"Lethargy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the weight of an immeasurable loss had been almost beyond endurance to a man of his age and of his volcanic nature. His physician was soon at his side, and, with some degree of success, put forth all his skill to rally his exhausted patient. He at last succeeded in producing a certain degree of lethargy, which, in benumbing the brain, brought respite from ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... moment, unmoving. The feeling was there again, like a scene waiting only to be gazed at directly to be perceived. It was as though a great wisdom lay at the edge of understanding. If he rested quietly it would all come to him. Yet always, when his mind lost its sleep-induced lethargy, the moment of ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... the cry of alarm, and the warning passed unheeded. But at last it was listened to, when a new outburst of aggressive activity on the part of the Turks for a while roused the maritime nations of the Mediterranean from their lethargy, and then a glorious page was added to the story ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... put our lethargy and its apologists to shame. Look at the author with pallid cheek and fevered brow, half starving in an attic, perfecting his style, polishing his periods. There is the actor, haggard, jaded, toiling for hours ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... gladdened, and, as I lay on my bunk listening to the merry crackle of the wood fire, I was in a purring lethargy of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... did she deceive herself;—he was too far sunk in the lethargy of grief, to be roused out of it by all her kind endeavours;—on the contrary, the sight of those near and dear relatives she presented to him only added to his affliction, by reminding him in a more lively manner ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... contrary, is the only motive which will permanently satisfy human nature. Certain of the Socialists have made it their deliberate policy for years to stir up hatred between the poor and the rich, on the ground that hatred alone can overcome the lethargy of the masses and arouse in them the intensity of feeling necessary for conflict. On the contrary, hatred engenders hatred on the opposite side, action provokes reaction. As the individual can be uplifted in his life only by accepting ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... man left the place in a state of utter intoxication. He was brought home nearly insensible, and placed in his bed, where he lay in the deep calm lethargy of drunkenness. The younger part of the family retired to rest much after their usual hour; but the poor wife remained up sitting by the fire, too much grieved and shocked at the recurrence of what she had so little expected, to settle to rest; fatigue, however, at length overcame ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... writhed on without regard for his feelings or theories, though its efforts became gradually feebler, and he hoped that by and by the decent part of both armies would settle into lethargy, leaving the night to the skirmishers, who never ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... long lethargy to life 'The seeds of happiness, and powers of thought; 'Then jarring appetites forego their strife, 'A strife by ignorance to madness wrought. 'Pleasure by savage man is dearly bought 'With fell revenge, lust that defies controul, 'With gluttony and death. ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... for, as he ascended the steep path leading up to the Truebsee Alp, he turned back to look at the high mountain-valley where he had dwelt so long, as though he was looking upon it for the last time. It seemed to him as if he was awaking out of a long lethargy and paralysis. Three days ago the dull round of incessant toil and parsimonious hoarding had been abruptly broken up by the loss of all he had toiled for and hoarded up, and the shock had driven him out like a maniac, to wander about the desolate heights of Engelberg ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... forgotten—and it was high time the Regent aroused himself from a supineness which rendered him contemptible, and which emboldened his enemies and those of the State to brave all and undertake all. This lethargy, too, disheartened his servants, and made all healthy activity on their part impossible. It had at last led him to the very verge of the precipice, and the realm he governed to within an inch of the greatest confusion. He had need, indeed, to be ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... muttering and moaning in his troubled sleep, and with the consciousness of her success all her unnatural strength passed away. She could hardly secrete it in her bosom ere she fell into a semi-conscious lethargy, through which she heard with terror her husband's low, weird ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... last movement left him. If his hand was raised, it remained extended until placed in a position of rest by his attendant. Only with the utmost difficulty could he be made to rise in the morning, to eat, drink, or walk. Only by great efforts could he be aroused from his lethargy sufficiently to answer the most simple question. The instinctive demands of decency in regarding the calls of nature were not respected. In short, the distinguishing characteristics of a human being were almost wholly obliterated, leaving but a physical ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... nothing but the prospect of the trouble of getting into bed, where very seldom I get above two hours' sleep. It is enough to make a parson swear! To this I must add, I found full employment for the few moments, when I could rouse myself from a melancholy lethargy, to spend in looking over my store of astronomical and other memorandums of upwards of ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... rising storm and ridden over to see him in the fall of the evening; and no accentuation of the gale that lashed the house, no increase in the roar of the ocean three hundred yards away, had power to interrupt his lethargy. ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... with a dismal groan. Joel did not hear it. It is doubtful if he heard anything until several minutes later, when the pronouncement of his name awoke him from the lethargy into ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... plainly rather than flatteringly, and I have done so because I believe the time has fully come when woman should be a woman, and not a mere gaudy appendage to man; when her soul should wake up from its long lethargy and put on the habiliments of wisdom and usefulness; when she should live to a grander purpose than she has done, and should make her power felt more sensibly in the morality and religion, business and bosom, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... where the head of the clan, having dined, had been overtaken with lethargy and in a hammock on his porch was asleep in ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... consequence, whether to live or die. On the 8th of February, another of the crew died. From this time to the 17th, their sufferings were extreme. At seven o'clock, A.M. of that day, they were aroused from a lethargy by the cheering cry of the steersman, "there's a sail!" The boat was soon descried by the vessel, the brig Indian, Captain Grozier, of London, which took them on board, latitude 33 deg. 45' S., longitude 81 deg. 3' W. They were ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... aroma compounded of morocco leather, flowers, and the odour of Sunday garments. Only when the four ushers tiptoed about with the collection boxes on the end of handles, like exaggerated corn-poppers, did the lethargy into which he had fallen break for a moment. The irregular passage of the receptacle from one to another was at least a motion not ordered in the deliberate rhythm of decorum; and the clink of the money was pleasantly removed from the soporific. Bobby gazed with awe at the coins ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... with gold and silver store Lodged in his coffers, ne'ertheless was poor (The man would drink from earthen nipperkin Flat wine on working-days, on feast-days thin), Once fell into a lethargy so deep That his next heir supposed it more than sleep, And entering on possession at his ease, Went round the coffers and applied the keys. The doctor had a conscience and a head: He had a table moved beside the bed, Poured ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... and felt Its glory beating on his face; then, by that one earnest and believing presence, all was transformed and redeemed; the old emblems recovered their first significance, the time-worn phrases glowed with life again, and we ourselves were altered—our very heaviness was pathetic: it was the lethargy of death itself, and our poor sleepy prayers the strain of manacled ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... only really enviable people in the world. Notable, too, were the fanatics of the Kosinski type, stern heroic figures who seem strangely out of place in our humdrum world, whose practical work often strikes us as useless when it is not harmful, yet without whom the world would settle down into deadly lethargy and stagnation. Then in England came a whole host of cranks who, without being Anarchists in any real sense of the word, seemed drawn towards our ranks, which they swelled and not infrequently brought ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... beneath the pressure. I lying upon my back, seeing only that sheet of stars, in my nostrils the smell of the straw, rocked by the slow dreamy motion of the wagon, was filled with an exquisite ease and lethargy. I was going into battle, was I? I was to have to-night the supreme experience of my life? It might be that to-night I should die—only last week two members of the Red Cross—a nurse and a doctor—had been killed. It might be that ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... communities it is regarded as a disgrace to die of consumption. So it is. But the stigma rests upon the community which permits the ravage of this preventable disease; not upon the victims of it, except as they contribute to the general lethargy. In order to save the feelings of the family, a death from consumption is reported as bronchitis or pneumonia. The man is buried quietly. The premises are not disinfected, as they should be, and perhaps some unknowing ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... last supply of extrinsic warmth was at an end. Despite shut windows, the darkening of the stove was presently followed by a very sensible and fast-increasing change of temperature; and this addition to their causes of discomfort roused every one of the company from his temporary lethargy. The growl of dissatisfied voices awoke again, more gruff than before; the spirit of jesting had long languished and now died outright, and in its stead came some low and deep and bitter-spoken curses. Poor Mrs. Renney shook off her somnolency and shook her shoulders, ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... period contains another notable example of a sudden and unaccountable decline in population. The scene is Spain, which, after playing an active and very prominent part in the world's history, sank quickly into the lethargy from which it has never recovered. It may be noted that here, as in the case of Rome, the decay of population and energy followed a great influx of plundered wealth. On the other hand, the increase of population in our newly-planted North American colonies must have been extremely ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... way, was in his own house) formed a little coterie apart, and grabbed up whatever morsels of wisdom and learning their master could afford to let drop in the midst of his hand-to-hand combat with the forces of anarchy and lethargy. But he had little to say to them. His appeals were addressed to the body of gaping, half- amused, half-bored loungers in the middle of the room, who listened pleasantly and forgot instantaneously; who never knew where to go on, and had an inveterate knack of misunderstanding ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... quietness, stoicism, composure, insensibility, quietude, tranquillity, immobility, lethargy, sluggishness, unconcern, impassibility, phlegm, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the strongest kind they can bear—the excitement of being with people of like nature with themselves; and if they fail in this, their mind sinks by its own weight, and they fall into a grievous lethargy.[1] Such people, it may be said, possess only a small fraction of humanity in themselves; and it requires a great many of them put together to make up a fair amount of it,—to attain any degree of consciousness as men. A man, in the full sense of the word,—a man par excellence—does ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of the hand the figure turned and swept out of my tent into the darkness. The instant that the fellow disappeared from my sight I recovered from my lethargy which had fallen upon me. Springing to my feet, I rushed to the opening and looked out. A Sepoy sentry was standing leaning upon his musket, ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... last impulse of such festivities. The English cruisers lately in port had vanished up the Channel; and at Elizabeth Castle, Mont Orgueil, the Blue Barracks and the Hospital, three British regiments had taken up the dull round of duty again; so that by the fourth day a general lethargy, akin to content, had settled ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... young (not a great deal older than yourself), perhaps a lady—a woman—might win her confidence. She seems to have been a dressmaker. Could you not offer her some employment, and draw her from the extraordinary lethargy which seems to dull her faculties? No mind can hold out against it; she will ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... of the world, even in the lethargy which had come upon it in viewing the loss of most of North America, could not afford to leave the Grass to its own devices, content to receive the refugees it drove out or watch them die. A World Congress to Combat the Grass was hastily called in London. It was ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Richard went with John to New Orleans in the morning. Phyllis was glad to be alone. She had tried to send her lover away cheerfully; but there is always the afterward. The "afterward" to Phyllis was an extreme sadness that was almost lethargy. Many crushed souls have these fits of somnolent depression; and it does no good either to reproach them, or to point out that physical infirmity is the cause. They know what the sorrowful sleep of the apostles in the garden of Olivet was, and pity them. ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... delicious feeling of profound rest that ensued when I found myself prone and motionless? Equally impossible is it to describe the agonising struggles that I made to induce my unwilling spirit to rouse my listless body. Those who have striven in semi-consciousness to throw off the awful lethargy of nightmare may have some conception of my feelings. I knew, even then, that it was the critical moment—the beginning of the end. In a burst of anxiety I began to pray—to shout with all my strength—for deliverance. ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... the fool and the false philosopher; those whose lukewarmness makes them mere puppets, not strong enough to face the realities of existence. When pain or sorrow has worn out the keenness of suffering, the result is a lethargy not unlike that which accompanies old age, as it is usually experienced by men and women. Such a condition makes the entrance to the path impossible, because the first step is one of difficulty and needs a strong man, ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... had seen it he would have been saved a deal of trouble, for he could simply have described its rocky wilds for his Inferno!" All blessed the fresher atmosphere and brisker breezes of the Indian Ocean, which, if warm, are bearable, and awoke from the lethargy of a sultriness which was like that of an overheated, airless room, to life and interest, ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... her father to take a little rest, promising to call them, in case of any change. For more than two hours he had been sitting there, expecting the end to come at almost any moment; but still the boy's lethargy was unbroken. ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... the rest of the world by a boundless sea, and having no place of refuge but the wreck of a grounded vessel, the multitude addressed at first their vows to heaven, and forgot, for a moment, all earthly concerns. Then suddenly starting from their lethargy, they began to look after their wealth, the merchandise they had in small ventures, utterly regardless of the elements which threatened them. The miser, thinking of the gold contained in his coffers, hastening to put it in a place of safety, either by sewing it into the lining of his clothes, ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... hope in the possibility of attaining the best things. If men are ever bereft of their instinctive or rational conviction that they have the power ultimately to bring institutions of all kinds into harmony with their higher conceptions, they will sink into the lethargy of despair or the slough of sensualism. The belief in the reality of the Ideal in personal and social life is not only the joy and inspiration of the poet and thinker; it is also the salvation of the race. It is imperishable, because it is the product ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... it to you with all my feeble powers. May you be blessed in every thing in this world and the next. It's growing mighty dark now, honey; hold my hand, till it grows light again." With a last effort, she lifted May's hand to her lips, and kissed it; then a deep lethargy stole over her. May said the prayers for the departing soul, and recommended the dying one to the tender care of the Immaculate Mother of Jesus. A ray from the setting sun, stealing through the trees without, flowed into the shaded room, and rested on her pillow in ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... youthful kind. Prince Frederick is thought to be in a deep consumption; and for the Duke of Cumberland, next post will probably certify you of his death, as he is relapsed, and there are no hopes of him. He fell into his lethargy again, and when they waked him, he said he did not know whether he could call himself ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... nature and effects of poison were not, however, wholly without practical result. Cleopatra learned from them, it is said, that the bite of the asp was the easiest and least painful mode of death. The effect of the venom of that animal appeared to her to be the lulling of the sensorium into a lethargy or stupor, which soon ended in death, without the intervention of pain. This knowledge she seems to have laid up in her mind ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... the old breed of '44, Colonel—the men who were in the saddle all day, and on their knees half the night. When shall we see the like of them again? A few such broken wrecks as I are left, with the fire of our youth all burned out and nought left but the ashes of lethargy and lukewarmness.' ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of May 1705, about five o'clock in the evening, Denis Misanger de la Richardiere, eighteen years of age, was attacked with an extraordinary malady, which began by a sort of lethargy. They gave him every assistance that medicine and surgery could afford. He fell afterwards into a kind of furor or convulsion, and they were obliged to hold him, and have five or six persons to keep watch over him, for fear that he should throw ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... up a swaying motion. Smoke went toward him slowly, scarcely able to will movement through the lethargy that weighed his flesh. He noted that his brain was clear. It was only the ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild glow of animation during his narrative. It relapsed into lethargy at the advent ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... gained—every breath drawn a sobbing groan. Hills and dales rose successively before him, clothed in the dead-white snow that had become a nightmare to his darkening sight. He reeled sometimes as he walked, dizzy from lack of sleep; a thousand fantastic fancies flitted through his hot brain; a deadly lethargy began once more to creep over his senses, but he gnawed the flesh of his lips to keep back consciousness. And still, when will grew powerless, he felt the mysterious strain ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... still in the way I was, when I wrote you last, in a public-house, and pestered with noise: I have not above six ideas at present, and none of them fit for a letter. Dear Boswell, farewell! pray for my recovery from this lethargy of spirits and sense which has ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... were nearing London, on the following afternoon, that Catherine awoke from a lethargy during which she had spent the greater portion of the journey. From her place in the corner seat of the compartment in which they had been undisturbed since leaving Wells, she studied her companion through half-closed eyes. Julian was reading ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... anger roused her from her lethargy; and she rose immediately when Tom reminded her that it was late, and they ought to be going home. Home! how the word seemed to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... which resists a degree of cold above the freezing-point." In a following page he cites observations made by Bugeaud, under the parallel of 58 degrees N. L., between the months of November and June, during most of which time, of course, vegetable life was in its deepest lethargy. Bugeaud found that when the temperature of the air was at -34.60 degrees, that of a poplar was only at -29.70 degrees, which certainly confirms the doctrine that trees exercise a certain ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... lethargy of sadness Cecilia was soon, however, awakened by the return of the surgeon, who had brought with him a physician to consult upon Mrs Delvile's situation. Terror for the mother once more drove the son from her thoughts, and she waited with the most apprehensive ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... (er) the thing which is (pet), evil (ou). Nevertheless the Coptic language has had its literature, like the Chinese, the roots of which, far from being aggregated, scarcely approach each other without immediate contact. We must admit that nations once roused from their lethargy, and tending towards civilization, find in the most uncouth languages the secret of expressing with clearness the conceptions of the mind, and of painting the emotions of the soul. Don Juan de la Rea, a highly estimable man, who perished in the sanguinary revolutions of Quito, imitated ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... In the meantime, Justinian, pretending that he knew nothing of what was going on, neither inquired to what part of the world Priscus had been banished, nor ever thought of him again afterwards, but remained silent, as if he had fallen into a state of lethargy. However, he seized the small fortune that he had ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... tear of mind and body he had undergone (he says himself that on this expedition he was three-and-thirty days almost without any sleep), and on the day following his departure from La Mona he fell into a lethargy that deprived him of sense and memory, and had well nigh proved fatal to life. At last, on September 29th, the little fleet dropped anchor off Isabella, and in his new city the great Admiral lay ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... dreams, broken by the chilling lash of spray from the strokes of the others, as they drove the craft back against the wind, and he only partly awoke from his lethargy when George wrenched him from his seat and forced him down the rough trail toward warmth ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... appearing like Virgil's Camilla, stirs him from this lethargy. He falls in love at first sight, as Tasso's heroes always do, and vows to prove himself her worthy knight by deeds of unexampled daring. Thus the plot is put in motion; and we read in well-appointed order how the hero acquired his horse, Baiardo, Tristram's magic lance, his sword Fusberta from ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the bill," agreed Mr. Dicker, catching the enthusiasm of his counsellor and shaking off his lethargy. He perceived a dim promise of fees, and at the sight his load of despondency dropped away from him, as Christian's burden loosened in presence of the cross. He looked a little like the confident, resolute Tom Dicker, who twenty years before had graduated from ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... exertion or mental application, after, as before his simple meal. He will feel none of the narcotic effects of ordinary diet. Irritability, the direct consequence of exhausting stimuli, would yield to the power of natural and tranquil impulses. He will no longer pine under the lethargy of ennui, that unconquerable weariness of life, more to be ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... in its pain:— Then the old days of Holyrood halls return'd The leaden lethargy from his soul he spurn'd, And was the Prince again:— All Scotland waking in him; all her bold Chieftains and clans:—and all their tale, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... last half-century; or was it the sleep that presaged death? Her enemies told her so in plain and unvarnished language. Her friends, too, said that she was folding her robes to die with what dignity she could. Lethargy, sloth, sleep—a dead, dull, dreary sleep—fell like a leaden pall upon her spiritual life, darkening the light that shone but vaguely through the storied panes of her mediaeval windows, while a paralysing numbness crippled her limbs and quenched ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Our very passions we hold up to thee, and say, "Behold, Lord! Think about us; for thus thou hast made us." We would not escape from our history by fleeing into the wilderness, by hiding our heads in the sands of forgetfulness, or the repentance that comes of pain, or the lethargy of hopelessness. We take it, as our very life, in our hand, and flee with it unto thee. Triumphant is the answer which thou boldest for every doubt. It may be we could not understand it yet, even if thou didst speak it "with ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... shock. She was only twenty-five and strong. Her body held many years of activity, possibly other children, and her mind still awaited its full development. How that would come was the really vital matter. The ordinary result would be that, after the full period of lethargy and physical and mental recuperation, Adelle should drift back into something like the same life she had previously led. She would go abroad and establish herself in a new environment, gradually acquiring new associations that in time would efface ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... bounds—while it certainly had a depressing effect upon its staunch supporters, for they were well aware the failure would not be attributed to its true source —that is, the bitter opposition it had met with from its unprincipled opponents, the lethargy of many of its pretended friends, and from other causes which we have already mentioned in this book. But it would be published "from Dan to Beersheba" that it had received a fair trial and, after being "weighed in the balance ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... power of vitality was there in Bonivard, that he did not sink in lethargy, and forget himself to stone! But he did not; it is said that when the victorious Swiss army broke in to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections, and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... arouse himself from his lethargy, and went forward into the forecastle with the sailors. But the breed of sailors seemed to have changed since the days he had lived in the forecastle. He could find no kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial creatures. He was ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... man. He came, dressed quite simply, but just as any gentleman would for a morning walk. He put forth all his eloquence, and flashed wit, like rays from a beacon, all through the lesson. Like a man roused from lethargy, he revealed to me a new world of thoughts. He told me the story of some poor devil of a valet who gave up his life for a single glance ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... and am amazed at your being cured of that disorder. Why a new disorder expelled the old one in a marvelous manner; as it is accustomed to do, when the pain of the afflicted side, or the head, is turned upon the stomach; as it is with a man in a lethargy, when he turns boxer, and attacks his physician. As long as you do nothing like this, be it even as you please. O my good friend, do not deceive yourself; you likewise are mad, and it is almost "fools all," if ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... Had even nothing been done, this inertness might have been less significant; but somewhere in the early seventies, despite all the progress elsewhere noticeable, there were built deliberately some half-dozen corvettes, smaller than the Iroquois class, mostly of wood. That a period of lethargy in action should steal over a government just released from strenuous exertion is one thing, and bad enough; but it is different, and much worse, that there should be a paralysis of idea, of mental development corresponding to the movement ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... jarred Blake from his lethargy. He groaned and sluggishly raised his head. His face was bloodless and haggard, his bloodshot eyes were dull and bleared. He had the look of a man at the close of a ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship—a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, 'What meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargy by that direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... already acquired, there is need for the act of the imagination and of the other powers. For when the act of the imagination is hindered by a lesion of the corporeal organ, for instance in a case of frenzy; or when the act of the memory is hindered, as in the case of lethargy, we see that a man is hindered from actually understanding things of which he had a previous knowledge. Secondly, anyone can experience this of himself, that when he tries to understand something, he forms certain phantasms to serve him by way of examples, in which as it were ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... end of the Dutch occupation, one lonely congregation had been planted in that region which, at a later time, when the Dutch church in America had awaked from its lethargy, was to become known as "the garden of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... suggestion of a modern idea of progress, and in the medieval age itself there was nothing to create a fresh phrasing of expectancy. Men were aware of the darkness of the days that had fallen on the earth; even when they began to rouse themselves from their lethargy, their thoughts of greatness did not reach forward toward a golden age ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... three weeks, found that Esperance, if not cured, was at least on the way to convalescence. She would still pass many hours when she failed to recognize people. A kind of coma took possession of her every now and then and kept her for days together in a kind of lethargy. ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... was upon him had increased. He coughed frequently; his breathing was difficult; though constantly moving, he felt as if, in the absence of excitement, his one wish would have been to lie down and abandon himself to lethargy. Two men who sat with him in the third-class carriage had spread a rug over their knees and amused themselves with playing cards for trifling sums of money; the sight of their foolish faces, the sound of their laughs, the talk they interchanged, exasperated him to the last point of endurance; but ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... to be so throughout the commune—people were sure that Michel Voss was fifty or thereabouts; but there was very little in his appearance to indicate so many years. He was fat and burly to be sure; but then he was not fat to lethargy, or burly with any sign of slowness. There was still the spring of youth in his footstep, and when there was some weight to be lifted, some heavy timber to be thrust here or there, some huge lumbering vehicle to be hoisted in or out, there ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... whole matter in a philosophical and ultra-pragmatic way. Some observers have hazarded that our postponement of haircuts is due to mere lethargy and inertia, but that is not so. Every time we get our locks shorn our wife tells us that we have got them too short. She says that our head has a very homely and bourgeois bullet shape, a sort of pithecanthropoid contour, which is revealed ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... answer to your supreme question. It is the answer to the most important question that was ever asked. It is the most important that you will ever be called to act upon in this world. Does the prospect of an answer quicken your heartbeat? Does it shake you out of your lethargy into intensest interest? It ought to if it does not. For the answer that I give is not the answer of a mere speculator or dreamer. It is the answer of inspiration and it is an answer whose truth has been tested by the personal experience ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... is essentially a country of sports and gamblers, has not the European courage as well as rapacity for fresh development in cultural matters. Can it be because America is not really intelligent? I should be embarrassed in thinking so. There is nevertheless an obvious lethargy in the appreciation of creative taste and a still lingering yet old-fashioned faith in the continual necessity for importation. America has a great body of assimilators, and out of this gift for uncreative assimilation has ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... of 1580, Philip went to Lisbon to take formal possession of the crown of Portugal, which he had inherited. I sent my wife to him to intercede for me. But he refused to see her, and so I was left to continue the victim of his vindictive lethargy. After a year of this, upon my giving a formal promise to renounce all hostility towards Vasquez, and never seek to do him harm in any way, I was accorded some degree of liberty. I was allowed to go out and to receive visitors, but not to visit ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... in a mood of lethargy not to be fathomed by mere affection. Not only did he turn away at the mere suggestion of eating, but he feebly hid his face ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... are precluded by their station in society from the necessity of manual labour. Mental exercise, and mental amusements, are essential to persons in the higher ranks of life, who would escape from the fever of dissipation, or from the lethargy of ennui. The mere physical advantages which wealth can procure, are reducible to the short sum of "meat, fire, and clothes." A nobleman of the highest birth, and with the longest line of ancestry, inherits no intuitive taste, nor can he purchase it from the artist, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... of the mighty North, slowly rising from lethargy like those Medicean figures of Michael Angelo, which leap from stone to avengers. There was no mutter of coming storm, no clank of coming sabres and bayonets, no creak of great wheels rolling southward, and war in its extremest and most deadly phase. Richmond and Virginia ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... sleep more like the torpor of lethargy than natural slumber, fell on me at once. I neither stirred nor heard any thing till near two o'clock, when a piercing shriek from the deck aroused me. The moon had set, but there was light enough to show the decks abaft filled ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... magazines. But the drug effect held, and he continued briefly to doze through his eating and reading. It was the same when he showered and dressed, and, though the drug had brought him little forgetfulness during the night, he felt grateful for the dreaming lethargy with which it ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... never dared to look above my blind superiors for wisdom, until a "something" which I will call "fate" broke the windows of my mental dungeon and permitted the light of "SPIRITUAL LIBERTY" to filter through my being which awoke "reason and common sense" from her long sleep of lethargy. ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... to 'Gib' is decidedly roundabout. We began with a run to Venice, usually six hours from the Vice-Queen of the Adriatic: it was prolonged to double by the thick and clinging mist-fog. The sea-city was enjoying her usual lethargy of repose after the excitement of the 'geographical Carnival,' as we called the farcical Congress of last September. She is essentially a summering place. Her winter is miserable, neither city nor houses being built for any but the finest of fine ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... were received with enthusiastic shouts by the warlike part of the populace. Granada once more awoke, as a warrior shaking off a disgraceful lethargy. The commanders and council partook of the public excitement, and despatched a reply to the Christian sovereigns, declaring that they would suffer death rather than surrender ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... roofs of Algiers dimly outlined against the crescent sweep of lights that marked the levee of the great Southern metropolis, still prostrate from the savage buffeting of the war, yet so soon to rouse from lethargy, resume her sway, and, stretching forth her arms, to draw once again to her bosom the wealth and tribute, tenfold augmented, of the very heart of the nation, until, mistress of the commerce of a score of States, she should rival ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... resulted in the famous Lyrical Ballads of 1798. In their partnership Coleridge was to take up the "supernatural, or at least romantic"; while Wordsworth was "to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday ... by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us." The whole spirit of their work is reflected in two poems of this remarkable little volume, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which is Coleridge's masterpiece, and "Lines Written a Few ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... had been four years a monk, and had laid aside, apparently forever, the brush he had previously wielded with such promise. The young stranger sought the Frate in his cell at San Marco, and soon found the way to his heart. Stimulated by this new friendship, Bartolommeo roused himself from lethargy and resumed the practice of art with increasing success. It is pleasant to trace the influence which the two artists exerted upon each other. The older man had experience and learning; the younger had enthusiasm ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... shutting of the door that broke the spell, that roused Jimmy from the lethargy into which he had ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... thought he saw some signs of animation, so he had him removed, and carefully conveyed to the house in which Catharine then was. Once there, every possible care was bestowed upon him. By degrees he recovered from his lethargy, and looked around ...
— Catharine's Peril, or The Little Russian Girl Lost in a Forest - And Other Stories • M. E. Bewsher
... restraint of boarding-school irksome, the separation from Russell was well-nigh intolerable to Electra. At first she had seemed plunged in lethargy; but after a time this mood gave place to restless, unceasing activity. Like one trying to flee from something painful, she rushed daily to her work, and regretted when the hours of darkness consigned her to reflection. Mrs. Clifton was quite aged, and though uniformly ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... effect. By a powerful effort Paul threw off his lethargy, and once more sprang on with the rest, continuing to ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... obsessed me, was strong enough to penetrate the lethargy of mind and body into which Dicky's letter had thrown me. I spoke of it to Lillian ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... a sheeted burden upon it. As his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom beyond the room's centre, Parish could make out the hunched figure that sat at the head of the body, still mercifully wrapped in something like lethargy and too numbed ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... a denial of all heavenly and earthly facts that might be termed disenchantment, or if you will, despair; as if humanity in lethargy had been pronounced dead by those who felt its pulse. Like a soldier who is asked: "In what do you believe?" and who replies: "In myself," so the youth of France, hearing that question, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... marked by aspirations for a better state of things, and discussions between the rival schools of Classicists and Mediaevalists. The latter carried the day, and, after an heroic struggle and many failures, England awoke from her long lethargy, to find herself the possessor of a noble architecture, a true exponent of ecclesiastical art and tradition, although confessedly far from perfect when applied to domestic buildings. For these latter edifices the old manor-houses, with their many mullioned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... found, as well, to discredit the notion that there would supervene, on the consigning to the limbo of inutile political systems of the disabling regime that now governs, an epoch, which would witness the shaking off, by the heavy, phlegmatic red man of the present, of his dull lethargy, with the casting behind him of former inaction and unproductiveness; and his being moved to assert a healthy, genuine, wholesome activity, to be directed to lofty or soulful purpose, or expressed ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... of humanity, which is exhilarating in a high degree; there is activity on all sides; and you soon catch the spirit of the place. Men have a purpose in view, something to accomplish; and there is the entire absence of lethargy; there are no drones in the great hive. You realise that you are in a city of distances as well as surprises; and wherever you go you find some object or locality or happening that calls for comment. Hark! there is the fire alarm. The engines and hose-carts and fire ladders, with ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... with a sudden growl from the lethargy into which he had momentarily allowed himself to sink. His relaxed muscles hardened. He raised his ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... people and events in distant Europe far into the night. And Madame sang Polish love-songs in a sweet, pathetic voice, and I recounted one or two American yarns in Yankee vernacular which excited inordinate gaiety, so easily amused were these poor souls with minds dulled by long years of lethargy and despair. And I wondered, as I glanced around the squalid room, how many years had elapsed since its mud-walls had last echoed to the sounds of ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... a charm and a joy. But their primary value to us is that they are among the rare beings who have possessed "the vision and the faculty divine," who, to quote Ruskin, can "startle our lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment." There is about them nothing incomprehensibly transcendental, nothing "unpractical," nothing aloof from the life we live—if we live it fully—but wholly the contrary. Those who say otherwise ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... their own dignity, in contemplating that of their Grand Monarch; and the whole reign of Louis XV., remarkable only for weakness and effeminacy, made no other alteration than that of spreading a sort of lethargy over the nation, from which it showed ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy; as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past,—from the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and sack,—were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... surrounded by the proprietor, the maitre d'hotel and his assistants, the porters, and the chasseurs, with all of whom Mr. Greyne was now familiar. Brandy and water having been supplied, together with smelling-salts and burnt feathers, Mrs. Greyne roused herself from an acute attack of lethargy, and asked for Mr. Greyne. A joyous ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... dejected Heart that pursue poor Belton through his last Stage of Life (brought on by a lingering Illness, and ill Usage from an artful Woman to whom Vice had attached him, and increased by his Soul's being startled and awaked from that thoughtless Lethargy in which Vice had so long lulled him) naturally break forth in those fearful Tremors, those agonizing pannic Terrors of the Mind, which follow him to the End, and make a strong and lively Picture of the Terrors of Death first thought on, when Life was flying, and could no longer ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... later, Mr. Meyer was aroused from a brooding lethargy, by a crowd of shouting underwriters, who rushed into the Captain's room, seized him by the shoulders, and hurried him out and ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... was falling thick and icy. Aramis was the next to come in and to discover Athos almost insensible. But at the first words he uttered the comte roused himself from the kind of lethargy in which ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a miracle can rouse such people from their lethargy. It is not to be expected, nor is it even possible in the natural course of things. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... uneasily and drew a deep breath, which was followed by something strangely resembling a sigh. I knew it was time to move; and, shaking off a sensation of fast-approaching lethargy, I tried to get rid of the feeling of faintness, and only roused the sharp pain afresh. Still, that spurred me into effort; and as I pressed Sandho's sides lightly, he began to amble gently along, while I raised ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... the past with very mixed feelings,—dreaming of the easy-going methods of our forefathers, which gave them leisure for study and reflection, or esteeming their age as an age of lethargy, ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... Reckon it up by rigid arithmetic, and work out the calculation when you are on your knees if you can. All over the North Sea that night there were desolate places that rang to the cry of parting souls; after vain efforts and vain hopes, the drowning seamen felt the last lethargy twine like a cold serpent around them; the pitiless sea smote them dumb; the pitiless sky, rolling over just and unjust, lordly peer and choking sailor, gave them no hope; there was a whole tragedy in the breasts of all those doomed ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... and arrange them, for as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy, during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving, save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of Troy in the war with the Greeks, the son of Priam and Hecuba; fought with the bravest of the enemy and finally slew Patroclus, the friend of ACHILLES (q. v.), which roused the latter from his long lethargy to challenge him to fight; Achilles chased him three times round the city, pierced him with his spear, and dragged his dead body after his chariot round Ilium; his body was at the command of Zeus delivered up to Priam and buried with great pomp ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that the same perverted taste which meets its reproof in these lectures is common amongst us. Were we called upon to describe the malady under which our countrymen labour in respect to literary taste, we should describe it as a state of torpor and lethargy, rather than of virulent disease. It is indifference, more than any morbid taste, which an imaginative work would have to struggle against in this country. There is little necessity here to guard the public against ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... happened or on which something outside himself interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed, staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... when his condition was most alarming, Albine again gave him her hand to rest his cheek upon. But when she saw that it brought him no relief she wept to find herself powerless. Since he had fallen into the lethargy of winter she had felt too weak to drag him unaided from the nightmare in which he was struggling. She needed the assistance of spring. She herself was fading away, her arms grew cold, her breath scant; she no longer ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... "if you want a strong impregnable position, I cannot conceive what better you can find than Sestos. Why, it would need a combined naval and military force to invest that port." By these and such like arguments he rescued them from the lethargy of despair. ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... coldness and numbness in her limbs, which by degrees affected the nerves (I think the physicians call them), seized the brain, and at last ended in a lethargy. It betrayed itself at first in a sort of indifference and carelessness in all her actions, coldness to her best friends, and an aversion to stir or go about the common offices of life. She, that was the cleanliest creature ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... indeed, had the power of insistence remained to me. But the saner medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... watched a great deal of patriotic effort during the last decade, I have seen enormous expenditures of will, emotion and material for the sake of our future, and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effect of lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the shortness and weakness of aim in very much that has been done. I miss continually that sharply critical imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellent work, which shines out supremely ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells |
