"Stagnant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... remained to the end of his day a humble reporter, he would still have the supreme satisfaction of knowing that he had not resigned himself body and soul to the life of the pool, to a frog-like acquiescence in the stagnant pool. ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... ours? It is meant that there should never pass across a Christian's soul more than a ripple of agitation, which may indeed ruffle and curl the surface; but deep down there should be the tranquillity of the fathomless ocean, unbroken by any tempests, and yet not stagnant, because there is a vital current running through it, and every drop is being drawn upward to the surface and the sunlight. There may be a peace in our hearts deep as life; a tranquillity which may be superficially disturbed, but is never thoroughly, and down ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... nursery, is reduced to 15 or 18 parts only, and the carbonic acid gas is increased from 1 or 2 parts in 100, to 5, 6, 8 or 10—when to this is added the other noxious exhalations from the body, and from the lamp or candle, fire-place, feather bed, stagnant fluids in the room, &c., &c.—is it any wonder that children, in the end, become sickly? What else could be expected but that the seeds of disease, thus early sown, should in due time spring up, and ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... however, was not one that could adapt itself to a stagnant existence; so when his three weeks on shore are ended, we see him on his way from the Home Farm to join ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... ruffled the surface of the glassy waters! Three successive gales of wind are bad enough; but three gales blowing hard enough to blow the devil's horns off are infinitely preferable to one idle, stagnant, motionless, confounded calm, oppressing you with the blue-devils and maddening you with the fidgets at one and ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... taylori were caught in hoop nets in clear deep pools and in the Rio Chiquito. No specimens were collected or observed in marshy situations where the water was shallow or stagnant. Individuals were seen only near dusk and in early morning when a number floated just below the surface with only their heads showing. They were never seen on land during our short stay in the basin. The few stomachs that were opened contained vegetable material. In terms of number of ...
— A New Subspecies of Slider Turtle (Pseudemys scripta) from Coahuila, Mexico • John M. Legler
... in his dungeon, alone, he had opened himself and viewed the cloaca which had so long been fed by the residual waters escaped from the abattoirs of Tiffauges and Machecoul. He had sobbed in despair of ever draining this stagnant pool. And thunder-smitten by grace, in a cry of horror and joy, he had suddenly seen his soul overflow and sweep away the dank fen before a torrential current of prayer and ecstasy. The butcher of Sodom had destroyed himself, the companion ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... and poured its turbid waters along in fulness and strength, but no longer with noise. All night that body of water had been in motion downwards, and seemed to me enough to deluge the whole country to the Darling, and correct at least any saltness in its waters, if stagnant; a probability which had greatly reconciled me to the necessity for changing the line of my intended route, as the waters above the junction of the Castlereagh had never been known to become salt. We proceeded, falling soon into a ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... She memorized with novel delight much that was told her day by day concerning the nature surrounding her,—many secrets of the air, many of those signs of heaven which the dwellers in cities cannot comprehend because the atmosphere is thickened and made stagnant above them—cannot even watch because the horizon is hidden from their eyes by walls, and by weary avenues of trees with whitewashed trunks. She learned, by listening, by asking, by observing also, how to know the signs that foretell wild weather:—tremendous ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... uniformity of his life. They will be told in order as they occur, and I hope will not weary the reader. The days of a scholar are frequently not distinguished by varieties even as unimportant as these. Johnson found his mind grow stagnant by a constant residence in the neighbourhood of Charing-cross itself, where he thought human happiness at its flood: and once, when moving rapidly along the road in a carriage with Boswell, cried out to his fellow-traveller, "Sir, life has few things better than this." ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... subsistence basis. The formal economy has grown an average of about 3% over the past five years. However, population has increased at about the same rate over the same period, leaving per capita income nearly stagnant. The WASMOSY government has continued to pursue its economic reform agenda, albeit with limited success because of in-fighting in the ruling party and resistance from the opposition. Paraguay's ongoing integration into Mercosur (the Southern Cone Common Market) offers ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... presents a sacred scientific theory that "saline particles entered into her until her whole body was infected"; and with this he connects another piece of sanctified science, to the effect that "stagnant bile" may have rendered the surface of her body "entirely ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... and stagnant: the water yet rushed on full and fast; its flow almost seemed a flood in the utter silence. Moore's ear, however, caught another sound, very distant but yet dissimilar, broken and rugged—in short, a sound of heavy wheels crunching a stony road. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... pleasures of housekeeping and cooking beside the rough, deep-living exhilaration of gypsy life on the plains! She looked back pityingly at those days of stagnant peace, compared the entertainment to be extracted from embroidering a petticoat frill to the exultant joy of a ride in the morning over the green swells. Who would sip tea in the close curtained primness of the parlor when they could crouch by the camp fire and eat a corn ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... just what is promised. A revival in THE MOST UNLIKELY PLACE IN THE CIRCUIT, where even the raciest of preachers seems to be dull, and where there is a monotony which would shame a prison. Yes, there, right there, look out for the water, not stagnant, but water that "breaks out." "Then shall the lame man leap as the hart" that finds the stream it needs, and the "dumb shall sing," for this living water shall quench his thirst, and loosen his dried-up tongue. When shall it be? Young local preacher, why not when thou preachest the ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... Dictionary, circa 1730, I find the following: 'Natron; or, a Natron, from Gr. Natron (?), a kind of black greyish salt, taken out of a lake of stagnant water in the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... and murmuring—but still bravely working; and storms and tempests, the purifiers of stagnant nature, are inscribed ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... we took full ten hours to go twelve miles. When we came to the end of our stage we found we had to encamp for the night in the low scrub of the forest, with stagnant water all around us. There was a hut at the place with two native policemen to help travellers, and we were told by them that there had been for some days in the neighbourhood what is called "a rogue elephant"—an elephant which, for some ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... theatre," responded I. And so it was, exceedingly so. It had been built when the place flourished, and the community was prosperous and could afford to be merry. Now, trade having decayed, and money ceased to circulate, the blood has also grown stagnant amongst this once gay people: the fire is out and ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... happy and a hundred times repaid in the little help I gave it. It needed help, to enable it effectively to keep connection with its source. As it became gradually shut off from this, it weakened, became then stagnant, and finally it ceased its ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Randolph Street to Harrison, observing the shifting character of Chicago's great thoroughfare. To Harvey it seemed like a river, starting clear but gradually roiled by the smaller streams that poured in, each a little muddier than the one next north, until it was clogged and stagnant with the scum of the city. But to-day he was going north. The sidewalk was crowded with eager girls and jaded women, keen on the scent of bargains. These amused Harvey, and he smiled as he crossed Washington Street. A ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... Ruysdael, Forest Landscape, in the London National Gallery. In the Cn. is a stagnant pool, backed on the Right by thick woods. A dead tree, white, very prominent in the Right foreground, another at its foot sloping down to Cn. On the Left a bank sloping down to Cn., a tree at its foot; ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... good, and live my rich wild life through bliss and agony, like a true daughter of the sun, instead of crystallising slowly here into ice, amid countenances rigid with respectability, sharpened by the lust of gain; without taste, without emotion, without even sorrow! Let who will be the stagnant mill-head, crawling in its ugly spade-cut ditch to turn the mill. Let me be the wild mountain brook, which foams and flashes over the rocks—what if they tear it?—it leaps them nevertheless, and goes laughing on its way. Let me go thus, for weal ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... was received with pleasure; for since leaving Agua Fria little water had been drunk, it being either muddy, stagnant, or alkaline. The water at Navajo Springs ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... nations shall learn war no more, yet we are fully convinced, both from the Holy Scriptures and the history of the past, that under the overruling providence of God wars occasioned by the oppression, the ambition, and the covetousness of men, are often the means of breaking up the stagnant waters of superstition and irreligion, and securing to the truth a position from which it may most successfully send abroad its light, and mould the heart of a nation to religion and peace. Despotism is ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... which are known to have been done through a laudable devotion, are not unworthily extolled with due praises; and since the mind, when relaxed, loses its energy, and the torpor of sloth enervates the understanding, as iron acquires rust for want of use, and stagnant waters become foul; lest my pen should be injured by the rust of idleness, I have thought good to commit to writing the devout visitation which Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, made throughout Wales; and to hand down, as ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... changing its shape and of moving from place to place, by means of the delicate processes which it puts forth. Now, while there are found in the lowest realm of animal life, organisms like the amoeba of stagnant pools, consisting of nothing more than minute masses of protoplasm, there are others like them which possess a small central body called a nucleus. This is known as ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... peace in the swamp where the Copper head sleeps, Where the waters are stagnant, the white vapor creeps, Where the musk of Magnolia hangs thick in the air, And the lilies' phylacteries broaden in prayer; There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is Death, Though the mist ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... that night for many reasons, of which the chief shall be told. The way to Nazri is long and the way to Nazri is exceedingly rough. Leaving the table-land you plunge down a trackless gully into the dry bed of a stream. Thence it is an hour's uneasy walking among stagnant pools and granite boulders to the foot of another nullah which runs up to the heart of the hills. From this you pick your way along the precipitous side of a mountain, and if your head is good and your feet ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... European deficiencies, I have never found any deficiency of time. Money went like the wind; champagne grew scanty; the trust of tailors ran down to the dregs; the smiles of my fair flirts grew rare as diamonds—every thing became as dry, dull, and stagnant as the Serpentine in summer; but time never failed me. I had a perpetual abundance of a commodity which the philosophers told me was beyond price. I had not merely enough for myself, but enough to give to others; until I discovered the fact, that it was as little ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... exerted himself to make all his subjects think and talk alike about divine things". That the foremost leader of the church thus should recommend an effort to impose uniformity upon the church by governmental action proves to what extent church life had become stagnant. Nor did such secular culture as there was present a better picture. The Reformation had uprooted much of the cultural life that had grown up during the long period of Catholic supremacy, but had produced no adequate substitute. ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... answered Straw, looking back into the wagon. "Just a little touch of the dengue. He's been drinking stagnant water, out of cow tracks, for the last few months, and that gets into the bones of the best of us. I'm not ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... rose from the dewy ground, and as they neared a marshy pool, a low, musical whining and croaking told that the frogs which made the stagnant place their home had a full belief that before long ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... ye, whose thoughts are fingers, Of the hands that witch the lyre— Greenland has its mountain icebergs, AEtna has its heart of fire; Calculation has its plummet; Self-control its iron rules; Genius has its sparkling fountains; Dulness has its stagnant pools; Like a halcyon on the waters, Burns's chart disdain'd a plan— In his soarings he was heavenly, In his sinkings ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... infiltration through the forest. The marshy shores of the pond, covered with aquatic trees, alders, willow, and ash, were the terminus of all the wood-paths, the remains of former roads and forest by-ways, now abandoned. The water, flowing from a spring, though apparently stagnant, was covered with large-leaved plants and cresses, which gave it a perfectly green surface almost indistinguishable from the shores, which were covered with fine close herbage. The place is too far from human habitations for any ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... where a train had been attacked and the troops in it hard pressed. The Boers cleared off just before the Battery came up, which then had followed and overtaken us. Another bothersome hunt after water for the horses in the dark. All we could find was a stagnant pool, which ought to poison those that drank of it. Some more troops also joined the column. Colonel Brookfield (M.P.) is in command ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... set some time before, and an unbroken gray dusk lay all over the land. The mawkishly sweet scents of the grass and flowers were heavy in the motionless, stagnant air. ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... that have been flooded, where it is peculiarly fatal—the grazing (according to Mr. Leigh, and our experience confirms his statement) upon the clays lying over the blue lias rock—the neighborhood of woods and of half-stagnant rivers—the continuation of unusually sultry weather—overwork, and all the causes of acute dysentery, may produce that of a chronic nature; an acute dysentery—neglected, or badly, or even most skillfully treated—may degenerate into an incurable chronic affection. Half starve a cow, or ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... with that of Ibsen. The nature of the revolution, exercised by the subject of this memoir between 1880 and 1890, that is to say from Ghosts to Hedda Gabler, was destructive before it was constructive. The poetry, fiction and drama of the three Northern nations had become stagnant with commonplace and conventional matter, lumbered with the recognized, inevitable and sacrosanct forms of composition. This was particularly the case in Sweden, where the influence of Ibsen now proved more violent and catastrophic than anywhere else. Ibsen destroyed the attraction of the ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... a dark and narrow canal, on whose stagnant water loomed large the black shapes of great barges, into the windows of gaunt and weather-stained houses over the way. Not a light shone in any window. Away in the distance the same clock as I had heard before struck ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... comparatively little water, and the mouths of which are obstructed by sand bars caused by the prevailing north and east winds. As a result of these bars the streams flood the country and form large stagnant lakes, that have effectively prevented a settlement of the region. Some seven miles before reaching the mouth of the Gran Estero there is a little town called Matanzas, a kind of headquarters for turtle fishermen and which, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... you wouldn't care to divorce your three maids and come and live here," suggested the witch. "I could of course cure you of the nerve-storms you speak of. Or rather I could help you to have nerve-storms all the time, without any stagnant grown-upness in between. Then you wouldn't notice the nerve-storms. This house is a sort of nursing home and college combined. I'll ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... their mounts and eyed him suspiciously. Nor was there great cause for wonderment in that, for the American presented aught but a respectable appearance. His khaki motoring suit, soaked from immersion in the moat, had but partially dried upon him. Mud from the banks of the stagnant pool caked his legs to the knees, almost hiding his once tan puttees. More mud streaked his jacket front and stained its sleeves to the elbows. He was bare-headed, for his cap had remained in the moat at Blentz, and his disheveled hair ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... my life," muttered Warwick, "shrunk into this stagnant pool? Happy the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame,—to have it is a purgatory, to ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such a settlement close to other towns was made for the sake of mutual protection. Between the two more ancient towns there continued to be a marsh or swamp, and Rome was protected on the south by stagnant water; but between Rome and the third town there was a dry plain. Rome also had a considerable suburb toward the Aventine, protected by a wall and a ditch, as is implied in the story of Remus. He is a personification ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... bird nor any drone of bees, Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze: The air was stagnant all, and Silence was A living thing that breathed ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... noticed a strange odour, which Elsie attributed to a stagnant pool of water near which they were standing. She now peered over the side of the cart, which was more like a lidless box on wheels than anything else, and she perceived that it was full of fish. The man occupied the only available ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... himself. No daily paper, with its fresh material for thought and discussion, comes to enliven the long blank evenings by the tent fire; no wars or rumours of wars, no coup d'etat of diplomacy, no excitement of political canvass ever agitates the stagnant intellectual atmosphere of Korak existence. Removed to an infinite distance, both physically and intellectually, from all of the interests, ambitions, and excitements which make up our world, the Korak simply exists, like a human oyster, in the quiet waters of his monotonous ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... seemed to beat the world into a metallic sleep. The sea had stiffened itself into a dead flame. Molten, staring sweeps of color burst upon their eyes with a massive intimacy. The etched horizon, the stagnant gleaming arch of the water, and the acetylene burn of the sand gave the scene the appearance ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... holiday is, and we have laws to punish those who "violate" it. No man can violate the Sabbath; he can, however, violate his own nature, and this he is more apt to do through enforced idleness than either work or play. Only running water is pure, and stagnant nature of any sort is dangerous—a ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... be considered as a store-ship whence the provisions were to be issued daily, under the superintendence of Ensign Venables. The remainder of the troops were also ordered to disembark and encamp, the position of the Briton in a stagnant swamp of half salt, half fresh water, with mangrove trees crushed under it, being considered prejudicial to the health ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall
... slopshops—looked tawdry and degraded as a clown's painted face seen by daylight. Thick, malodorous vapours arose from the squalid streets, lying back on the level, and from the crowded shipping of the port. These hung in the stagnant air, about the forest of masts and the funnels of steamers. And the noise of the place was as that of Bedlam let loose.—The long-drawn, chattering rush of the coal pitched from the baskets down the echoing, iron ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... had crept behind a stone wall, built up in a hollow, by a stagnant pool, taking but little heed of the darkness and the storm, so intent were they upon the subject which engrossed ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... from the strong root where she had fastened it, and led the stallion down the wash to a pool of water. And she stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder while he bent his head to sniff at the water. He tasted it, plainly with disgust. It was stagnant water, full of vermin. But finally he drank. Lucy led him up the wash to another likely place, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... gratifying to find that the reminiscence turned on none but pleasant facts and characteristics! Life must, indeed, be slow in that little decaying hamlet amongst the chalk hills. After all, depend upon it, it is better to be worn out with work in a thronged community, than to perish of inaction in a stagnant solitude take this truth into consideration whenever you get tired of work ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... but no sounds from the homes of the white people came down to the lonely Chinese. If his clear treble was interrupted, it was by the cracking of a dry branch as a cottontail sped past on its way to a stagnant pool, or it was by a dark-emboldened coyote, howling, dog-like, at the moon which, white as the snow that eternally coifs the Sierras, was just rising above their ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... infantine memories with a bashfulness which Grandcourt's bearing was not likely to dissipate. He and Lydia occasionally, in the presence of the servants, made a conventional remark; otherwise they never spoke; and the stagnant thought in Grandcourt's mind all the while was of his own infatuation in having given her those diamonds, which obliged him to incur the nuisance of speaking about them. He had an ingrained care for what he held to belong to his caste, and about property he liked to be lordly; ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... priest, to religion, to Rome; it is the property of poetry, of imagination, of the people. Hence the rapid and innumerable transformations of that architecture which owns but three centuries, so striking after the stagnant immobility of the Romanesque architecture, which owns six or seven. Nevertheless, art marches on with giant strides. Popular genius amid originality accomplish the task which the bishops formerly fulfilled. Each race writes its line upon the book, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... female dogs. But before I had passed on many steps, I was surprised to see another shoal of imprisoned wenches, twice more detestable than they. Some had been changed into toads, some into dragons, some into serpents who were swimming and hissing, glavering and butting in a fetid, stagnant pool, much larger than Llyn Tegid. {84} "In the name of wonder," said I, "what sort of creatures may these be?" "There are here," said he, "four sorts of wenches, all notoriously bad. First, there are ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... prohibit all attack from that side. The space between Bit-Yakin and the long line of dunes or mud-banks which blocked the entrance to it was not so much a gulf as a lagoon of uncertain and shifting extent; the water flowed only in the middle, being stagnant near the shores; the whole expanse was irregularly dotted over with mud-banks, and its service was constantly altered by the alluvial soil brought down by the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Ulai, and the Uknu. The navigation of this lagoon was dangerous, for the relative positions ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... are excited over a serial story because you can't guess if "Lady Eleanor" really stole the diamonds or not, it is only because you have no idea of what excitement is. You are in a condition of stagnant lethargy compared to that of Hillsboro over the question whether Nelse will marry Ellen Brownell, "our Ellen," or Flossie Merton, the ex-factory girl, who came up from Albany to wait at the tavern, and who is said to have a ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... with oil, that swiftly 100 He might pass the black pitch-water. All night long he sailed upon it, Sailed upon that sluggish water, Covered with its mould of ages, Black with rotting water-rushes, 105 Rank with flags and leaves of lilies, Stagnant, lifeless, dreary, dismal, Lighted by the shimmering moonlight, And by will-o'-the-wisps illumined, Fires by ghosts of dead men kindled, ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... widens and deepens! Far, far beyond the confines of the Tuskegee Institute community the light of this new life is seen and felt and has its salutary effect. The stagnant life of centuries has awakened, and is casting off its bonds. A new term, "intelligent thrift," has come into its possession. Wherever this term has gone and taken root, there has gone with it the thought that unless the idea make for character, as well as for more cotton ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... by his side; Or bold cock-pheasant stalk'd along the road, Whose gold and purple tints alternate glow'd. But groves no farther fenc'd the devious way; A wide-extended heath before him lay, Where on the grass the stagnant shower had run, And shone a mirror to the rising sun, (Thus doubly seen) lighting a distant wood, Giving new life to each expanding bud; Effacing quick the dewy foot-marks found, Where prowling Reynard trod his nightly round; To shun whose thefts 'twas Giles's evening care, His feather'd victims ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... though he was, he could have sat down and cried. Blackest night seemed to nestle under those matted boughs, and the sullen gleams of stagnant water—the plash of a frog jumping in—the wading birds that stalked about—told him what to expect if he went farther. At the same instant a gleam of copper sunset struck across the heavens on the tops of the evergreens, and the west was not in the direction that the wanderer ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... stagnant life, a gust of wind will blow. Those beautiful trees, that you water with the stream of oblivion, Providence will destroy; despair will overtake you, heedless ones, and tears will dim your eyes. I ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "Mr. Overton was evidently considerably excited when he sent it, and somewhat incoherent in consequence. Well, well, he will be here, I daresay, by the time I have looked through the TIMES, and then we shall know all about it. Even the most insignificant problem would be welcome in these stagnant days." ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The languid movement of the festoons under the breeze was like the sighings of desolation made visible. The dense tangle of the undergrowth stretched everywhere, repellent, unrelieved by the vivid color flashes of the mountain blossoms. Stagnant wastes of amber-hued water ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... and squalor in its more out-of-the-way corners as Bruges. Bruges, of course, like Venice, and half a dozen towns in Holland, is a strangely amphibious city that is intersected in every direction, though certainly less persistently than Venice, by a network of stagnant canals. On the other hand, if it never rises to the splendour of the better parts of Venice—the Piazza and the Grand Canal—and lacks absolutely that charm of infinitely varied, if somewhat faded or even shabby, colour that characterizes the ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... marshes, these sloughs, the mud of which was systematically raked, the dull gray earth that the Breton flora held in horror, were in keeping with the gloom that filled our souls. When we reached a spot where we crossed an arm of the sea, which no doubt serves to feed the stagnant salt-pools, we noticed with relief the puny vegetation which sprouted through the sand of the beach. As we crossed, we saw the island on which the Cambremers had lived; but ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... stones that made its cool pavement, and projected in thick layers from the shelving banks, the white columns of gigantic sycamores leaped earthward, their bases driven, as it seemed, deep into the ground—all their convolutions of roots buried out, of view. Dropping into the stagnant waters below, came one by one the broad, rose-tinted leaves, breaking the ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... the laboratory. The chamber was examined almost daily; a perceptible diminution of the floating matter being noticed as time advanced. At the end of a week the chamber was optically empty, exhibiting no trace of matter competent to scatter the light. Such must have been the case in the stagnant caves of the Paris Observatory. Were our electric beam sent through the air of these caves its track would be invisible; thus showing the indissoluble association of the scattering of light by air and its power to ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... their bundles and scurried to one side, their eyes gleaming with fear. The canvas avalanche swept past them. They leaned, faint and dumb, against trees and listened, their blood stagnant. Below them it struck the base of a great pine tree, where it writhed and struggled. The three watched its convolutions a moment and then started terrifically for the top of the hill. As they disappeared, the bear cut loose with a mighty effort. He cast ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... caution is necessary in all such appendages. The earth must be thoroughly underdrained to prevent the vapors of stagnant water, and have a large admixture of broken charcoal to obviate the consequences of vegetable decomposition. Great care must be taken that there be no leaves left to fall and decay on the ground, since vegetable exhalations poison the air. With ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... this speech was meant to make peace; but Molly was in twenty minds as to whether she should accept the olive-branch or not. Her temper, however, was of that obtuse kind which is not easily ruffled; her mind, stagnant in itself, enjoyed excitement from without; and her appetite was invariably good, so she stayed, in spite of the inevitable tete-a-tete with Alice. The latter, however, refused to be drawn into conversation again; replying ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... fringe of marsh, two or three miles broad, mostly bottomless, woven with sluggish creeks and stagnant pools, borders the Warta for many miles towards Landsberg; Custrin-Landsberg Causeway the alone sure footing in it; after which, the country rises insensibly, but most beneficially, and is mainly drier ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... the invasion of worm-eaten cupboards, where layers of ancient smells lingered on in the stagnant air, and recalled to the reflective nose the many good things that had been kept there. The upper floors were scrubbed with such abundance of water that the old-established death-watches, wood-lice, and flour-worms were all drowned, the suds trickling down into ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... cannot boast of the scenery changing to advantage. Instead of flourishing woods and verdure, we beheld a parched dreary flat, diversified by fields of withering barley, and stunted avenues drawn formally across them; now and then a stagnant pool, and sometimes a dunghill, by way of regale. However, the wild rocks of the Tyrol terminate the view, and to them imagination may fly, and walk amidst springs and lilies of her own creation. I ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... runs a muddy, sluggish stream, the banks of which are densely crowded with tanyards and iron works. On the one side of this valley is the busy Rue Mouffetard, and on the other one of the outer boulevards, while a long line of sickly-looking poplars mark the course of the semi-stagnant stream. Tantaine seemed to know the quarter well, and went on until he reached the Champs des Alouettes. Then, with a sigh of satisfaction, he halted before a large, three-storied house, standing on a piece of ground surrounded by a mouldering wooden fence. The aspect of the house had something ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... slowly away, as we crawl along past league upon league of wild steppe land. The coup d'oeil from our carriage-window is not inspiriting. It rests upon a bare, bleak landscape, rolling away to the horizon, of waves of drab and dirty-green land, unbroken save for here and there a pool of stagnant water, rotting in a fringe of sedge and rush, or an occasional flock of wild-fowl. At rare intervals we pass, close to the line, a Tartar encampment. Half a dozen dirty brown tents surrounded by horses, camels, and thin shivering cattle, the latter covered with coarse sack-clothing tied round ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... medium of living men who think those thoughts, and who criticise, compare and disseminate them. Some at least of the drawbacks of their academic education are redeemed by the living energy of the intellectual personality pervading their social organism. It is like the stagnant reservoir of water which finds its purification in the showers of rain to which it keeps itself open. But, to our misfortune, we have in India all the furniture of the European University except the human teacher. We have, instead, mere purveyors ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... become conscious of the change. A stagnant heat brooded over everything; not a breath of wind; huge banks of magnificent storm- cloud came marching up majestically from the horizon, throwing out little jets of lightning, with solemn murmurs of thunder. Drop, drop, drop, tinkled on the gathered ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... horizon, to the westward of where I and my poor friend, Captain Alphonse, were drifting on the desert sea. The sight of the ship again, even in the distance, and the warmth of the sun's bright beams, which made the stagnant blood circulate in my veins once more, gave me hope and renewed courage, for I recollected and thought that after all, there were eight white men still left on board the ill-fated vessel to keep possession of her and defend my little one—eight good ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... they go a bit further and admit the Renaissance to have sprung because of contact between feudal Europe and African Mohammedanism. Again we must admit, no matter how bitter the taste, that the mixed race has always been the great race—the pure race always the stagnant race. One potent reason for the possible downfall of European civilization to-day is the fact that the Aryan element has proven incapable of the mighty trust. It has forgotten the everlasting lesson of history ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the quick flush of a shower, but to relieve a soil too heavily saturated by opening new outflows, setting new currents astir of both air and moisture, and thus giving new life and an enlarged capacity to lands that were dead with a stagnant over-soak. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... go much into the world. Sometimes you'll find a bit of a pond-hole in a pasture, and you'll plunge your walking-stick into it and think you are going to touch bottom. But you find you are mistaken. Some of these little stagnant pond-holes are a good deal deeper than you think; you may tie a stone to a bed-cord and not get soundings in some of 'em. The country boys will tell you they have no bottom, but that only means that they are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... increased trade with the American continent, raised it to prosperity. One sign of vigor, the roll of capital, was wanting; speculation was fast asleep. The government of the day seems to have observed this with regret. A writer of authority on the subject says that, to stir stagnant enterprise, they directed "the Bank of England to issue about four millions in advances to the state and in enlarged discounts." I give you the man's words; they doubtless carry a signification to you, though they are jargon in a fog to me. Some months ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... among the rocks. The horses of both my dragoman and muleteer fell on this trip, but without serious results to either horses or riders. It was quite wearying to proceed thus, so when we finally reached a large sloping rock under which was a kind of stagnant pool—the only water we had seen since leaving Coefrinje—I was glad to know that there we would lunch, even though I could not drink ...
— My Three Days in Gilead • Elmer Ulysses Hoenshal
... trout streams and the bracing air, to take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie, covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless, springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull pools of stagnant water still held out against the sun, or, further still southeast among the "breaks" of the many forks of the South Cheyenne, on the sandy flats men dug for water for their suffering horses, yet shrank from drinking it themselves lest their ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... On the one hand, the beast: on the other, the prey. Where is man?... Your Debussy is the genius of good taste: Strauss is the genius of bad taste. Debussy is rather insipid. But Strauss is very unpleasant. One is a silvery thread of stagnant water, losing itself in the reeds, and giving off an unhealthy aroma. The other is a mighty muddy flood.... Ah! the musty base Italianism and neo-Meyerbeerism, the filthy masses of sentiment which are ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... other answered. 'Without such criticism a force would become stagnant, and could never hope to keep level with those continental armies, which are ever striving ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with better taste had discarded the napkin, and wore a smart cap. On the persons of not a few of the females was displayed a considerable amount of value, in the shape of gold chains, rings, and jewellery. This is an indication, not of wealth, but of poverty and stagnant trade. It was a custom much in use among oriental ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... head-waters of the little tributary and over the low saddle. They had endeavored to reach unfrequented paths as soon as possible in order that they might pass unnoticed. Before quitting the valley they halted their heaving horses, and, selecting a stagnant pool, scoured the grease paint from their features as best they could. Their ears were strained for sounds of pursuit, but, as the moments passed and none came, the tension eased somewhat and they conversed guardedly. As the morning light ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... the breeze had come. The sails flapped, the main boom swung over with a thump, and the stagnant water, stirred at last, bubbled merrily past the ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... little pond dried up by the summer heat, near which he had often gathered plants for Stephane. Among groups of trees which straggled up on all sides, under a patch of blue sky, a ground of blackish clay, cracked and creviced, herbage, dried rushes; here and there some patches of stagnant water, the surface of which was rippled by the gambols of the aquatic spider; further on a large tuft of long-plumed reeds, which shivered at the least breath and rocked upon their trembling stems drowsy red butterflies and pensive ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... retrace his steps with an air of humiliation, as if half ashamed of having given way to such excitement. From his hiding-place the pirate saw him pass, and watched him out of sight. Then, clambering quickly out of the stagnant pool, he pushed deeper and deeper into the recesses of the morass, regardless of every danger, except that of falling ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... he rejoined. "If you prefer your puddle should be stagnant—admirable metaphor, by the way—it shall be as you wish. Only I hate to see the way things are going with you, and I'm bound to tell you so. You are losing your spirit, tying your hands, and throwing all your manly independence to the winds. If you live two years with that irreproachable ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... into the stagnant condition which is so commonly experienced wherever contentment with routine long holds sway. Mr. and Mrs. Booth were not only welcomed, but given a free hand to take any course they pleased to fill the building with hearers, and ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... great number of dead fish all round it. This must certainly be a very unprecedentedly dry season indeed; this water-hole does not seem to have received any water for the last two years. The water being old and stagnant, I am afraid will make us ill; we have all already been suffering much from stagnant waters we have been compelled to use. I, however, must give the horses a day's rest to enable them to make the next and last push, nearly a hundred miles, to the first springs. From the ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... my feet. Then oot came more hares and rabbits, and after them the twa dogs in full chase. One hit me as I was getting up and sent me rolling into the ditch full of stagnant water. ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... much, but not all. Youth is always led by the tone of the elder people. Until the tone of the parent is improved, the conduct of the young will remain much the same. The more distant a parish from a town, the more outlying and strictly agricultural, and therefore stagnant, the greater the immorality. It is the one blot upon the character of the agricultural poor. They are not thieves, they are not drunkards; if they do drink they are harmless, and it evaporates in shouting and slang. They are not riotous; but the immorality cannot be gainsaid. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... process, besides the maize in its natural state, a certain quantity of maize which has been steeped in a particular manner is used as a ferment; and there are men and women who are versant in the manner of steeping maize, and are hired for this purpose. When this kind of drink is made by means of stagnant water, it is reckoned stronger and better than when running water is used. In the West Indian islands this drink is called chica, but the Peruvian name is azua. It is either white or red, according to the kind of maize used for its preparation, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... into the house with his latch-key, and banged the door behind his back. But no sooner had he breathed the soft, woolly, stagnant air within than a change came over him. His ferocious strength ebbed away, and he began ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... away to our right and the left, and frogs hushed their croak. The sun shone hot, and while traversing the valley we experienced a little of its real African fervour. About half way across we came to a sluice of stagnant water which, directly in the road of the caravan, had settled down into an oozy pond. The pagazis crossed a hastily-constructed bridge, thrown up a long time ago by some Washensi Samaritans. It was an extraordinary ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... false, for a plain and particular reason. Many voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... for the most part overflowed to the depth of six inches or a foot, beyond which latter the water becomes prejudicial. Level marshes, of firm bottom, under a moderate stratum of mud, and not liable to deep stagnant water, are the situations preferred; the narrower hollows, though very commonly used for small plantations, being more liable to accidents from torrents and too great depth of water, which the inhabitants have rarely industry enough to regulate to advantage by permanent ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... water, got upon a pile of rubbish, and stood regarding us with open mouth while we took breakfast. So far from this being a cause of annoyance, I felt really glad that our presence had agitated the stagnant waters of ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... tide inward and outward, while the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians. It was difficult to realize, as we looked at the line of fine shops and stately business premises, that they really abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square which we ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... citizens, leaving out all humanitarian views—as a mere matter of political economy it is better to have the colored race a living force animated and strengthened by self-reliance and self-respect, than a stagnant mass, degraded and self-condemned. Instead of the North relaxing its efforts to diffuse education in the South, it behooves us for our national life, to throw into the South all the healthful reconstructing influences we can command. Our work in this ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... the source the river is unfordable. How many miles from the source of our first experience do we stand? How many of us, instead of having 'a river that could not be passed over, waters to swim in,' have but a poor and all but stagnant feeble trickle, as shallow as or shallower than ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... outspokenness, my disregard for their social laws, my impatience of all constraint. Among my books and my drugs in my lonely den at Mansie I could let the great drove of the human race pass onwards with their politics and inventions and tittle-tattle, and I remained behind stagnant and happy. Not stagnant either, for I was working in my own little groove, and making progress. I have reason to believe that Dalton's atomic theory is founded upon error, and I know that mercury is ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... No more can rouse the appetites of KINGS; When the low Flattery of their reptile Lords Falls flat and heavy on the accustomed ear; When Eunuchs sing, and Fools buffoon'ry make. And Dancers writhe their harlot limbs in vain: Then War and all its dread vicissitudes Pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts.... ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... on Anne. He saw into the queen as one sees into a stagnant pool. The marsh has its transparency. In dirty water we see vices, in muddy water we see stupidity; Anne ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... productions offers, instead of flourishing verdure, only an incumbered space pierced by aged trees, loaded with parasitic plants, lichens, agarics—impure fruits of corruption. In the low parts is water, dead and stagnant because undirected; or swampy soil neither solid nor liquid, hence unapproachable and useless to the habitants both of land and of water. Here are swamps covered with rank aquatic plants nourishing only venomous insects and haunted by unclean ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... creature by thus pandering to earthly ends. Then worse than this, still greater multitudes are prompted to this union by sensuous desires—base animalism. Oh, to what a sink of iniquity, what a pool of pollution, what a stagnant pit of moral rottenness is the Marriage relation sunk by the unhallowed and unbridled sensuality of thousands who enter it! If there is any place in the world where the voice of God should be heard ringing in pealing thunder-tones the commands of virtue and ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... from stagnant pools, charged with putrid vegetable matter and animalculae, would be very likely to generate fevers and dysenteries if taken into the stomach without purification. It should therefore be thoroughly boiled, and all the scum removed from the surface as it rises; this clarifies it, and by mixing ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... into her dull ears to awake. And deep down the roots of life begin to stir and wake, and send the sap circulating once more. Hedgehogs and field-mice emerge sleepily and begin to busy themselves in the hedges. From the darkness below old decayed matter ferments and bubbles up, and the stagnant water in the ditches begins to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... frequent and glaring enough for even wilfulness to see; and the central secret of this sad phenomenon, so I am sure, has been suggested here. When the socializing faith of a nation has perished, the alternative for it becomes this, that it can be stable only as it is stagnant, and vigorous only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... soft and mellow September night, with a violet sky overhead sprinkled with silver. But a touch of autumn decay was in the air, which was heavy and still, and a white mist was rising in thick, sluggish clouds from the green, stagnant surface of the lake. The wood was veiled in blackness, in which the trunks of the trees were just visible, standing in straight, regular ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... brooks and torrents that fall into these lakes, and of internal springs by which they are fed, and which circulate through them like veins, they are truly living lakes, 'vivi lacus;' and are thus discriminated from the stagnant and sullen pools frequent among mountains that have been formed by volcanoes, and from the shallow meres found in flat and fenny countries. The water is also of crystalline purity; so that, if it were not for the reflections of the incumbent mountains ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... I creep, back to the womb! Let snows and stagnant seas my province blight, Deep down in matrix grots shall I consume My mother's flesh, my spirit and the night. I shall beat about her heart a few brief years,— I, who once rolled fiery gold through all her veins, And soared from mountain-throats o'er hemispheres, And throbbed in ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... Nurnberg;" so runs the way. At Erlangen there loiters now, recruiting, a certain Rittmeister von Katte, cousin to our Potsdam Lieutenant and confidant; to him this transit of the Majesty and Crown-Prince must be an event like few, in that stagnant place. French Refugees are in Erlangen, busy building new straight streets; no University as yet;—nay a high Dowager of Baireuth is in it, somewhat exuberant Lady (friend Weissenfels's Sister) on whom Friedrich Wilhelm ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... into the pauper mind and conscience—perhaps a task as trying as you could well imagine to the faith and patience of any honest clergyman. For, on the very first bench, these were the faces on which his eye had to rest, watching whether there was any stirring under the stagnant surface. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... had not deserted his ghost, he would need no long reflection to discover that all these great ships, these railways, these telegraphs, these factories, these printing-presses, without which the whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism,—that all these pillars of our State are but the ripples and the bubbles upon the surface of that great spiritual stream, the springs of which only, he and his fellows were privileged to see; and seeing, to recognise as ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... supporters of immateriality, to the inconsistent theologians, who commonly ascribe to their adversaries the most ridiculous opinions, in order to obtain an easy, short-lived triumph in the prejudiced eyes of the multitude; or in the stagnant minds of those who never examine deeply; that chance is nothing but a word, as well as many other words, imagined solely to cover the ignorance of those to whom the course of nature is inexplicable—to shield the idleness of others who are too slothful to seek ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... notion to adopt the canal that it had so long refused. Next morning the good people of Vicksburg woke to find their metropolis, not on the river channel, but practically an inland town overlooking a stagnant mud flat. The town of Delta, which, the night before, was three miles below Vicksburg, was, in the morning, two miles above it. Since that time, energy and intelligence have conspired in its behalf, and Vicksburg is still an important river port; but the channel ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... at the dropping-off-place of the world, a stagnant little village of a dozen houses set in an oasis that is surrounded by the desert of civilization. And here, where life scarcely throbs, I've scented a mystery that has powerfully impressed me and surely needs untangling. ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... nobody would want to read in two days' time; while men shut animals in cages, and made bears jig to please their children, and all were striving one against the other; while, in a word, like gnats above a stagnant pool on a summer's evening, man danced up and down without the faintest notion why—in this condition of affairs the quality of courage was alive. It was the only fire within that gloomy valley.'" He stopped, though ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the priests who prayed in the kivas, old Ho-tiwa walked away from the spirit of discontent, and down the trail to the ruins of Sik-yat-ki. All the wells but that one of the ancient city were useless, green, stagnant water now. And each day it was watched lest it also go back into the sands, and at the shrine beside it ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... branch, the Yssel, which flows into the Zuider Zee. Once more the river bifurcates into insignificant streams, one of which is called the Kromme Rijn, and beyond Utrecht, and under the name of the Oude Rijn, or Old Rhine, it becomes so stagnant that it requires the aid of a canal to drain it into the sea. Anciently the Rhine at this part of its course was an abounding stream, but by the ninth century the sands at Katwijk had silted it up, and it was only in the beginning of last century that its ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... there was far from encouraging. The day after I took over from my predecessor I ventured into the men's recreation room. I was received with silence, frosty and most discouraging. I made a few remarks about the weather. I commented on the stagnant condition of the war at the moment. The things I said were banal and foolish no doubt, yet I meant well and scarcely deserved the reply which came at last. A man who was playing billiards dropped the butt of his cue on the ground ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... weight. There was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting electric fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture from breathing could be extracted by the dehumidifiers. But for them—if the air had been left stagnant—the journey ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... times to other sins, still these were but as stars in his evil firmament, while covetousness ruled it like the sun; or, if the beauteous stars and blessed sun be an image too hallowed for his wickedness, we may find a fitter in some stagnant pool, where the pestilential vapour over all is Mammonism, and the dull, fat weeds that rot beneath, are pride, craftiness, and lechery. In fact, to speak of passions in a heart such as his, were a palpable misnomer; all was reduced to calculation; his rage was fostered ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper |
