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More "Inert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... always a crowd there about this hour, but it is generally a very quiet motionless crowd, consisting of listless idlers calmly smoking their cigars, or listening to or retailing the—in general—very dull news of the capital; but on the day of which I am speaking the mass was no longer inert. There was much gesticulation and vociferation, and several people were running about shouting, "Viva la constitucion!"—a cry which, a few days previously, would have been visited on the utterer with death, the city having ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... gives us a connected narrative of creation. Before the earth and sea and the all-covering heaven, one aspect, which we call Chaos, covered all the face of Nature,— a rough heap of inert weight and discordant beginnings of things clashing together. As yet no sun gave light to the world, nor did the moon renew her slender horn month by month,— neither did the earth hang in the surrounding air, poised by its own weight,— nor did the sea stretch its long arms around the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... and harbor constructors to remove sunken rocks out of the way of shipping. But thanks to it, too, the Communards were enabled to blow up the finest monuments of Paris in a few hours. It was at once a powerful instrument of industrial development, and of progress in the conquest of man over inert matter, and a terrible engine of devastation in warfare, and of massacre and vandalism where homicidal and destructive passions were aroused ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.—Fool! why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervour, to gaze on the stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the Desert, foolishly enough, for the last three-thousand years: but canst thou not open thy Hebrew BIBLE, then, or even ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... thrown to the ground. He had picked himself up and had fled, abandoning his gun and knapsack, and at last, worn out by the forced marches endured for eight days, undermined by fear, weakened by hunger, he had rested himself in a trench. He had remained there dazed, inert, stunned by the roar of the bombs, resolved no longer to defend himself, to move no more; then he thought of his wife, and, weeping, demanded what he had done that they should make him suffer so; he picked ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... he went and preached unto the spirits in prison." The revised text expresses the true thought that Christ was quickened, that is to say, was active, in His own spirit state, although His body was inert and in reality dead at the time; and that in that disembodied state He went and preached to the disobedient spirits. The later reading fixes the time of our Lord's ministry among the departed as the interval ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... sounds of voices and of footsteps approaching, but Marishka could not move. She was prone, inert, helpless. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... plastic power Hid Beauty safe from Death in words or stone; Of Rome, fair quarry where those eagles crowd Whose fulgurous vans about the world had blown Triumphant storm and seeds of polity; Of Venice, fading o'er her shipless sea, Last iridescence of a sunset cloud; Than this inert prosperity, This bovine comfort in the sense alone! 150 Yet art came slowly even to such as those. Whom no past genius cheated of their own With prudence of o'ermastering precedent; Petal by petal spreads the perfect rose, Secure ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... if the soul had not already quitted this inert, sluggish, lethargic body, it had at least retreated and concealed itself in depths whither the perceptions of the exterior organs no ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... capriciously with the silent and apparently causeless obstinacy to which very old persons are subject, and which makes them resemble children. In order to sit down beside the young lady he needed a folding-chair. His slightest movements were marked by the inert heaviness, the stupid hesitancy, which characterize the movements of a paralytic. He sat slowly down upon his chair with great caution, mumbling some unintelligible words. His cracked voice resembled the noise made by a stone falling into a well. The young woman nervously pressed my hand, as ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... the match, the gas burst into light and burned with a steady flame. Ardan immediately bent anxiously over the prostrate bodies of his friends. They lay on each other like inert masses, M'Nicholl ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... sense. Again, in speaking of the similarity of facts and the regularity of sequences, we refer them to a law of nature, just as if they were sentient beings acting under the will of a sovereign. Parts of pure matter—the chemical elements, for instance—do not act at all; being brute and inert, it is only by a strong metaphor that they are said to be subject to law. Again, we attribute force, power, &c., to the primitive particles of matter, and speak of their natural agencies. Just so, we talk of tone in coloring, and of a heavy or light sound; ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... those higher beings of your race, who devote themselves to that paramount science through which is attained command over all the subtler forces of nature permeated by vril. But when you talk of matter as something in itself inert and motionless, your parents or tutors surely cannot have left you so ignorant as not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert: every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon by agencies, of which heat is the most apparent and rapid, but vril the most subtle, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... military efforts of democratic France, and luring England into a career of Continental conquest. Monarchy and aristocracy would have gone unchallenged, except within the "natural limits" of France; and the other nations, never shaken to their inmost depths, would have dragged on their old inert fragmentary existence. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... movements, themselves obedient to the human muscles which are commanded by the human brain, which again is guided in its volitions by the voice of the great half-living creature. A strange cross between the form and functions of animated beings, on the one hand, and the passive conditions of inert machinery, on the other! Its utterance rises through all the gamut of Nature's multitudinous voices, and has a note for all her outward sounds and inward moods. Its thunder is deep as that of billows that tumble ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... activity in inert matter that we little suspect. See the processes going on in the stratified rocks that suggest or parody those of life. See the particles of silica that are diffused through the limestone, hunting out each other and coming together in concretions and forming flint or chert nodules; ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... o'clock he lifted her out of her wheel chair. Harriett saw his stoop, and the taut, braced power of his back as he lifted. Prissie lay in his arms with rigid limbs hanging from loose attachments, inert, like a doll. As he carried her upstairs to bed her face had a queer, exalted look of pleasure ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... can the country be exposed to danger or suffering from an infliction such as now threatens? It is impossible, unless we assume all the parties interested—whether the government, the landed proprietors, the farmers, or the labourers—to be inert, and forgetful of their respective interests to an extent of which the world has not yet seen a parallel ... Is it possible to imagine that such a cooperation can be withheld: can the alienation and ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... without end The old man gathers what he dares not spend, While, as for action, do he what he will, 'Tis all half-hearted, spiritless, and chill: Inert, irresolute, his neck he cranes Into the future, grumbles, and complains, Extols his own young years with peevish praise, But rates and censures these ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... bodily indeed at St. Ronan's, but, so far as society was concerned, on the road towards the ancient city of Coventry; and his banishment thither, incurred by that most unpardonable offence in modern morality, a solecism in the code of honour. Though sluggish and inert when called to action, the Baronet was by no means an absolute coward; or, if so, he was of that class which fights when reduced to extremity. He manfully sent for Captain MacTurk, who waited upon him with a grave solemnity ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... career by those "improbable events," so dear to romance, that serve to introduce a hero—a robber's attack, a tempest, or a carriage accident. With a sly glance at such dangerous characters as Lady Greystock in The Children of the Abbey (1798), Miss Austen creates the inert, but good-natured Mrs. Alien as ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Ibsen's works; it is certainly the most impertinent. If there was one class in Norwegian society which was held to be above criticism it was the clerical. A prominent character in Ibsen's comedy is the Rev. Mr. Strawman, a gross, unctuous and uxorious priest, blameless and dull, upon whose inert body the arrows of satire converge. This was never forgotten and long was unforgiven. As late as 1866 the Storthing refused a grant to Ibsen definitely on the ground of the scandal caused by his sarcastic portrait of Pastor Strawman. But the gentler sex, to which every poet looks for an audience, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... interesting her, since no detail was likely to do so. Unfortunately it didn't interest her much. Franklin's eagerness about some local election, or admiration for some talented pupil, or enthusiasm in regard to a new theory that delved deeper and circled wider than any before, left her imagination inert, as did he. But to-night all these things were transformed by the greatness of her own need and of her own relief. And when she read that Franklin was to be in Europe in six weeks' time, and that he intended to spend some months there, and, if ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... value of their remedies is "next to nothing." It must be admitted that many of the plants used in their medical practice possess real curative properties, but it is equally true that many others held in as high estimation are inert. It seems probable that in the beginning the various herbs and other plants were regarded as so many fetiches and were selected from some fancied connection with the disease animal, according to the idea known to modern folklorists as the doctrine of signatures. ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... extremes of Polynesian diversity. The Marquesan is certainly the most beautiful of human races, and one of the tallest—the Paumotuan averaging a good inch shorter, and not even handsome; the Marquesan open-handed, inert, insensible to religion, childishly self-indulgent—the Paumotuan greedy, hardy, enterprising, a religious disputant, and with a trace of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates—the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. It is not to be inferred that of this poetical vigor Pope had only a little, because Dryden had more; for every other writer, since Milton, must give place to Pope; ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... polarized, or retained its magnetic energy, and we are now taking out one set of lines and putting in reversely polarized lines of force. This done, we break the reversed current without much effect of self-induction. The ring remains polarized and inert until an opposite flow of current be sent through. Iron is then a different ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... stream, as it usually does. This state of things greatly increased the chances of flood in the middle Danube, as the descending volume of water and ice-blocks found the lower part of the river still frozen and inert. Even up to the 21st the daily rise in the river was only six inches, and if the large floes of ice which passed the town had only gone on their course without interruption all might still have been well. Unfortunately, however, this was far from being the case. It seems that ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... practised; and Molly was young enough to believe that, after any exercise of virtue, the spirits rose, cheered up by an approving conscience. Such was not the case with Cynthia, however. She sometimes said such things as these, when she had been particularly inert and desponding,— ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... five years before came back to me, a night when, confronted by the necessity for concealing a crime, the box upstairs had been hurriedly unpacked, its contents hidden here and locked away, and some other content, inert and heavy, had taken the ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... stars and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert—but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... pleasing herself, to do nothing which would lower her in the eyes of the world, exercised a powerful influence over her actions. Intellectually brilliant, a clever woman of business, and mentally active; she was yet on some occasions curiously inert, and carried the state of mind embodied in the words "live and let live," to dangerous lengths. She must have possessed great determination, as even Balzac's adoration, and his undoubted powers of fascination, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... interrupted the conversation. The two youths looked down. The deck plan of the tug lay flat and empty save for the inert form of Gaskin. The noise came from inside the cabin and arose to a shouting. It was a drunken ribald sound. A suspicion flashed ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... time, Jane lay and listened. He was tired past all telling, but his soul was relaxed. He lay there for hours—until the tall clock above his head chimed two. He could not sleep, but his consciousness was inert and his mind seemed limp and empty, as one who has worked past his limit. The hymn that the clock chimed through the quarter hours repeated itself over and over again without meaning in his brain. Something aroused him; he ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... of Nature." He says: "We were assured, not long ago, that at Brussels a hen had brought forth half a dozen rabbits." He then adds, "Needham's eels soon followed the Brussels hen." D'Holbach says: "Experience proves to us that the matter which we regard as inert and dead, assumes action, intelligence, and life, when it is combined in a certain way." Voltaire responds: "This is precisely the difficulty. How does a ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... lethargy. Whips cracked, and the gigantic vision had passed. That was June 11—Waterloo was the 18th. On the 20th, three or four hours after the first doubtful rumour had reached us, a carriage drew up to change horses. There was the same inert figure, and the same question and answer. The team broke into a gallop, and the fallen Napoleon was gone. Soon all went on in the ordinary way, and in our little town, isolated in the midst of its forest, one might have thought no changes had taken place; people had ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... vacant self-possession would put down all the Grattans and Currans and Jeffreys and Sydney Smiths in the world. I defy the most brilliant, the readiest, the most genial of talkers to vivify the mass of inert dulness he will find now at every ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... repeat all the arguments, by which I have proved [Book II. Part III. Sect 3.], that reason is perfectly inert, and can never either prevent or produce any action or affection, it will be easy to recollect what has been said upon that subject. I shall only recall on this occasion one of these arguments, which I shall endeavour to render still more conclusive, and ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... loud sigh of relief at his narrow escape. After a moment he peered cautiously around the edge of the door, and seeing the way clear to the control deck, ran back to the ladder. He paused at Roger's inert form and bent over, his lips close ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... scientific questions you will find that "Name ist Schall und Rauch" even more emphatically than Faust says it is in Theology. Most of us are idolators, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions "Force," "Gravity," "Vitality," which our own brains have created. I do not know anything about "inert" things in nature. If we reduce the world to matter and motion, the matter is not "inert," inasmuch as the same amount of motion affects different kinds of matter in different ways. To go back to my own illustration. The fabric of the watch is not ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... of these things the Believer must do, for the mind is a living and moving process, and the thing that lies inert in it is presently covered up by new interests and lost. If you make a sort of King Log of your faith, presently something else will be sitting upon it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving, King de facto of your soul, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... a nurse were in the room when they entered. Murphy lay inert on the bed. He had never regained consciousness, the doctors said, and he was in such a weakened condition that only a miracle beyond the skill of surgery and medicine could save him. The mayor ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... the resemblances of anything existing without the mind, or unperceived, but they will have our ideas of the primary qualities to be patterns or images of things which exist without the mind, in an unthinking substance which they call MATTER. By MATTER, therefore, we are to understand an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion DO ACTUALLY SUBSIST. But it is evident from what we have already shown, that extension, figure, and motion are ONLY IDEAS EXISTING IN THE MIND, and that an idea can be like nothing but another idea, and that consequently neither ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... in his arms and lifted her a little, pressing his lips to her face. She was inert as a statue. She feared him still, and she felt the shiver of horror at his touch, but it could not move her limbs any more. Her eyes opened and looked into his, very close, but his were shut. The mask ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... they ceased to bolt. Standing behind the bushes—against which I now placed the gun to be nearer at hand—I watched the nets till my eye was caught by the motions of the ferret-bag. It lay on the grass and had hitherto been inert. But now the bag reared itself up, and then rolled over, to again rise and again tumble. The ferrets left in it in reserve were eager to get out—sharp set on account of a scanty breakfast—and their motions caused the bag to roll ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... vary any more for the loud tone than for the low tone. The opening must be the same. The low tone must have the power of the loud tone, since it is to be equally understood. The acoustic organs should have nothing to do with the transmission of sound. They must be inert so that the tone may be homogeneous. The speaker or singer should know how to diminish the tone without the contraction of the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... comes in the peculiarly paralysing effect of these baser emotions. As Victor Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, "Despair yawns." Fear and anxiety bring with them a particular kind of physical fatigue which makes us listless and inert. They lie on the spirit with a leaden dullness, which takes from us all possibility of energy and motion. Who does not know the instinct, when one is crushed and tortured by depression, to escape into solitude and silence, and to let the waves and streams flow over one. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Trust and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the Traction Trust and the Money Trust—those masters of America who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-governing, but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant, inert, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... a crowd was collected round the poor, inert mass of humanity which lay motionless in a pool of blood. But two workmen, roused by Vignol's shrieks, were soon on the spot, and pushed their way through the crowd of persons who were gazing with a morbid curiosity on ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... I climbed from the inert body. The torch had hissed itself out. Grantline swung on our building corner, and I leaned down with him to examine it. The torch had fused and scarred the surface of the wall, burned almost through. A pressure-rift had opened. We could see it, a curving gash in the metal wall-plate ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... of Marie Antoinette!' said the invalid, raising a petulant hand, and letting it fall again, inert. 'All the silly memorials of her they sell here!—and the sentimental talk about her! Arthur, of course, now—with his picture—thinks of ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... France; in spite of the disorder in the finances and the crushing weight of the imposts, she was working and growing rich; intellectual development was following the rise in material resources; the court was corrupt and inert, like the king, but a new life, dangerously free and bold, was beginning to course through men's minds the wise, reforming instincts, the grave reflections of the dying Montesquieu no longer sufficed for them; Voltaire, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... I could hear distinctly the echo which followed it. Orrin may have heard it too, for he gave a groan and drew in his horse, and when I reached him I saw him sitting there before the smouldering ashes of his home, silent and inert, without a word to say or an ear to hear the instinctive words of sympathy I could not now ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... unknown captain, had done that which as a junior admiral he did later at Copenhagen, at a moment far more critical to Great Britain. By his own unusual powers of impulse and resolve he had enforced, as far as was possible against the passive, inert lethargy—not to say timidity—of his superior, the course of action which at the moment was essential to the interests of his country. Truly great in his strength to endure, he knew not the perturbations nor the vacillations that fret the temper, and cripple the action, of smaller men; ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... individual soul which, dying, flung into space the two wings of the infinite, the two poles of the sun and the moon. The sun and the moon are the two eternal death-results of the death of individuals. Matter, all matter, is the Life-born. And what we know as inert matter, this is only the result of death in individuals, it is the dead bodies of individuals decomposed and resmelted between the hammer and anvil, fire and sand of the sun and the moon. When time ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... first to make fun of him at the club, to find those easy words which are remembered, and to turn that smooth, flabby, pink, ugly face, like that of an old woman, and of a Levantine eunuch in which the mouth is like a piece of inert flesh, and where the small eyes glisten with concentrated cunning, and remind us of the watchful, angry eyes of a gorilla, at the same time, into ridicule. I knew that he was selfish, without any affection, unreliable, full of whims, turning like a weathercock ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... in public religious gatherings might be encouraged to relate in a proper, earnest, and modest manner their religious experiences, and might also entreat others to become converted. He maintained that much of the criticism of an inert ministry was well founded, that much of the enthusiastic work of laymen and of the itinerants deserved to be recognized by the regular clergy, and that they ought to bestir themselves in furthering such enthusiasm among their own people. Edwards urged also his belief in the ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... provinces, and nowhere else, we have, stronger than before, a sense of a stationary region overhead, or a region that receives products like this earth's products, but from external sources, a region in which this earth's gravitational and meteorological forces are relatively inert—if for many weeks a good part of this substance did hover before finally falling. We suppose that, in 1685, Mr. Vans and the Bishop of Cloyne could describe what they saw as well as could witnesses in 1885: nevertheless, it is going far back; we shall have to have ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... He then aspired not to a higher name Than sober clerks of moderate talents claim; Gravely to pray, and rev'rendly to preach, Was all he saw, good youth! within his reach: Thus may a mass of sulphur long abide, Cold and inert, but, to the flame applied, Kindling it blazes, and consuming turns To smoke and poison, as it boils and burns. James, leaving college, to a Preacher stray'd; What call'd he knew not—but the call obey'd; Mild, idle, pensive, ever led by those Who could ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... forests—more than robes, a vital part of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they have captured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solar rays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark, the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. When the leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, what sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a union and compact ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... of reasoning it may be sufficient to observe, that the contractile fibres consist of inert matter, and when the sensorial power is withdrawn, as in death, they possess no power of motion at all, but remain in their last state, whether of contraction or relaxation, and must thence derive the whole of this property from the spirit of animation. At the same time it is not ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... to overcome the Revolution and save the monarchy, remained inert and sterile. The Opposition insultingly charged it with impotence; it called it the hectoring ministry, the dullest of ministries, and, for answer, it prepared the expedition of Algiers and prorogued the Chambers, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... then found themselves alone on the "Waldeck" after the collision, having no means of raising that inert hull, without even power to leave it, because the two boats on board had been shattered in the boarding. They were reduced to waiting for the passage of a ship, while the wreck drifted little by little under the action of the currents. This action ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... found that they had still retained their pristine savor and strength. No argument of mine, however, could convince my Manbo friends to the contrary. The spirits had consumed the soul, and there remained, according to their staunch belief, nothing but the outward form and inert bulk ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... on the oak chest. The simple, faltering words just spoken had shaken him to the core. Hidden there—hidden even from himself—had lain inert for months a mighty passion such as only a great heart can know. In one moment he had seen it and known it for what it was. Yes, he had indeed loved this girl; he loved her still. When he spoke again his voice seemed to have ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... solely by its strong appeal to the individual conscience. St Simonian institutions, or delightful phalansteres, will in vain flatter every passion and indulge every sense; if they leave the conscience inert, if nothing is built on the sense of duty, they will no sooner rise but they will crumble back ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Sara? 'Smat-ter?" Hattie's tired hand crept toward her friend; but her volition would not carry it across and it fell inert ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... remained thus, crying and half inert with mental anguish and pain, she could not afterwards have told. Nor did she know what it was that roused her from this torpor, and caused her suddenly to sit up in her chair, upright, wide-awake, her every sense on ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... cost him to speak made him conscious of extreme lassitude following upon great exertion. It seemed that when he lay down and drew his blanket over him the action was the last before utter prostration. He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting veins. And there he lay for a long while before he felt that he had begun ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... lifeless, deceased, inanimate, defunct, extinct, departed; inert, obtuse, impassive, callous, torpid, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... like steel. It needed all her strength to support him, for he was heavy, his body inert as that of one fainting. For a moment his head rested against her bosom; and her breath came short, sighing ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... much for Potter. He had brilliant and unusual powers of expression, but this was beyond them. He went to the chair beside the little table, flung himself upon it, his legs outstretched, his arms dangling inert, and stared haggardly upward ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... manifested fatigue upon noticing that you had been an ass, that would have been logical, that would have been rational; whereas it seems to me that to manifest surprise was to be again an ass, because the condition of intellect that can enable a person to be surprised and stirred by inert ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... out-of-doors, taking a leaf from Nature's book and noting how she conceals ugliness wherever she finds it. Then there was the satisfaction of being mistress of the poor domain; of planning, governing, deciding; of bringing order out of chaos; of implanting gayety in the place of inert resignation to the inevitable. Another element of comfort was the children's love, for they turned to her as flowers to the sun, drawing confidently on her fund of stories, serene in the conviction ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... secondary likenesses between the abortive forms of the creative imagination and the impotent forms of the will. In its normal and complete form will culminates in an act; but with wavering characters and sufferers from abulia deliberation never ends, or the resolution remains inert, incapable of realization, of asserting itself in practice. The creative imagination also, in its complete form, has a tendency to become objectified, to assert itself in a work that shall exist ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... living matter are self-preservation and the propagation of the species. The instinct for self-preservation causes a plant to turn away from cold and damaging winds toward the life-giving sun; the inert mussel to withdraw within its shell; the insect to take flight; the animal to fight or to flee; and man to procure food that he may oppose starvation, to shelter himself and to provide clothes that he may avoid the dangers of excessive cold and heat, ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... not go to bed that night. She threw herself, dressed as she was, on her bed, and she had not even the strength to cry left in her, she was so thoroughly dumfounded. She remained quite inert, scarcely knowing that she had a body, and without being at all able to collect her thoughts, though, at moments, she remembered something of what had happened, and then she was frightened at the idea of what might happen. Her terror increased, and every time the great ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... upon a rock, watching her without understanding. Yarra, who had stolen near to Ryder's body, crouched upon the rock, staring intently at the face of his friend. Presently Jim noticed that Lucy was lying inert, and he lifted her to the pool and bathed her forehead with the cool water. Yarra brought a pannikin and a bottle containing brandy from the cave, and Jim poured a little of the spirit between the girl's lips. Lucy revived after a few minutes, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... men on the veranda Galen Albret's identity alone was evident. Grim, four-square, inert, his very way of sitting his chair, as though it were a seat of judgment and he the interpreter of some fierce blood-law, betrayed him. From under the bushy white tufts of his eyebrows the woodsmen felt the search of his inspection. ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... a queen. Popular feeling ebbs and flows with prodigious force, and the change from one state to the other depends, sometimes, on very accidental causes. The news of Mary's escape spread rapidly over the land. Her friends were encouraged and emboldened. Sympathies, long dormant and inert, were awakened in her favor. She issued a proclamation, declaring that her abdication had been forced upon her, and, as such, was null and void. She summoned Murray to surrender his powers as regent, and to come and receive orders from her. She called ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... from her drawer a key, handed it to Hermann, and gave him the necessary instructions. Hermann pressed her cold, inert hand, kissed her bowed head, and left ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... by the laws of nature. But it is impossible to comprehend how physical force can enrich itself at a given moment by a conscious force. Physical force is reduced to movements of bodies and to displacements of atoms; how could a change of position in any inert objects give rise to a judgment, a reasoning, or any phenomenon of the consciousness? It is further said: this idea of function, which materialists here introduce to render more comprehensible the passage from a material body to a spiritual action, contains ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... home of their own. I would warn all brides to superintend the choice of that home. A man, certainly one of the nicest kind, has not what may be called a domestic eye. If he is artistic he will choose a dwelling for its picturesqueness, regardless of drains and dank ditches near the house. An inert man will value his home for its proximity to the station. Another considers the garden the most important feature. The stay-at-home will be influenced by the place which affords the most scope for the pursuit of ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... trees and other rubbish, which had come down the river, and settled close to it. Johnson, partly from a desire to see it play more freely, and partly from that inclination to activity which will animate, at times, the most inert and sluggish mortal, took a long pole which was lying on a bank, and pushed down several parcels of this wreck with painful assiduity, while I stood quietly by, wondering to behold the sage thus curiously employed, and smiling with an humorous satisfaction each time when he carried ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... remained of the spring term. School would close on May twenty-eighth. Already Washington had become insufferably warm, and even Columbia Heights School situated upon its hill, was very trying. The girls were almost too inert to work and spent every possible moment ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... to damage them with our engines from a distance, and also possible to burn them to the water's edge with incendiary missiles; and if they do venture to stir from their place, they will not overtake anyone by pursuing nor escape by fleeing, since they are so heavy that they are entirely too inert to inflict any damage, and so huge that they are exceptionally liable ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... and left the room. He went upstairs slowly, surprised at the feeling of apathy that had come over him. In the face of direct action the high tension of the last few weeks had snapped, leaving him dull, almost inert, and reluctance to go forward grew with every step. But at the head of the stairs his mood changed suddenly. All that the coming interview meant to him revealed itself with startling clearness. With a deep breath he caught at the rail, for ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... it will act. Something may surely be expected from those in arms who even without them would be considered awkward customers; they show no inert pasty masses of flesh, no cadaverous skinniness, they are not shade-blighted women; they do not quiver and run with sweat at the least exertion, and pant under their helmets as soon as a midday sun like ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... power will that army be invested when it rises up and stands upon its feet! We may form some faint idea of it, when in our large cities any thing occurs to excite the interest and warm up the feeling of that apparently inert Celtic mass. The largest halls constructed cannot contain the multitudes who have only read the announcement of a meeting, a lecture, or a charitable undertaking. Such scenes are witnessed every day along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... away. Oppressed and thoughtful, Banneker walked slowly across the blazing, cactus-set open toward his shack. There was still the simple housekeeping work to be done, for he had left early that morning. He felt suddenly spiritless, flaccid, too inert even for the little tasks before him. The physician's pronouncement had taken the strength from him. Of course he had known that it couldn't be very long—but only ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... been perfectly inert up to this time, threw out a marvelous light, which illuminated the depths ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... state analogous to the ordinary "waking trance" of the hypnotists. It is believed that all bodies convey, or are the vehicles of certain universal property called od or odyle (od-hyle), which is not regarded as a force but as an inert and passive substance underlying the more active forces familiar to us in kinetic, calorific and electrical phenomena. In this respect it holds a position analogous to the argon of the atmosphere, and is capable of taking up the vibrations of those bodies to which it is related and ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... a fish snap at my bait, checked it, and knew that I was fast into a monster. For a few moments he let me feel something heavy and inert at the end of my line, then there was a plunge and a rush, the line went hissing out, and try as I would to check it, the fish ran straight off till I dragged with all my might, and felt that either the line must break or my hands ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... and thought over those words. Oh, ethics! Oh, logic! Oh, wisdom! At his age! So they deprived him of his only remaining pleasure out of regard for his health! His health! What would he do with it, inert and trembling wreck that he was? They were taking care of his life, so they said. His life? How many days? Ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred? Why? For his own sake? Or to preserve for some time longer the spectacle of his impotent ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant • David Widger
... modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... people generations before they are seized with such political fanaticism, but judging from precedents, it is a rational probability that the absolute monarchy of China may yet become the object of furious attack by her now inert and abject populace, apparently in happy ignorance of the nature of sovereign authority, the free and unrestrained exercise of which they may learn ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... activity on our satellite. Heat, therefore, there was once in the moon; and accordingly we are enabled to conclude that, on a retrospect through illimitable periods of time, we must find the moon transformed from that cold and inert body she now seems to a glowing and incandescent mass of molten material. The earth therefore and the moon in some remote ages—not alone anterior to the existence of life, but anterior even to the earliest periods of which geologists have cognizance—must have been both globes of ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... subtle watch-work of the brain, the mighty laboratory of the heart, vision, sensibility, self-propagated warmth, pleasure, hope, memory, thought, liberty—not one of these divine gifts does it possess. It is cold, icy, senseless, dull, inert matter. Let Phidias have formed the statue, it is no better. Let the purest gold be its material, it is no worthier than the meanest model in clay to the valuation of the philosopher. And here, as in so many cases, the great philosopher ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... death, he called into birth the flowers and the numberless forests,—even as he himself was every morning born anew out of darkness,—so he called the children of the earth to a glorious rising in his light. Everything of the earth was inert, weighing heavily upon the sense and the heart, only waiting its transfiguration and exaltation through his power, until it should rise into the heavens; which was the type of his translation to himself of his ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... now deep in her siesta. She was inert, relaxed, untroubled by dreams. Her hair was damp ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... and knew it. His body lay along the rocky road, inert and unresisting. He breathed in convulsive gasps, but apart from that, now that he was down, he never moved. He was as tired as a man well could be. Varney sitting closely upon him, holding him ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the broken end hurtled over the ledge. The eagle's fight was done. It swerved from its course, and frantically tried to recover itself. But all in vain. Far out over the hillside it swung, and then a helpless and inert mass, it dropped down, and crashed into the tops of the firs and jack-pines, which lifted their heads like pointed ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... he said: "Oh, one can swallow it—it's strange, but it is comparatively inert if swallowed even in a pretty good-sized quantity. I doubt if Mrs. Ralston ever heard of it before except by hearsay. If she had, she'd have scratched herself with ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... given a little study to the nature of soils and plant food. Some of his land needs draining. The ground is sour and cold from stagnant water beneath the surface, and the plant food which Nature originally placed in it is inert and in no condition to be used. Nearly all of his uplands have been depleted of organic or vegetable matter. He did not put into the soil all that the plants needed, and the fact that his crops were poor proves it. The materials he used may have been adulterated, or not in a form ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... with the tuberculous focus. One of the obstacles to this is that the focus is often surrounded by tissues or fluids which have been almost entirely deprived of bactericidal substances. In the case of caseated glands in the neck, for example, it is obvious that the removal of this inert material is necessary before the tissues can be irrigated with fluids of high bactericidal value. Again, in tuberculous ascites the abdominal cavity is filled with a fluid practically devoid of anti-bacterial substances, so that ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... the truth of feeling and of circumstance is translated into a tinkling sound, a tinsel common-place. It must be owned, there is a power in true poetry that lifts the mind from the ground of reality to a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, incoherent materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration of its own, melts and moulds them into sublimity and beauty. But Sir Walter (we contend, under correction) has not this creative ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... from long prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of enervating ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... propagated, the spiritual realm of the Roman Pontiff policed, and his secular authority augmented. A Spanish Order rose at the right moment to supply that intellectual and moral element of vitality without which the Catholic Revival might have remained as inert as a stillborn child. The devotion of the Jesuits to the Papacy, was in reality the masterful Spanish spirit of that epoch, masking its world-grasping ambition under the guise of obedience to Rome. This does not mean ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... has now been standing with its handle secured for about eight hours. No excitement is apparent, but still it may not be absolutely inert. Of this each one present must judge, but I will connect it with this electroscope (Figs. 13 and 14), and then move the handle slowly, so that you may see when the excitement commences and judge of its absolutely reliable behavior as an instrument ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... But Dr. Guenther informs me that the sluggishness of the common tope (Galeus vulgaris) is much like that of the sturgeon, and yet the bodies of its vertebrae are distinct and well-ossified. Moreover, the great salamander of Japan is much more inert and sluggish than either, and yet it has a well-developed, ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... and the train swept farther west she became dull, languid, almost inert. Lack of food and the previous night's exposure induced in her a feeling of giddiness which at times had in it something of the nature of delirium. In this state her mind turned persistently to Thalassa, and the object of her return to him. She was struggling towards him, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... had envied the loungers in the parks—those silent, inert figures that lie under the trees all the long summer day, their shabby hats over their faces, their hands clasped above their heads, legs sprawled in uncouth comfort, while the sun dapples down between the leaves and, like a good fairy godmother, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... understanding is at once pitifully weak and odiously perverse, and whose heart is from the beginning wicked, corrupt, and given over to reprobation. The difference is plainly enormous. The theologian discourages men; they are to wait for the miracle of conversion, inert or desperate. The naturalist arouses them; he supplies them with the most powerful of motives for the energetic use of the most powerful of their endowments. "Men would always have Grace," says Holbach, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... bud, and the new leaves are capable of performing their office of exposing these juices to the influence of the air; the placental vessels cease to act, coalesce, and are transformed from sap- wood, or alburnum, into inert wood; serving only for the support of the new tree, which ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... against an unhappy fate. Though his frame was lithe, vigorous, and admirably proportioned, all his movements were slow and apathetic, like those of an old man. His gestures were entirely devoid of animation, his whole expression inert, and it was evidently a matter of perfect indifference to him where he might chance to find himself at home, in his dismal chateau, or abroad in ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... two or three electrodes from which the air has been exhausted, or which is filled with an inert gas, and used as a detector, an amplifier, an oscillator or a modulator in wireless ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... except that I traded horses twice, reaching my destination within a week, having seen no country en route that could compare with the valley of the Clear Fork. The capital city was a straggling village on the banks of the Colorado River, inert through political usurpation, yet the home of many fine people. Quite a number of cowmen resided there, owning ranches in outlying and adjoining counties, among them being my acquaintance of the year before and present ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... acid, of which the process of burning deprives it. The effects of these two preparations are exceedingly different on animal bodies; the former causing rapid decomposition and consumption; the latter being, on the contrary, quite inert. Loaf-sugar, though prepared by means of lime, ought never to contain a particle of it, and scarcely ever does. So that, on the whole, the remarks in the text are totally incorrect. As a matter of fact, again, the writer, from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... unpleasant topics. He left alone the subject as to why Millicent had trapped him and forced her company upon him. For the time being she was good and gentle, the reason being that she also was relaxed and inert—the result of a good meal after a ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... fell over her hopeless eyes; her lips drooped; the flush of her splendid florid beauty had faded as if it had never bloomed. She discovered that she was gasping in the dull, chill air. She leaned against the balustrade of the stairs, limp, inert, as if every impetus of vigor had deserted her. But it would never do for her to faint, she reflected. She must act for others, with just judgment, with foresight, with effective housewifely care, and with good heart ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... was doomed I knew, but I was prevented from seeing the destruction by a spur of the hill that shut off the view of the city. It is impossible for me to tell how long I stood there inert. Probably it was only a few seconds, but so vivid were my impressions that it now seems as though I stood as a spectator for many minutes. When I recovered possession of my senses I ran to my house and collected the members of the family, all of whom were panic stricken. I hurried ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... model for his case. His outstretched feet and legs are in one. The form of the knee, the swell of the calf, the contours of the thigh and the trunk, are summarily indicated, and are, as it were, vaguely modelled under the wood. The head, apparently the only living part of this inert body, is wrought out in the round. The dead man is in this wise imprisoned in a kind of statue of himself; and this statue is so well balanced that it can stand on its feet if required, as upon a pedestal. In the other type of sarcophagus, the deceased lies at full length upon his tomb, and his ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... applied the term force also to that molecular attraction which we called chemical affinity. When, however, we spoke of the conservation of force, in the case of elastic collision, we meant neither a pull nor a push, which, as just indicated, might be exerted upon inert matter, but we meant force invested in motion—the vis viva, as it is ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... liquid and uncrystallized. Think how these fools of men have called diamonds precious above all gems through these many weary years, and showered them on their kings, or tossed them to their mistresses' feet, never dreaming that the silly stone they lauded was inert, crystallized life!" ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... saw him sitting alone in the dining-room, with his head resting on his hand, the attitude informed with life. The turn of his head, the shape of his hand, were insistent things. She saw him standing in front of her, long-limbed, erect of mien. She saw—If she looked pale and inert, it was because that inner thought of her lived so hard that the body was worn out ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... Gresham, Secretary of State in the early part of Cleveland's second term, died in May, 1895, being succeeded by Richard Olney, transferred from the portfolio of Attorney General. In a day, Cleveland's foreign policy, hitherto so inert, became vigorous to the verge of rashness. Deeming the Monroe Doctrine endangered by Great Britain's apparently arbitrary encroachments on Venezuela in fixing the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... bent over, he opened his eyes, smiled, pronounced her name, still smiling and keeping his sunken eyes on her. They were filmy and bluish, like the eyes of the very old; and the hand she lifted and held was the stricken hand of age—inert, lifeless, without weight. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... intensely active and progressive as the nineteenth century has been, in politics, science and literature, it would have been surprising if the church had remained inert, wrapped like a mummy in the cerements of the past. At the beginning of the century, there were voices on all hands loudly proclaiming that it was dead; that it was antiquated and obsolete; that it had lost touch with the life of the time, that it was a relic of exploded superstition; and ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... "Sure it does," he said. "I'd say it was a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple— comparatively, anyhow—because inert ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... slept, but lay inert and not unhappy. Now and then one of his gentlemen, given permission, tiptoed into the room, and stood looking down at his royal master. Annunciata came, and was at last stricken by conscience to a prayer at his bedside. On one of her last visits that was. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and chaos of people to the hill and the moon. But the people stood round her like stones, like magnetic stones, and she could not go, in actuality. Skrebensky, like a load-stone weighed on her, the weight of his presence detained her. She felt the burden of him, the blind, persistent, inert burden. He was inert, and he weighed upon her. She sighed in pain. Oh, for the coolness and entire liberty and brightness of the moon. Oh, for the cold liberty to be herself, to do entirely as she liked. She wanted to get right ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... leaned her head against the back and closed her lids; presently they grew pink. Then, with drooping head, inert hands and staring ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... from among the inert figures and sleepily regarded us before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead—it was like a phantom world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... remembered that she did not know a word of French; and when I looked round there was no one to be seen. The mysterious message still rang in my ears, but I was far too weak to attempt to cut the tree myself, I lay there in a state of inert drowsiness until, rousing myself a little before dawn, I heard the familiar footsteps of Yamba approaching the spot where I lay. Her face expressed anxiety, earnestness, ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Winter. Winter, after all, Is not so drear as was my boding dream While Autumn gleamed its latest watery gleam On sapless leafage too inert to fall. Still leaves and berries clothe my garden wall Where ivy thrives on scantiest sunny beam; Still here a bud and there a blossom seem Hopeful, and robin still is musical. Leaves, flowers and fruit and one delightful song Remain; these days are short, but now the nights Intense ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... the armed soldiers seemed to draw closer together, as if to escape her individual censure. It was like a group of heavy water-fowl, when they close to avoid the stoop of the slight and beautiful merlin, dreading the superiority of its nature and breeding over their own inert physical strength.—"How now?" again she demanded of them; "is it a time, think ye, to mutiny, when your lord is absent, and his nephew and lieutenant lies stretched on a bed of sickness?—Is it thus you keep your oaths?—Thus ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... in a stupor for some minutes, till a strange sensation succeeded the aforesaid perceptions, mystifying her intelligence, and leaving her physically almost inert. With his personal disappearance, the last three days of her life with him seemed to be swallowed up, also his image, in her mind's eye, waned curiously, receded far away, grew stranger and stranger, less and less real. Their meeting and marriage had been so sudden, unpremeditated, adventurous, ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... there about this hour, but it is generally a very quiet motionless crowd, consisting of listless idlers calmly smoking their cigars, or listening to or retailing the—in general—very dull news of the capital; but on the day of which I am speaking the mass was no longer inert. There was much gesticulation and vociferation, and several people were running about shouting, "Viva la constitucion!"—a cry which, a few days previously, would have been visited on the utterer with death, the city having for some weeks past been ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... starting for Brittany, and making a fresh appeal to his father; then he was withheld by the dread that an angry discussion would be the only sequence. He knew that his father's pride, sustained by that of his grandmother, was unconquerable, and that the sentence, which condemned him to a dreary, inert, and profitless existence, would only be pronounced upon ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... abroad but these two. A coat of ice had polished the walks, so she went by the road, between the long white mounds that lined it. The road, whose curves were absorbed in the dimness, had thus lost its look of activity and lay inert as any frozen waterway. Only a little wind, the star's sparkle, and Mary's step and breath seemed living things—but from the rows of chimneys up and down the Old Trail Road, faint smoke went up, a plume, a wreath, a veil, where the village folk, invisible within quiet roof and wall, lifted ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... in her steamer chair, her hand abandoned to him. And when her mirth had passed a slight sense of fatigue left her silent, inert, staring at nothing. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... him. They cut their way into the very heart of the column; and before the Russians could crush them with mere weight the other regiments of the same brigade hurled themselves on the right and on the left against the huge inert mass. The Russians broke and retreated in disorder before a quarter of their number, leaving to Scarlett and his men the glory of an action which ranks with the Prussian attack at Mars-la-Tour in 1870 as the most brilliant cavalry operation in modern warfare. The squadrons ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... more careless days, when he lived for this kind of thing. After all, what was life but a means whereby to give one's spirit play? And yet again—and yet—was he no more than a brute himself? What was the use? What good would it all do? And suddenly he loosed his grip, and the inert body of the bosun rolled down the tarpaulined hatch and ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... to, but of course my days are busy, and evenings somewhat taken up with the children. Still, I deny matter as being inert, having absolutely no power of itself, except what is delegated to it by the senses. I know it has no life, intelligence or causation of itself, but only as man in his ignorance allows it to have. This has been held by wise men of all ages. ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... who communicates an account of it to Le Genie Civil. The discovery was due entirely to scientific induction from some experiments made upon different specimens of dynamite, with a view to the determination of the effect on the explosive force of the various inert or at least slowly combustible substances with which nitro-glycerine is mixed to produce the dynamite of commerce. Of late, in place of the infusorial earth which formed the solid portion of Nobel's dynamite, such substances as sawdust, powdered bark, and even gunpowder, have been used, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... added to a form of exquisite proportions, rather full and rounded for her years, and of the tallest medium height, she inherited from her mother. Even the color of her eye, the arched brows, and the long silken lashes, came from the same source; but its expression was her fathers. Inert and composed, it was soft, benevolent, and attractive; but it could be roused, and that without much difficulty. At such moments it was still beautiful, though it was a little severe. As the last shawl fell aside, and she stood dressed in a ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his grief—unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... is really preventing a free, natural production, and that other parts are then compelled to do its work; this accounts for many ruined voices. "To make a part rigid is equal to the extirpation of such part. While it is in a state of rigidity it ceases to take part in any action whatsoever: it is inert and the same as if ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... respect is more correct than ours. It is not to be supposed that the dye used can produce any very bad effects on the consumer, for, had this been the case, it would have been discovered before now; but if entirely harmless or inert, its being so must be ascribed to the very small quantity which ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... aroused to action. His laborious method of describing by an accumulation of details postponed the play of his powers, which are at their height in the action of his characters; yet sooner or later the inert masses of his composition were fused into a burning whole. But if Balzac is primarily a dramatist in the creation and manipulation of his characters, he is also a supreme painter in his presentation of scenes. And what characters and what scenes has he not set before us! Over two thousand ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of intrusion, hither might wealth and congenial culture have invited all the gentler and better spirits which had begun to move over the troubled face of Italy, promising a second and younger empire of poesy, and lore, and art. To the graceful and romantic but somewhat pensive and inert, temperament of the young noble, more adapted to calm and civilized than stormy and barbarous times, ambition proffered no reward so grateful as lettered leisure and intellectual repose. His youth coloured by the influence of Petrarch, his manhood had dreamed of a happier Vaucluse not untenanted ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... being perceived: then suddenly the boatswains gave out their cry, and the men cheered, and all pulled as hard as they could, and with splash and dash they drove their ships against the enemy's, which were inert, lying at anchor, some empty, others hurriedly taking their crews on board. The ships of three Cyprian kings—Pnytagoras, king of Salamis, Androcles, king of Amathus, and Pasicrates, king of Curium[14402]—were ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... with his compliments. Fanny wondered what she wanted with it. "Not to inspect our little characters, it is to be hoped," said Vizard. "Why not pay her a visit, you ladies? then she will tell you, perhaps." The ladies instantly wore that bland look of inert but rocky resistance I have already noted as a characteristic of "our girls." Vizard saw, and said, "Try and persuade ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... that "all things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made."[206] C. W. Leadbeater has well put it: "The result of this first great outpouring [the 'moving' of the Spirit] is the quickening of that wonderful and glorious vitality which pervades all matter (inert though it may seem to our dim physical eyes), so that the atoms of the various planes develop, when electrified by it, all sorts of previously latent attractions and repulsions, and enter ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... gone crazy. I had, for the time, gone crazy. The fellow lay at my feet, inert. I stopped ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... present knowledge could go. His judgment still hung in suspense, but his senses quickened themselves to detect, if possible, what the outcome might be. He saw the tender approach the boat, lie alongside; saw one sailor after another descend the rope ladder, saw a limp, inert mass lifted from the rowboat and carried up, as if it had been merchandise, to the deck of the yacht; saw two men follow the limp bundle over the gunwale; and finally saw the boat herself drawn up and placed in her davits. Hambleton's mind at last slid to its conclusion, ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... standing in his shirt Before a company of Calmucks, drilling, Exclaiming, fooling, swearing at the inert, And lecturing on the noble art of killing,— For deeming human clay but common dirt This great philosopher was thus instilling His maxims,[409] which to martial comprehension Proved death in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... energetically plunge his hooked pole in and out and around until he had located the submerged sheep. He lifted its head above the dip. The sheep showed no sign of life. Down on his knees dropped Glenn, to reach the sheep with strong brown hands, and to haul it up on the ground, where it flopped inert. Glenn pummeled it and pressed it, and worked on it much as Carley had seen a life-guard work over a half-drowned man. But the sheep did not respond ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... by the head and two by the heels, and carried me, stiff and inert, from the hut. As I came into the open air I could have cried out in my amazement. The moon had risen above the beacon, and there, clear outlined against its silver light, was the figure of the man stretched upon the top. The brigands were either in their ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him into the power of the demons, he felt himself pushed and dragged amidst a crowd of people who were all hurrying in the same direction. As he was unaccustomed to walk in the streets of a city, he was shoved and knocked from one passer to another like an inert mass; and being embarrassed by the folds of his tunic, he was more than once on the point of falling. Desirous of knowing where all these people could be going, he asked one of them the cause of ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... difficult to disentangle the main issues; but it seems certain that side by side with political and economic divisions, there is a gulf growing wider and wider every day between the adherents of what might be called the Hellenic Renaissance and the inert, suspicious, unintelligent mob; that mob the mud of whose heavy traditions is capable of breeding, at one and the same time, the most crafty hypocrisy and the most ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... agonies in past ages must have been employed to produce such vast upheavals. One cannot help contemplating with awe the possibility of the world again becoming violently rent and shaken to its foundations by the forces which though now comparatively inert, still exist beneath us and occasionally give sad proof of their undiminished power. In the present day the slow but continued action of this subterranean power is in some parts perceptible (as in South America) and we have ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... consequence. The giant was put to bed in the little room behind the partition of the drinking-room that he might hear what was said and talk to his friends, for his head was quite clear although his enormous body was helplessly inert. It was hoped at first that his immense legs would regain some degree of power; but this hope soon disappeared, and Toine spent his days and nights in the bed, which was only made up once a week, with the help of four neighbors ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... Robert settled the inert form of the Onondaga against his left shoulder, and, being naturally very strong, with a strength greatly increased by a long life in the woods, he was able to carry the weight easily. He had no plan yet in ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... which had been perfectly inert up to this time, threw out a marvelous light, which illuminated the ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... helpless hands hit against some floating substance on the waves. She could not have grasped it by herself, for her strength was gone; but a hand gripped her in the darkness, and dragged her, almost insensible, to safety. For a long while she lay inert across the knees of her rescuer. Consciousness was at its very boundary. She knew that in some dim distance strong hands were chafing a wet and frozen body...but whose hands?...whose body?...Presently it was lifted to the shelter of strong arms; ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... house, break his exhausted slumbers. Lying on an outflung arm his head with its sunken, closed eyes, loose lips, seemed hardly more alive than the photographed clay of Mrs. Hollidew in the sitting room. He would wake slowly, confused; the dog would lick his inert hand, and they would go together in search of food to ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... produced there as the results of certain processes which are proceeding within the plant, and there is no evidence to show that any part of it is ever absorbed in the state of oil by the roots when they are presented to them. On the other hand, the oils are extremely inert substances, and undergo chemical changes very slowly; so that there is no likelihood of their being converted into carbonic acid, or any other substance which may be useful to the plant; and as they contain no nitrogen, and consist only of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, they can ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... form and more than once during that time, they had almost given up hope of bringing back the spark of life. Then, all at once, a change took place—the ashy look of her face gave way to a faint tinge of color—the blue lips parted in something very like a sigh, and her hands, which had been lying inert and lifeless at her ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... art of HENRY JAMES, Vain the wealth of ROTHSCHILDS or of MORGANS, If I fail to satisfy the claims Of these mystic and momentous organs; I'm no better than a grain of sand Or a simple common polypody, With an undeveloped pineal gland, An inert pituitary body. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... established fact that matter, per se, is inert, and that its energy is derived from the physical forces; therefore all chemical and physical phenomena observed in the universe are caused by and due to the operations of the physical forces, and matter, of whatever state or condition it may be in, is but the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... of this antithesis comes from an imperfect realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... The only inert and useless gas in an arrangement like this is the nitrogen of the air, which being in large quantities does act as a serious diluent. To diminish the proportion of nitrogen, steam is often injected as well as air. The glowing coke can decompose the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... this thickly-populated province nowhere venturing to rise against the handful of robbers by whom they were so cruelly persecuted. A Baron von Puckler offered an individual exception: his endeavors to rouse the inert masses met with no success, and, rendered desperate by his failure, he blew out his brains. When too late a prince of Anhalt-Pless assembled an armed force in Upper Silesia and attempted to relieve ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... at the right of the doorway lay a form—awful, ghastly, and unspeakably repulsive. The head, which lay high but inert upon the pillow, was surrounded with the grey hairs of age, and the eyes, which seemed to stare into ours, were glassy with reflected light and not with inward intelligence. This glassiness told the tale of the room's grim silence. It was death we looked on, not the death we had ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... go to sleep, Sophy!" His dark eyes, full of life and compelling power, held my tired and dimmed ones, his firm, warm hands held my cold and inert fingers. "My love, my dear love, stay. You have got to stay, Sophy. Don't you understand? ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... furrows of the road. Then, more like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the steaming underbrush. Here he lay still until the clatter of harness and the sound of voices faded in the distance. Had he been followed, it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any semblance to a known form or figure. A hideous, reddish mask of dust and clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated in his trailing sleeves. And when he rose, staggering like a drunken man, and plunged wildly into the recesses of the ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... reigning his pony to a sliding stop, as he saw that, for the present at least, the man was safe, though his inert form might indicate serious injury. ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... of actual or referred injury of a part; (3) a series of local phenomena that are developed in consequence of primary lesion of the tissues and that tend to heal these lesions; (4) the method by which an organism attempts to render inert the noxious elements introduced from without or arising within it; (5) a disturbance of the mechanism of nutrition of an organ or tissue, affecting the structures concerned in ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... a change had come in Miss Vaughan's condition. Her eyes were still closed, but her body no longer lay inert and lifeless, for from moment to moment it was shaken by a severe nervous tremor. Godfrey's face was very grave as he ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... Harding turned from the awful sight as Billy Mallory's bloody and swollen eyes rolled up and set, while the mucker threw the inert form roughly from him. Quick to the girl's memory sprang Mallory's recent declaration, which she had thought at the time but the empty, and vainglorious boasting of the man in love—"Why I'd die for you, ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and pointed at by his own equals—his own little world—cuts him to the soul. And if you can succeed in breaking his pride, and destroying this sensitiveness, then he is a lost being. He can never recover his self-esteem, and you have chucked him half way—a stolid, inert, sullen victim—to the perdition of the prison or ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... they might be sold into the territories—is the regulation of commerce, isn't it? Well now, isn't that better than calling the territories property and subject to the arbitrary rule of Congress as merely inert matter? If you can rule the territories arbitrarily as to slavery, why not as to anything else? Suppose we annex Cuba; under this doctrine we could rule Cuba arbitrarily, just as England ruled the Colonies here arbitrarily. Then take the ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... governed much as other countries are governed, the real directive power lying in the hands of a comparatively small body which is able by hook or crook to infect with its conscious will a population largely indifferent and inert. A visitor to Moscow to-day would find much of the constitutional machinery that was in full working order in the spring of 1919 now falling into rust and disrepair. He would not be able once a week or so to attend All-Russian ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... to where their horses were tied up in a glade, and presently we were galloping towards the hills, myself an inert bundle strapped across an Indian saddle. The pain of the motion was great, but I had a kind of grim comfort in bearing it. After a time I think my senses left me, and I slipped into a stupor, from which I woke with ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... were enough to wreck the vitality of a man. With an almost womanish tenderness, Carew had brought his friend back to the tent, and made him over to the care of Paddy who gave up all things else, for the sake of his little Canuck. All that afternoon and night, Weldon lay passive, inert, while Paddy bathed him, fed him, poured cool, soft things over his wounds, fed him again, and then sat down beside him with his own stubby hand resting against Weldon's limp fingers. But, the next morning, Weldon rose, buttoned and belted himself with elaborate care. Then, disregarding ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... POSITION or REST. This aspect of the Universe or of Language may therefore be appropriately denominated Statoid (or Spaceoid). The relations between the Parts of this Aspect, denoted by the Prepositions and Conjunctions, are inert or static relations, concerning predominantly Position in Space, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... old age, and yet the life principle remains. He does not eat—at least, the nourishment he takes is wholely negligible. But he still has energy. To be sure, he rarely moves about and his body remains practically inert. But we must never forget that the mind is a muscle and calls for continual rebuilding. And the mind of Mr. Cumberland is never inactive. It works ceaselessly. It will not permit him to sleep. For three days, now, as far as I can tell, he has not closed his eyes. It might ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... what source she had drawn a characterizing passionate, though silent, strength of mind and body, it would be difficult to explain. Her mind and her emotions had been left utterly unfed, but they were not of the inert order which scarcely needs feeding. Her feeling for the sparrows had held more than she could have expressed; her secret adoration of the "Lady Downstairs" was an intense thing. Her immediate surrender to the desire in the first pair of human eyes—child eyes though they were—which had ever ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... whereat her heart failed her, as a thrusting of herself where she was not welcome; but he spoke so fiercely and dictatorially, that she reserved her pleading for the morning, when he would probably be too inert not to be glad of ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Thus I continued, inert, helpless, motionless, till the Princesse d'Henin came into my apartment. Her first news was, that Bonaparte had already reached Compigne, and that to-morrow, the 20th of March, he might arrive in ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... admiration begins. They pared away the stone to the minimum that safety demanded, and beyond it,—yet not from thrift, but to make the design more preeminent and necessary, and to owe as little as possible to the inert strength ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... village—known for miles up the creek as persons of probity—who claim that it was too much confidence in the Genus Smart-Setter, and trotting horses at the County Fairs, that made it possible for our friend to avail himself of the Bankruptcy Act. Still others, too inert to follow the winding ways of a strange career and give reasons, dispose of the matter by simply saying, "Providence!"—rolling their eyes upward, then walking out, leaving the wordy contestants humiliated ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... order;—while this spirit prevailed among the ruling classes, there was little fear that a revolution of any kind would be effected by a sudden stroke. As in domestic politics, so too in international relations, these solidly established states were habitually inert, strong in defence, but irresolute and sluggish in attack. The age produced no conqueror to sweep through Europe like a whirlwind, because the implements of conquest on the grand scale had either been destroyed or had not yet come into existence. The peoples of Europe ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... was supplied and the party moved on. About to descend into the sunken road the bearers ducked to that fatal shell whine ... too late. Three blood-soaked figures were visible through the lifting-smoke stretched inert on ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... wrest himself from the iron grasp; madly he fought for freedom; but always there was that slow, deadly tightening at the throat. Panting and choking, he had made one last desperate attempt to break the grip that pinned him down; and then lay spent and inert except for an occasional hoarse gasp, or convulsive movement ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... to utter a single word. I saw him, after he had searched the dead man's pockets, raise the inert body with its awful featureless face and drag it to the bulwarks. Then I rushed forward ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... otherwise find to be abundantly certain; and it produced conspicuous definite results. It is, as it were, the one fact still worth human remembrance in this expensive Radewitz and its fooleries; and is itself left in that vague inert state,— ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... Felix had felt half asleep through the earlier days of his stay, and Lance seemed to be lulled into a continual doze whenever he was unoccupied, and that was almost always. It had grieved his elder brother to see this naturally vivacious being so inert and content with inaction, only strolling about a little in early morning and late evening, and languid and weary, if not actually suffering, during the heat and glare of the day. He was now, with his air-pillow and a railway rug, lying on the beach beside Felix, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for some yards with blood running abundantly from his neck, and fell and never stirred again. Another went down upon his back clumsily in the roadway and lay wringing his hands faster and faster until suddenly with a movement like a sigh they dropped inert by his side. A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit ran and stopped and ran again. He seemed to be holding something red and strange to his face with both hands; above them his eyes were round and anxious. Blood came out between his fingers. He went right past the hotel and stumbled ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... viz., Krishna and Arjuna. This handsome Bhima also is the foremost of all persons endued with might. Of great renown, what can he not achieve when with ye two? Troops, when properly led, always do excellent service. A force without a leader hath been called inert by the wise. Forces, therefore, should always be led by experienced commanders. Into places that are low, the wise always conduct the water. Even fishermen cause the water (of tank) to run out through holes. (Experienced leaders ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... judge, not he; not even a merciful judge; he was a man full of weakness and a son full of love. He remembered nothing of what his brother had told him; he neither reasoned nor argued, he merely laid his two hands on his mother's inert body, and not being able to pull the pillow away, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the most incongruous and vacillating, idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of something inert and extended and passive, as the cause of our sensations and the substratum of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing but an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition that every sensation comes to us, causatively, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... opened the door they thought that she had fainted, for she lay in an inert heap on the floor at the foot of the bed. But a hasty examination showed them, to their horror, that the girl was dead—heart failure, presumably. But when they raised her from the floor they discovered the real cause of her ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... of integrity or fixed principle, there is not much lost upon either race: in that point they are "much of a muchness." They are also both respectable for their attainments in cowardice; but with this difference, that the Cinghalese are soft, inert, passive cowards: but your Kandyan is a ferocious little bloody coward, full of mischief as a monkey, grinning with desperation, laughing like a hyena, or chattering if you vex him, and never to be trusted for a moment. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... deserted roadways towards that old solitary brick-tower. Here I stand, and watch the Arno rolling its sullen waves. In Pisa, at such an hour, the Arno is the emblem of Despair. Swollen with melted snow from the mountains, it has gnawed its miserable clay banks and now creeps along, leaden and inert, half solid, like a torrent of liquid mud—irresolute whether to be earth or water; whether to stagnate here for ever at my feet, or crawl onward yet another sluggish league into the sea. So may Lethe look, or Styx: the nightmare of a ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... rattled over the pavings, through the lighted streets, no one spoke. The lady leaned back in her corner. Opposite her Rodriguez hummed "Salve! dimora" and I beside him, sat strangely confused and inert, still as if in ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... cruelty, or hard-heartedness, before a tribunal of her equals (i. e., fashionable friends), the charge would have been scornfully repelled, and unanimous would have been her acquittal. "Hard-hearted! oh, no! she was only prudent and wise." Who could expect her to suffer her pampered, inert darling to meet and acknowledge as an equal the far less daintily fed and elegantly clad sister, whom God called to labor for her frugal meals? Ah, this fine-ladyism, this ignoring of labor, to which, in accordance with the divine ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... own part, trials, which in perspective would have seemed to me quite intolerable, when they actually came I endured without prostration. Yet I must confess that, in the time which has elapsed since Emily's death, there have been moments of solitary, deep, inert affliction, far harder to bear than those which immediately followed our loss. The crisis of bereavement has an acute pang which goads to exertion; the desolate after-feeling sometimes paralyses. I have learnt ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... energy of matter, then—what else had they now? Lux and Relux, the two artificial metals, made of solidified light, far stronger than anything of molecular structure in nature, absolutely infusible, totally inert chemically, one a perfect conductor of light and of all radiation in space, the other a perfect reflector of all radiations—save molecular rays. Made into the condition of reflection by the action of special ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... pillows in a sitting posture, gazed vaguely before her with the eyes of an idiot. The death of her son had been like a blow on the head that had felled her senseless to the ground. For hours she remained tranquil and inert, absorbed in her despair; then she was at times seized with attacks of weeping, shrieking ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... set the people by the ears talking, if talk they would, or to induce them to show themselves there inert if no more could be got from them. To accommodate with chairs and sofas as many as the furniture of her noble suite of rooms would allow, especially with the two chairs and padded bench against the wall in the back closet—the small inner drawing-room, as she would call it to the clergymen's ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... remained without response. The woman lay there unmoving, inert. Only was life in her hot eyes, and the trifling rise and fall of the bed covering as she breathed. Obviously she was considering. Perhaps she was wondering how much she had a right to tell this officer. She was completely without guidance. If her husband had been alive doubtless her lips would ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... damage them with our engines from a distance, and also possible to burn them to the water's edge with incendiary missiles; and if they do venture to stir from their place, they will not overtake anyone by pursuing nor escape by fleeing, since they are so heavy that they are entirely too inert to inflict any damage, and so huge that they are exceptionally liable ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... few seconds the struggles of the victims ceased, and their inert bodies were roughly thrust into a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... of death. The waves raised themselves slowly and sluggishly over the boat's edge as though wishing to contemplate with their sea-green eyes this medley of white and dark bodies. The ship-wrecked men rowed with nervous desperation; then they lay down inert, recognizing the uselessness of their efforts, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... out. It came from the shelter of a bluff directly ahead. The leading dog floundered. Then the brute fell with a fierce yelp, and sprawled in the snow while the others swept over his inert body. The man in the sled strove to brake the sled with the "gee-pole" which he snatched to his aid. There was a moment of desperate struggle. Then the sled flung tail up in the air and the man was hurled headlong ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... play, the person who assumes the responsibility for the performance in all its details, may be the dramatist himself; M. Sardou and Mr. Belasco have shown surpassing skill in bringing forth all that lies latent in the inert manuscripts of their plays. He may be the actual manager of the theater; the late Augustin Daly was a stage-manager of striking individuality. He may be the actor of the chief part in the play; Mr. Willard and Mr. Sothern have revealed another aspect of their talent by the ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... exhort you to take this seriously. It is not to be understood as mere Bible teaching to be stored away in the mind along with an inert mass of other doctrines. It is a marker on the road to greener pastures, a path chiseled against the steep sides of the mount of God. We dare not try to by-pass it if we would follow on in this holy pursuit. We must ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... aside and stepped into the room. Smith and I perforce followed him. Just within the door the three of us stood looking across at the limp thing which had spread terror throughout the Eastern and Western world. Helpless as Fu-Manchu was, he inspired terror now, though the giant intellect was inert—stupefied. ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... thus wholly inert, the origin of the impulse towards greater complexity must be sought for outside of that which undergoes the change. The movement by which one species becomes a higher is not an elaboration, an extension or a differentiation of existing ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... went back to the upturned, dreadful face. The malignancy had gone out of it. The eyes rolled no longer, but gazed with a great fixity at something that seemed to be infinitely far away. As Tommy looked, a terrible rattling breath went through the heavy, inert form. It seemed to rend body and soul asunder. There followed a brief palpitating shudder, and the head on his arm sank ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... opened the gate wide, without a word, to let him enter. Mrs. Chadron lifted her arms appealingly, and hurried to his side as he stopped. Stiffly he leaned over, his inert burden held tenderly, and lowered what he bore ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... the new world opened to Ivy Geer. It was as if a corpse, cold, inert, lifeless, had suddenly sprung up, warm, invigorated, informed with a spirit which led her own spell-bound. Grammar,—Grammar, which had been a synonyme for all that was dry, irksome, useless,—a beating of the wind, the crackling of thorns under a pot,—Grammar even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... are scentless, or emit only a disagreeable odor. It, moreover, contains an active poison; a French gentleman, having imbibed a mouthful or two of an infusion of its flowers as tea, found himself rendered nearly powerless. Vinegar has the peculiar property of rendering this poison perfectly inert, whether in or out of the body. When mixed with vinegar, the poison may be drunk with safety, while, if only tasted by itself, it causes a burning sensation in the throat. This gentleman described the action of the vinegar, when he was nearly deprived of power by the poison imbibed, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Then, all pushing from one side, gaining such a foothold as the sail afforded them, they succeeded, after many straining efforts, in righting her. Slowly and painfully they baled her out, and then lay for many hours too inert to move. ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... the heat of sultry afternoon, the air stirless, the water in the channel warm and rank-smelling. The boats were drifting lazily under the banks, the native steersmen half sleeping at their posts, the white men stretched out, listless, sun-wearied, inert. A canoe shot out across the path of the boats, disappeared along another waterway, stopped, and a Spaniard got out and plunged into the trees on the low island. He watched the flotilla go by. He noticed the ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... for Potter. He had brilliant and unusual powers of expression, but this was beyond them. He went to the chair beside the little table, flung himself upon it, his legs outstretched, his arms dangling inert, and ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... the face of Vigne's radiance—Arnaud was as still and shadowed as the inert surface of a dammed stream. Then slowly, the slenderest trickle at first, his wit revived his spirit; and he opened an unending mock-solemn attack on Bailey Sandby's eminently serious acceptance of the responsibilities of his ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... be tedious to repeat all the arguments, by which I have proved [Book II. Part III. Sect 3.], that reason is perfectly inert, and can never either prevent or produce any action or affection, it will be easy to recollect what has been said upon that subject. I shall only recall on this occasion one of these arguments, which I shall endeavour ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... seriously engaged with an enemy. War against Spain had been declared, October 19, 1739. He had then recently commissioned a fifty-gun ship, the Portland, and in her sailed for the West Indies, where he remained until the autumn of 1742; but the inert manner in which Spain maintained the naval contest, notwithstanding that her transmarine policy was the occasion of the quarrel, and her West Indian possessions obviously endangered, removed all chance of active service ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... in the business of whaling, my feelings at this juncture may perhaps be hard to understand. But this much let me say: that Right whaling on the Nor'-West Coast, in chill and dismal fogs, the sullen inert monsters rafting the sea all round like Hartz forest logs on the Rhine, and submitting to the harpoon like half-stunned bullocks to the knife; this horrid and indecent Right whaling, I say, compared to a spirited hunt for the gentlemanly Cachalot in southern and more genial seas, is as the butchery ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... jelly-fish, whose transparent brilliancy in the coolness and constant movement of the waves, vanishes on the shore in little gelatinous pools. During those intervals of idleness, when the absence of thought leaves the hand inert upon the modelling tool, Felicia, deprived of the sole moral nerve of her intellect, became savage, unapproachable, sullen beyond endurance,—the revenge of paltry human qualities upon great tired brains. After she had brought tears to ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... whorls of the living muscle, linked together for a while in the intricate figures of the dance of life, giving and taking energy as they dance, and then we should see how, loosing hands, they slipped back into the blood as dead, inert, used-up matter."—Michael Foster, Professor of Physiology in the University of ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... en masse, this systematic brutality, had its theorists and apologists; human faculties were denied to the blacks. They were classed as a race between the flesh and the spirit. Thus the infamous abuse of power, which was exercised over this inert and servile race, was called necessary guardianship. Tyrants have never wanted sophists: on the other hand, men of right feeling towards their fellows, who had, like Gregoire, Raynal, Barnave, Brissot, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... passion that his hands trembled on the steering-wheel. Afraid of losing all muscular control, he brought the automobile to a full stop at the roadside. Her sapphirine eyes were shining, her hands lay inert in her ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... him stretched out in the dark boat; and the splash of the water against the marble of the palaces echoed in her imagination like the wailing, thrilling trumpets at the burial of Siegfried—the hero of Poetry marching to the Valhalla of immortality and glory upon a shield of ebony—motionless, inert as the young hero of the Germanic legend—and followed by the lamentations of that poor prisoner of life, Humanity, that ever eagerly seeks a crack, a chink, in the wall about it, through which the inspiriting, comforting ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... impatient passenger in the smoker, who found the stoppages at these wayside hamlets interminable, both in frequency and in the delay at each of them; and while the dawdling train remained inert, and the moments passed inactive, his eyes dilated and his hand clenched till the nails bit his palm; then, when the trucks groaned and the wheels crooned against the rails once more, he sank back in his ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... subjected to the same processes of solution, evaporation, filtration, &c. The final result thus obtained is deducted from that given by the assay, the difference gives the corrected result. In some cases, where it is desired or necessary to have a tangible residue or precipitate, some pure inert material ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... England into a career of Continental conquest. Monarchy and aristocracy would have gone unchallenged, except within the "natural limits" of France; and the other nations, never shaken to their inmost depths, would have dragged on their old inert fragmentary existence. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
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