|
|
|
More "Flaccid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... merchant looked away from the glowing Oriental web upon which they stood. The weeping stenographer sat with her damp little wad of lace-edged handkerchief in her hand and stared at him with her reddened eyes; the other held her flaccid purse, and looked at the speaker. Now and then she nudged violently the friend, who did ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... By exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness. Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the spectacle of supreme intellectual dexterity ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... found dulness to quicken into sentiment in a thin ether, as water, tho not very hot, boils in a receiver partly exhausted; and heads, in appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon rising ground, as the flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... warm hand grasped the flaccid fingers of the young man. "Forgive me for letting my interest run away with my sympathies. I'm thinking of the future, more than mere protection from newspaper scandal. This crime is so ingenious that I believe it has a more ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... news of her From some old thief and son of Lucifer, 890 His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop, Sunburned all over like an AEthiop. And when my Cotnar begins to operate And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate, And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent, I shall drop in with—as if by accident— "You never knew, then, how it all ended, What fortune good or bad attended The little lady your Queen befriended?" —And when that's told me, what's remaining? ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... is a thoroughly infirm piece of writing—a second rate magazine story. One concludes at once that the author himself does not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is worse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, a bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the Conrad gallery in such scenes. Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, Lena Hermann seduced by the fashions, Almayer a candidate for office! As well think ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... blonde lady. "Home?" The sagging lines about her flaccid chin took on a new look of firmness and resolve. The light of determination glowed in ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... violence, he instantly recovered his senses, but seemed to be puzzled to recall the circumstances connected with his first view of the snake. After a mental effort he explained, while the cold sweat poured from his face, and his limbs were flaccid as an infant's, that the sound of a rattle had caused him to stop short—that a pleasant halo danced before his eyes, and sweet sounds met his ears—and that from that instant until the conclusion of the trance, "he was as happy as he ever expected ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the lightning of thought has penetrated into the flaccid popular soil, the elevation of Germans into men will ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... fleshy pulp. We search long and diligently, and our efforts are blessed with an unwonted success. By the time that the sun has attained height enough in the heavens to make his power tyrannically felt, our baskets are filled. Tou Tou has to throw away her wild-roses, limp and flaccid, into the dust of the lane. We walk home, singing, and making poor jokes, as is our wont. As we draw near the house with joyful foretastes of breakfast in our minds, with redly-flushed cheeks and merry eyes, I see Sir Roger leaning on the stone balustrade of the terrace, looking as ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... gradually fading and transforming into something quite different. The brilliant eyes became sleepy, and, from a habit of narrowing the lids over them, possibly to shut out the bright sun, receded more and more beyond the full and flaccid cheeks, and even contracted a Mongolian curve at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of William and Joe Bullitt, designed to express cordiality, suddenly became flaccid and died. If Mr. Crooper had been a sensitive person he might have perceived the chilling disapproval in their glances, for they had just begun to be most unfavorably impressed with him. The careless loudness—almost the notoriety—with which he had uttered Miss Pratt's ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... be a day of queer experiences. He had never before realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. Here in this small punctilious packet lay a Sesame—a power of transformation beside which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday into this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from house to house—a change just as irrevocable and complete, and yet so very normal. Which should it be, that, or—his face ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Mr. Mill's social principles, and the theoretical corollaries they contain, who yet would condemn his manly plainness and austere consistency in acting on them. The too common tendency in us all to moral slovenliness, and a lazy contentment with a little flaccid protest against evil, finds a constant rebuke in his career. The indomitable passion for justice which made him strive so long and so tenaciously to bring to judgment a public official, whom he conceived to be a great criminal, was worthy of one of the stoutest patriots ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... browned. The plant was a large one, and none of the free leaves, which were asleep and depended vertically, were browned, excepting four very young ones. But three other leaves, though not browned, were in a rather flaccid condition, and retained their nocturnal position during the whole of the following day. In this case it was obvious that the leaves which were exposed horizontally to the zenith suffered most. This same pot ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... life to have seen. Except for consumptive coughs, the misstep of a wooden leg of which the clumsy ferule slipped on a cobblestone, and the querulous whimper of a child, half-starved and imperfectly swaddled in a tattered shawl, on a flaccid bosom, the mob were silent in an expectation as intense as the lookers-on. The wind brought the whistle of the railway locomotives and the clanking of a steam-dredger in the river, like a giant ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... her repugnance by a visible effort. "Is it ... is it worth while?" she asked, regarding the flaccid, tumbled, wax-like thing, with its bloated, white globe of a skull. Every muscle of it was relaxed and limp, its eyes shut, its tiny jaw hanging. "Wouldn't it be better to let ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... on Lakos, such as it was, was pale green and thin, lacking in warmth and vitality. The vegetation was flaccid and nearly colorless, more like a mushroom growth than anything else; and the inhabitants ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... fluid every twenty-four hours. That at all events was the amount flowing from this open tap in its water system. Even the topmost branches of the tree had not become, during the fifteen days, abnormally flaccid, so that, apparently, no drainage of fluid from the upper portion of the tree had been taking place. For a fortnight the tree apparently had been drawing, pumping, sucking—I know not what word to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... animal is a hard grazer, a difficult and obstinate feeder—no skillful man will purchase it—such a creature must go to a novice, and even to him at a price so low as to tempt him to become a purchaser. On the other hand, the skin must not be thin, like paper, nor flaccid, nor loose in the hand, nor flabby. This is the opposite extreme, and is indicative of delicateness, bad, flabby flesh, and, possibly, of inaptitude to retain the fat. It must be elastic and velvety, soft and pliable, presenting ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... the bared shoulders. Magda winced away from them, shivering. For a moment Sister Agnetia's arm hung flaccid, the cords of the flagellum ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... shoulder-jarring wallop on the side of her jaw. Her head snapped up and her knees caved in. She folded from the hips and went down bonelessly. From her throat came the bubbly sound of air being forced painfully through a flaccid ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... wipes "The fatal wound, now stays his fleeting breath, "With herbs apply'd; but all his arts are vain; "Incurable the hurt. Just so, when broke, "The violet, poppy, or the lily hang, "Whose dark stems in a water'd garden spring; "Flaccid they instant droop; the weighty head "No longer upright rais'd, but bent to earth. "So bent his dying face; his neck, bereft "Of vigor, heavy on his shoulder laid. "Phoebus exclaim'd;—Fall'st thou, OEbalian youth, "Depriv'd of life in prime? and must I ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... peculiarity noted in comminuted fractures of the long bones was the degree of local shock; the limbs were often quite powerless, the muscles flaccid, and common sensation lowered. This was of importance in two ways; firstly, shortening of the limb was often absent as a sign, and, secondly, pain was sometimes not at all pronounced even when the patient was moved. The primary ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... sucking pulls upon the delicate structures of the mouth and throat, and so impairs the health tone of these structures that they become flaccid and feebly nourished. This to a certain degree causes adenoids, enlarged tonsils, loose palate and weak throat, with the constant tendency to winter colds and ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... weight of interested prejudice or romantic association have overlaid his other faculties. The cells of his memory are vast, various, full even to bursting with life and motion; his speculative understanding is empty, flaccid, poor, and dead. His mind receives and treasures up every thing brought to it by tradition or custom—it does not project itself beyond this into the world unknown, but mechanically shrinks back as from the edge of a prejudice. The land of pure ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... hole in the wall. He made out the flaccid form of Farley, outstretched upon the stone floor in a drunken stupor. The man evidently had been on the verge of unconsciousness when he leered through the hole. The chance was slight that he would ever remember anything of what ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... the death of her parents; and, secondly, because she was a capable person with plenty of common-sense. These two adjuncts—namely, money and common-sense—Mrs. Agar wisely looked for in candidates for the flaccid hand of ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... has been kicking about the market-place four days or more. All that sort of cookery has been invented by French and German doctors, and I should like to hang them for having done so. They go and prescribe diets and a hunger cure as though what suits their flaccid German systems will agree with a Russian stomach! Such devices are no good at all." Sobakevitch shook his head wrathfully. "Fellows like those are for ever talking of civilisation. As if THAT sort of thing was civilisation! Phew!" (Perhaps the speaker's concluding exclamation would ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... no resemblance to the fabulous basilisk of the Greeks, got up at our approach, puffed out its throat, and shook the membranous crest on the top of its head. Its bright eye seemed to scan the horizon; no doubt it caught sight of us, for its flaccid body stiffened out, and with a rapid bound it sprang into the stream. The reptile raised its chest in swimming, beating the water with its fore paws as if with oars. We soon lost sight of it, to Lucien's ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... flaccid, helpless. For the time being all her rage, her rudeness, her amazement, even, drained out of her. For this impostor to face her down in this way; for her to claim Ida May's name and identity with such utter calm—such ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... and most original as novelist. 'Paul Felton,' his masterpiece in prose, is a powerful study of a diseased condition of mind. In its searching psychologic analysis it stands quite apart from the more or less flaccid production of its day. He indeed could not escape the influence of Charles Brockden Brown, whom he greatly admired, and he in turn reached out forward toward Poe and other writers of the analytic school. One powerful story of Poe's, indeed, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... "does not have to work!" So might one talk Defending long, bedridden ease, Weak yielding ankles, flaccid knees, With, "I don't ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... models usually did such stunts. No, Hedger told her, but Molly Welch added to her earnings in that way. "I believe," he added, "she likes the excitement of it. She's got a good deal of spirit. That's why I like to paint her. So many models have flaccid bodies." ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... be too profuse. It induces a feeble pulse, cold extremities, weak respiration, general debility, and may occur in opposite states of the system, i.e., in women who have a plethoric and robust habit, or in those of flaccid muscles and bloodless features. When the menstrual discharge is natural, it is so gradual that by mixing with the vaginal secretions it is prevented from coagulating, while in this ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... carriage, all dusty with the night's driving, looking dilapidated and forlorn; the tired horses drooped their heads in the flaccid and empty canvas nose-bags. The extinguished lamps were black with the smoke from the last flare of their sputtering wicks. The coachman lay inside, snoring,—a mere heap of cloth and brass buttons ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... Partition-Treaties; anon tickled by Belleisle into the reverse posture; then again reversing. An idle, easy-tempered, yet greedy creature, who, what with religious apostasy in early manhood, what with flaccid ambitions since, and idle gapings after shadows, has lost helm in this world; and will make a very bad voyage for self ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Matthias appeared upon the scene. The Estates had already been in communication with him, better hopes, for the time at least, being entertained from him than from the flaccid Rudolph. Moreover a kind of compromise had been made in the autumn between Matthias and the Emperor after the defeat of Leopold in the duchies. The real king had fallen at the feet of the nominal one by proxy of his brother Maximilian. Seven thousand men of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in its flaccid state varies considerably in size, due not only to varying conditions of temperature but also to individual peculiarities. The organ may vary between 2-1/2 inches and 6 inches in length in the flaccid state and between 5 inches and 8 inches in the erected condition. The size of the generative ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... his knuckles into the corners of his eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net and peered around. The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night. So far so good. The faithful servant of his employers ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... nervous leg of the Wondersmith caught the little creature in the centre of the body, doubled up his brown, hairy form, till he looked like a fur driving-glove, and sent him whizzing across the room into a far corner, where he dropped senseless and flaccid. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... semiparalysis. A Cetonia-grub, pricked away from the centre on a level with the fore-legs, has her right side flaccid, spread out, incapable of contracting, while the left side swells, wrinkles and contracts. Since the left half no longer receives the symmetrical cooperation of the right half, the grub, instead of curling ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... it,—and which, deluging the community, raises the price of everything, begets speculation, stimulates an excessive and factitious trade, and is then suddenly withdrawn from the system, at the height of its inflation, like wind sucked from a bladder, to leave it a mere flaccid, wrinkled, empty, worthless old film ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Mr. Pumblechook, leaning back in his chair, quite flaccid with admiration, "that's the way you know 'em, sir!" (I don't know who Sir was, but he certainly was not I, and there was no third person present); "that's the way you know the noble-minded, sir! Ever forgiving and ever affable. It might," said the servile Pumblechook, putting down his untasted ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... many of them were good, honest, kind, common girls, only demoralized by long lying around in a waiting posture. It had taken the fire and sparkle out of them. They were not in a healthy state. They were degraded, contracted, flaccid. They did not hold themselves high. They knew that in a marketable point of view there was a frightful glut of women. The usually small ratio of men was unusually diminished by the absence of those who had gone to the war, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Cahirciveen, and thence towards Killorglin, is harrowing and startling. The whole potato crop is literally destroyed, while over a very wide surface the oat crop presents an unnatural lilac tinge to the eye; at the same time, in too many instances, the head is found flaccid to the touch, and possessing no substance. The barley crop, too, in many places, exhibits the effect of a powerful blight. In some places, also, where turnips have been grown, they present—as, indeed, has been the case in other parts of the county—a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... complained once of a Difficulty of making Water.—After Death I had her Body opened, when the only Thing particular which we could observe, was the urinary Bladder about four times the natural Size; it seemed to be flaccid, and in a State of Relaxation; the Kidneys were sound, and no Signs of any Distemper could be observed about the Uterus or Rectum, or near the os coccygis.—When she was first in the Hospital, I desired her always to examine her Urine; but she never observed ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... low tone, "there's something the matter with Swain," and I motioned to where he sat, flaccid and limp, apparently half-asleep. "He is suffering from shock, or something of that sort. It's something more, anyway, than over-wrought nerves. He seems to be ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... were a solvent for lies, what surprises would be in store for us! Nearly everybody who now appears to us to be upright, inflexible, and to hold his chest high, would be disclosed as a flaccid, weak person, presenting ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... But there was not moral force in the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance. Lorenzo was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil manners had emasculated the hero. In the state the last spark of independence had expired ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... mitigated, yet prolonged, they no longer wish for action, but remain motionless and passive, or may occasionally rock themselves to and fro. The circulation becomes languid; the face pale; the muscles flaccid; the eyelids droop; the head hangs on the contracted chest; the lips, checks, and lower jaw all sink downwards from their own weight. Hence all the features are lengthened; and the face of a person who hears bad news is said to fall. ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... at first, came no thought at all merely a dumb sense of unreasoning terror under which his muscles went flaccid, and out of control, so that his body shrank limp and heavy against its ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... western course, my sinews are flaccid, Perfume and youth course through me and I ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... balloon—the reader, however impatient, must listen to this allusion—whoever has seen a balloon, may have observed that in its flaccid state it can be folded and unfolded with the greatest ease, and it is manageable even by a child; but when once filled, the force of multitudes cannot restrain, nor the art of man direct its course. Such is the human mind—so tractable ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... school-boy it would have been nothing. His legs, hardened by exercise, would have sent him across like a deer, but Jack's muscles only a short time before were flaccid and weak in the extreme. Still the voyage had done something; the strong will growing up within him did more, and without a moment's hesitation, feeling as if his reputation was at stake, he went sharply to the starting-point, took the short ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... Roustan misunderstood me, though his hint Serves as a fillip to a flaccid brain.... —How gild the sunset sky of majesty Better than by the act esteemed of yore? Plutarchian heroes outstayed not their fame, And what nor Brutus nor Themistocles Nor Cato nor Mark Antony survived, Why, why should I? Sage ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Roman Empire, in its feeble and flaccid old age, seemed to have lost all capacity for making war. Theodoric the Amal performed his share of the compact; but when with his weary army, encumbered with many women and children, he emerged from the passes of the Balkans he found no Imperial generals there to ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... that the woman in the doorway had relaxed her frozen immobility and was between Paul and me as we rubbed the thin, icy hands and forced brandy between the flaccid lips. We all three thought her dead or dying, and labored over her with the frightened thankfulness for one another's living presence which always marks that dreadful moment. But even as we fanned and rubbed, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... section of both lobes, a large quantity of thick, black matter, similar to black paint, gushed from the opening, exposing an almost excavated interior of both lobes. The carbonaceous matter contained was in quantity about an English pint, and the lung, when emptied, became quite flaccid, and very light. The air-cells of this lung were entirely destroyed, or nearly so, and one of the divisions of the left bronchus opened abruptly into the cavity at the upper part. Both lobes were so completely adherent ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... now and then, But blunt and flaccid is my pen, No longer talked of by young men As rather clever: In the last quarter are my eyes, You see it by their form and size; Is it not time then to be wise? Or ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... seated herself at the window in a Voltaire armchair, and dismissed her maids. The candles were taken away, and once more the room was left with only one lamp burning in it. The Countess sat there looking quite yellow, mumbling with her flaccid lips and swaying to and fro. Her dull eyes expressed complete vacancy of mind, and, looking at her, one would have thought that the rocking of her body was not a voluntary action of her own, but was produced by the action of some ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... entered. She was very tall and pale, her dress was a little dowdy. Like her father and Millicent, she carried her head forward and had a tendency to look downwards, and her spine seemed flaccid. Ethel was beautiful, or about to be beautiful; Millicent was pretty; Rose plain. Rose was deficient in style. She despised style, and regarded her sisters as frivolous ninnies and gadabouts. She was the serious member of the family, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... the discomfiting situation of Mr. Simon Pinski at 9 P.M. on the second evening following the introduction of the ordinance, in the ward house of the Fourteenth Ward Democratic Club. Rotund, flaccid, red-faced, his costume a long black frock-coat and silk hat, Mr. Pinski was being heckled by his neighbors and business associates. He had been called here by threats to answer for his prospective high crimes and misdemeanors. By now ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... at him with pity, and glanced for a moment at his neighbor's red face, his short, thick neck, his "corporation," as Chenet called it to himself, that hung down between two flaccid, fat legs, and his apoplectic rotundity of the old, flabby official, and, lifting the white Panama hat which he wore, from his head, he ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... exasperate him. I have an innate passion for contradiction—my whole life has been nothing but a series of melancholy and vain contradictions of heart or reason. The presence of an enthusiast chills me with a twelfth-night cold, and I believe that constant association with a person of a flaccid and phlegmatic temperament would have turned me into an impassioned visionary. I confess, too, that an unpleasant but familiar sensation was coursing lightly through my heart at that moment. It was—envy. I say "envy" boldly, because I am accustomed to acknowledge ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... with it. Benjamin was revealed the owner of a big, bald, shiny head with a face which was puffed and purple. "You were right, Benjamin," said Harry sadly, "You were kind. To wear a mask was charity, nay, decency—what breeches are to other men. That obese and flaccid nose—pah, let us talk of something else." He lay upon Benjamin and tugged at his sword-belt. Benjamin writhed and groaned. His sword was caught underneath him, the hilt deep in the small of his back. Harry hauled the sword-belt ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... patriotism, in the days of his manly strength, mental as well as physical, and who held him in high esteem as a patriot orator and the staunchly loyal tribune of the New World peoples. In these days of flaccid patriotism and moral declension in public life, his example may well stimulate and inspire. In his wholehearted devotion to the hopes as well as to the interests of the Colonies most notable was the polemical fervor with which he espoused their cause and noble the stand he took ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... death, but the caresses of his adored bride would soon put it out of his mind. Of that long, ardent love affair there would be nothing left but a man parading his bliss through Europe, and a poor old sad woman in Lancia, a laughing-stock for the Lancian circles. Her flaccid flesh trembled. The revengeful instincts of her race cried out in futile rage. No, no, it could not be! She would sooner drag his dead daughter to his feet; she would sooner kill him with a ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... observed that she had again "dressed up" in honour of his second descent of the stairs; and Walter repeated his fragment of objectionable song; but these jocularities were rendered pointless by the eventless evening that followed; and in the morning the carnations began to appear tarnished and flaccid. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... organism. The waxy tones were in all the visible parts of her flesh. The neck and shoulders explained by their blanched paleness the wasted arms, flung forward and crossed upon the table. Her feet seemed enervated, shrunken from illness. Her night-gown came only to her knees and showed the flaccid muscles, the blue veins, the impoverished flesh of the legs. The cold, to which she paid no heed, turned her lips violet, and a sad smile, drawing up the corners of a sensitive mouth, showed teeth that were ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... secure; compact, solid, dense, compressed; fixed, resolute, constant, unwavering, unshaken, steadfast, stanch, determined, invincible, inflexible, incompliant. Antonyms: flaccid, soft, vacillating, irresolute, lax, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... theatre as often as the critics, I well know; but I am too well equipped for the strife to be deterred by it, or to bear malice towards the losing side. In trying to produce the sensuous effects of opera, the fashionable drama has become so flaccid in its sentimentality, and the intellect of its frequenters so atrophied by disuse, that the reintroduction of problem, with its remorseless logic and iron framework of fact, inevitably produces at first an ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... with its legs doubled beneath, was a large camel, evidently in the last stage of weakness and disease, its ragged coat and flaccid hump hanging over to one side, bowing its head slowly at the waiting vultures, that calm, bald-headed and silent, sat about with their weird heads apparently down between their shoulders—a great gathering, waiting for the banquet that was ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... predisposing cause of the impotency so common among the ancient Scythians. Mr. Hunter was also of opinion that this article of dress by keeping the parts too warm, affording them a constant support, and allowing the muscles but little freedom of motion, may, at least, relax and cause them to become flaccid, if it do not totally incapacitate them for the due performance ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... this big household under De Lancy's guidance. There were those who said they had seen her brush a speck of dust from De Lancy's coat-collar, as she emerged from her morning interview with him; and others who said they had seen her hidden in the shrubbery listening to the rather flaccid conversation of her splendid poodle ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in other lands as a natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia as a forced growth. In lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs. These, thus lifted from the earth, lost even the little force in the State they had before; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... "in convents girls of intelligence are all too rare. The greater number of them are colourless persons, devoid of imagination or fire. To exiles like these, any country, any climate would seem good; to flaccid, crushed natures of this type, every belief would seem authoritative, every religion holy and divine. Fifteen hundred years ago these nuns would have made excellent vestal virgins, watchful and resigned. What they need is abstinence, prohibitions, thwartings, things contrary to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... himself, rather sternly and watchfully, to those arriving in "my building," as he called the house full of studios, which was military. But gout, and it is to be feared drink, had long ago made him physically flaccid, and mentally rather sulky and vague. He looked a wreck, and as if he guessed that he was a wreck. An artist on the first floor had labelled him, "The derelict looking for tips ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... that was resting quietly on his knee. It lay in hers, flaccid and inert, its dreadful passivity stinging her into realization of the truth. Patrick was dead. And, judging from his expression, he had found death "a very good sort of thing," just as he ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... purple tendrils deliriously through the warm water. They swept past Priscilla's drooping hands, touching them with their yielding bodies and brushing them softly with their tendrils. Now and then she lifted one from the water, watched it lie flaccid on the palm of her hand and then dropped it into ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... patriotic passions which are the mainsprings of history by the mere calculus of abstract concepts which satisfied Mill. Fitzjames, like Henry VIII., 'loved a man,' and the man of Mill's speculations seemed to be a colourless, flaccid creature, who required, before all things, to have some red ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... possible in the mere tourist's experience. In the difference between this London and that you fully realize the moral and physical magnitude of the season. The earlier London throbbed to bursting with the tide of manifold life, the later London lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the mere sense of what it has been through. The change is almost incredible, and the like of it is nowhere to be witnessed with us. It seems a sort of bluff to say that a city which still holds ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... For about three weeks the patient showed a variable stupor. She would lie with a mask-like face inaccessible, cataleptic, drooling saliva, often with her mouth open. When taken up, she was usually perfectly flaccid, but once she let herself slide on the floor after she had stood immobile at the window. Sometimes there was marked resistance to passive motions, especially when attempts were made to open her mouth ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... asleep. And it was certain that something lived in him that was not there the day before, for, instead of the flaccid immobility in which he was mired all day, he was shaken at that moment by violent tremors, and on his expressionless, dead face there was a wrinkle of suffering life, a contraction as of pain. Jansoulet, profoundly moved, gazed at that thin, wasted, earth-colored face, on ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it was his eyes could ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... mighty comely pair, the child being so lean, and light, and active, and the laird himself a man of a manly, pretty stature, his hair (the periwig being laid aside) showing already white with many anxieties, and his face of an even, flaccid red. But this day Francie's heart ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... do I know that I had heard of that form of lovemaking—but more of that hereafter. I did her on her belly, and some-thing incited me to do it to her dog fashion, but it was never repeated; we examined as said each others appendages, but once satisfied, having seen mine get from flaccid to stiff, the piddle issue, the spunk squirt, she never wanted to see it again, and could not understand my insatiable curiosity about hers. She knew I think less than most girls of her age about the males, having never I recollect nursed male children, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... Only when she began to plead that she had no one to help her with her flowers, to carry the pots for her, did he wrench himself from the contemplation of the flashing steel mechanism that had for him such wonderful fascination and lend his flaccid baby muscles to the fiction of help. He began zealously to toil to and fro, carrying the smallest pots wherever she bade him. Her own interest in the occupation was enhanced by the colloquy that ensued whenever she passed her small guest. "Hello, Archie!" she would ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Summer Roses all their glory yield To crown the Votary of Love and Joy, Misfortune's Victim hails, with many a sigh, Thee, scarlet POPPY of the pathless field, Gaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield Thy flaccid vest, that, as the gale blows high, Flaps, and alternate folds around thy head.— So stands in the long grass a love-craz'd Maid, Smiling aghast; while stream to every wind Her gairish ribbons, smear'd with dust and rain; But brain-sick visions cheat her tortur'd ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... they had achieved and how they had lost their firm, sinewy proportions, their strong grasp, my heart swelled with pity and with passionate devotion. Often I felt as if I could have held these cold hands to my heart for warmth, and given of my own warm blood to fill those flaccid veins. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... found him too narrow, which is another form of imperfect sympathy. His lack of humour has alienated the interest of thousands. His ardent advocacy of toleration in the noblest of his prose treatises has been belittled by a generation which prides itself on that flaccid form of benevolence, and finds the mere repeal of the Licensing Act the smallest part of it. His pamphlets on divorce and on government have earned him the reputation of a theorist and dreamer. The shrewd practical man finds it easy to despise him. The genial tolerant ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... and there were signs that their quarry found the ground harder to cover. The second discard lay in open sight—again a leather bag which Nalik'ideyu sniffed and then began to lick eagerly, thrusting her nose into its flaccid interior. ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... various accents, those foreign intonations, gruff or faltering, as one gazed upon those widely different physiognomies, some violent, barbarous, vulgar, others hyper-civilized, worn, suggestive only of the Boulevard and as it were flaccid, one noted that the same diversity was evident also among the servants who, some apparently lads just out of an office, insolent in manner, with heads of hair like a dentist's or a bath-attendant's, busied ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... observed the chaired lady, whose back hair, by reason of her prominent position, so challenged inspection. Her face was not easily discernible, but the aforesaid cunning tress-weavings, the white ear and poll, and the curve of a cheek which was neither flaccid nor sallow, were signals that led to the expectation of good beauty in front. Such expectations are not infrequently disappointed as soon as the disclosure comes; and in the present case, when the lady, by a turn of the head, at length revealed herself, she was not so ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... a harking solitude of empty chambers; there have been mornings when I have come out to breakfast past door-mats cheerful with boots of both sexes, and door- post hooks where dangling coats and trousers peopled the place with a lively if a somewhat flaccid semblance of human presence. The worst was that, when some one went, we lost a friend, and when some one came we only ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... trousers and flannel shirt, and weather-beaten black slouch hat. The inevitable revolver hung at his thigh. His pursed lips spurted a jet of tobacco juice as he keenly surveyed me with small, shrewd, china-blue eyes squinting from a broad flaccid countenance. But the countenance was unemotional while he offered a thick hand which proved singularly soft ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... world-spanning mind of man. Man's nature, brimful of passions and affections, would have had an home in that little heart, whose swift pulsations hurried towards their close. His small hand's fine mechanism, now flaccid and unbent, would in the growth of sinew and muscle, have achieved works of beauty or of strength. His tender rosy feet would have trod in firm manhood the bowers and glades of earth— these reflections were now of little ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... him at night. To despoil him of his life, his glorious rush over the mountain side, his plunge into the valley, and fierce strain up the opposing hill; to see that ideal of strength, suppleness, and joyous flight, lie nerveless and flaccid at his feet; to be able to call the thicket-like antlers of the splendid animal his own, was for the time the one ambition of Hilary Sercombe; for he was of the brood of Mephistopheles, the child of darkness, whose delight lies in undoing ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... but it is not at all disagreeable in the clover-scented air; and his shrill whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies the farm dog from the interior of the stone wall, is a pleasant summer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck is not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass I have never before seen. It has absolutely no muscular tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skin filled with water. Let the rifleman shoot one while it lies basking on ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... each side, with flaccid legs just able to move in turn, Melchard was guided to a bench some way down the platform, and seated between two bolstering forms to which ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... but to admit the suggestions and biddings of those who cared for her. She could not even resent this language of Reuben's, to which formerly she would have opposed her unyielding pride; his proximity infected her with nervousness, but at the same time made her flaccid before his energy. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... who went out to the park early in the day were driven for refuge from the blazing sun to the trees and bushes, where prostrated by the heat they lay limp and flaccid upon the grass. Miss Hazel Sleighter, who for some reason which she could not explain to herself had joined the first contingent of picnickers, was cross, distinctly and obviously cross. The heat was trying to her nerves, but worse, it made her face red—red all over. Her pink ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... which the decrepit but still vigorous institution arrogated to itself. They adapted its anachronisms with singular adroitness to the needs of modern society. They transfused their throbbing blood into its flaccid veins, until it became doubtful whether the Papacy had been absorbed into the Jesuits, or whether the Jesuits had remodeled the Papacy for contemporary uses. But this tendency in the aspiring order to identify itself with Rome, this ambition to command ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... dishes. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and her hands, on the table, were clenched. On her left a man in an unmarked blue uniform sat, sagging heavily forward in his chair, breathing stertorously, with a dark flush over a pouched and flaccid countenance. Opposite him, sitting formally upright, was a negro in a carefully brushed gray suit, with a crimson satin necktie surcharged by vivid green lightning. His bony face, the deep pits of his temples, were the dry spongy black of charcoal, and behind steel-rimmed glasses his eyes ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... On this flaccid group Buzz burst, bomb-like. He hung his hat on the hook, wordlessly. The noise he made woke his father, as he had meant that it should. There came a muttered growl from the old man. Buzz leaned ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... thunder-crash which never came. And always was the air hot and dry, and the wind, when it blew, was as a breath from the mouth of a volcano. The grass, withered and brown, fell away into dust; the leaves hung limp and flaccid on the trees; the cultivation areas of the selections were parched and dismal; and to add to the tribulation of the selectors, swarms of grasshoppers were abroad, swooping down in clouds, made up of myriads, upon ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... not always. She was hungry,—one could see that easily enough,—and not drunk, as most of her companions would have been found at this hour. She did not drink, this woman,—her face told that, too,—nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,—some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone. While she was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... and Keys, and Kirk Maughold, and Port y Vullin. Here at the Lague lived ADAM FATSISTER, the Deputy Governor, who had been selected for that post because he owned five hundred hungry acres, six hungrier sons, a face like an angel's in homespun, a flaccid figure, and a shrewd-faced wife, named RUTH. Hither came STIFFUN, to beg shelter. The footman opened the door to him, but would have closed it had not ADAM, with a lusty old oath, bidden him to let the man ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... is very rarely required, and has as yet been performed only for the removal of foreign bodies impacted in the oesophagus, and interfering with respiration and deglutition. To cut upon the flaccid empty oesophagus in the living body would be an extremely difficult and dangerous operation, from the manner in which it lies concealed behind the larynx, and in close contact with the great vessels. When it is distended by a foreign body, and specially ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... of the district, a melancholy, flaccid man with a saffron-colored visage that looked like a half-deflated balloon, a martyr to prickly heat, anaemia, and monotony, peered up from under the moving punkah, to inquire of his subordinate ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... balls and fetes and afternoon at homes, ever foremost in the mad chase after pleasure, for which alone she seems to think she has been sent into the world. Dressed in the extreme of youthful fashion, her thinning hair dyed and crimped and fired till it is more like red-brown tow than hair, her flaccid cheeks ruddled, her throat whitened, her bust displayed with unflinching generosity, as if beauty was to be measured by cubic inches, her lustreless eyes blackened round the lids, to give the semblance of limpidity to the tarnished whites—perhaps the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... marked with such a thin and haggard expression as general destitution always is certain to leave behind it. The skin of those who, with better health and feeding, had been fair and glossy as ivory, was now wan and flaccid;—the long bones of others projected sharply, and as it were offensively to the feelings of the spectators—the over-lapping garments hung loosely about the wasted and feeble person, and there was ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... help in the matter of Wilbur's future. Lyman was flaccid in the matter. The boy had once stolen into the Penniman parlour while Lyman and Winona were out rifling the ice box of delicacies, and enticed by the glitter of Lyman's flute had thrillingly taken it into his hands to see what made it go, dropping it in his panic, from the centre table to the ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... that rude hamlet of Stockbridge—those reverend forms finishing their long journey at the feet of the poor exiled missionary. When their errand was announced, he burst into tears, overcome by a sense of unworthiness, and in a subsequent letter he confirms his unfitness by reference to his 'flaccid solids and weak and sizy fluids.' But the demand was pressed, and Northampton learns with astonishment the exaltation of her banished pastor. The successful deputation possessed one member of rare interest. This was John Brainerd, who had succeeded his brother David as a missionary, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... said? Richardson and even Fielding have their longueurs. Miss Austen is too prone to linger over the tea-table beyond all human patience. And even Scott's descriptions of his loved hills grow sometimes unreadable, especially when they are told in a flaccid and slovenly style. But Vanity Fair is kept up with inexhaustible life and invention, with a style which, for purity and polish, was beyond the reach ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the sentimentalists," answered the severe critic, "but that of exceeding feebleness. They have no bone and muscle in their genius—all is flaccid and rotund in its feminine symmetry. They seem to think that vigour consists in florid phrases and little aphorisms, and delineate all the mighty tempests of the human heart with the polished prettiness of a miniature-painter ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but they are not strong enough for the times or for masterdom. For France, it is a great nation; but even in France they want a man, and Cavaignacso[182] only a soldier. If Louis Napoleon had the muscle of his uncle's little finger in his soul, he would be president, and king; but he is flaccid altogether, you see, and Joinville stands nearer to the royal probability after all. 'Henri Cinq' is said to be too closely espoused to the Church, and his connections at Naples and Parma don't help his cause. Robert has more hope of the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... with one's refuge in God there is nothing left to struggle with. My point is that whatever there may be to struggle with there is nothing to be afraid of. Freedom from struggle would profit us not at all. On the contrary, it would render us nerveless, flabby, flaccid, ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... institutions to which women are sent at a great expense to have hired operators stretch and exercise their inactive muscles. They lie for hours to have their feet twigged, their arms flexed, and all the different muscles of the body worked for them, because they are so flaccid and torpid that the powers of life do not go on. Would it not be quite as cheerful, and a less expensive process, if young girls from early life developed the muscles in sweeping, dusting, starching, ironing, and all the multiplied domestic processes which our grandmothers knew ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and, as it were, to die: the movements then become slower and rarer, the pauses longer, by which it is made much more easy to perceive and unravel what the motions really are, and how they are performed. In the pause, as in death, the heart is soft, flaccid, exhausted, lying, as it were, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, [181] sleeping only four hours, to gain time for reading. And here Winckelmann made a step forward in culture. He multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it all flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in which his reading had been considerable,—all but the literature of the arts. Nothing was to enter into his life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this time he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire belongs to that flimsier, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... Paresi followed Ives' flaccid, shocked gaze to the bulkhead where there had been the outline of the closed port, and beside it the hole which had held the axle of the manual wheel, and which now was a smooth, seamless curtain of impenetrable black. ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... he went straight to the bank. Wright, Delbridge, and the clerks and stenographers seemed unreal creatures, with flaccid, vacuous faces, as he shook hands with them and answered their conventional queries about his vacation. "Vacation!" The word was not in his vocabulary. "Business! "That, too, was a corpse of a word floating on the still waters of past usage. "Money, stocks, bonds, market-reports!" They seemed ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... Gautier, was short, fat, and bustling, with large round-eyed spectacles upon her nose, and the pasty complexion and premature flaccid wrinkles that come with long seclusion from sunshine and exercise. She marched about like one who had chosen Martha's rather than Mary's manner of serving her Lord, and we saw her chat a full half-hour with the wife of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... vaginal muscles alone, grasp the male organ and cause ejaculation, although the man remains passive. According to Lorion the Annamites, adopting the normal posture of coitus, introduce the penis when flaccid or only half erect, the contraction of the vaginal walls completing the process; the penis is very small in this people. It is recognized by gynaecologists that the condition of vaginismus, in which there is spasmodic contraction of the vagina, making intercourse ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... month, now, under his bland and graceful learning among the intimates of his set, Dysart had been slowly but steadily going to pieces. At such moments as this it showed on the surface. It showed now in his loose jaw and flaccid cheeks; in the stare of the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... BE USED?—Medically a binder is not necessary, neither is it objectionable from a medical standpoint. It is supposed to hold the flaccid, empty womb in place. This it does not do and we are of the opinion, that it, in many instances, according to how it is put on, compresses the womb out of place. The binder is certainly appreciated by most ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... in him, he is much dissatisfied with Oxford—thinks it (as we all do) terribly fallen off since his days. Perhaps the infusion of Dissenters' sons (it is just at the time of the first Commission in 1854) may brace its flaccid sinews, though the middle-class, he confesses, is abominably disagreeable. He sees a good deal of this poor middle-class in his inspecting tours, and decides elsewhere about the same time that "of all dull, stagnant, unedifying entourages, that of middle-class ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... quite thin and emaciated. Gait slow and unsteady. Voluntary movements retarded. Knees trembled and knocked against each other. No paralyses or pareses noted. Marked general tremors were occasionally seen. Musculature well developed but flaccid. All deep reflexes diminished. Cremasteric absent. Other superficial reflexes were noted to be normal. Organic reflexes abolished. Involuntary urination and defecation. There was a systolic murmur present and a slight ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... another individual appeared: a somewhat flaccid-looking individual, with colorless hair and eyes, one who seemed to exhale an air of apology, as it were, from the hobnailed boot upon the floor to the grimy forefinger that touched the ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... boughs of the acacias, and froze the water that dripped from the Medicean balls on the old wall of the Fortezza. Even in summer a little breeze would spring up towards sunset, and the leaves that had hung heavy and flaccid on the trees in the blazing heat of noon would be stirred by it to some semblance of life, while the shadows lengthened, and the incessant maddening scream of the locusts died down into silence. The gardens were a favourite resort. As the church bells rang the Ave Maria ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... eyes of this man, decrepit at the age of forty-seven; a faint color flushed his flaccid cold cheeks, his ill-furnished mouth was half open, and on his blackened lips a sort of foam gathered, thick, and as white as chalk. This fury in such a helpless wretch, whose life hung on a thread, and who in a duel would risk nothing while Crevel had ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... and when it reached the summit it was quite full and swollen, as if fresh air had been blown into it; or what is the same thing, it swelled in proportion as the weight of the column of air which pressed upon it diminished. When again brought down, it became more and more flaccid, and, when it reached the bottom, it resumed its original condition. In the nine chapters of which the treatise consists, he shows that all the phenomena or effects hitherto ascribed to the horror of a vacuum, arise from ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... and that of the fluid which now fills them. This difference is sufficient to cause the body to sink, as a general rule; but is insufficient in the cases of individuals with small bones and an abnormal quantity of flaccid or fatty matter. Such individuals float even ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... umpire for the quarreling goddesses, he would have given up Helen and the goddesses for her! If I could only steal a kiss, if only I might put my arms around that divine, that heavenly bosom, perhaps the virility would come back to this body and the parts, flaccid from witchcraft would, I believe, come into their own. Contempt cannot tire me out: what if I was flogged; I will forget it! What if I was thrown out! I will treat it as a joke! Only let me be ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... half an hour longer, he was in condition to march; but the danger was past, the tremendous excitement had subsided, and his muscles, which had been strained up to the highest tension, seemed to become soft and flaccid. The party passed the Union pickets, and reached the headquarters of the division general, who had just finished ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... end of the body whilst in contact with the object; and by this means the two adhered firmly together. {28} That under these circumstances a vacuum was produced was plainly seen on one occasion, when a large worm lying beneath a flaccid cabbage leaf tried to drag it away; for the surface of the leaf directly over the end of the worm's body became deeply pitted. On another occasion a worm suddenly lost its hold on a flat leaf; and the anterior end of the body was momentarily seen to be cup-formed. ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... lesion is seldom recognised at birth. The first symptom noticed is tenderness in the supra-clavicular region, the child crying when this part is touched or the arm is moved. The attitude may be that of the Erb-Duchenne type, or the whole of the muscles of the upper limb may be flaccid, and the arm hangs powerless. A considerable proportion of the cases recover spontaneously. The arm is to be kept at rest, with the affected muscles relaxed, and, as soon as tenderness has disappeared, daily massage and passive ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... had achieved and how they had lost their firm, sinewy proportions, their strong grasp, my heart swelled with pity and with passionate devotion. Often I felt as if I could have held these cold hands to my heart for warmth, and given of my own warm blood to fill those flaccid veins. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... transforming into something quite different. The brilliant eyes became sleepy, and, from a habit of narrowing the lids over them, possibly to shut out the bright sun, receded more and more beyond the full and flaccid cheeks, and even contracted a Mongolian curve at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... glabra. RUPTUREWORT. The Leaves.—It is a very mild restringent, and may, in some degree, be serviceable in disorders proceeding from a weak flaccid state of the viscera: the virtue which it has been most celebrated for, it has little title ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... discomfiting situation of Mr. Simon Pinski at 9 P.M. on the second evening following the introduction of the ordinance, in the ward house of the Fourteenth Ward Democratic Club. Rotund, flaccid, red-faced, his costume a long black frock-coat and silk hat, Mr. Pinski was being heckled by his neighbors and business associates. He had been called here by threats to answer for his prospective high crimes and misdemeanors. By now it was pretty ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... fainting limbs, "And in his arms now cherishes, now wipes "The fatal wound, now stays his fleeting breath, "With herbs apply'd; but all his arts are vain; "Incurable the hurt. Just so, when broke, "The violet, poppy, or the lily hang, "Whose dark stems in a water'd garden spring; "Flaccid they instant droop; the weighty head "No longer upright rais'd, but bent to earth. "So bent his dying face; his neck, bereft "Of vigor, heavy on his shoulder laid. "Phoebus exclaim'd;—Fall'st thou, OEbalian youth, "Depriv'd of life in prime? and must I see "Thy death my fault? thou art my grief, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... afraid, a large, corpulent man, of a loose and heavy build, with a flaccid face and bright little inexpressive eyes like a bird's, sat on a bench within the glow ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... seem to lie quite on the surface:—in her beauty, a certain unusualness about her, a decision of will which made itself felt in her graceful movements and clear unhesitating tones, so that if she came into the room on a rainy day when everybody else was flaccid and the use of things in general was not apparent to them, there seemed to be a sudden, sufficient reason for keeping up the forms of life; and even the waiters at hotels showed the more alacrity in doing away with crumbs and creases and dregs with struggling flies in them. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... with pity, and glanced for a moment at his neighbor's red face, his short, thick neck, his "corporation," as Chenet called it to himself, that hung down between two flaccid, fat legs, and his apoplectic rotundity of the old, flabby official, and, lifting the white Panama hat which he wore, from his head, he said, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... to the park early in the day were driven for refuge from the blazing sun to the trees and bushes, where prostrated by the heat they lay limp and flaccid upon the grass. Miss Hazel Sleighter, who for some reason which she could not explain to herself had joined the first contingent of picnickers, was cross, distinctly and obviously cross. The heat ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... at an open page of a textbook, but not studying; not even reading; not even thinking. Nor was he lost in a reverie: his mind's eye was shut, as his physical eye might well have been, for the optic nerve, flaccid with ennui, conveyed nothing whatever of the printed page upon which the orb of vision was partially focused. Penrod was doing something very unusual and rare, something almost never accomplished except by coloured people or by a boy in school on a spring day: he was ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... factor in general physiologic disturbances or lack of general tone. When the splanchnic vessels are dilated there is also a lack of proper tone to the cerebral vessels, and this may be a cause of mental weariness and neurasthenia. While ptosis of organs in the abdomen and a flaccid condition of the musculature of the abdomen are frequent causes of this splanchlnic stasis, and therefore hypotension, especially in women, it is quite possible that suprarenal insufficiency will allow this condition of the splanchnic vessels ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... hand that was resting quietly on his knee. It lay in hers, flaccid and inert, its dreadful passivity stinging her into realization of the truth. Patrick was dead. And, judging from his expression, he had found death "a very good sort of thing," just as ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... the coral garden to advantage you must pass over it—not through it. Drifting idly in a boat in a calm clear day, when the tips of the tallest shrubs are submerged but a foot or so, and all the delicate filaments, which are invisible or lie flat and flaccid when the tide is out, are waving, twisting and twining, then the spectacle is at its best. Tiny fish, glowing like jewels, flash and dart among the intricate, interlacing branches, or quiveringly poise about some slender point—humming-birds of the sea, sipping their nectar. A pink ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Empire, in its feeble and flaccid old age, seemed to have lost all capacity for making war. Theodoric the Amal performed his share of the compact; but when with his weary army, encumbered with many women and children, he emerged from the passes of the Balkans he found no Imperial ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... her to do. He never gave her glance or word, but stepped past her straight to my mother, and laid the white, shining, dripping bundle that he bore—the trilling hushed, the sparkle quenched, so flaccid, so limp, so awfully still—at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fair and habitable land, and still the waters gushed through the narrow crevices roaring seaward. But the Devil had one sorrow. All his children born before the catastrophe were crabbed, unregenerate, stiff-tailed fiends. After that event every new-born imp wore a flaccid, invertebrate, despondent tail—the very last insignium of ignobility. So runs the legend of The ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... moves by turns through sorrow and through joy. Each has its service for the soul, as for the earth has day and night each its ministry and message. Of pain come hardihood and strength and sympathy. What a sapless, fibreless thing is a man untrained by endurance and untaught by suffering! How flaccid in muscle, how narrow in intelligence, how shallow ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... impotency so common among the ancient Scythians. Mr. Hunter was also of opinion that this article of dress by keeping the parts too warm, affording them a constant support, and allowing the muscles but little freedom of motion, may, at least, relax and cause them to become flaccid, if it do not totally incapacitate them for the due ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... there was no real harm in the drug, and that Mr. Spielhagen would be all right if left to wake naturally and without shock. However, as his present attitude was one of great discomfort, they decided to carry him back and lay him on the library lounge. But before doing this, Mr. Upjohn drew from his flaccid grasp the precious manuscript, and carrying it into the larger room placed it on a remote table, where it remained undisturbed till Mr. Spielhagen, suddenly coming to himself at the end of some fifteen minutes, missed the sheets from his hand, and bounding up, crossed ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... who surround him; he will restrain himself in his pleasures, in order that he may be enabled truly to enjoy them; he will know that money cannot re-establish a soul worn out with enjoyment; cannot give fresh elasticity to organs enfeebled by excess; cannot give fresh tension to nerves grown flaccid by abuse; cannot invigorate a body enervated by debauchery; cannot corroborate a machine, from thenceforth become incapable of sustaining him, except by the necessity of privations; he will know that the licentiousness of ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... Maitland had scarcely tasted anything that might reasonably be called food. "He had eaten; he had not dined," to adopt the distinction of Brillat-Savarin. He had been dependent on the gritty and flaccid hospitalities of refreshment-rooms, on the sandwich and the bun. Now he felt faint as well as weary; but, rummaging amidst his cupboards, he could find no provisions more tempting and nutritious than a box of potted shrimps, from the college stores, and a bottle of some Hungarian ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... customers, and they had seated themselves wherever they could find vacant places. The majority were nearing the age of forty: their flesh was puffy and so bloated by vice as almost to hide the outlines of their flaccid mouths. But amid all these gross bosoms and figures some slim, pretty girls were observable. These still wore a modest expression despite their impudent gestures, for they were only beginners in their art, who had started life in the ballrooms ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Carlyle's; "general utility" was a favourite of "that old stager the devil."[145] Yet no critic of intellect ever used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. Browning was Paracelsus as well as Aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever "Knowledge" and "Love," Love was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted comrade who does the same ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... let down the hood, climbed in, slid into the driver's seat, and went through the operation of starting. Only, he didn't start. The self-starter hummed as it spun the flywheel, but nothing whatever was elicited save a profane phrase from Foster and a growl from Mert. Bud sat back flaccid, ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... lines are; and there, the first German lines, equally silent and flooded. On our way to these flaccid ruins we pass through the middle of what yesterday was the zone of terror, the awful space on whose threshold the fierce rush of our last attack was forced to stop, the No Man's Land which bullets and shells had not ceased to furrow for a year and a half, where their crossed fire during ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... as dull and lifeless as ever; the eyelids had fallen to their accustomed suggestion of ambush, and it seemed scarcely possible that the sharp directions of a few moments since could issue from such flaccid lips, and so much determination could ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... Gailey," she said, with a kind and even very cordial smile, and heartily shook the flaccid, rheumatic hand that was primly held out to her. And yet in spite of herself, perhaps unknown to herself, there was in her tone and her smile and her vigorous clasp something which meant, "Poor ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... they made a mighty comely pair, the child being so lean, and light, and active, and the laird himself a man of a manly, pretty stature, his hair (the periwig being laid aside) showing already white with many anxieties, and his face of an even, flaccid red. But this day Francie's heart was not in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... portrait and placed it in the flaccid hand. The fingers closed over it. The filmiest wraith of a smile played ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... or at least taking the risk of being forced into resigned submission. The believers in the religion of valor, on the other hand, proclaim that war is a good thing in itself, that it develops the best human virtues, invigorates a nation become flaccid through ease and luxury, and puts in command the strong, dominating spirit of a valid nation or race. What is the just mean between these two extremes? Is it not that war is always a hideous and hateful evil, but that a nation may sometimes find it to be the least of two evils between which it has ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... analysis of that great light there are the two lines; the one purest white of righteousness, and the other tinged with a ruddier glow, the line of love. The one adorns and sets off the other. Love without righteousness is flaccid, a mere gush of good-natured sentiment, impotent to confer blessing, powerless to evoke reverence. Righteousness without love is as white as snow, and as cold as ice; repellent, howsoever it may excite ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... skillful man will purchase it—such a creature must go to a novice, and even to him at a price so low as to tempt him to become a purchaser. On the other hand, the skin must not be thin, like paper, nor flaccid, nor loose in the hand, nor flabby. This is the opposite extreme, and is indicative of delicateness, bad, flabby flesh, and, possibly, of inaptitude to retain the fat. It must be elastic and velvety, soft and pliable, presenting to ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... and then, But blunt and flaccid is my pen, No longer talked of by young men As rather clever: In the last quarter are my eyes, You see it by their form and size; Is it not time then to be wise? Or now ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... it is! But thought is a tonic which sometimes restores a man's enfeebled self-respect. I was beginning to lose that particular condition of health and sanity, Roger!—my self-respect was becoming a flaccid muscle—a withering nerve;—but a little thought- exercise has convinced me that my mental sinews are ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... anticipating the rending thunder-crash which never came. And always was the air hot and dry, and the wind, when it blew, was as a breath from the mouth of a volcano. The grass, withered and brown, fell away into dust; the leaves hung limp and flaccid on the trees; the cultivation areas of the selections were parched and dismal; and to add to the tribulation of the selectors, swarms of grasshoppers were abroad, swooping down in clouds, made up of myriads, upon everything that was green or bore the semblance of green, and never ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... figure in his dusty boots, coarse trousers and flannel shirt, and weather-beaten black slouch hat. The inevitable revolver hung at his thigh. His pursed lips spurted a jet of tobacco juice as he keenly surveyed me with small, shrewd, china-blue eyes squinting from a broad flaccid countenance. But the countenance was unemotional while he offered a thick hand which proved singularly soft ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... jerked back with some violence, he instantly recovered his senses, but seemed to be puzzled to recall the circumstances connected with his first view of the snake. After a mental effort he explained, while the cold sweat poured from his face, and his limbs were flaccid as an infant's, that the sound of a rattle had caused him to stop short—that a pleasant halo danced before his eyes, and sweet sounds met his ears—and that from that instant until the conclusion of the trance, "he was as happy as he ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... clover-scented air, and his shrill whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies the farm dog from the interior of the stone wall, is a pleasant summer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck is not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass, I have never before seen. It has absolutely no muscular tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skin filled with water. Let the rifleman shoot one while it lies basking on a sidelong rock, and its body slumps off, and rolls ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... visible parts of her flesh. The neck and shoulders explained by their blanched paleness the wasted arms, flung forward and crossed upon the table. Her feet seemed enervated, shrunken from illness. Her night-gown came only to her knees and showed the flaccid muscles, the blue veins, the impoverished flesh of the legs. The cold, to which she paid no heed, turned her lips violet, and a sad smile, drawing up the corners of a sensitive mouth, showed teeth that ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... away, but Mrs. Burdon, a big, slatternly Missourian, with all the kindliness of a universal mother in her swarthy face and flaccid bosom, ushered them into the cave-like dwelling set in the sunny ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... Richardson and even Fielding have their longueurs. Miss Austen is too prone to linger over the tea-table beyond all human patience. And even Scott's descriptions of his loved hills grow sometimes unreadable, especially when they are told in a flaccid and slovenly style. But Vanity Fair is kept up with inexhaustible life and invention, with a style which, for purity and polish, was beyond the reach of Fielding, Richardson, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... has animated every department of life and business, puffing them up like gas in a balloon, since about '35 has departed and left the fiscal system perfectly flaccid and lifeless. The rage for speculation in real estate has absorbed all loose cash, and the country is now groaning for its fast-locked circulating medium. A friend at Detroit writes: "With fifty ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... brilliant treason, modelled on an antique Roman tragedy. But there was not moral force in the protagonist to render that act salutary, not public energy sufficient in his fellow-citizens to accomplish his drama of deliverance. Lorenzo was corrupt. Florence was flaccid. Evil manners had emasculated the hero. In the state the last spark of independence had ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... has been at work in Germany: the German soil that Napoleon ploughed yielded a Moltke and a Bismarck,[226] while to-day, however mistakenly, the German Press is crying out that only another war—it ought in honesty to say an unsuccessful war—can restore the nation's flaccid muscle. It is yet too early to see the results of the Russo-Japanese War, but already there are signs that by industrial overstrain and the repression of individual thought Japan is threatening to enfeeble the physique and to destroy the high spirit of the indomitable ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... recitatives of the younger—to see a wild man of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on" to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with "unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause, madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with the fixed resolve, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... more striking than any possible in the mere tourist's experience. In the difference between this London and that you fully realize the moral and physical magnitude of the season. The earlier London throbbed to bursting with the tide of manifold life, the later London lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the mere sense of what it has been through. The change is almost incredible, and the like of it is nowhere to be witnessed with us. It seems a sort of bluff to say that a city which still holds all ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... brought to see her received with equal postponement, began to fret for the great thing to come to pass. One cannot be always heroically stiffened to receive the cavalry of communal criticism. Waiting weakens the backbone. But she concealed from her boy these flaccid relapses. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... pale passions of man under civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirm piece of writing—a second rate magazine story. One concludes at once that the author himself does not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is worse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, a bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the Conrad gallery in such scenes. Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, Lena Hermann seduced by the fashions, Almayer ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... state varies considerably in size, due not only to varying conditions of temperature but also to individual peculiarities. The organ may vary between 2-1/2 inches and 6 inches in length in the flaccid state and between 5 inches and 8 inches in the erected condition. The size of the generative organs is not an index ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... but the result may be glorious. Yet a good many of them were good honest, kind, common girls, only demoralized by long lying around in a waiting posture. It had taken the fire and sparkle out of them. They were not in a healthy state. They were degraded, contracted, flaccid. They did not hold themselves high. They knew that in a market-point of view there was a frightful glut of women. The usually small ratio of men was unusually diminished by the absence of those who gone to the war, and of those who, as was currently reported, were ashamed that they ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... been pinned open, and next morning five of them were found much browned. The plant was a large one, and none of the free leaves, which were asleep and depended vertically, were browned, excepting four very young ones. But three other leaves, though not browned, were in a rather flaccid condition, and retained their nocturnal position during the whole of the following day. In this case it was obvious that the leaves which were exposed horizontally to the zenith suffered most. This same pot was afterwards ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... occasionally seen also in boys. For example, Breschet, in the year 1820, reported the case of a boy three years of age who exhibited all the signs of puberty. His voice resembled that of a young man of sixteen to eighteen. The length of the flaccid penis was 9.6 cm. (3-3/4 inches), its diameter at the root was 7.2 cm. (2-3/4 inches); the length of the organ when erect was 13.5 cm. (5-1/4 inches). In the presence of girls or women the boy's penis became erect, ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... Yesterday was a dotard. To-day is a sage: between them stands the night which brings wisdom, the night which gives light. I ought to go, I ought to do it, I promised I would—I am weak, I know. But how can I resist the downy creases of my bed? My feet feel flaccid, I think I must be sick, I am too happy just here. I long to see the ethereal horizon of my dreams again, those women without claws, those winged beings and their obliging ways. In short, I have found the grain of salt to put upon the tail of that bird that was always flying away: ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... overcame her repugnance by a visible effort. "Is it ... is it worth while?" she asked, regarding the flaccid, tumbled, wax-like thing, with its bloated, white globe of a skull. Every muscle of it was relaxed and limp, its eyes shut, its tiny jaw hanging. "Wouldn't it be ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... be all right if left to wake naturally and without shock. However, as his present attitude was one of great discomfort, they decided to carry him back and lay him on the library lounge. But before doing this, Mr. Upjohn drew from his flaccid grasp, the precious manuscript, and carrying it into the larger room placed it on a remote table, where it remained undisturbed till Mr. Spielhagen, suddenly coming to himself at the end of some fifteen minutes, missed the sheets from his hand, and bounding up, crossed the room to repossess ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... window in a Voltaire armchair, and dismissed her maids. The candles were taken away, and once more the room was left with only one lamp burning in it. The Countess sat there looking quite yellow, mumbling with her flaccid lips and swaying to and fro. Her dull eyes expressed complete vacancy of mind, and, looking at her, one would have thought that the rocking of her body was not a voluntary action of her own, but was produced by the action of some concealed ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... his bland and graceful learning among the intimates of his set, Dysart had been slowly but steadily going to pieces. At such moments as this it showed on the surface. It showed now in his loose jaw and flaccid cheeks; in the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... two butchers and the dry-goods merchant looked away from the glowing Oriental web upon which they stood. The weeping stenographer sat with her damp little wad of lace-edged handkerchief in her hand and stared at him with her reddened eyes; the other held her flaccid purse, and looked at the speaker. Now and then she nudged violently the friend, who did not ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... difficulty in ascertaining the exact structure of the species just noticed, as the fruit-bearing cells, or sporophores, are very small, and when the spicules are developed the substance becomes so flaccid that it is difficult to cut a proper slice, even with the sharpest lancet. I have, however, satisfied myself as to the true structure by repeated observations. But should any difficulty arise in verifying it in the species in question, there will be none in doing so in Lycoperdon giganteum. ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... its adversary; the right that yields leaves the victor vanquished. Chivers could even have killed Collinson in his vague discomfiture, but he had a terrible consciousness that there was something behind him that he could not make way with. That was why this accomplished rascal felt his flaccid cheeks grow purple and his glib tongue trip ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... and, resting on our oars, drifted slowly back with the current. The evening was indescribably brilliant and serene. The sky was cloudless, of a greenish blue, and full of light. The river was clear as glass. We could see the flaccid water-weeds swaying languidly with the current far below, and now and then a shoal of tiny fish shooting along half-way between the weeds and the surface. A rich fringe of purple iris, spear-leaved sagittarius, and ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... not bother him any more just now," Saxham interposed, noting the droop of the piteous, flaccid mouth, and feeling the flutter of the uneven pulse. The Mayor's wife broke into helpless sobbing. The Mother-Superior drew her swiftly out of the sick child's hearing and sight. And a shadow fell upon the thin light coverlet, and a crisp, decided ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the bag sloped upward, and there were signs that their quarry found the ground harder to cover. The second discard lay in open sight—again a leather bag which Nalik'ideyu sniffed and then began to lick eagerly, thrusting her nose into its flaccid interior. ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... is to be criticised, perhaps punished. Up to now, therefore, it has been a most successful policy; but the danger is before us. My own feeling would decidedly be that all would be spoiled by a single execution. The great hope after all lies in the knotless, rather flaccid character of the people. These are no Maoris. All the powers that Cedarcrantz let go by disuse the new C. J. is stealthily and boldly taking back again; perhaps some others also. He has shamed the chiefs in Mulinuu into a law against taking heads, with a punishment of six years' imprisonment ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such as it was, was pale green and thin, lacking in warmth and vitality. The vegetation was flaccid and nearly colorless, more like a mushroom growth than anything else; and the inhabitants were suspicious ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... to his assistance, and without encountering much trouble, succeeded in wresting a Webley from Stryker's limp, flaccid fingers. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... would have nearly two thousand pounds a year on the death of her parents; and, secondly, because she was a capable person with plenty of common-sense. These two adjuncts—namely, money and common-sense—Mrs. Agar wisely looked for in candidates for the flaccid hand ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... knuckles into the corners of his eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net and peered around. The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night. So far so good. The faithful servant of his employers ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... furnish'd with a Cornea, with a transparent humour, and with a uvea or retina, that the Figure of each of the small Hemispheres are very Spherical, exactly polish'd, and most vivid, lively and plump, when the Animal is living, as in greater Animals, and in like manner dull, flaccid, and irregular, or shrunk, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... and flaccid, like the unbaked loaves into which I had poked inquiring fingers in my childhood, and there was an unwholesome look of fear in his little bright eyes. The Baron had been badly scared, and lacked the ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... seen a balloon—the reader, however impatient, must listen to this allusion—whoever has seen a balloon, may have observed that in its flaccid state it can be folded and unfolded with the greatest ease, and it is manageable even by a child; but when once filled, the force of multitudes cannot restrain, nor the art of man direct its course. Such is the human mind—so ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... had gone, Mrs. Madison returned from the stairway, and, kneeling beside her husband, put her arms round him gently: she had seen the tear that was marking its irregular pathway down his flaccid, gray ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... car and going into the theater. At these tidings Mrs. Makebelieve roused for a moment from her strange apathy. Since tea-time she had sat (not as usual upright and gesticulating, but humped up and flaccid) staring at a blob of condensed milk on the outside of the tin. She said she thought she would go out and see the great actor, although what all the women saw in him to go mad about she did not know, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... lately been filled in a tavern near Tres Pinos by an Irishman who sold had American whisky under that pleasing Castilian title. Nevertheless Concho had already nearly emptied the bottle, and it fell back against the saddle as yellow and flaccid as his own cheeks. Thus reinforced Concho turned to look at the valley behind him, from which he had climbed since noon. It was a sterile waste bordered here and there by arable fringes and valdas of meadow land, but in the main, dusty, dry, and forbidding. His eye rested for a moment on a low ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... "joining the crew," trains for months beforehand, walking, running, rowing, until the flaccid muscles become as ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... is that Professor Huxley was justified in saying that Spiritualism adds a new terror to death. Fancy the awful depth of flaccid imbecility into which Charles Bradlaugh must have fallen, to indulge in "ohs," and gasp out "glorious," "glorious," and talk of his "subdued" and "bewildered" mind, and bid himself be "a man." It was not thus that he spoke in the flesh. His language was manly, firm, and restrained; his attitude ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... induces a feeble pulse, cold extremities, weak respiration, general debility, and may occur in opposite states of the system, i.e., in women who have a plethoric and robust habit, or in those of flaccid muscles and bloodless features. When the menstrual discharge is natural, it is so gradual that by mixing with the vaginal secretions it is prevented from coagulating, while in this disease, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... their slight clothing at that name, turned their backs, and looked at Katharine above their shoulders. The Lady Rochford recoiled so far that her skirts were in danger from the fire in the great hearth; her woebegone, flaccid face was suddenly drawn at the mention of Cromwell, and she appeared about to kneel at Katharine's feet. She looked round at ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... hesitated. She was an elderly woman with flaccid yellow cheeks, watery eyes, and a ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... talking in the voice that is a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out of something brilliant with a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman telling children playing together "don't, don't, don't," in the whine ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... ladies' dressing-room. His aunts were two small, plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect, her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... stank. It was foul. The Medecin Chef took a curette, a little scoop, and scooped away the dead flesh, the dead muscles, the dead nerves, the dead blood-vessels. And so many blood-vessels being dead, being scooped away by that sharp curette, how could the blood circulate in the top half of that flaccid thigh? It couldn't. Afterwards, into the deep, yawning wound, they put many compresses of gauze, soaked in carbolic acid, which acid burned deep into the germs of the gas gangrene, and killed them, and killed much good tissue besides. ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... the defence of her friend, who, clerk though he might be, was neither impudent nor vulgar, she found herself driven back upon self-respect. The battle went on for hours; it exhausted her; it undid all the good effects of sun and sea, and left her flaccid, pale. ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... are blessed with an unwonted success. By the time that the sun has attained height enough in the heavens to make his power tyrannically felt, our baskets are filled. Tou Tou has to throw away her wild-roses, limp and flaccid, into the dust of the lane. We walk home, singing, and making poor jokes, as is our wont. As we draw near the house with joyful foretastes of breakfast in our minds, with redly-flushed cheeks and merry eyes, I see Sir Roger leaning on the stone balustrade of the terrace, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... or hear the last news of her From some old thief and son of Lucifer, {890} His forehead chapleted green with wreathy hop, Sunburned all over like an Aethiop. And when my Cotnar begins to operate And the tongue of the rogue to run at a proper rate, And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent, I shall drop in with—as if by accident— "You never knew, then, how it all ended, What fortune good or bad attended The little lady your Queen befriended?" —And when that's told me, what's remaining? {900} This world's too hard for my explaining. The same wise judge ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... either side of the bishop's path were ranged the seminarists, in cassocks of black with a dark blue or red hood—depressing looking youths with flaccid faces and an unhealthy eye. Behind them stood a group of friars in rough woolen garments of brown, with heads clean shaven all but an inch of closely cut hair like a halo on a saint. They seemed cheerful and were laughing ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... She looked, therefore, with a cold and calm eye on the prince as he entered, and for the first time he seemed no longer the handsome man, the being endowed with numberless fascinations, of former days. She read only in his flaccid features the sad history of the past. The charm was broken which had held her eyes captive. Her vision was clear again, and she shuddered before this wild, demoniacal beauty which she had once adored as God's image in man. As she looked at him, she ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... towards Killorglin, is harrowing and startling. The whole potato crop is literally destroyed, while over a very wide surface the oat crop presents an unnatural lilac tinge to the eye; at the same time, in too many instances, the head is found flaccid to the touch, and possessing no substance. The barley crop, too, in many places, exhibits the effect of a powerful blight. In some places, also, where turnips have been grown, they present—as, indeed, has been ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that effect, quoting Dr. Bergeret, who had long been physician to a number of religious societies, as saying that he had never seen serious troubles of the organs of generation in these communities, which denotes that if they indulged in proper fasting and prayer they were in the same condition of flaccid impotence as the athlete in Galen's anteroom. Louis VII, of France, tried fasting and prayer in connection with rigid continence, and, as a result, his wife, Queen Eleonore, was divorced from him and married Henry II, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... atmosphere. I have found dullness to quicken into sentiment in a thin ether, as water, though not very hot, boils in a receiver partly exhausted; and heads, in appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon rising ground, as the flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out into stiffness ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... There was no brain disease. The lungs were healthy, but slightly congested. On opening the thorax there was a faint spirituous odour discernible. The stomach contained about a pint of completely digested food. The heart was flaccid. The right-heart contained a considerable quantity of dark, fluid blood. There was a tendency to fatty ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... where the golden statue of the Goddess had been kept; but alas, the figures themselves! Alas! I knew how Cleopatra must be feeling; and I dared not speak. Perhaps she was even blushing: but I did not look. Instead, I gazed helplessly up at that exposed, misshapen form, that flaccid chin. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... careful note, as well as of the laboratory address. By this time the hissing of the fumigating apparatus had ceased. The two men went to the conservatory and gazed in upon a ruin of limp leaves and flaccid petals, killed by the powerful gases. Suddenly, with an exclamation of astonishment, the investigator stooped and lifted from the floor a marvel of ermine body and pale green wings. The moth, spreading nearly a foot, was ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... at the Opera is applauded; she returns all radiant with joy. Anon the applauses wax fainter, or threaten to cease; she is heavy of heart, the light of her face has fled. Is Sovereignty some poor Montgolfier; which, blown into by the popular wind, grows great and mounts; or sinks flaccid, if the wind be withdrawn? France was long a 'Despotism tempered by Epigrams;' and now, it would seem, the Epigrams have get ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... unwearied sweep of wood thy cliffs that scales, The never-ending waters of thy vales; The cots, those dim religious groves enbow'r, Or, under rocks that from the water tow'r 125 Insinuated, sprinkling all the shore, Each with his household boat beside the door, Whose flaccid sails in forms fantastic droop, Bright'ning the gloom where thick the forests stoop; —Thy torrents shooting from the clear-blue sky, 130 Thy towns, like swallows' nests that cleave on high; That glimmer hoar in eve's last light, descry'd Dim from the twilight water's shaggy side, Whence lutes and ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the lightning of thought has penetrated into the flaccid popular soil, the elevation of Germans ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... little in other lands as a natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia as a forced growth. In lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs. These, thus lifted from the earth, lost even the little force in the State they had before; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... something shameful in his flaccid idleness, in the aimlessness of his whole life now, devoid of all work, undirected towards any effort. But that was not his fault. He had worked with energy in business, with equal energy in play, worked for self's sake, for love's sake, and for country's sake. And for all he had done, for his ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... cooled, Edwards became involved in characteristic difficulties. The pastor, it may easily be supposed, was not popular with the rising generation. He had, as he confesses with his usual candour, 'a constitution in many respects peculiarly unhappy, attended with flaccid solids; vapid, sizy, and scarce fluids; and a low tide of spirits; often occasioning a kind of childish weakness and contemptibleness of speech, presence and demeanour; with a disagreeable dulness and stiffness, much unfitting me for conversation, but more especially ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... residing constantly in the atmosphere, surrounded by oxygen, and respiring it in greater proportions than any other species of animals, are endowed with a superior degree of muscular strength, whilst the muscles of fish, on the contrary, are flaccid and oily; these animals are comparatively feeble in their motions, and their temperature is scarcely above that of the water in which they live. This is, in all probability, owing to their imperfect respiration; the quantity of hydrogen and carbon, that is in consequence ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... OF THE ABDOMEN.—This is very characteristic of pregnancy. When a lady is not pregnant the abdomen is soft and flaccid; when she is pregnant, and after she has quickened, the abdomen; over the region of the womb, is hard ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... and only a small orifice left at the other. Into this opening several bamboo canes had been inserted and the other ends of these canes were in contact with conical clay funnels which collected the gas bubbling up through the mud of the geyser. Soon the flaccid organ began to slowly expand and show such a tendency to upward movements that Challenger fastened the cords which held it to the trunks of the surrounding trees. In half an hour a good-sized gas-bag had been formed, and the jerking and straining upon the thongs showed ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me, O Ternissa—no, not even after this walk do you—as when I saw you blow a fly from the forehead of Philoctetes in the propylea. The wing, with which Sophocles and the statuary represent him, to drive away the summer insects in his agony, had wearied his flaccid arm, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... humours again. Ennui was upon him. This goodly promontory, the earth—particularly that portion of it known as Quicksand—was to him no more than a pestilent congregation of vapours. Overtaken by the megrims, the philosopher may seek relief in soliloquy; my lady find solace in tears; the flaccid Easterner scold at the millinery bills of his women folk. Such recourse was insufficient to the denizens of Quicksand. Calliope, especially, was wont to express his ennui ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... denying Him? Was she setting her foot on the outskirts of hell? It mattered not. She shut her eyes wearily, closed her fingers as for life upon the hand that held hers. All strength, health for her, lay in its grasp: her own life lay weak, flaccid, morbid on his. She had chosen: she would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Marcelo felt a vague attraction. "Although a German, he appears a good sort," meditated the old man, eyeing him carefully. In times of peace, he must have been stout, but now he showed the loose and flaccid exterior of one who has just lost much in weight. Desnoyers surmised that the man had formerly lived in tranquil and vulgar sensuousness, in a middle-class happiness suddenly ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... at the open window, with his arms against it. Renovated health sparkled in the eyes of the one; surprise and delight and thankfulness to Heaven filled the other's with sudden tears. He clasped Giovanni, kissed his flaccid and sallow cheek, and falling on his knees, adored the Giver of life, the source of health to body and soul. Giovanni was not unmoved: he bent one knee as he leaned on the shoulder of Francesco, looking down into his face, repeating his ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... rather to my credit than otherwise; but it would be morally worthless if I did not add the story of another plant, which, in this same New Smyrna hammock, I frequently noticed hanging in loose bunches, like blades of flaccid deep green grass, from the trunks of cabbage palmettos. The tufts were always out of reach, and I gave them no particular thought; and it was not until I got home to Massachusetts, and then almost by accident, ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... we can't ignore. When I say terrific I don't mean that I'm afraid of it. I'm not. It seems to me too strengthening to be afraid of. With all you can say against it, it strikes me as a tonic in our rather flaccid life, like iron in the blood. I've sympathy with it, too, to some extent; I've sympathy with him. You know, I do belong to the people. I'm glad we know him, and that in a way we've a right to get near to him. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... yellow or grayish yellow, generally stipitate on long flaccid stalks, or sessile and interlacing: stipes yellow, blending with the hypothallus; capillitium intricate, expanding at maturity after the manner of Arcyria to several times the sporangial length, the nodules small, yellow; spores nearly ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... phraseology are internal; it must be delivered in a flowing, waving manner, never square or hard, yet with every accent showing like the supple muscles of an athlete beneath his skin. Without the skeleton a musical composition is flaccid, shapeless, weak and without character. Chopin's music needs a rhythmic sense that to us, fed upon the few simple forms of the West, seems almost abnormal. The Chopin rubato is rhythm liberated from its scholastic bonds, but it does not ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... is from an inch to an inch and a quarter broad, reddish-brown, often densely cespitose, somewhat fleshy, convex, then plane, flaccid, smooth, often watery, margin thin, in old specimens ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... A worse has seldom discredited the name of any man with a spark of genius in him. Dryden's delectable tragedy of "Amboyna," Lee's remarkable tragicomedy of "Gloriana," Pope's elegant comedy of "Three Hours after Marriage," are scarcely more unworthy of their authors, more futile or more flaccid or more audacious in their headlong and unabashed incompetence. Charity would suggest that it must have been written against time in a debtor's prison, under the influence of such liquor as Catherina Bountinall or Doll Tearsheet would have flung at the tapster's ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was that now, Stener stood by Cowperwood meditating—pale, flaccid; unable to see the main line of his interests quickly, unable to follow it definitely, surely, vigorously—while they drove to his office. Cowperwood entered it with him for the sake of continuing ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... of this—a curious, a comic, but a most conclusive proof—is the dependence of the great daily papers on the headline. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred retain this and nothing more, because the matter below is but a flaccid ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... The long, nervous leg of the Wondersmith caught the little creature in the centre of the body, doubled up his brown, hairy form, till he looked like a fur driving-glove, and sent him whizzing across the room into a far corner, where he dropped senseless and flaccid. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... somewhat flaccid old ladies ("castanae molles," as Preciozi called them) with perfect hypocrisy; he regarded the classic decorations of the salons, and while he listened to rather strange French and to most elegant ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... cords descended on the bared shoulders. Magda winced away from them, shivering. For a moment Sister Agnetia's arm hung flaccid, the cords of the flagellum pendant ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... once Elise Gautier, was short, fat, and bustling, with large round-eyed spectacles upon her nose, and the pasty complexion and premature flaccid wrinkles that come with long seclusion from sunshine and exercise. She marched about like one who had chosen Martha's rather than Mary's manner of serving her Lord, and we saw her chat a full half-hour ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... might best be described as a succession of short and unwieldy jumps, which, as he was a rather stout gentleman, appeared to indicate some very urgent and pressing need for hurry. His face was bathed in perspiration, and his collar had become flaccid and shapeless from the same cause. It appeared to Tom, as he gazed at those rubicund, though anxious, features, that they should be well known to him. That glossy hat, those speckless gaiters, and the long frock-coat, surely they could belong to none other than ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the battle-rattle and alarums of the last scene were echoing tinnily from the stage—when Bruce and Beau and Mark (who was playing Malcolm, Martin's usual main part) came in wearing their last-act stage-armor and carrying between them Queen Elizabeth flaccid as a sack. Martin came after them, stripping off his white wool nightgown so fast that buttons flew. I thought automatically, I'll have to ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... fringe of thin white hair above the ears. There are deep wrinkles upon his forehead; and the eyes, half obscured by the bushy grey eyebrows, are bloodshot and sunken; the jaws hollow and spectral, and his lower lip drooping and flaccid. He lifts his hand to pour out another glass of liquor from the decanter at his side, when his daughter lays her hand upon it, and looks ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... over and touched—very lightly—the broken portion of the native's appendage. The muscles of the creature's face pulled its flaccid flesh into distorted positions, bunching some and stretching others. "It is very probably registering ...
— Vital Ingredient • Charles V. De Vet
... those various accents, those foreign intonations, gruff or faltering, as one gazed upon those widely different physiognomies, some violent, barbarous, vulgar, others hyper-civilized, worn, suggestive only of the Boulevard and as it were flaccid, one noted that the same diversity was evident also among the servants who, some apparently lads just out of an office, insolent in manner, with heads of hair like a dentist's or a bath-attendant's, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... scattered array of dishes. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and her hands, on the table, were clenched. On her left a man in an unmarked blue uniform sat, sagging heavily forward in his chair, breathing stertorously, with a dark flush over a pouched and flaccid countenance. Opposite him, sitting formally upright, was a negro in a carefully brushed gray suit, with a crimson satin necktie surcharged by vivid green lightning. His bony face, the deep pits of his temples, ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... unnatural excitement, all the poetic stimulation of the past few days, had vanished. He felt flaccid, while his life struggled slowly through him. After an intoxication of passion and love, and beauty, and of sunshine, he was prostrate. Like a plant that blossoms gorgeously and madly, he had wasted the tissue of his ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... November. During the Course of the Fever, she only complained once of a Difficulty of making Water.—After Death I had her Body opened, when the only Thing particular which we could observe, was the urinary Bladder about four times the natural Size; it seemed to be flaccid, and in a State of Relaxation; the Kidneys were sound, and no Signs of any Distemper could be observed about the Uterus or Rectum, or near the os coccygis.—When she was first in the Hospital, I desired her always to examine her Urine; but she never observed that she passed any Sand, ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... chin receded, but was of surprising length and breadth. His ears sat very low on his head and were ludicrously small. Above them rose a massive dome, covered with thick, well-brushed hair of a yellowish hue, parted exactly in the middle. His cheeks were white and flaccid, and there was a fullness in front of the jaw-point that suggested approaching bagginess. He smiled with his lips closed, and broadly at that. The picture was even less alluring than when his face was in repose. In the subdued, gray ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... ministers to decay. So far from ministering to holiness, that is to wholeness, parasitism ministers to exactly the opposite. One by one the spiritual faculties droop and die, one by one from lack of exercise the muscles of the soul grow weak and flaccid, one by one the moral activities cease. So from him that hath not, is taken away that which he hath, and after a few years of parasitism there is ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... or flaccid, from Khansbending inwards, i.e. the mouth of a water-skin before drinking. Like Mukhannas, it is also used for an effeminate man, a passive sodomite and even for a eunuch. Easterns still believe in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... satisfy latent passions, with the fugitive pleasure in doing so. But the external agencies that originally wound up that mainspring never cease to operate; every fresh stimulus gives it another turn, until it snaps, or grows flaccid, or is unhinged. Moreover, from time to time, when circumstances change, these external agencies may encrust that primary organ with minor organs attached to it. Every impression, every adventure, leaves a trace or rather a seed behind it. It produces a further complication in the structure of the ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... a solvent for lies, what surprises would be in store for us! Nearly everybody who now appears to us to be upright, inflexible, and to hold his chest high, would be disclosed as a flaccid, weak person, presenting in ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... life, assume four {different} appearances? for, in early Spring, it is mild, and {like} a nursling, and greatly resembling the age of youth. Then, the blade is shooting, and void of strength, it swells, and is flaccid, and delights the husbandman in his expectations. Then, all things are in blossom, and the genial meadow smiles with the tints of its flowers; and not as yet is there any vigour in the leaves. The year {now} waxing stronger, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... heroic war for Liberty in 1881. From the Limpopo as far as Cape Town the Second Majuba has given birth to a new inspiration and a new movement amongst our people in South Africa. A new feeling has rushed in huge billows over South Africa. The flaccid and cowardly Imperialism, that had already begun to dilute and weaken our national blood, gradually turned aside before the new current which permeated our people. Many who, tired of the slow development of the national idea, had ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... feeling the silence, turned to Tenney to see if his leadership could surmount this base assault. The assault was premeditated. The gay insolence of the man's manner told him that. Tenney stood there silent, flaccid, a hand on the casing of the door. Every vestige of religious excitement had left his face. His overthrow was complete, and Raven, judging how Martin must rejoice, was for the moment almost as sorry for Tenney as for his wife. The little disturbance had lasted ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... heart begins to flag, to move more slowly, and, as it were, to die: the movements then become slower and rarer, the pauses longer, by which it is made much more easy to perceive and unravel what the motions really are, and how they are performed. In the pause, as in death, the heart is soft, flaccid, exhausted, lying, as it were, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... back and the hinder part of his arms, thighs, and legs were livid. That fat which lay on the muscles of his belly was of a loose texture, inclining to a state of fluidity. The muscles of his belly were very pale and flaccid. The cawl was yellower than is natural, and the side next the stomach and intestines looked brownish. The heart was variegated with purple spots. There was no water in the pericardium. The lungs resembled bladders half filled with air, ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... he would be at, he stepped forward and tendered his hilt to the girl, who took it with flaccid fingers. "I am in your hands now," he said, fixing his eyes on hers and endeavouring to convey his meaning to her. For surely, with such a face, she must have, with all her recklessness, some womanliness, some ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... now must close. Roustan misunderstood me, though his hint Serves as a fillip to a flaccid brain.... —How gild the sunset sky of majesty Better than by the act esteemed of yore? Plutarchian heroes outstayed not their fame, And what nor Brutus nor Themistocles Nor Cato nor Mark Antony survived, Why, why should I? Sage Canabis, you ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... arm midway between the shoulder and elbow, with the thumb and fingers of the opposite hand. When the arm is bent, the inside muscle will become hard and prominent, and its tendon at the elbow rigid, while the muscle on the opposite side will become flaccid. Extend the arm at the elbow, and the outside muscle will swell and become firm, while the inside muscle and its tendon at the elbow will ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... swathed with I cannot imagine: but I conjecture there must have been stiff brown paper next to the smooth silk stocking, which produced the irregularities of the surface. The dullness of his eyes, the slowness of their motions, his drooping eyelids, his flaccid cheeks, his hanging chin, and the bagging of his cloaths, all denoted waste, want of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... completely unsuccessful; the hollows appeared to have been dry for a very long time; he travelled tolerably well to our camp, where he was immediately killed, skinned, quartered, and cut up. His meat was not quite so flaccid and watery as that of our last bullock; but it was by no means good. He was an old, and a heavy beast, and the experience we had of him strongly corroborates my observations, that such beasts can neither bear the fatigues of a long journey, ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... the summit it was quite full and swollen, as if fresh air had been blown into it; or what is the same thing, it swelled in proportion as the weight of the column of air which pressed upon it diminished. When again brought down, it became more and more flaccid, and, when it reached the bottom, it resumed its original condition. In the nine chapters of which the treatise consists, he shows that all the phenomena or effects hitherto ascribed to the horror of a ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... on a footing of his own, to-day this seemed impossible, for the most indispensable means were lacking to him. As he felt his little money-bag, which he was wont to place under his pillow, he could not forbear smiling in spite of all his troubles, for his fingers sank into the flaccid leather, and found only two coins, one of which he knew alas! was of copper, and the dried merry-thought bone of a fowl, which he had saved to give ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... leaf is immersed in a very strong, almost concentrated, solution of carbonate of ammonia, the glands are instantly blackened, and they secrete copiously; but no movement of the tentacles ensues. Two leaves thus treated became after 1 hr. flaccid, and seemed killed; all the cells in their tentacles contained spheres of protoplasm, but these were small and discoloured. Two other leaves were placed in a solution not quite so strong, and there was well-marked aggregation in 30 m. After 24 hrs. the spherical or more ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... been observed, that Corpulent Persons in some Diseases, that seize on them, do fall away to wonder, not only in the Wast, but in the Arms, Legs, and Thighs; and the very Calves of the Legs have been observed so flaccid and loose, that one might wrap the skin about the bones. The reason whereof, according to the opinion deliver'd, may be easily rendred to be, A great Consumption of the Stock of Liquors, that in Health kept ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... the Action of the Biceps Muscle.*—Place the fingers upon the tendon of the biceps where it connects with the radius of the forearm. With the forearm resting upon the table, note that the tendon is somewhat loose and flaccid, but that with the slightest effort to raise the forearm it quickly tightens. Now transfer the fingers to the body of the muscle, and sweep the forearm through two or three complete movements, noting the changes in the length ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... time I saw expression on the flaccid faces of the Council—surprise and astonishment that a prolat should dare dispute an aristo command. Then a ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
