"Somnolent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... village of Bixby was in its usual condition of somnolent cheerfulness, that same afternoon. The mail had come in, being brought in Abner Colt's green wagon from the railway-station two miles away. The appearance of the green wagon, with its solitary brown bag, not generally too well filled, ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... raccoon slept for thirty-six hours on end, all attempts to awake him, by pulling his tail or tweaking his hair being quite unavailing. This was a novelty in narcotics; so Sebastian was asked to come and look at the slumbering brute. He suggested the attempt to perform an operation on the somnolent raccoon by removing, under the influence of the drug, an internal growth, which was considered the probable cause of his illness. A surgeon was called in, the growth was found and removed, and the raccoon, to everybody's ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Selifan had long been sitting with half-closed eyes, and hands which bestowed no encouragement upon his somnolent steeds save an occasional flicking of the reins against their flanks; whilst Petrushka had lost his cap, and was leaning backwards until his head had come to rest against Chichikov's knees—a position which ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... have assumed for the nonce the attributes of that unaccountably somnolent Fate, and brought him to a terrible end, I am sure abundant justification will be found in the recital of his mythical misdeeds, which, I repeat, were not a circumstance to his real transgressions. Indeed, one has to go ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... their destination, they got out of the cart. They were in a half-somnolent state. Kirsha was off before they realized that they had not thanked him. When they looked for him they could only see a cloud of dust and hear the clatter of hoofs and the rattle of wheels ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... Presently the familiar cliff and the tawny path scaling it loomed ahead. He began to climb upward, almost on all-fours, digging his finger nails into the yellow clay in an instinctive effort to pull himself forward. Finally he gained the top ... The street, somnolent with approaching noon, was deserted—the child had disappeared. He recovered his whirling senses and looked again. This time he saw that the door of the shack stood open. He took a step forward. A figure loomed in the doorway. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Beginning is for thee, and there: but where, and of what sort, and for whom will the End be? All grows, and seeks and endures its destinies: consider likewise how much grows, as the trees do, whether we think of it or not. So that when your Epimenides, your somnolent Peter Klaus, since named Rip van Winkle, awakens again, he finds it a changed world. In that seven-years' sleep of his, so much has changed! All that is without us will change while we think not of it; much even that is within us. The ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... grievances like an Eastern monarch, and rejoicing in the abasement of the evildoer. Nor was the spirit of his adventure bounded by the ocean. More than once he crossed the seas; the Hague knew him, and Amsterdam, though these somnolent cities gave small occasion for the display of his talents. It was from Scilly that he crossed to the Isle of Man, where, being recommended to Lord Derby, he gained high favour, and received in exchange for his jests a comfortable ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... too, that the following noon—this day being a Sunday, warm, clear, and somnolent—Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave sat upon the lawn before Matocton, and little Roger Musgrave was with them. In fact, these two had been high-handedly press-ganged by this small despot to serve against an enemy then harassing ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... port of Sunwich was basking in the sunshine of a July afternoon. A rattle of cranes and winches sounded from the shipping in the harbour, but the town itself was half asleep. Somnolent shopkeepers in dim back parlours coyly veiled their faces in red handkerchiefs from the too ardent flies, while small boys left in charge noticed listlessly the slow passing of time as recorded by ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... some months before it had entirely perished, though I stood motionless, everything which I looked at seemed in motion to and fro. A stiff cloudy vapour seemed to have settled on my forehead and temples, which usually occasions a sort of somnolent pressure upon my eyes, and particularly from dinner till the evening. So that I often recollect what is said of the poet Phineas ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... also left the villa, promising to return in a few hours; and Brendon joined Albert in his sleeping apartment. For a time they were alone together and then came Jenny with some soup. She stopped to chat for a little while and, finding her uncle apparently somnolent and disinclined to talk, turned to Mark and spoke under her breath. She was ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... smothered under the downfall of proofs, queries, and scribbled sheets which descended upon his desk from all sides. For a time he struggled manfully: for a time thereafter he wallowed desperately. Then he sent out a far cry for help. The cry smote upon the ear of McGuire Ellis, "Hoong!" ejaculated that somnolent toiler, coming up out of ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence, he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a peering suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the other silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an amazing and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken black hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage properties of a stupid and conventional parody ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... no thought for the morrow or indeed even for the day. He was entirely incapable of earning a living and had been successively an actor, a lecturer, a preacher, and a pedagogue. He was a fine scholar of Latin and could quote Terence, Horace, and Plautus in a way that could stir the somnolent soul even of a school-boy. His chief enemy, next to laziness, was drink. He would disappear for days at a time into his study, and afterward explain that he had been engaged in the preparation of his magnum opus, which ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... the schooner. Their plans when the "Boomskys" should be reached were rehearsed over and over again. Then came spells of card and checker playing, story-telling, or hours of silent inertia when, man fashion, they brooded over pipes in a patch of sun, somnolent, the mind ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... passed beyond the hearing of the astonished eavesdropper. Good heaven, what was this? Not his child? Two minutes later Mrs. Odell-Carney was back at the spring where they had left her somnolent husband, who had refused to climb a hill because all of his breath was ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... up"; indeed, they have been swarming in since Prague came into her own some few years ago and became the capital of a free and independent republic. In former years, when Prague was still accounted a small provincial town of somnolent habits, there were only two or three hotels that counted at all as accommodation for foreigners; now there are many yet inadequate to the number of visitors. As to those that are drawn to Prague, their numbers may be accounted for by the fact that most of ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... into Harrimay only ten minutes later. It was a pretty but rather somnolent place, just a string of white-painted, green-blinded houses and two or three stores along both sides of an oiled highway. It was a long ten-minute jitney ride from the ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... winged his short and glittering flight. The air was warm, fragrant, and delicious, and the larboard watch of the tired crew of the Gentile, after a boisterous passage of forty days from Gibralter, yielded to its somnolent influence, and lay stretched about the forecastle and waists, enjoying the voluptuous languor which overcomes men suddenly emerging from a cold into ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... and apologised. He was always in the habit of giving precedence to his mistress, and he really had forgotten for a moment that the somnolent Nym was to be regarded as his Sovereign. So his future Majesty, with Bertram's assistance, mounted the bay charger, and his sister Alianora was placed on the pillion ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... same room with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think the performance little to be admired. As a general rule, the members speak shamefully ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and so are the fines. The Ballot Question—oldest of dialectic nightmares—is often found astride of a somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of GENERAL-UTILITY men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and they fill as many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the 'Princess's,' ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... story of Col. John James Waldron," continued Old Grumps, with a groan which was very somnolent, as if it were a twin to a snore. "That's the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... obligations to Herr Renwick was an added bitterness to her wounded pride, but hope had already beggared her and she could not choose. She got into coat and hat, and after another careful scrutiny of her somnolent guardian, quietly opened the shutters of the side window, stepped out into the shadow of the hedge, and made her way toward ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... woman in a little cracked civil voice—a demonstration by which our friends were so affected that they bobbed up and almost curtseyed to her. They subsided again, and it was shortly after, in a summer hum of French insects and a phase of almost somnolent reverie, that Maisie most had the vision of what it was to shut out from such a perspective so appealing a participant. It had not yet appeared so vast as at that moment, this prospect of statues shining in the blue and of ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... not immediately apparent to my unaccustomed eyes. Indeed, when I first saw the town, there brooded over it a calm that seemed almost sabbatic in its restfulness, though I learned later on that underneath its somnolent exterior the deeper currents of life—love and hatred, joy and despair, ambition and avarice, faith and friendship—flowed not less steadily ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... this), temperance in food, and especially—in the light of what has been said above—temperance in drink, are all incidentally of value as aids to the maintenance of purity. So also is the avoidance of the habit of lying in bed in a semi-somnolent condition after true sleep has finally departed. A Christian's body is meant to be a temple of the Holy Ghost, and no other spirit, whether of impurity or of sloth, should be allowed to ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... embodies the romance of Power, Mexico represents to perfection the romance of Picturesqueness. To pass from the United States to Mexico is like passing at one bound from the New World to the Old. Wherever it has not been recently Americanized, its beauty is that of sunbaked, somnolent decay. It is in many ways curiously like its mother—or rather its step-mother—country, Spain. But Spain can show nothing to equal the spacious magnificence of its scenery or the picturesqueness of its physiognomies and its costumes. ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... had believed possible. During the last week her sufferings were less, and she lay quiet part of the time. Friday morning she had an attack of faintness, in the course of which she remarked "I am dying." She recovered and before noon sank into a somnolent state from which she never awoke. Her breathing became softer and fainter till it ceased at half-past five in the afternoon. Oh, what a transition was that! from pain and weariness and woe to the world of light! ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... two who were still missing the reason for their absence was simple enough. As soon as Suarez had parted from his somnolent companion, the thought occurred to him that since the latter, only a single man, was so careful of his life, he, being married, and with a family, had still greater reason for being careful of his. Having given his companion a proof of his courage, which had cost him ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... from memory, but I believe my words are pretty correct. When Lord Brougham had delivered this emphatic utterance, he proceeded with his address, which was a dull affair and did not inspire the least enthusiasm. It was, indeed, a somewhat somnolent discourse, and his audience hardly seemed to wake up till he reached his peroration, which closed with a telling ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... Karstens and Tatum were tossing uneasily in the bedclothes, the writer sat up with a blanket round his shoulders, crouching over the primus stove, with the thermometer at -21 deg. F. outdoors. Walter alone was at ease, with digestive and somnolent capabilities proof against any invasion. It was, of course, broad daylight all night. At three the company was aroused, and, after partaking of a very light breakfast indeed, we sallied forth into the brilliant, clear morning with not a cloud in the sky. The only packs we carried ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... began to rouse. The heavy eyes, the languid stretch, the unmeaning contemplation of the noontide sunlight, the slow struggles of a somnolent brain. These things were suggested in the gradual stirring of the place to a ponderous activity. The heavy movement of weary diggers as they lounged into camp for their dinner had no suggestion of the ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... my pride!" she said sadly. "Hardly had I gone, already I had repented. But when I returned, I found you, oh, so altered! wearing already that mask of somnolent indifference which you have never laid aside until . . . ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... one hundred and ninety-eight. He gave me another somnolent grin, and fell into deeper slumber. I would have made him move about, but I might as well have tried to make Cleopatra's needle waltz around the room with me. Tom's breathing became stertorous, and that, in connection with ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... departures. In the central and local administration the reactionary policy of the latter half of Alexander II.'s reign had been steadily maintained; the revolutionary movement had waxed and waned, but its aims were essentially the same as of old; the Church had remained in its usual somnolent condition; a grave agricultural crisis affecting landed proprietors and peasants had begun, but it was merely a development of a state of things which I had previously described; the manufacturing industry had made gigantic strides, but they were all in the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... daily routine of life amused these votaries of fashion—nothing roused them from their attitude of somnolent placidity, except perhaps some peculiarly bloody combat in the arena—one of those unfettered orgies of lust of blood which they loved to witness and which have for ever disgraced the glorious ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... George self-consciously, not knowing what to say. He nearly blushed as, in an attempt to seem at ease, he gazed negligently round at the rows of chairs and marble tables, and at the sparse traffic of the somnolent Place. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... coverings, disheveled forms and shaggy heads. In my own corner nothing had been molested. The world outside was strangely quiet. The trail was open. So with no attention to my roommates I hastily washed and dressed, buckled on my armament, and stumped freely forth, down the somnolent hall, down the creaking stairs, and into ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... in the land of Lotus Eaters, "that slumber is more sweet than toil!" The back benches of that room were strewn with shattered hopes. Small intelligent scholars came up and passed by on their way to Balliol Scholarships; but the faces at the back of the room remained terribly somnolent and happy. A certain Banbury had been there for three years and had earned the nickname of "old Father Time," and Mansell, too, swore he would enrol himself with the Lost Legion, while even Gordon said that nothing would shift him from there ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... of a somnolent tendency in Frederick (which had no existence out of his own imagination), and after dinner, when Frederick had withdrawn, privately apologised to Mrs General for the poor man. 'The most estimable and affectionate of brothers,' he said, 'but—ha, hum—broken up altogether. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... opportunity to carry my bold scheme into effect than that which at that moment presented itself to me. I quietly emerged from my place of concealment and, once more crouching low among the ferns, crept slowly and with infinite caution toward the somnolent Jose, gradually working my way round until I could just see him clear of the corner of the capstan-house. Some twenty minutes of this work brought me right up to the gable end of the building, from which position I again reconnoitred Jose. He was unmistakably fast asleep, and therefore ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still higher, on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its earthen trenches. From hereabout the ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... transfigured, lit up from within as it were, when his drooping eyelids were raised and his eyes awoke to life. In the son's case, the father's ponderousness had turned to gravity. This big fellow, Eugene, usually preserved a heavy somnolent demeanour. At the same time, certain of his heavy, languid movements suggested those of a giant stretching his limbs pending the time for action. By one of those alleged freaks of nature, of which, however, science ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... dotted with one man ploughing with a dun mule. Nobody was dragging the creek; no couriers dashed hither and yon, bringing tidings of no news to the distracted parents. There was a sylvan attitude of somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view. "Perhaps," says I to myself, "it has not yet been discovered that the wolves have borne away the tender lambkin from the fold. Heaven help the wolves!" says I, and I went ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... that day, Saint Mars Montalvin, Tom Sheffield, and his cousin, Madame de Rhouel, a Creole, who laughed as incessantly as a bird sings. It was growing dusk, and the distant rumbling of the carriages in the Avenue of the Champs-Elysees sounded like some somnolent rhythm. There was a delicate perfume of flowers; the lamps had not been brought in yet, and chatting and laughing filled the room ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... By her door he murmured, "Good creature! you sleep with a sense of duty done," and paced on, reflecting, "She has not made money a demon of discord," and blessed her. He had his thoughts at Hippias's somnolent door, and to them the world might ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... there were a number of pegs for them to sling their guns and bags on when they came in of an evening to have a pipe and a chopin of white wine. Ziska's uncle and aunt were both large, stout, and somnolent people, very good-natured and kind, but a trifle dull. Ziska really had the management of the place, and she was not slow to lend a hand if the servants were remiss in waiting on us. But that, it was understood, was done out of compliment ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... diffusion of light from the clouded moon, skulking affrighted somewhere in the grim and sullen purlieus of the sky? She listened, thinking to hear the stir of horses in their stalls, some sound from barn or byre, the wakening of the restless poultry, all snugly housed; but the somnolent stillness of the muffled earth continued unbroken, and only the frantic wind screamed and howled ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the compilation. He writes in the Theosophical Review: "It has been translated into no less than twenty different languages, and may be said without the faintest risk of contradiction, to have been the busiest instrument of Buddhist propaganda for many a day in the annals of that long somnolent dharma. The least that learned Buddhists of Ceylon can do to repay the debt of gratitude they owe to Colonel Olcott and other members of the Theosophical Society who have worked for them, is to bestir themselves to throw some light ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... apartments with the preparation of food, and in the labors of the loom and spindle; while young children, half-naked, play around the house doors and through the lanes with an activity in strong contrast with the prevailing tone of grave and somnolent repose. ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... hypnotic, agrypnotic, hypnosis, hypnotism, narcotic, opiate, dwale, somniloquence, somniloquism, somnial, somniferous, hypnophobia, hypnogogic, stupefacient, mesmeric, soporific, dormitive, soporiferous, soporous, somnific, somnolent, somniloquous, antihypnotic, morphean, oversleep, morphine, narcosis, lullaby, incubation, hypnogenic, Mara, Morpheus, Hypnos, Somnus, dormitory, diurnation, cubicle, insomniac, hibernation, somnipathist, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... death, but of smooth-pulsing life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action, of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with struggle and travail. The spirit of the place was the spirit of the peace of the living, somnolent with the easement and content of prosperity, and undisturbed ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... and the high-stepping horses, which were indeed the exception, for the majority ambled along half somnolent from careless coachmanship, one sought in vain for some idea of what they were doing it all for. They did not seem to enjoy it. If they did not enjoy it, why did they do it? The expression that was common and universal to almost all was their seriousness. The Volunteer ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... the soldier; "I am no whit somnolent; I always hear best with my eyes shut. It is a fashion I learned ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... the rather somnolent Vere de Vere, he scornfully yanked his extra pairs of thick, white-streaked, yellow cotton socks from the wicker ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... being so early abroad—a curse to which I responded with a sonorous "Pax Domini sit tecum" the still somnolent sentinel opened the post and let us pass. I was glad in the end that we had waited and thus avoided the necessity of showing my ring, for should inquiries be made concerning two monks, that ring of mine might have betrayed the identity of one of them. I gave thanks to Heaven that I knew ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits. Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday in June. He was unannounced, as had ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This because Benoit, M. de Kercadiou's old seneschal, had accompanied his seigneur upon this soft adventure, and was installed—to ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained, soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires inexplicable. Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... bygone times, in which the clerk flourished in all his glory, would be complete without some reference to the important person who occupied the second tier in the "three-decker," and decked in gown and bands delivered somnolent sermons from its upper storey. Curious stories are often told of the careless parsons of former days, of their irreverence, their love of sport, their neglect of their parishes, their quaint and irreverent ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... A comfortable, rather somnolent feeling settled upon the school. A long stand at cricket is a soothing sight to watch. There was an absence of hurry about the batsmen which harmonised well with the drowsy summer afternoon. And yet ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... back streets of Cambridge several persons who had owed him a grudge. He appeared, indeed, in the discoveries that were now made on every side, to be something better dead than alive. A stout and somnolent gentleman, with red cheeks and eyes half closed, was the only mourner from the outside world at the funeral. This, it appeared, was an uncle. Father dead, mother divorced and leading a pleasant existence amongst the capitals of Europe. ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... resemblance of spiral ones and caused to ascend in corkscrews above trousers which refuse to tuck unlumpily into one's socks—these, and a host of other matters, always kept a proportion of the hut-dwellers awake and busy and loquacious even in the somnolent post-prandial half-hour ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... cit.) deduces the crimes of extreme old age. "The excitable weakness of the old man brings him into great danger of becoming a criminal. The excitability is opposed to slowness and one-sidedness in thought; he is easily surprised by irrelevancies; he is torn from his drowse, and behaves like a somnolent drunkard.... The very old individual is a fanatic about rest—every disturbance of his rest troubles him. Hence, all his anger, all his teasing and quarreling, all his obstinacy and stiffness, have a single ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the drawing-room for a quiet hour before dinner and lit a cigar. He had hardly realised his pleasantly tired and rather somnolent condition when his daughter entered carrying a large Teddy-bear, two dolls, a toy trumpet and a box containing a wooden tea-set. She dropped several of these articles just inside the door. "Come and help me pick up my sings," she commanded. ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... still, her breast straining for breath. She remained so long without speaking that Justine began to think she was falling back into the somnolent state that intervened between her moments of complete consciousness. But at length she lifted her lids again, ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... carriages, and woke in the morning at La Roche or some strange-sounding place, for paler coffee and the pale brioche. So it was with Colonel and Mrs. Ercott and their niece, accompanied by books they did not read, viands they did not eat, and one somnolent Irishman returning from the East. In the disposition of legs there was the usual difficulty, no one quite liking to put them up, and all ultimately doing so, save Olive. More than once during that night the Colonel, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as high up, apparently, as the private dares to go, unless he considers the somnolent iniquity of the Colonel quite beyond the range of the bugle. But the pathetic appeal was too much for Crittenden, and he got up, stepping into a fragrant foot-bath of cold dew and out to a dapple gray wash-basin ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... Brunswick, did not look particularly merry at two o'clock of a late September morning. There was an easterly haze driving in from the Baie des Chaleurs and the darkness was so saturated with chilly moisture that an honest downpour of rain would have been a relief. Two or three depressed and somnolent travelers yawned in the waiting room, which smelled horribly of smoky lamps. The telegraph instrument in the ticket office clicked spasmodically for a minute, and then relapsed into a gloomy silence. The imperturbable station master was tipped back against the wall in a wooden armchair, with ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... somebody's coming in or going out, like the feverish throbbing of life in the house of a leader of society. It was well known that until three o'clock the duke received at the department; that the duchess, a Swede still benumbed by the snow of Stockholm, had hardly emerged from behind her somnolent bed-curtains; so that no one came, neither callers nor petitioners, and the footmen, perched like flamingoes on the steps of the deserted stoop, alone enlivened the scene with the slim shadows of their long legs and the ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the evening fire, the trains passing on the track were their next and indeed their only neighbours, except the wild things of the wood. Lovely weather, light and monotonous employment, long hours of somnolent camp-fire talk, long sleepless nights, when he reviewed his foolish and fruitless career as he rose and walked in the moonlit forest, an occasional paper of which he would read all, the advertisements with as much relish as the text: such was the tenor of an existence ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... murmur indicated that Mrs. Harkutt was receiving her guests. The cool breath of the wet leaves without slightly stirred the white dimity curtains, and somewhere from the darkened eaves there was a still, somnolent drip. Presently a hurried whisper and a half-laugh appeared to be suppressed in the outer passage or hall. There was another moment of hesitation and the door opened suddenly and ostentatiously, disclosing Phemie, with a taller and slighter young woman, her elder ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... for the drivers in the engineers and artillery, for the country now was broken by great boulders, dust rose in clouds obscuring the vision, and no semblance of a road was to be found. The lead-drivers had to keep a sharp look-out lest they ran down somnolent stragglers wandering across their path, and if the column halted suddenly they had to throw off quickly to one side to avoid running into the waggon immediately in front and telescoping the whole team. This was a particularly ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... quieter spur of Madison Avenue, climbing and descending Murray Hill. Here she was almost alone. Motor-car traffic had practically ceased; foot-passengers there were none; on each side of the street the houses were somber and somnolent. The electric lamps flared as elsewhere, but with ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... mighty sage, and physical speculation was regarded askance as having in it a dangerous touch of the devil. But the Darwins were always a bold folk, and had the courage of their opinions more than most men. So even in Lichfield, cathedral city as it was, and in the politely somnolent eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin ventured to point out the probability that quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, and men were all mere divergent descendants of a single similar original form, and even that 'one and the same kind ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... day is ended! Ghostly shadows creep Along each dim-lit wall and corridor. The bugle sounds as from some faery shore Silvered with sadness, somnolent and deep. Darkness and bars . . . God! shall we curse or weep? Somewhere a pipe is tapped upon the floor; A guard slams shut the heavy iron door; The day is ended—go to ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... 13 inches; tail, 5-1/2 inches. Hodgson kept some of this species in his garden for some time. They were somnolent by day, active by night, and did not hybernate in Nepal. They were fed on grain and fruit, and would chatter a good deal over their meals, but in general were silent. They slept rolled up into a ball, were tame and gentle usually, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... of a certain village in northern India; crows were packed everywhere, taking no notice for the nonce of the feast of filth and garbage spread invitingly around them, and in which sprawled the disgusting, distorted bodies of somnolent water buffaloes; inside the houses hags, matrons, maidens, and little maids slept through the terrific heat of the noonday hours; in the distance the Himalayas, supreme and distressing, like a ridge across eternity, ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... night and, in the agent's car, returned jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a country road-house. Half the night they lay awake planning the things they were to do there. Anthony was going to work at an astounding pace on his history and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... from his Rector the why and the wherefore, and if the change is for the better he should not let love of existing practice be stereotyped into a desire of a never changing system, which may perchance easily slide into lethargy and somnolent repose. In these days it ...
— Churchwardens' Manual - their duties, powers, rights, and privilages • George Henry
... a shred or two of muslin, an end or two of ribbon collected for conversion into doll-millinery. The doll, duly night- capped and night-gowned, lay in its cradle; she was rocking it to sleep, with an air of the most perfect faith in its possession of sentient and somnolent faculties; her eyes, at the same time, being engaged with a picture-book, which ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... roused himself. Extreme heat after extreme cold always has a somnolent effect on those ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room for a moment, then stood still, facing her mother—a dark-faced, pock-marked woman, with heavy, somnolent eyes—and waited for her to speak. The reply came slowly ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... on, the day had been somnolent, enlivened in the Carey household only by the solemn rite of paying the annual rent of the Yellow House. The votive nosegay had been carefully made up, and laid lovingly by Nancy under Mother Hamilton's portrait, in the presence not ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... drawing-room. There was one particularly long poem which he had read aloud to my mother and father; a seemingly harmless thing, from which they never recovered. Out of the mentions made of this effusion I gathered that it was like a moonlit expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool, and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness, often glowed upon Alcott's features and trembled in his voice. I believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy which pictured to him all high aims as possible of realization ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... this hour?" murmured Mr. Welles. His voice was sunk to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his waistcoat moved slowly and rhythmically with his breathing. It was evident that he did not in the least care whether it was a train ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of a lioness, by a leopard that coerces her, and, for this reason, cheetas are sterile like mules and all other hybrids. No animal of the same size is as weighty as the cheeta. It is the most somnolent animal on earth. The best are those that are 'hollow-bellied,' roach backed, and have deep black spots on a dark tawny ground, the spots on the back being close to each other; that have the eyes bloodshot, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... fever; a case of acute pneumonia. Her delirium had kept Tilda—who was preternaturally sharp for her nine years—awake and curious during the better part of two night-watches. Thereafter, for a day and a night and half a day, the patient had lain somnolent, breathing hard, at intervals feebly conscious. In one of these intervals her eyes had wandered and found the child; and since then had painfully sought her a dozen times, and found her again and ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... absolute truth of any spoken or published statement. The exultant hope of to-day was dashed to-morrow. The despair of the morning was lightened by gleams of hope before night closed, and was darkened and lightened again and again. Great cities and towns aroused themselves from a half-somnolent belief in security. Village by village England awakened to what she faced in common with an amazed and half incredulous world. The amazement and incredulity were founded upon a certain mistaken belief in a world predominance of the laws of decency and civilisation. The statement ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... shut, enclosing them. Down the quiet, tree-shaped sidewalk, Mr. Penfield Evans strode into the somnolent afternoon, turning down Huron Street. At the remote end of the block and before her large frame mansion of a thousand angles and wooden lace work, Mrs. Harvey Herrington's low car sidled to her curb-stone, racy-looking as a hound. That lady herself, ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... stunned by his fall, remained on the pavement in front of the Holy Virgin at the street corner. Little by little, he regained his senses; at first, for several minutes, he was floating in a sort of half-somnolent revery, which was not without its charm, in which aeriel figures of the gypsy and her goat were coupled with Quasimodo's heavy fist. This state lasted but a short time. A decidedly vivid sensation of ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... daughter. Each sigh of pain was a reproach. The pallid and ever-paling cheek was a whip of scorpions, lashing the mother's naked soul. Will ethical teachers say that there is no salutary moral lesson in this vivid picture? To many it seems better than a cart-load of dull tracts or somnolent homilies. Poor, pathetic little Jeanne, lying there in the cemetery of Passy—where later was erected the real tomb of Marie Bashkirtseff, though dead she yet spoke a lesson of contrition to her mother. And though the second marriage of Helene has been styled an anti-climax, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... movement in the crowd, which parted. At the farther end of the lane thus made, a flashy young gypsy was seen, with a somnolent old mare on ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill." From its clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of theological association—a vague reverberation of old Calvinistic sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent quality. The three years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should suppose, among the happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently genial. In the American Note-Books there is a charming passage (too long to ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... listening almost drowsily to something that she could not hear, or else, since his sensitive-looking nostrils were dilated, to be relishing some sweet odor—perhaps the smell of the roses. She received an impression of deliberate, yet somnolent, sensuous enjoyment; and she recalled having seen long ago, in a doorway in Tunis, this same expression on the face of a beggar who had just been ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... lovely seneschal! so somnolent, so statuesque! Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... hanged!" he muttered. "Most everlastingly hanged! Wonder what they think this is? A somnolent kindergarten show? Talk ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... duties in connection with the science of secret investigation, had been sufficiently fulfilled for the day, and he prepared to wend his way back to the house, when the sound of voices, once more aroused his somnolent attention. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... running violently with it towards the cliff of the Leas. It was most extraordinary. The little brute, you know, didn't bark or wriggle or make the slightest sign of vitality. It kept quite stiffly in an attitude of somnolent repose, and Gibberne held it by the neck. It was like running about with a dog of wood. "Gibberne," I cried, "put it down!" Then I said something else. "If you run like that, Gibberne," I cried, "you'll set your clothes on fire. Your ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... building on one of the side-streets at the lower end of the avenue. From its roof, after you had worked your way through the groves of washing which hung limply from the clothes-line, you could see many things of interest. To the left lay Washington Square, full of somnolent Italians and roller-skating children; to the right was a spectacle which never failed to intrigue Ginger, the high smoke-stacks of a Cunard liner moving slowly down the river, sticking up over the house-tops as if the boat was travelling ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled": Burntisland, where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indecent exposures of themselves made by Voltaire, La Harpe, and many billions beside of bilious people. Whereas, of all the shameful people (equally billions and not less bilious) that have presumed to quarrel with Milton, not one has thought him ludicrous, but only dull and somnolent. In 'Lear' and in 'Hamlet,' as in a human face agitated by passion, are many things that tremble on the brink of the ludicrous to an observer endowed with small range of sympathy or intellect. But no man ever found the starry ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously leads your mob. Next it appears dampening generous enthusiasm in what we once counted glorious; to free the slave is discovered to be tolerable only in so far as it freed his master! Do we sense somnolent writhings in black Africa or angry groans in India or triumphant banzais in Japan? "To your tents, O Israel!" These nations ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... part To him who momentary at the helm Doth guide the ship of state through calm and storm. To think in words, disloyalty proclaims; But act subservient fealty do prove. (Exit Printus) Quezox: Most noble Sire, thy courage I admire But Somnolent doth wait without the door. Francos: Ha! He doth quickly to my call respond, But bid him enter. I will quick despatch The matter which thy urgent hopes demand. (Enter Quezox and Somnolent) Quezox: Sire, here is he who holds our wide domain Within the hollow of his cunning ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... the artist, the student of statecraft and of military tactics, the political theorist, the merchant, the man of laws, the man of arms, and the churchman turned for precedents and precepts. The nations of the North, still torpid and somnolent in their semi-barbarism, needed the magnetic touch of Italy before they could awake to intellectual life. Nor was this all. Long before the thirst for culture possessed the English mind, Italy had appropriated ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the Mediterranean basin on the opposite side of the Atlantic. This American region of weakness extends westward from the Lesser Antilles across the Gulf of Mexico into Mexico proper, where are located some of the loftiest volcanoes of the globe, Popocatepetl and Orizaba, both now in somnolent condition, and including the more westerly volcano of Colima, which has been almost continuously ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... animation of face and alertness of body; but even Dandie slouched like a rustic. The rest of the congregation, like so many sheep, oppressed him with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day following day—of physical labour in the open air, oatmeal porridge, peas bannock, the somnolent fireside in the evening, and the night-long nasal slumbers in a box-bed. Yet he knew many of them to be shrewd and humorous, men of character, notable women, making a bustle in the world and radiating an influence from their low-browed doors. He knew besides they were like ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tell you that there are "seven sleepers" in our woods, and enumerate them thus: the Bear, the Coon, the Skunk, the Woodchuck, the Chipmunk, the Bat, and the Jumping Mouse. All are good examples, but the longest, soundest sleeper of the whole somnolent brotherhood is the Jumping Mouse. Weeks before summer is ended it has prepared a warm nest deep underground, beyond the reach of cold or rain, and before the early frost has nipped the aster, the Jumping Mouse and his wife curl up with their long ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... gaze upon the disk' affect reason? Certainly, it does not immediately affect reason; but through the nerves of the eye it very powerfully operates on the organ of reason, the brain, and induces an impressive, passive, and somnolent condition. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... but to submit with a sigh to the ensuing hullabaloo. Rateau, somnolent and pacific in his lodge, became a demon when he got a broom in his hand. In this sedentary being, who could drowse all morning in the stale basement atmosphere heavy with the cumulative aroma of many meat-stews, a martial ardour, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... fun in Bagdad. But there never will be civilization where Comedy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social equality of the sexes. I am not quoting the Arab to exhort and disturb the somnolent East; rather for cultivated women to recognize that the Comic Muse is one of their best friends. They are blind to their interests in swelling the ranks of the sentimentalists. Let them look with their clearest vision abroad and at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... happened—and from his appearance I suspected a soul-wrenching struggle—he was at least for the present physically safe and entirely sane. But it was with serious misgivings that I slipped past the somnolent Jack and upstairs to Jerry's room, where I found Christopher and together we packed a bag, descending by the back stairs, where I took the bag from Christopher's hand and ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... proceedings, without bringing fresh light to bear upon our investigations. After the luncheon interval, I was pleased to observe that for one cause or another—I repeat, for one cause or another—he was distinctly—shall I say somnolent, gentlemen? Yes, I will say somnolent. And I wish to inform him that the more somnolent he remains, the better we ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... v.; shilly-shally &c (irresolute) 605. sleeping, &c v.; asleep; fast asleep, dead asleep, sound asleep; in a sound sleep; sound as a top, dormant, comatose; in the arms of Morpheus, in the lap of Morpheus. sleepy, sleepful^; dozy^, drowsy, somnolent, torpescent^, lethargic, lethargical^; somnifacient^; statuvolent^, statuvolic^; heavy, heavy with sleep; napping; somnific^, somniferous; soporous^, soporific, soporiferous^; hypnotic; balmy, dreamy; unawakened, unawakened. sedative &c 174. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... opposed to reason." Second, "the idea of life, as it is conceived in this system, implies the idea of a power, an operation, a communication, since this life no longer remains, so to speak, latent or passive in God and in the Word, but through them reaches the believer. It is not a mental somnolent thing; it is not a plant without fruit; it is a germ which is to ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... execution had not the power of the pianists of the modern school." It is not at all surprising that the general public and the younger generation of artists, more especially the romanticists, were not unanimously moved to unbounded enthusiasm by "the clear limpid flow" and "almost somnolent tranquillity" of Field's playing, "the placid tenderness, graceful candour, and charming ingenuousness of his melodious reveries." This characterisation of Field's style is taken from Liszt's preface to the nocturnes. Moscheles, with whom ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... somnolent game was suddenly awakened by two blissful errors, which gave the audience something to jeer at. A tally slipped home for Boston. A sharp double play redeemed the errors and closed the inning. The ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... that office with detached scrutiny while William Rufus Le ffacase occupied it? Somnolent in a leather armchair, he opened tiny, sunken eyes to regard us with less than interest as we entered. Under a shiny alpaca coat he wore an oldfashioned collarless shirt whose neckband was fastened with a diamond stud. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Jean-Christophe, coldly bid him good-day, and, without a word, gravely and with dignity sit down at the piano. When she was alone, it pleased her to play interminable scales, for that allowed her agreeably to prolong her half-somnolent condition and the dreams which she was spinning for herself. But Jean-Christophe would compel her to fix her attention on difficult exercises, and so sometimes she would avenge herself by playing them ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... them from the Moreno grandees. Gone were the Morenos from all but the archives of California, but the willows and Dr. Hiram Webster were full of years and honors. The ranchos were ranchos no longer. A somnolent city covered their fertile acres, catching but a whiff at angels' intervals of the metropolis of nerves and pulse and ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... me, have waned; But I will right that. We've good chances still. You must return foot-hot to Quatre-Bras; There Kellermann's cuirassiers will promptly join you To bear the English backward Brussels way. I go on towards Fleurus and Ligny now.— If Blucher's force retreat, and Wellington's Lie somnolent in Brussels one day more, I gain that city sans ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... had a seat in parliament—rested on a table beside him: near it stood a silver flagon of Gascony wine, ready, no doubt, for the pious uses of the morrow. Fasting and watching had made him more than usually somnolent, than which nothing could have been better for the purpose of the Saint, who now appeared to him radiant in all the colors ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... the professor continued to wind itself slowly round and round the coils it spoke of, doubling, trebling, quadrupling its somnolent energy as the coil multiplied its ohms ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... withdrawn into the centre of the pea, the Bruchus, whether larvae or nymph, is reached by the long oviduct. It receives an egg in its tender flesh, and the thing is done. Without possibility of defence, since it is by now a somnolent grub or a helpless pupa, the embryo weevil is eaten until nothing but skin remains. What a pity that we cannot at will assist the multiplication of this eager exterminator! Alas! our assistants have got us in a vicious circle, ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... intelligent and even attractive face, but dreadfully emaciated, bloodless and sallow. He lay quite motionless except for the scarcely perceptible rise and fall of his chest; his eyes were nearly closed, his features relaxed, and, though he was not actually asleep, he seemed to be in a dreamy, somnolent, lethargic state, as if under ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... thought of that calamity. An hour and a half, perhaps an hour and three-quarters, if the doctor was long-winded, and then would begin again that active agony from which, even in the dull ache of the present, he shrunk as from the bite of fire. He saw, in a vision, the family pew, the somnolent cushions, the Bibles, the psalm-books, Maria with her smelling-salts, his father sitting spectacled and critical; and at once he was struck with indignation, not unjustly. It was inhuman to go off to church, and ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... could see the far-spreading countryside, white with rime, and stiffly slumbering under that crystal casing, like some venerated saint awaiting April's resurrection. And, that day, when the visitors presented themselves, Gervais also was slumbering in his white cradle, rendered somnolent by the season, but plump even as larks are in the cold weather, and waiting, he also, simply for life's revival, in order to reappear in all the triumph of his ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola |
