into the water, and amusing himself as best he could. It was early in May, and the river was swollen from recent thaws. Below the cataract where the lumbermen worked, the broad, brown current moved slowly along with sluggish whirls and eddies; but the raft was moored by chains to the shore, so that it was in no danger of getting adrift. It was capital fun to see the logs come rushing down the slide, plunging with a tremendous splash into the river, and then bob up like live ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... strapped on a stiff hat, so that the light can be thrown where it is wanted, is an excellent device for night fishing. And during the heated term, when fish are slow and sluggish, I have found the following plan works well: Bake a hard, well salted, water Johnnycake, break it into pieces the size at a hen's egg and drop the pieces into a spring-hole. This calls a host of minnows ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... their arms. Our loss was one hundred and thirty-two killed and wounded; the Maori loss was fifty killed, wounded unknown. By January, General Cameron had passed beyond Ngaruawahia, the village which had been the Maori King's head-quarters, and which stood at the fine river-junction where the brown, sluggish Waipa loses its name and waters in the light-green volume of the swifter Waikato. Twice the English beat the enemy in the triangle between the rivers. A third encounter was signalised by the most heroic incident in the Colony's history. Some three hundred Maoris were shut up in entrenchments ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... over the flats and marshes through which the narrow, sluggish river wanders to Lake Michigan, came the hoarse whistle of a steamer. Bannon turned and looked. His view was blocked by some freight cars that were standing on the C. & S. C tracks at some distance to the east. He ran across the tracks and out on the wharf, climbing on the ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... mouth to the first fork, is a growth of cedar, on either bank, intermixed with hemlock, pine, birch, and a few scattered maples. Thence to the third fork, denoted on the map, the growth is exclusively pine and fir. This river is sluggish and deep, and is navigable for boats of ten to fifteen tons burden, without any obstruction to the third forks. Its width is uniform, about sixty to seventy ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... you if poisons acted equally, and with the same effect, on men of the North as on men of the South; and you answered me that the cold and sluggish habits of the North did not present the same aptitude as the rich and energetic temperaments of the natives ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... but it is hard work for the back to carry it down twice a day." He looked at me as if searching for better understanding. "But I will tell you something nice," he added, by way of stirring up my sluggish imagination; "the little brown cow has calved, and this autumn we are going to kill the old cow, and we shall have ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... "publication." I told them I had never been a Welsh preacher, that it was nearly five-and-twenty years since I had left the Principality, and that, moreover, I could not preach at all to men who put down their heads in the sluggish and sleepy manner in which most of their men had done that night. "Oh! but they won't do so when you, a stranger, preach," was the reply. "Then," I said, "there must be a great want of true devotion among them, if that would make all the difference." ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... short time our own royals and topgallant sails followed their bad example. The captain gave a stamp of impatience on the deck. The breeze was falling, even the topsails and courses no longer bellied out as before. Still, the frigates glided on, but the sluggish eddies astern showed how greatly their ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... Clarence Mills. "That wasn't it. My sluggish memory will arouse presently, and then I shall be able to exhibit signs ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... the country, completed a disarmament program for former combatants in late 2004, but the security situation is still volatile and the process of rebuilding the social and economic structure of this war-torn country remains sluggish. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... in August, 1914, wise unbelievers shook their heads and commiserated Wellesley; but the dauntless Chairman of the Alumnae Restoration and Endowment Committee continued to press on with her campaign—to draw dilatory clubs into line, to prod sluggish classes into activity, to ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... that grows to a length, sometimes, of twelve or fifteen feet. The country people not infrequently make of it a kind of house pet. When that is done, the reptile often makes its home in the cottage thatch, living on birds and mice. They are dull and sluggish in motion. While visiting a sugar plantation a few years ago one of the hands asked if I should be interested by their maja. He dipped his hand into a nearby water-barrel in the bottom of which two of them were closely coiled. ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... heart was in his throat! It had been a contest to stir the most sluggish blood. In spite of the absence of Grafton and Kenneth, Lower had played a hard, fast game, and had she made a decent per cent of her tries at goal would have been the winner at this moment. But Jim Marble had missed almost every goal from foul, and Collier, who had tried his hand, had been scarcely ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... I expected and found yet another uncertain height, and beyond it a third, and, a mile beyond, another. This summit was like those random marshy steps which rise continually and wearily between the sluggish rivers of the prairies. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... woodland soon; Blair-Drummond sees the hoofs strike fire, They sweep like breeze through Ochtertyre; They mark just glance and disappear The lofty brow of ancient Kier; They bathe their coursers' sweltering sides Dark Forth! amid thy sluggish tides, And on the opposing shore take ground With plash, with scramble, and with bound. Right-hand they leave thy cliffs, Craig-Forth! And soon the bulwark of the North, Gray Stirling, with her towers and town, Upon ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... see the air of triumph with which she led him to the head of the line, and positively delightful to the onlookers to see Hen Lord doing right and left, ladies' chain, balance to opposite and cast off, at a girl's beck and call. He was not a bad dancer, when his sluggish blood once got into circulation; and he was considerably more limber at the end of Money Musk, considerably less like a wooden image, than ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... valley crept a river, Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay; Its sluggish water dragged with slow ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... 1978 the Chinese leadership began moving the economy from a sluggish, inefficient, Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a more market-oriented system. Whereas the system operates within a political framework of strict Communist control, the economic influence of non-state organizations and individual citizens has been steadily increasing. The authorities ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... threatened the country of Nice and the territory of the republic. If the allies had pushed their advantages with vigour, the republicans must have lost more; but they, as was their general rule, were sluggish and irresolute. Nelson, who had been detached with a small squadron to co-operate with the Austrian general, Devins, and who served on the coast of Nice, was almost frantic at his sluggishness. A plan had been formed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Cleveland, until the construction of the Ohio canal, was without either of those two requisites for a manufacturing point. The Cuyahoga river, though giving abundant water power along a considerable portion of its course, enters Cleveland as a slow moving stream, winding its sluggish way in so tortuous a course that it seems reluctant to lose its identity in the waters of the lake. Water power, under such circumstances, is out of the question, and, as with no coal, and a rapidly decreasing supply ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... She was feeling her way down stream and sounding warnings to other craft. By and by the beat of her screw and the ripple of the water from her bow sounded so near that Alvin edged closer to land. In the heavy mist loomed a minute later a bulky steamer, surging southward at sluggish speed, the crew, as seen for an instant, ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... some adverse criticism among a few of the less liberal patrons of the community in regard to the basket work and nature study Miss Reist is teaching. Oh, I suppose we must expect that! Progress is always hampered by sluggish stupidity and contrariness. We who can see into the future and read the demands of the times must surely note that the children must be taught more than the knowledge contained between the covers of our school ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... over the desert, a dull sulphurous yellow streaked the black clouds, and from time to time the sultry air was rent by a blinding flash sent across the firmament from the north. There was a hot, sluggish wind blowing from the southwest, which drove the sand across the lake into the streets; the fine grit stung: and burnt the face of the wanderer who hurried on with half-closed eyes and tightly-shut lips. A deep oppression seemed to have fallen ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be a total misapprehension of the great throbbing thought of better days to come which stirred the sluggish life of the expiring century, to assume, as we often do, that that cry of "liberty, equality, and fraternity," was merely the cry of the French, driven to desperation by the gulf between the nobility and the people. In truth, almost the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... round the tree, with its branches sheltering the roof in a picturesque, half foreign fashion. Here and there were massive old houses and shops, with some approach to the size and the substantial—even costly—fittings of "Robinson's." A side street led down to a little sluggish canal which joined the Dewes, a river of considerable size on which Redcross had originally been built. This canal was crossed by a short solid stone bridge, bearing a quaint enough bridge-house, still ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... lay upon the bridge. More life than was usual upon the bridge moved there on Sunday. Then the cars were crowded with people seeking the parks. Many crossed on foot, stopping to look idly down at the dark and sluggish water. ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... streams, where the current is sluggish and the soil soft, one sometimes finds a wonderfully ingenious device for remedying the above difficulty. When the dam is built, and the water deep enough for safety, the beavers dig a canal around one end of the dam ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... universal humor in the squirearchy of Brandenburg; not of good omen to Burggraf Friedrich. But the chief seat of contumacy seemed to be among the Quitzows, Putlitzes, above spoken of; big squires in the district they call the Priegnitz, in the country of the sluggish Havel River, northwest from Berlin a forty or fifty miles. These refused homage, very many of them; said they were "incorporated with Boehmen"; said this and that; much disinclined to homage; and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... disappear, vanish; dar por perdido consider lost. perdido, -a lost, ruined, done for, beside one's self, vanished, defeated, wandering. perdidoso, -a losing, loser. perdn m. pardon, forgiveness. perdonar pardon, forgive. peregrino, -a strange, wonderful. perezoso, -a sluggish. prfido, -a perfidious, treacherous. perfumado, -a sweet-scented, perfumed. perfume m. perfume, fragrance, sweet odor. pero conj. but, however. perpetuo, -a perpetual, continual. perro m. dog. perseguir pursue, importune, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... gradually from the river, and was bounded on the rear by a long, sluggish creek, beyond which lay a stretch of woods, affording an excellent covert for the enemy, but without great facilities for attack, as there were but two or three fords and bridges. This brook could easily be held against a small ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... swell of the ocean, though soothing, in the regularity and monotony of its sluggish ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... to a state, which, however elevated in theory, was in fact more degraded and more miserable than that of bondage. In addition to all this, pauperism, with the numerous evils of corrupt and corrupting indolence, threatened to impose its sluggish weight upon a groaning community. Hence, the progress of emancipation was, for the time, most righteously arrested.'—[Address of the Board of Managers ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... fuliginous vapours and air permeate this vessel, as they do the pulmonary bronchia, wherefore do we find neither air nor fuliginous vapours when we divide the pulmonary vein? Why do we always find this vessel full of sluggish blood, never of air, whilst in the lungs we ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... tells the world it were as mad To link the Present with the sluggish Past, As wed the ways of winsome, wanton youth, To lean and laggard age. I pitied her: Made her the mistress of my countless wealth— Loving with doting and uxorious love. And the ripe graces of her radiant mind Shone out resplendent. But my withered life Woke to her love with sere and ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... limits, has little idea of what one of these rivers is like in flood time. He sees that, even at such favoured spots, between the low banks there is a stretch of sand far exceeding in width the main channel, where a considerable volume of water is running, and the minor depressions, in which a sluggish and shallow flow may still be found. If, leaving the railway, he crosses a river by some bridge of boats or local ferry, he will find still wider expanses of sand sometimes bare and dry and white, at others moist and dark and covered with dwarf tamarisk. He may notice ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... old planet seemed even enough the next day, when, after a dozen hours of much needed sleep, the campers' eyes opened upon a scene which might have stirred any sluggish blood—and they ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... the tent the breeze blew the flap lazily back and forth. A light rain fell with muffled gentle insistence on the canvas over their heads, and out through the opening the landscape was blurred—the wide stretch of monotonous, billowy prairie, the sluggish, shining river, bending in the distance about the base of Black Wind Mountain—Black Wind Mountain, whose high top lifted, though it was almost June, a white point of snow above dark pine ridges of the hills below. The five ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... entirely free from all explanatory accessories, and interpret themselves to the most sluggish soul. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... favor, thrown by the surging tide of circumstances upon the surface of life's agitated waters, to allow a doubt to assail her. Too often, within our own memory even, has the slender yet firm hand of a woman been seen outstretched to snatch the life of a brother, husband or friend from the sluggish and perilous stream which runs slowly but surely on towards a hopeless ruin. "The mere idea," says George Eliot, "that a woman had a kindness towards him, spun little threads of tenderness from ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... burned out, the defensive screen collapsed, and the red converter beam attacked voraciously the unresisting metal of those prodigious walls. Soon there was a terrific explosion as the pent-up air of the planetoid broke through its weakening container, and the sluggish river of allotropic iron flowed in an ever larger stream, ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... time it was clear that even France would soon be stricken to the heart unless Napoleon speedily concentrated his forces. On the north and east the allies were advancing with a speed that nonplussed the Emperor. Accustomed to sluggish movements on their part, he had not expected an invasion in force before the spring, and here it was in the first days of January. Buelow and Graham had overrun Holland. The allies, with the exception of the Czar, had no scruples about infringing the neutrality of Switzerland, as ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... at last it joins the broad vast sea—where some halt to rest from heavy loads and think as they look over the parapet that to smoke and lounge away one's life, and lie sleeping in the sun upon a hot tarpaulin, in a dull, slow, sluggish barge, must be happiness unalloyed—and where some, and a very different class, pause with heaver loads than they, remembering to have heard or read in old time that drowning was not a hard death, but of all means of suicide ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... cope with the multitudinous ignorance and misery of our overgrown cities. It was very slowly that the national conscience was aroused to the peril and sin of allowing the masses to grow up in heathen ignorance; but at last the English State shook off its sluggish indifference to the instruction of its poor, and became as active as it had been supine. Mr. Forster's Bill is the measure which indicates this turning of the tide. We do not propose now to discuss the provisions ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... sight, Buffalo Bull was standing beneath it. Grizzly Bear retraced his steps, going again to the stream, following its course until he got beyond the headland. Then he drew near and peeped. He saw that Buffalo Bull was very lean, and standing with his head bowed, as if sluggish. So Grizzly Bear crawled up close to him, made a rush, seized him by the hair of his head, and pulled down his head. He turned Buffalo Bull round and round, shaking him now and then, saying, "Speak! Speak! I have ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown
... seemed three or four tedious ones,) fearing I had slipt the fellow, I inquired at every turnpike, whether a servant in such a livery had not passed through in his return from London, on a full gallop; for woe had been to the dog, had I met him on a sluggish trot! And lest I should miss him at one end of Kensingtohn, as he might take either the Acton or Hammersmith road; or at the other, as he might come through the Park, or not; how many score times did I ride ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... lunatic. Your phlegmatic person may ripen resolves and bring out truths, with the incomparable clearness of a long-exposed, slowly developed, slowly printed photograph. A man who would exchange the slow gigantic toil of that sluggish and deliberate person, Charles Darwin, for the tumultuous inconsequence and (as some people think it) the net mischief of a Gladstone, would no doubt be prepared to substitute a Catherine-wheel in ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... passion, mystery and revenge, makes the sluggish blood course wildly through every artery ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... following two years were decidedly unpleasant. I was growing rapidly and was sluggish, awkward and stupid. At school I was more unpopular than ever and seemed to have a positive genius for doing the wrong thing. On the rare occasions when my companions admitted me to their counsels I was ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... middle of the afternoon the swamp became almost impassable, and the major was about to suggest the propriety of picking out an easier path, when George suddenly halted on the banks of a narrow, but deep and sluggish, stream, and, wiping his forehead with his coat-sleeve, said, with something like a ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... forgive my rude brutishness; forgive me, sweet one, or I shall go out and do some injury to myself or another, thou hast so stirred my sluggish heart"— ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... They were very silent as they sat watching with keen delight the varied business of the ship, doubly interesting to them now that they could not take part in it, when the wind began to drop, and the course of the vessel to grow more sluggish. ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... water! And the trees how remote, aerial, and floating! as if growing in the skies, with no roots' fast hold of the earth. Filling the valley, conforming to every bend and stretch of the creek, lay the breath of the water, motionless and sheeted, a spirit stream, hovering over the sluggish current a moment, before it should float upward and melt away. It was cold, too, as a wraith might be, colder than the water, for the June sun had not yet risen ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... possible to gain a faint and scarcely true impression of what the town was like. At night, new things often look old, and old new, outlines are magnified, and general effects are altogether lost. The river ran down the quay like a dark and sluggish thread; there was no poetry or romance about it. The banks were built up with granite, which made it look more like a canal than a river. To be at all picturesque it wanted the addition of boats and barges, of which just now it was free and void. The trees whispered in the night ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... arose. Their black figures sank and disappeared from against the sky. They were as two horns which the sluggish heath had put forth from its crown, like a mollusc, and ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... measure which lays the grasp of Congress upon this great question—a grasp which is to hold on to it until it shall be finally settled. I regard it as a measure which is to take that great question out of that sea of embarrassment and sluggish inactivity in which, through the course which the President has thought proper ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... months, Burton returned to Trieste, where life seemed hum-drum enough after so many excitement, and spangled visions. He spent the time writing a book The Gold Mines of Midian and the Ruined Midianite Cities, and the sluggish months having at last crawled by, he again ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... here is Versailles. Jinny stood on the stone rim and leant over the pond, clasped by Cruttendon's arms or she would have fallen in. "There! There!" she cried. "Right up to the top!" Some sluggish, sloping-shouldered fish had floated up from the depths to nip her crumbs. "You look," she said, jumping down. And then the dazzling white water, rough and throttled, shot up into the air. The fountain spread itself. Through it came the sound of military music far away. All the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... by comes my brother Tom to me, though late (which do vex me to the blood that I could never get him to come time enough to me, though I have spoke a hundred times; but he is very sluggish, and too negligent ever to do well at his trade I doubt), and having lately considered with my wife very much of the inconvenience of my going in no better plight, we did resolve of putting me into a better garb, and, among other things, to have a good velvet cloake; that is, of cloth ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... was muscle-racking. In most cases there were stairs to climb. He stood, sagging under his burden, till chests were cleared by the housewives or sluggish maids. He discovered that the iceman was considered a fair and logical butt for all the forenoon grouches of the kitchen. Women complained querulously that the ice dripped on the clean floor, or that the piece was not up to the twenty-cent piece delivered by the other company, or that he was late, ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... given above, vital action in the whole bodily system has to be increased on a definite line. This is the ripening and removing used-up substance from the body. It is sluggish ripening of substance to which we trace the morbid living growth; that sluggishness must be overcome. The first and most important means for this is fresher air for the lungs. The seaside home, if there are no drugs or drinks prescribed in ignorance, ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... his hand. He pulls again, he pulls with force; the cord resists! Fire mounts to his brain; his sluggish blood is quickened; his heart and temples beat violently; his fever returns, but only to restore to him, at this decisive moment, his former vigor. He hastily digs new steps in the interstices of the rock; with his hands ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... before sunset, that our small scout of ten were halted by a burnt log bridge over a sluggish inlet to a lake. The miry trail to the Chinisee Castle led over it, swung westward along the lake, rising to a steep bluff which was gashed with a number of ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... to many a hermit of Protestant, and so-called civilised times, who hides his head in a solitude in Yorkshire, and buries his probably fine talents in a Lincolnshire fen? Have I genius? Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to cheer and convince the timid, to lead the blind groping in darkness, and to trample the audacious sceptic in the dust? My own conscience, besides a hundred testimonials from places of popular, most popular worship, from reverend prelates, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... intestines are sluggish, they may be stimulated by administering a dose of castor oil. It is advisable to make the patient rinse his mouth two or three times a day with a mouth wash. It is also well to apply a lotion around the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague |
