"Monotonous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... language is like no other on the globe; it is said to contain not more than about three hundred and thirty words, but it is by no means monotonous, for it has four accents; the even, the raised, the lessened, and the returning, which multiply every word into four; as difficult, says Mr. Astle, for an European to understand, as it is for a Chinese to comprehend the six pronunciations of the French E. In fact, they can so diversify ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the Golden River. He entered on it with the boldness of a practised mountaineer; yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water; not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody; then breaking off into short melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress or pain. The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... romantic history. In those newer parts of our continent names have too often lost the flavor of history; have, in truth, done so, save in isolated instances. The "Smithtons" and "Griggsby Stations" are monotonous and uninteresting, and the Tombstones are little short of sacrilege. In the crush of movers' wagons there appeared to be a scramble for names of any sort. Places multiply, imagination is asleep, and names nearest at hand are most readily laid hold of; yet, even in such a dearth of ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... take her course," he opined, and glanced about him quizzically. "I mistrusted this wasn't goin' to be no prosaic jubilee, but what I'm wonderin' is, how's it goin' to come out? 'Tain't likely anyone'll get hurt, 'cause they can't hit me, an' I don't want to hit them. But, this is goin' to get monotonous sometime an' I'll want to leave here. They've got my horse, an' it's a cinch I ain't goin' away afoot. Guess I'll have to borrow one like Ol' Bat did down to Las Vegas an' get plumb out of the country. An' there's another reason I can't linger to ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... Mixed Voices The Translated Way "And Yet It Is a Gentle Art." Occasionally Jim and Bill When Nobody Listens Office Mottoes Metaphysics Heads and Tails An Election Night Pantoum I Can Not Pay That Premium Three Authors To Quotation Melodrama A Poor Excuse, but Our Own Monotonous Variety The Amateur Botanist A Word for It The Poem Speaks Bedbooks A New York Child's Garden of Verses Downward, Come Downward Speaking of Hunting The Flat Hunter's Way Birds and Bards A Wish—An Apartmental Ditty The Monument of Q. ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... was paid out of the tank and coiled in the hold ready for instant use when we should reach our destination. The music of the cable on the drum, the voice of some one in authority calling "Cobra—cobra," to the natives in the tank, and their monotonous "Sigi do—sigi do," half-sung, half-chanted, seemed an integral part of the day's beauty. Even the natives themselves, guiding the heavy, unwieldy, treacherous cable round and round in the water-soaked tank, that only one turn should be lifted at a time, grinned affably ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... far in the night the monotonous staccato of the guitar went on, accompanying plaintive murmurs, outbursts of anger and cries of pain, the tremulous moans of sorrow. My nerves vibrated, I broke my nails on the rock, and seemed to hear once more the parody ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... a man of genius, often tinctured by eccentricity and enthusiasm, maintain an eternal conflict with the monotonous and imitative habits of society, as society is carried on in a great metropolis, where men are necessarily alike, and where, in perpetual intercourse, they shape themselves ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... came too late to the throne to indulge any propensities of this nature with so little discretion) was but a variety of the same species. He also was an amateur, and an enthusiastic amateur of murder. But as this taste, in the most ingenious hands, is limited and monotonous in its modes of manifestation, it would be tedious to run through the long Suetonian roll-call of his peccadilloes in this way. One only we shall cite, to illustrate the amorous delight with which he pursued any murder which ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... monotonous period under a roof: but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the same rock, giving it a neat and clean appearance. There are few windows on the street; the houses are one story high, with diminutive doors, not more than four feet high; and the low dull walls stretching along the streets, give the city a dismal and monotonous appearance. The reason of building the doors so low, is to prevent the quartering of Turkish government horsemen on their families, as well as to prevent the Bedawin Arabs from plundering them. On the southwest corner of the city stands an ancient castle in ruins, built on ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... resolution and confidence to all his actions, and inspired his friends with admiration and excessive devotion to him, and caused him to be respected by his most violent opponents. As a speaker he was prolix, monotonous, and never eloquent, except, perhaps, for a few minutes when provoked into a passion by something which had fallen out in debate. But, notwithstanding these defects, and still more the ridicule which his extraordinary phraseology had ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the satin frost-glow of the moon; Their eyes the fire of Sirius. They circled, and droned a monotonous tune, Abandoned ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... monotonous!" he exclaimed, still speaking French. Then rapidly recovering his consciousness as the full horror of the situation began to break on his mind, he went on muttering audibly: "Have they really hopped the twig? Bah! Fudge! what has ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... had a most depressing effect on the boy, whose heart was still sore for his father. After the sudden shock of such a loss, the monotonous repetition of the snatching away of all alike, in the midst of their characteristic worldly employments, and the anguish and hopeless resistance of most of them, struck him to the heart. He moved between each bead to a fresh group; staring ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... called it monotonous; yet there was a curious variety in monotony, such as no other book has brought to the author's attention. The same mail gave the pleasant word of some distinguished writer who was so kind as to encourage a beginner in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... sure I should have cried my eyes out before this time. If I had enjoyed any amusement in the midst of this dissipation, it would all have been very well; but I declare to you in confidence I have been tired to death. Nothing can be more monotonous than the life of a hackneyed fine lady;—I question whether a dray-horse, or—a horse in a mill, would willingly exchange places with one, if they could know as much of the matter as I do. You are surprised at hearing all this from me. My dear Belinda, how I envy you! You are not yet ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... with its fading, rose-colored reflections, not so far from the anchored vessels but they might, had they chosen, have spoken across to those on board, the monotonous, austere, and yet vaguely soft gray of the old town rising behind them against the melting sky, sat ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... much need of it. The system pourtrayed in this book is intended to act on all the faculties of a child, especially the highest, and to strengthen them at the time the mere animal part of his nature is weak. The existing schools were not found fit to take our children when they left us. The dull, monotonous, sleepy, heavy system pursued, was quite unadapted to advance such pupils. At this point of the history much damage was done to our plans. The essence or kernel was omitted and the mere shell retained, to make infant schools harmonise with the existing ones, instead of the contrary. There were ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... the atmosphere that is breathed by a sleepless man is always heavy with sleep, and in spite of his efforts to keep awake, Luke dozed away in his chair. Then for hours there was a gloomy silence, broken only by the monotonous footfall within and the throb ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... fulfillment than the situations to which the majority of men instinctively respond. Even the length of the enlistment period looks like a slow march up a 60-mile grade. Promotion is slow, duty frequently monotonous. It is all too easy for the individual to worry about his own insignificance and to feel that he has become lost in the crowd. Under these conditions a man may go altogether bad, or simply get lazy and rock with the grain. But ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... too late? Tara listened to the long, monotonous intonation of the wedding service. She heard the virtues of O-Tar extolled and the beauties of the bride. The moment was approaching and still no sign of Turan. But what could he accomplish should he succeed in reaching the throne room, other than to die with her? ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... still be put off till to-morrow! And he must marry; he often told himself so. She was there beside him on the yellow brocade ottoman. She was much too good for him; but she liked him. Should he do it—now? he asked himself, as he watched the slender gloved hand swaying the feather fan with monotonous languor. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... During the day selling and buying go on vigorously. As evening approaches the merry-go-rounds are patronized, and crowds gather round singing and dancing parties. The dancers are young men linked hand in hand, who move about in circles, shuffle their feet, and sing in a very monotonous fashion. Many set to the preparation of the evening meal, and the valley and the hill-sides are aglow with fires and lights. Amusement, however, has not come to an end. Singing is kept up till the small hours of the morning, to the no small disturbance of those who cannot sleep except when ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... especially as the Empress Irene did not always retain the observance consistent with his awful rule and right supremacy, although especially severe in exacting it from all others, in reference to her lord. Therefore, though, he had felt some pleasure in gaining a short release from the monotonous recitation of the Princess's history, he now saw the necessity of resuming it, or of listening to the matrimonial eloquence of the Empress. He sighed, therefore, as he said, "I crave your pardon, good our imperial spouse, and our daughter born in the purple chamber. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... could see, had cleverly adapted their plans to the conditions. "The effect might so easily have been monotonous and cold, and it might have been flat and dreary. It was a fine idea to lift the central portion of each of those main palaces above the surfaces of the roofs to introduce the semicircular windows ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... twice, the police bent toward one another, and whispered odd remarks concerning the hall, that appeared queerly audible in the intense silence. But in a while there was not even a whisper from anyone, and only the monotonous drip, drip of the quiet rain without the great entrance, and the low, dull sound of the fire ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... the heavy train of sleepers had been climbing the long rise from the river—a monotonous stretch of treeless, short-grass plains reaching from the Missouri to the mountains. And now the train stopped ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... before sailing you had expressed the hope that something really exciting and adventurous would befall the party—that you were tired of the monotonous humdrum of twentieth-century existence—that you regretted the decadence of piracy, and the expunging of romance ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the hearth, with her cheeks and eyes extended to their utmost capacity. It was a very dreary awakening, and Ethelyn sighed as she looked from her window out upon the far-stretching prairie, where the first snows of the season were falling. There were but few objects to break up the monotonous level, and the mottled November sky frowned gloomily and coldly down upon her. Down in the back-yard James and John were feeding the cattle; the bleating of the sheep and the lowing of the cows came to her ear as she turned with a ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... laziness may be induced by a too monotonous round of duties. Try changing them. Make them as attractive as possible. For, of course, you do not require him to perform these duties for your sake, whatever you allow him to suppose about it, but chiefly for the sake of their influence on his character. ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... work was regular, and, as some might imagine, rather monotonous, there were not wanting accidents and incidents to enliven the routine of daily duty. The landing of the boats in rough weather with stones, &c., was a never-failing source of anxiety, alarm, and occasionally amusement. Strangers sometimes visited ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... long evenings when he was eternally playing bridge. Finally I promised it would make me more contented and able to bear the monotony of marriage better, if only he would let me go. He thought it was awfully wicked of me to call marriage monotonous, and said his mother would have been horrified at such a remark. I told him it was no good expecting a young wife to behave like one's mother, and he said he'd rather I didn't. Then we laughed, and the dear old boy gave in, and said that Everard was a white sort of man, and might take me out once ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... Alemannians, on the contrary, lack the vivacity of the Bavaro-Austrian stock. On the monotonous heights of the Swabian plateau are developed such brusque individualism, tenacious self-will, peculiar humor inclined to self-depreciation, soaring fantasy, and (withal there is no lack of comprehension for the ideas of domesticity) ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... succession; the last gigantic work being written in the almost incredibly short space of twenty-seven days. How great it is everyone now knows, but, at the time the colossal choruses were actually considered a great deal too heavy and monotonous; and Handel, always quick in resource, at the second performance introduced a number of operatic songs to make them go down better, and after the third performance the piece was withdrawn altogether. Fortunately, opinions have changed since then. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... and drank her in with thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him enveloped her, delicately and yet forcefully, constraining and urging and compelling her to meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her in waves of sweetness, growing in strength, and the monotonous buzzing of the black honey-bees mingled with the drumming of the crickets, and the flowing of the river, and the beating of her heart, and the rushing of her blood. She leaned her fair head back against the great boulder, and said in a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... monotonous, his eyes staring straight in front of him, his hands, spread on his knees, gripped the cloth of his trousers. She would not admit to herself that she was frightened, but her heart was beating very fast and it was as though some stranger were with her in the room. It may have ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... should invent a mill to do amusements for you, my dear fellow," said Sir Hugo, "as the Tartars get their praying done. But I agree with you; I never cared for play. It's monotonous—knits the brain up into meshes. And it knocks me up to watch it now. I suppose one gets poisoned with the bad air. I never stay here more than ten minutes. But where's your gambling beauty, Deronda? Have you ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... cowardice," and even with "a cowardice that seemed inexplicable, except on the supposition of treachery." But this was only a faon de parler with him: the idea of secret perfidy, that was constantly moving under ground, gave an interest to the progress of the war, which else tended to the monotonous. It was a dramatic artifice for sustaining the interest, where the incidents might happen to be too slightly diversified. But that he did not believe his own charges was clear, because he never repeated them in his "General History of the Campaigns," which was a resum, or recapitulating ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... wish is that I should furnish a few brief chronological memoranda of my own life. That would be hard for me to do, and when done, might not be very interesting for others to read. Nothing makes such dreary and monotonous reading as the old hackneyed roll-call, chronologically arrayed, of inevitable facts in a man's life. One is so certain of the man's having been born, and also of his having died, that it is dismal to lie under the necessity of reading it. That ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... without which the soul must lose its fineness. He himself was seeking to show that beauty, in external material expression, was not merely consistent with strong ideals but requisite to their fit presentment. He recognized too that the various and variegated departures from the monotonous homely pattern of the every-day American house, which were evident in each live town, were but so many indicators that the nation was beginning to realize the truth of this. His battle was with the designers and builders who were guiding falsely and flamboyantly, not with the deceived victims, ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... it seemed to her, an interminably long way, they stopped opposite a tall stone house, one of a row all just alike, and looking very monotonous and sombre to Lucy's eyes, accustomed to the variety of the ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... methods of holding meetings seemed to the writer as being deficient in some things, and that the good of the cause required a change from the ruts and grooves in which these meetings had been run, and that we were making our services monotonous and chilling out spirituality by common methods of conducting divine service, in protracted meetings. Another thought was: That he and men like himself, as lawyers, that were given to talking and that knew much ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... our soldiers who wet through, sleepless, fed on food which, served as it finally was up in the trenches, would hardly have tempted a dog, have stood watching rain-sodden darkness of night yield to dismal shell-bringing dawn, and have witnessed the monotonous routine of war till sun, earth, sky and all the elements of nature seemed pledged in ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... Abbess. And here let me remark that I have no way, by which to ascertain at what particular time certain events transpired. The reader will understand that I write this narrative from memory, and our life at the nunnery was so monotonous, the days and weeks passed by with such dull, and irksome uniformity, that sometimes our frequent punishments were the only memorable events to break in upon the tiresome sameness of our unvarying life. Of course the most simple thing was regarded by us as a great event, something worthy of ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... critic, says: "An easy talent for composition, though of no depth; a feeling for pretty forms, though they were often monotonous and empty, and for graceful movement; a coloring blooming and often warm, though occasionally crude; a superficial but agreeable execution, and especially a vapid sentimentality in harmony with the fashion of the time—all these causes sufficiently account ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... or more disconsolate dwelling it was perhaps difficult to conceive. The sombrous and heavy sound of the billows, successively dashing against the rocky beach at a profound distance beneath, was to the ear what the landscape was to the eye—a symbol of unvaried and monotonous melancholy, not ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... music of the tom-tom, a primitive Arab drum, seemed to us never to cease at Biskra. At night, when we retired to rest, it was drumming in our ears, and in the morning, when we awoke, its monotonous tones still floated on the air. At all hours of the day and night the cafes are frequented by pleasure-seekers. Hence the incessant drumming, as the music of the tom-tom seems to be an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... blanket. The men were tired out with their day's walk, and soon slept. The doctor took his turn on guard at three o'clock in the morning. There was a tempest during the night, the gusts of which thickened the walls of the snow-house. The next day, at six o'clock, they set out again on their monotonous march. The temperature lowered several degrees, and hardened the ground so that walking was easier. They often met with mounds or cairns something like the Esquimaux hiding-places. The doctor had one demolished, and found nothing but a block ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... of Socialism, very sensible and very quietly put. 'How can we have fine art when the worker is condemned to monotonous and mechanical labour in the midst of dull or hideous surroundings, when cities and nature are sacrificed to commercial greed, when cheapness is the god of Life?' In old days the craftsman was a designer; he had his 'prentice ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... my mind a dislike for the man, and I almost regretted that we were in the same Omnibus. In some things, Mr. Carlyle is right: but in many, he is entirely wrong. As a writer, Mr. Carlyle is often monotonous and extravagant. He does not exhibit a new view of nature, or raise insignificant objects into importance, but generally takes commonplace thoughts and events, and tries to express them in stronger and statelier language than others. He holds no communion with his kind, but stands alone without ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... how an accidental discharge of dynamite, while signalling, had killed another boat's crew; of night attacks; ports fled from between the dawns; attacks by bushmen in mangrove swamps and by fleets of salt-water men in the larger passages. One item that occurred with monotonous frequency was death by dysentery. He noticed with alarm that two white men had so died—guests, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... we had been kept awake by the drumming and fifing, singing and shouting, weeping and howling, pulling at accordions and striking the monotonous Shingungo. Merolla names this cymbal Longa, and describes it justly as two iron bells joined by an arched bar: I found it upon the Tanganyika Lake, and suffered severely from its monotonous horrors. Monteiro and Gamitto (p. 232) give ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... treated himself to half a dozen big, slow swallows of water; then he lay and rested for half an hour. Again he rose; he moistened his mouth and lips, shut his teeth hard together as he took the first step upon swollen feet; again he wandered monotonously through a monotonous land. There was no wind now save, infrequently, frolicsome little whirlwinds which danced about him and were gone. When he found that their play angered him, that they seemed to mock at his weariness and dying energies, he frowned. This ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... great circle about the big ship. He was looking it over, but he began his inspection at a distance, and the orbit of his plane made a tightening spiral as he edged for a closer look. He was still swinging in the monotonous round when the ship made its first ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... to what may possibly become of them after death, or whether there IS any "after," for they are in the mentally comatose condition which precedes entire wreckage of brain-force; existence itself has become a "bore;" one place is like another, and they repeat the same monotonous round of living in every spot where they congregate, whether it be east, west, north, or south. On the Riviera they find little to do except meet at Rumpelmayer's at Cannes, the London House at Nice, or the Casino at Monte-Carlo; ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Then he was awakened. He rose, descended to his shady walk, then came out a little into the sun, as though to partake of its warmth for a minute in memory of his absent child. And then the dismal monotonous walk recommenced, until, exhausted, he regained the chamber and his bed, his domicile by choice. For several days the comte did not speak a single word. He refused to receive the visits that were paid him, and during the night he was seen to relight his lamp and pass long hours in writing, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... concerts in the Champs-Elysees. He brought back from them some airs which ran in his head for several weeks, and which he even hummed, beating time with his foot, while he was drinking his beer, and so the years followed each other, slow, monotonous and short, because they were ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... thought could only he enjoyed en masse. But this last remark applies in a certain measure to all popular poetry; for these little songs are like the warblings of the wood-birds; and a single voice would do little justice to the whole. The monotonous chirping of one little feathered singer is tedious or burdensome; while we enjoy their full concert as the sweetest music of nature. One swallow does not make a summer. But the whole blissful sense of nature waking from her wintry sleep comes over you, when ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... of our little camp quickly gathered, officers, soldiers of the Guard, and Sharp-shooters, negroes and teamsters. The Indians ranged themselves on one side of the fire, and the rest of us completed the circle. The dancing was done by some half-dozen young Indians, to the monotonous beating of two small drums and a guttural accompaniment which the dancers sang, the other Indians joining in the chorus. The performance was divided into parts, and the whole was intended to express the passions which war excites in the Indian nature,—the joy which they feel at the prospect of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... there is any necessity for me to describe the next four days of our voyage in detail, further than to say that they were, on the whole, the most miserable that I ever spent in my life, forming one monotonous record of heavy labour, heat, misery, and mosquitoes. All that dreary way we passed through a region of almost endless swamp, and I can only attribute our escape from fever and death to the constant doses of quinine and purgatives which we took, and the unceasing ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... couch; her elbows rested upon her knees, and her face, averted from the light of an iron lamp beside her, was bent upon that of the dying person. She moistened his mouth from time to time with some liquid, and between whiles sung, in a low monotonous cadence, one of those prayers, or rather spells, which, in some parts of Scotland and the north of England, are used by the vulgar and ignorant to speed the passage of a parting spirit, like the tolling, of the bell in catholic days. She accompanied this dismal sound with a slow ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the Swiss meadows and from whose points of view you could look over to the Alps on a clear day, became a torture to both the man and woman. They felt they must get away; the dark firs, the immense green forest became too monotonous for them. Should they not try some seaside resort for once? The sea is ever new. And it was also just the season for the seaside. The wind blew already over the stubble in the fields, as they drove down ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... It has been well observed by M. Gagnon, a French Canadian, that "many of them have no beauty {452} except on the lips of the peasantry." There is "something sad and soft in the voices that imparts a peculiar charm to these monotonous airs, in which their whole existence ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... his is made of the sounds of the sea. There is first a theme that suggests the monotonous wash of the waters and the crying of sea-birds within the vast spaces of the cavern. Then follows a noble rising passage, as if the spirit of the place were ascending from the depths of the sea and pervading with his presence the immensity of his ocean ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... The monotonous roll-call, the heat, the attitude in which I was lying, all conspired to make me drowsy; even the very press of sensations that crowded to my brain lent their aid, and at last I slept as soundly as ever ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... listened with delight to this conversation (which was in Arabic, which his father spoke fluently). The idea of going to stay for a time in an Arab encampment was exciting indeed, for he had already begun to find the life monotonous after the two years spent at school and in the lively ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... paid particular attention, in duty bound, as a gallant Cavalier and the best bred gentleman in Europe. Indeed, he seemed to gloat on the charms of those terrestrial deities with ecstacy! The introductions were endless, and the etiquette tiresome and monotonous. In fact, after making my humble congee, extrication became my only object, and I effected a retreat with difficulty. My stay was short, and as I had neither inclination nor opportunity for minute remark, I hope, Madam, that you will pardon my ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's desperate estate. And this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere fact that his emotion is painful. Joyous emotions about the self also stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came to be jocosely known as petrolio.] under our window, and there spends a leisure hour in the rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim either upon her pity or her weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that sorrow, and the monotonous whine of that dolor cannot move her to the purchase of a guilty tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid to deny charity to the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who comes twice a month to levy contributions of bread ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... hereditary to his race. His face and his body, which was clothed in black, were invisible in the darkness; but his big white eyes shone out, and there came from them a light like a ray of dawn through the chinks of a door. He spoke in a husky, monotonous tone, with a slight nasal twang that gave it the soft melody of music heard at night in the streets. Sometimes the breathing of an ass, or the soft lowing of an ox, accompanied, like a chorus of invisible spirits, the voice of ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... calling yourself a "miserable musician and blunderer" (!!) is a sign of your greatness. In the same sense Pascal says, "La vraie eloquence se moque de l' eloquence." It is true that your greatness brings you little comfort and happiness, but where is happiness, in the narrow monotonous sense which is absurdly given to the word? Resignation and patience alone sustain us in this world. Let us bear our cross together in Christ—"the God whom one approaches without pride, before whom one bends the knee without despair." ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... paternal homes? Then indeed the priest had said only too truly, that these public schools teach every thing except morals and religion! From the depth of St. Pierre's heart there quickly came a denial of the charge; and on the moment, like a chanted response, there fell upon his listening ear a monotonous intonation from within the door. A reading-class had begun its exercise. He knew the words by heart, so often had Claude and he read them together. He followed the last stanza silently with ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... was a tender-hearted and anxious mother, daughter, and sister, and an impeccable wife, if a somewhat monotonous one. At all events her husband never found fault with her in public or private. He had his reasons. To the friends of her youth and to all members of her own old set, she was intensely loyal; and although ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... swiftly, at no great distance from us. There was not a moan in the hot breeze to disturb the wonderful ocean stillness, and you almost thought you caught the beating of the iron heart in her, and the curious monotonous songs which engines sing as they work. She swept past like a phantom, running a line of illuminated windows along, which resembled a row of street-lamps out in the darkness; and as she came on to our quarter she struck seven ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... was a Raja who was very prosperous; but his wife found their life of wealth and ease monotonous, and she continually urged him to travel into other countries and to see whether other modes of life were pleasant or distressful; she pestered her husband so much that at last he gave way. He put his kingdom in charge of his father's sister and her husband and set off with his wife and his ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... stands, we entered on a wide desolate plain. It consists of a crumbling argillaceo-calcareous rock, which, from the dry nature of the climate, supports only scattered tufts of withered grass, without a single bush or tree to break the monotonous uniformity. The weather was fine, but the atmosphere remarkably hazy; I thought the appearance foreboded a gale, but the Gauchos said it was owing to the plain, at some great distance in the interior, being on fire. After ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... decline and fall of the Roman empire. Its story is crowded with events, but lacks those dramatic and romantic incidents which give such interest to the history of early Rome. Now good emperors ruled, now bad ones followed, now peace prevailed, now war raged; the story grows monotonous as we advance. The reigns of virtuous emperors yield much to commend but little to describe; those of wicked emperors repel us by their enormities and disgust us by their follies. We must end our tales with a few selections from the long and ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... cross-fertilisation is more advantageous than self-fertilisation because it promotes both fertility and plasticity. It was probably in this period that coloured flowers—attractive to insect-visitors—began to justify themselves as beauty became useful, and began to relieve the monotonous green of the horsetail and club-moss forests, which covered great tracts of the earth for millions of years. In the Carboniferous forests there were also land-snails, representing one of the minor invasions ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... shall be privileged to wait at table, hand them plate after plate, fried fish shall be all the fare. One suspects that Hebrews gained the taste in the Desert of Sinai, for the manna that fell there was not monotonous to the palate as the sciolist supposes, but likewise mutable under volition. It were incredible that Moses, who gave so many imperishable things to his people, did not also give them the knowledge of fried fish, so that they might obey his behest, and rejoice, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... alone can live here, the pine, a wild creature, inhabitant of the forests and sterile coasts; there is a whole colony of them here; they crowd together fraternally, and cover the sand with their brown lamels; the monotonous breeze which sifts through them forever awakes their murmur; thus they chant in a plaintive fashion, but with a far softer and more harmonious voice than the other trees; this voice resembles the grating of the cicadas when in August ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... the scenes of those poems and romances which had, in a manner, bewitched the world. I gazed about me for a time with mute surprise, I may almost say with disappointment. I beheld a mere succession of gray waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach; monotonous in their aspect, and so destitute of trees, that one could almost see a stout fly walking along their profile; and the far-famed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between bare hills, without a tree or thicket on ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... a fish must be far from monotonous, since he has always the excitement of hunting his own meals, and keeping out of the way of others of his kind who are hunting for him! Still, nervous prostration is quite unknown in that big water-world, and so it is to be inferred that the fishes live only for ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... the poor horses hanging out of their mouths. Day dawned, and there were no signs of the caravan. A thick vapour was rising from every quarter, and they hoped that when it cleared up they would be more fortunate; but no, there was the same monotonous landscape, the same carpet of flowers without perfume. The sun was now three hours high, and the heat was intense; their tongues clove to the roofs of their mouths, while still they went on over flowery meads; but neither forest or ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 'dewy-dashed') for compact description or ornament. Several additions were made in a later edition; and the corrections then made show with what sedulous care the poet diversified the structure of his lines, changing the pauses that break the monotonous run of blank verse, and avoiding the use of weak terminals when the line ends in the middle of a sentence. The opening of the poem was in this manner decidedly improved; yet one may judge that the finest passages are still to be found almost as they stood ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... boys the day passed in riotousness. The carousing was a necessary stimulant after the long, monotonous drive and exposure to the elements. Near the middle of the forenoon, Flood and The Rebel rounded up their outfits and started south for the Mulberry, while Bob Quirk gathered his own and my lads preparatory to leaving ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... which there was a low- roofed habitation of some kind or other, which was visible only by reason of one faint glimmer of light, flickering athwart a scrap of dingy red curtain. The dull, plashing sound of the river was louder here; and, mingling with that monotonous ripple of the water, there was a shivering sound—the trembling of rushes stirred by ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... compass, but this plan is not closely followed in the new additions and suburbs. This uniformity in plan, combined with the level ground and the style of buildings first erected, gave to the city an extremely monotonous and uninteresting appearance, but with its growth in wealth and population, greater diversity and better ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the East, she was familiar with all sorts of Hindoo and Persian legends, which she would repeat with a certain monotonous cadence and with an infinite grace. Listening to her as she described the charming dawn of the world, one would have said she had lived in the youth of creation. This I once said ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... Irish the fidgits. Then the Transport's got a three-master billed for San Francisco, and she sails to-morrow morning, and we're going on her." He seemed subdued, and hummed and strummed on his banjo, as if he couldn't get hold of what he wanted to let out. At last he struck up a monotonous thing that had no tune, and sang again: "One ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... patterns life fits each of us as we grow up. Not one in ten thousand glances into human faces is arrested because it has lit upon a personality that cannot be immediately located, measured, accounted for. The reason for this sterility of variety which soon makes the world rather monotonous to the seeing eye is that few of us are born with any considerable amount of personality, and what little we have is speedily suppressed by a system of training which is throughout based upon an abhorrence of originality. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... quickly through the table of contents to find what you seek. In the case supposed, of the ceremony at Venice, you will be aided in the search by having in mind that the catch-words involved are "Adriatic," and "Doge," and as these begin with capital letters, which stand out, as it were, from the monotonous "lower case" type (as printers call all the letters that are not capitals) your search will be much abridged by omitting to read through all the sentences of your table of contents, and seizing only the passage or passages where "Doge," or ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... cousin to it, or rather a caricature; namely, a close coatee, with stand-up collar, and very short skirts,—skirtees, they might be called,—the color gray; pantaloons and vest the same;—making the wearer a monotonous gray man throughout, invisible at twilight. The proposers of this metamorphosis, to make it go, selected an individual of small and agreeable figure, and procuring a suit of fine material, and a good fit, placed him on a platform ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... home was near the foot of the Jura, where I constantly faced its rounded domes, and the slope by which they gently descend to the plain of Switzerland. I have heard it said that there is something monotonous in the continuous undulations of this range, so different from the opposite one of the Alps. But I think it is only by contrast that it seems wanting in vigor and picturesqueness; and those who live in its neighborhood become very much attached ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... except the pilot himself, has a fore-bird's white body in a line with one eye, and more they do not need to trouble about. They can put all their strength into the monotonous work of wing-flapping, as long as they merely keep the one eye half open and see that they have the fore-bird in his place. Thus they know that all is in order, that they are in connection with the train, and with him at the ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... truth, as a necessary consequence of his imperfect and difficult method of discovery by comparative development. The word phrenology has become so identified with his incomplete discoveries, that it may be laid aside in the present stage of our progress. There is no monotonous repetition of function in nervous structures, and the possibility of subdivision of structure and function is limited only by our own ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... should possess excepting chronology and paint. Mr. Petter had selected with a great deal of care the various woods of which his house was built, and he decidedly objected to conceal their hues and texture by monotonous paint. The descriptions that he had read ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... as misrepresentations of "Deutschtum." Shall I be suspected of a quaint perversity of national prejudice if I say that Herr Chamberlain's war pamphlets are distinctly better reading than the great majority of their kind? They are much more individual, much less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as an oasis in ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... life,—for in those days Kohat was innocent of shops. At rare intervals, colourless mud hamlets—each with its warlike watch-tower—huddled close to the road as if for company and protection. Here the monotonous round of life was already astir. Women of a remarkable height and grace, in dark-blue draperies peculiar to the Frontier, went about their work with superb movement of untrammelled limbs, and groups of shiny bronze babies shrilled to the heartsome notes of the tonga-horn. There ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... she was to domestic eyes visibly cross, and her half-year at home had rendered her much less capable of concealing ill-humour. Something was owing to wear and suspense, together with the effects of the summer heat and confined monotonous life without change or luxury; but much was chargeable on the manifestations of temper to which she had given way in the home circle. She told Wilmet the trouble, which Ferdinand wished to have kept from open discussion till he had received a final statement of his means to lay before ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... herself with a start, placed the crystal in her lap with the first finger and the thumb of each hand lightly touching it, and stared fixedly into the magic glass. For a moment or two the future seemed obscured, then evidently it cleared. She began to speak in a deep, monotonous voice, as if talking in ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... with his double-bass slung over his back, and I, with my violin under my arm, started to walk from the Black Forest to Heidelberg. It was unusually snowy weather; as far as we could see across the great, deserted plain, there was no trace of road nor path. The wind kept up its harsh aria with monotonous persistency, and Wilfred, with his flattened wallet at his belt, and the vizor of his cap drawn over his eyes, moved on before me, straddling the drifts with his long, heron legs, and whistling a gay tune to keep up his spirits. Now and then, ...
— The Dean's Watch - 1897 • Erckmann-Chatrian
... it would be better to live with the Indians than to be killed, and signified his acceptance of the offer. Upon this the Indians formed a circle about him, and broke into a monotonous chant, accompanied with sundry movements of the limbs, which appeared to be their way of welcoming him ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger
... reeling, but he continued to tell off the seconds with the monotonous regularity of a timepiece, his every power centered on that process. The idea came to him that he was counting his own flickering pulse-throbs for the last time. With a tremendous effort of will he smoothed his face and felt his ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn without shrinking, from cloud-borne ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... the subtle but well-known signs of deceit; so doubt is forced on me; and then I am all suspicion, and so darkly vigilant that soon all is certainty; for 'les fourberies des femmes' are diabolically subtle, but monotonous. They seem to vary only on the surface. One looks too gentle and sweet to give any creature pain; I cherish her like a tender plant; she deceives me for the coarsest fellow she can find. Another comes the frank and candid dodge; she ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... here is, necessarily, very monotonous: the hired people come and go, or we go and come to and from them, and the mosquitoes and flies do very much as we do. Mosquitoes are really a great annoyance at times. They introduce themselves under the netting at night in a very mysterious ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... was to see this mysterious Miss Bessy—twenty times more mysterious, of course, for want of her surname. And then again (to try and account for my great curiosity, of which in recollection I am more than half ashamed), I had been leading the quiet monotonous life of a crippled invalid for many years,—shut up from any sight of new faces; and this was to be the face of one whom I had thought about so much and so long,—Oh! I think I ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... high spirits when he found the square, clean room, horribly furnished, in the by-street that branched from the main road, and advanced in an unlovely sweep to the mud pits and the desolation that was neither town nor country. On every side monotonous grey streets, each house the replica of its neighbor, to the east an unexplored wilderness, north and west and south the brickfields and market-gardens, everywhere the ruins of the country, the tracks where sweet lanes had been, gangrened stumps of trees, the relics of hedges, here and ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... to superintend the releasing of Platterbaff. Despite the earliness of the hour a small crowd had gathered in the street outside, and the horrible menacing Trelawney refrain of the "Fifteen Hundred Voting Men" came in a steady, monotonous chant. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... perfect repair, of its monotonous iron balconies, its monotonous lofty windows; and it would be insufferable if you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those wondrous little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the other, rising ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... exceedingly long, tedious day. The Kobuk River, which in its upper reaches is a very picturesque stream, began now to be as monotonous as the lower Yukon. It had grown to considerable size, and the bends to be great curves of many miles at a stretch, one of which, a decided bend to the north of the general westerly direction of the river, we were three full hours in passing down. It ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... over them within the hour. The comparatively small size of their alternating ridges and furrows give evidence that the waters beneath which they had formed had been of no very profound depth. In the upper part of the valley, which is bare, trackless, and solitary, with a high monotonous sandstone ridge bounding it on the one side, and a line of gloomy trap-hills rising over it on the other, the edges of the strata, where they protrude through the mingled heath and moss, exhibit the mysterious scratchings and polishings now so generally connected with the glacial theory ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... in winter, except for pedestrians, and we heard of several gangs of men who were sent there to work, digging all day and being unable next morning to find any trace of their labours. The only breaks in this monotonous marsh are Whitemouth and Broken-Head Rivers, flowing between wooded shores. The former is about forty miles from Ingolf, and the latter nearly seventy. Both are small streams flowing into the most southerly end of ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... Nature, in which our age can take the same tranquil pleasure as our youth—Lady Vargrave devoted much of her monotonous and unchequered time. She seemed to love them almost as living things; and her memory associated them with hours as bright ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... note just what were these wares and why they were demanded so insistently. First were spices, far more important then than now. The diet of those times was simple and monotonous without our variety of vegetables and sauces and sweets, and the meat, if fresh, was likely to be tough in fiber and strong in flavor. Spices were the very thing to add zest to such a diet, and without them the epicure of the sixteenth century would have been truly miserable. Ale and wine, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... To fortify men in love for their motherland, to see that insecurity, grinding poverty, interference, petty tyranny, could no longer undermine that love—this was to be, surely must be, done! Monotony? Was that cry true? What work now performed by humble men was less monotonous than work on the land? What work was even a tenth part so varied? Never quite the same from day to day: Now weeding, now hay, now roots, now hedging; now corn, with sowing, reaping, threshing, stacking, thatching; the care of beasts, and their companionship; sheep-dipping, shearing, wood-gathering, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... attachment and fidelity on the part of Indians towards their masters, but these are exceptional cases. All the actions of the Indian show that his ruling desire is to be let alone; he is attached to his home, his quiet monotonous forest and river life; he likes to go to towns occasionally, to see the wonders introduced by the white man, but he has a great repugnance to living in the midst of the crowd; he prefers handicraft to field labour, and ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... wood, I think ... Fie on me! my God, what a wretched creature I am!' I said at last, out loud. Of such sort were the unphrased, incomplete thoughts that went round and round a thousand times over in a monotonous whirl in my head. I repeat, I went back to the Ozhogins' the same hypersensitive, suspicious, constrained creature I had been ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Penfold was in a keen agony that sharpened all his senses; he caught the sense of the words in spite of the speaker, and clung wildly to the straw that monotonous machine held out. "My lord! my lord!" he cried, "I'll tell you the real reason why young ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... and sleep the fever out of his blood; he took the road; and as he went, the monotonous engine-throb died off behind him. He passed through the village; the street was empty, and it echoed loud to the sound of his footfall. Large shadows fell about him when for an instant the moon shot clear of ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... grows in another crevice; a deep, soft, verdant moss spreads itself along the top and over all the available inequalities of the fence; and where nothing else will grow, lichens stick tenaciously to the bare stones and variegate the monotonous gray with hues of yellow and red. Finally, a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base of the stone wall, and takes away the hardness of its outline; and in due time, as the upshot of these apparently aimless or sportive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is a matter of individual taste. Vast, palatial, magnificent Chambord certainly is, and much more attractive on the north facade, where the chateau is reflected in the waters of the Cosson, than from the cafe where we were seated. The long line of buildings in the south front is somewhat monotonous, even broken as it is by the several towers, and the great central lantern, which appears to the best advantage from this side. Rich as is all the ornamentation of Chambord, it is skyward that it breaks forth into the greatest exuberance ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... all so monotonous!" she said impatiently. "The king always is made to find out that the shepherdess does love him for his own sake. What would happen if ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... delude yourself into the notion that you are training for the sports. Ten minutes at the broad jump, five with the weight, a few sprints on the track—it is all very amusing and harmless, but it is apt to become monotonous after a time. And if the weather is at all inclined to be chilly, ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied independence can he enter into the divine unity. To this liberation of the self from its own bondage art contributes its share. The poetic genius, like the speculative and the religious, penetrates the monotonous disorder of everyday life, and lays bare "the impassioned expression" which is there for those who can read it. The dramatist, for instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some elemental force of ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... that the withdrawal of stimuli, or their monotonous repetition, are factors which do undoubtedly stand out as primary causes of sleep. We may suppose, if we like, that consciousness depends upon a certain rate of vibration which takes place in the brain structure. This vibration is maintained by the stimuli of the present, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... accustomed to go about every five minutes or so on the Thames, I understand you finding this monotonous, Jack. When you have had a little more of the sea, you won't mind how much you get of fine weather and favouring winds. As for storms, I don't care if I never see another. They are very grand to read of in books, and when you have got a stout ship and plenty ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... The natural imagery of these verses was supplied by frequent, I might say intense, observation of the Rydal Torrent. What an animating contrast is the ever-changing aspect of that, and indeed of every one of our mountain brooks, to the monotonous tone and unmitigated fury of such streams among the Alps as are fed all the summer long by glaciers and melting snows! A traveller, observing the exquisite purity of the great rivers, such as the Rhone at Geneva, and the Reuss at Lucerne, where they issue out of their respective lakes, might ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... bated breath Frank repeated the monotonous refrain of her saga, "and he made her thwow ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... taking a short cut to the village, and I still stood there. It must have been after eleven, and the monotonous tick of the big clock on the stairs behind me was ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... hear him). I used to be lonely when you were away. I used to think Homeport was a stupid, monotonous place. Then I used to go down on the beach, especially when it was windy and the breakers were rolling in, and I'd dream of the fine free life you must be leading. (She gives a laugh which is half a sob.) I used to love the sea then. (She pauses; then continues with slow intensity.) ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... with the fresh, monotonous plash of the waves, when the tide served, was his favourite resort. He could stand still and look out over the expanse of ripples, or wander on, as he pleased, watching ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... received their own mail matter, mounted and rode away; and there settled over the little town that monotonous quiet which would not be broken again until the arrival of the evening train, when, possibly, some chance passenger might alight ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... lengthening shadows; curling smoke ascended from the surrounding cottages. A thick fog crept along the vallies; a gray mist hovered over the tops of the mountains. The glassy surface of the sound glittered to the sun's departing ray. The solemn herds lowed in monotonous symphony. The autumnal insects in sympathetic wafting, plaintively predicted their approaching fate. "The scene is changed since we last visited this place, said Melissa; the gay charms of summer are beginning to decay, ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... Sam; better than the old coachman's closing lamentation, "Vy worn't there a alleybi?" better than Mr. Winkle, or Mrs. Cluppins, or Serjeant Buzfuz, or than all the rest of those engaged in any capacity in the trial, put together, was the irascible little Judge, with the blinking eyes and the monotonous voice—himself, in his very pose, obviously, "all face and waistcoat." Than Mr. Justice Stareleigh there was, in the whole of this most humorous of all the Readings, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... at which she was to keep her appointment. But the step she was about to take had difficulties and terrors in her own eyes, though she had no reason to apprehend her father's interference. Her life had been spent in the quiet, uniform, and regular seclusion of their peaceful and monotonous household. The very hour which some damsels of the present day, as well of her own as of higher degree, would consider as the natural period of commencing an evening of pleasure, brought, in her opinion, awe and solemnity ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... morning the signal for sailing was hoisted on board of the Young America, and the pilots came on board. The students were bright and fresh, and having seen the dikes and ditches of Holland, they were rather anxious to escape from its muddy waters and its monotonous plains. In fact, they sighed for another taste of blue water ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... want supper, and generally spend the evenings in my room. It is drearily monotonous here. Nothing to vary the routine for me, except my afternoon walk, and recently the warm weather has debarred me even from that. You are a great walker, I believe, and I look forward to many pleasant rambles with you when I feel stronger and autumn comes. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... Third Avenue, a long street, which, commencing just below the Cooper Institute, runs out to Harlem. A man came out of a side street, uttering at intervals a monotonous cry which sounded ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... in much before it was time to dress for dinner; but young men's habits are not usually very regular, the monotonous custom of doing everything by clockwork being a tedious concomitant of old age. Maud could not calculate on his absence at any particular hour of the day unless he were on duty, and the bare notion that she should wish thus to calculate ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... MSS., Domitian VII.). It is the Album, or Book of Life, of the monastery of Durham. Nor need we add that this album affords a relief to the eye wearied with looking over the pages of a modern album, and to the mind sick of the endless but monotonous repetition of imaginary ruins, love ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... felt sure the young lieutenant must be sound asleep, like the prosaic creature he was, she got up, took her cloak, woke her maid, and went on deck. Nobody was to be seen except the sailor at the helm, who was singing a sort of dirge in the Corsican dialect, to some wild and monotonous tune. In the silence of the night this strange music had its charm. Unluckily Miss Lydia did not understand perfectly what the sailor was singing. Amid a good deal that was commonplace, a passionate line would occasionally excite her liveliest curiosity. But just at the most important ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... of the boys, that are not otherwise employed at that time about the buildings or stock. The preparation of the fuel in the timber and again at the woodpiles is, to say the least, a long and rather monotonous employment. Boys who do not manifest an interest in this part of their early training, by reason of its necessity and general healthfulness, are prone to regard it as a very wearisome employment, until they acquire skill in the matter of position and movement, and then their ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... branch of natural science, he may rest assured that he is not neglecting the sacred trust which he accepted, but is only bracing and invigorating his mind, and keeping it from that stagnation which is the inevitable result of a too monotonous employment. The staff of missionaries which is spread over the whole globe supplies the most perfect machinery that could be devised for the collection of all kinds of scientific knowledge. They ought to be the pioneers of science. They should ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... was leaning on his hand, But, when again beside him sat the maid, His eyes for one slow minute having scanned Her moonlit face, he laid him down, and said, Monotonous, like solemn-read command: "For Love is of the earth, earthy, and is laid Lifeless at length back in the mother-tomb." Strange moanings from the ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the gable-end of the house and called up to the window, open at the top, which she knew to be that of Stella's room. While she waited expectantly, she became aware of a low voice talking very quickly in a queer monotonous way. Susan came to the window and looked out above the lace blind. She made a signal that she would open the gate ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... religiously and faithfully listened to an early mass, she gladly attended in the evening the "barraboula" of the negroes, dancing their African dances in the glare of torches and to the monotonous ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... child's enjoyment and to improve the quality of his oral reading. In these days when so many books are hastily read in school, there is a tendency to sacrifice expression to the mechanics and interpretation of reading. Those acquainted with school work know too well the resulting monotonous, indistinct speech and the self-conscious, listless attitude which characterize so much of the reading of pupils in grades above the third. It is believed that these readers will aid in overcoming these serious faults in reading, which all teachers and parents ...
— Children's Classics in Dramatic Form - Book Two • Augusta Stevenson
... vaguest. The average intelligence of the masses thereabout is not high; the change noticeable before crossing the Virginia line becoming more and more marked as one travels straight south. Whether the monotonous stretches of pine barren depress mentally, or frequent recurring "ager" prostrates physically, who shall say? But to the casual glance along that railroad line, was not presented an unvarying picture of ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... set his watch by some of them. But then it was a rarer and a more interesting thing than now. We can easily fancy the neighbors gathering to see the fine clock standing in its place in the hall, telling its monotonous tale all the nights ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... himself with vocal exercise, but it was rather a kind of chant than a song; being a monotonous repetition of one sentence in a very rapid manner, with a long stress upon the last word, which he swelled into a dismal roar. Nor did the burden of this performance bear any reference to love, or war, or ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens |
