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More "Lethargy" Quotes from Famous Books



... succeed in crossing the stream; they are thrown into it and remain there forever. Some souls come to the edge of the stream but are prevented from passing by the snake that threatens to devour them: these are the souls of the persons in a lethargy or trance. Being refused a passage, these souls return to their bodies and reanimate them. They believe that animals have souls and even that inorganic substances such as kettles etc., have in them ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... thus low, and stood pitifully smiling:—This spectacle, together with some subtle spur from the talk of love, roused Emilia from her lethargy. The warmth of a new desire struck around her heart. The old belief in her power over Wilfrid joined to a distinct admission that she had for the moment lost him; and she said, "Yes; now, as I am ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... But now came a series of cases destined to fling this earliest murder into the shade. Nobody could now be unprepared; and yet the tragedies, henceforward, which passed before us, one by one, in sad, leisurely, or in terrific groups, seemed to argue a lethargy like that of apoplexy in the victims, one and all. The very midnight of mysterious awe ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... light that showed high above our heads grew brighter towards noon, then began slowly to decline. Before the shadows had lengthened in the court above, however, the sound of our door being unbarred aroused us from our lethargy, and a moment later, three soldiers entered and told us to prepare to go before the great ruler Samory. Omar, attired only in a small garment of bark-cloth, took no heed of his toilet, therefore we at once announced our readiness to leave the loathsome place with its myriad creeping things, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... than of old. It did not seem to matter so greatly if there were nothing to be won from life, and she was very tired. It had been a mistake to come to Marden at all, there was too much time to think there. She returned to that fact eventually. The afternoon wore on and she fell into a lethargy with no desire to escape it, and did not hear Christopher's ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... he heard the wheels roll off, shook from him his lethargy. It was not only that Neverbend would boast that he alone had gone through the perils of their subterranean duty, but that doubtless he would explain in London how his colleague had been deterred ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... of Clarice, appearing like Virgil's Camilla, stirs him from this lethargy. He falls in love at first sight, as Tasso's heroes always do, and vows to prove himself her worthy knight by deeds of unexampled daring. Thus the plot is put in motion; and we read in well-appointed order ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... thing," he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a trivial conversation, "is that I didn't think—I didn't think at all. I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones—in a sort of lethargy— stagnant. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... half smile upon the lips, that made still more touching the tears not yet dried upon her cheeks. While thin, frail, shadowy, with white hair and furrowed cheeks, the old man fixed his sightless orbs on space; and his face, usually only animated from the lethargy of advancing dotage by a certain querulous cynicism, now grew suddenly earnest, and even thoughtful, as Fanny ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... unmoving. The feeling was there again, like a scene waiting only to be gazed at directly to be perceived. It was as though a great wisdom lay at the edge of understanding. If he rested quietly it would all come to him. Yet always, when his mind lost its sleep-induced lethargy, the moment ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet

... by the practical threat of voudou curses upon Agricola was one thing, Creole lethargy was quite another; and when, three mornings later, a full quartette of voudou charms was found in the four corners of Agricola's pillow, the great Grandissime family were ignorant of how they could have come there. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... Egyptian and endeavored to revive them. North of the Taurus even the Armenians began to write and polish their barbarian speech. Christian preaching, addressed to the people, took hold of the popular idioms and roused them from their long lethargy. Along the Nile as well as on the plains of Mesopotamia or in the valleys of Anatolia it proclaimed its new ideas in dialects that had been despised hitherto, and wherever the old Orient had not been entirely denationalized by Hellenism, it ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... has Ibsen rendered to the drama: he has revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the final decades of the nineteenth century,—when the novel was despotic in its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary expression, and when arrogant writers ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... were marked by aspirations for a better state of things, and discussions between the rival schools of Classicists and Mediaevalists. The latter carried the day, and, after an heroic struggle and many failures, England awoke from her long lethargy, to find herself the possessor of a noble architecture, a true exponent of ecclesiastical art and tradition, although confessedly far from perfect when applied to domestic buildings. For these latter edifices the old manor-houses, with their many mullioned windows and Tudor arcuation, formed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... awake and live My last brief moment as the man I was, Than lapse from life's long lethargy to death Without one conscious interval. At least I repossess my past, am once again No courtier med'cining the whims of kings In muffled palace-chambers, but the free Friendless Vesalius, with his back to the wall And all the world against him. O, for that Best gift ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... seemed burning up. The water he drank only partially allayed his frantic thirst. It was with great difficulty that he could arouse himself from a lethargy that seemed to completely paralyze both body and mind. As the moments passed, however, he succeeded in rallying into something like normal. But as yet he was unable to fully understand ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman

... of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the last half century. I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is lethargy. It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to public education and to a thousand interferences with their private self-seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... an indefectible state of union with God) is to be condemned as "a poisoned source of idleness and internal lethargy." ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... defeat and death, of the fall of our forts on the Delaware, of Lord Cornwallis gone to England, of failures to effect exchanges. Then she went on to write: "Your father was, strange to say, roused out of a sort of lethargy by the news of your death. Jack managed to get a letter to your aunt to say you were missing, and Arthur had search made for you; but many nameless ones were buried in haste, and he could not find your name on ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell

... successful inroads into England, subsisted his needy followers by the plunder of that country, and taught them to despise the military genius of a people who had long been the object of their terror. Edward at last, roused from his lethargy, had marched an army into Scotland, and Robert, determined not to risk too much against an enemy so much superior, retired again into the mountains. The king advanced beyond Edinburgh; but being destitute of provisions, and being ill supported ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... gentle hint did not arouse the old lady, who was falling back into a pleasant lethargy, so common ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens

... lifting the ice, and the waters were becoming turbulent to the eye; when the sapsuckers and creeping birds were jubilant, and the honk of the wild goose was a passing thing; when, with the upspring of the rest of nature, the trees threw off their lethargy, and through the rugged maples the sap began to course again. It was only a few days before Easter that my friend—his name was Hayes, "Jack" Hayes, we called him, though his name, of course, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... well I recall the gay transformation in my shop-mates when the whistle blew on Saturday night. The dullest and most morose showed intelligence then. The prospect of rest, be it ever so remote—even in the hereafter—roused them from their lethargy. How alert and cheerful we were on holidays, even the prolonged holiday of a strike brought its pinched joys. Quite a number of my ancient comrades of industry looked forward to the Poor House with a hopefulness born of thwarted toil. The luckiest ones out of the thousands whom I knew were those ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... few moments. He had heard that Government officials were hard to move, and knew that, in hot countries, Englishmen who marry native wives sometimes grow apathetic and succumb to the climatic lethargy. But this was not all: he had to contend against the official dislike of anything informal and unusual. Had he been in the navy, his warning would have received attention, but as he was a humble civilian he had, so to speak, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss

... suggests the following question: what would happen if I were to chill the creature in its immobile posture? I foresee a more prolonged inertia. The chill, of course, must not be great, for it would be followed by the lethargy into which insects capable of surviving the winter fall when ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... now present you rouse you from your lethargy; yet should they not, I will not cease to cry aloud. I cannot now remain in silence while my fellow countrymen are sacrificed, the citizens of two noble cities deceived, and an enterprise for which I have ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... been open to suppose that the fears which made the old man a homeless wanderer and fugitive for the last two years of his life, were wholly imaginary, but for the circumstances of his death. He died of a lethargy on the 26th of April, 1731, at a lodging in Ropemaker's Alley, Moorfields. In September, 1733, as the books in Doctors' Commons show, letters of administration on his goods and chattels were granted to Mary Brooks, widow, a creditrix, after summoning in official ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto

... This is not a fancy picture. It is a true copy of one of the features which make up the aspect 'of the State, and of every State where the moral leprosy of slavery covers the people with its noisome scales; a deadening lethargy benumbs the limbs of the body politic; a stupor settles on the arts of life; agriculture reluctantly drags the plough and harrow to the field, only when scourged by necessity; the axe drops from the woodman's nerveless hand the moment his fire is scantily supplied with fuel; and the fen, undrained, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... put one-fifth of his fortune, to the great discontent of the heirs. Henrietta's income had expanded from four thousand a year to twenty; and she spent her days in thinking of and talking of the careers to which she could help her husband if he would only shake off the lethargy which seized him the year after his marriage to a Fuller heiress. But Hastings would not; he was happy in his books and in his local repute for knowing everything there was to be known. Month by month he grew fatter and lazier and slower of speech. Henrietta pretended to be irritated against him, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips

... lengthened, and a wind of the evening entered the wood. Haward shook off the lethargy that had kept him lying there for the better part of an afternoon, rose to his feet, and left the green dell for the road, all shadow now, winding back to the toy metropolis, to Marot's ordinary, to the ball at the Palace ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... most thoroughly inured to the effluvia of this journalistic jargon; they have literally lost all taste, and their palate is rather gratified than not by the most corrupt and arbitrary innovations. Hence the tutti unisono with which, despite the general lethargy and sickliness, every fresh solecism is greeted; it is with such impudent corruptions of the language that her hirelings are avenged against her for the incredible boredom she imposes ever more and more upon them. I ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... criticism. Clearly it tends at all times to set up individual conviction against authority, freedom against discipline. It has as its virtue the quality of being opposed to red tape, professionalism, departmentalism pedantry, officiousness, intolerance, lethargy, and the tyranny of custom; it has its dangers in that, resting as it does in the last resort on the personal and the concrete, it tends in ill-balanced minds to neglect the value of ancient and dear illusions, and to degenerate into chaos ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... little change had taken place in Victor de Gisons' condition. He remained in a state almost of lethargy, with an expression of dull hopelessness on his face; sometimes he passed his hand wearily across his forehead as if he were trying to recollect something he had lost; he was still too weak to stand, but Jacques and his wife ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty

... members at his death, and now counts its members in England and America by millions. But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church, as we shall see later, broke the lethargy of the clergy who, under the influence of the "Evangelical" movement, were called to a loftier conception of their duties; while a powerful moral enthusiasm appeared in the nation at large. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green

... mangled wretch was forced to smile; To match his patience 'gainst her hate, His heart rebellious all the while. Where Pleasure still will lead to wrong, And helpless Reason warn in vain; And Truth is weak, and Treachery strong; And Joy the surest path to Pain; And Peace, the lethargy of Grief; And Hope, a phantom of the soul; And life, a labour, void and brief; And Death, ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

... almost beyond endurance to a man of his age and of his volcanic nature. His physician was soon at his side, and, with some degree of success, put forth all his skill to rally his exhausted patient. He at last succeeded in producing a certain degree of lethargy, which, in benumbing the brain, brought respite from ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... power of vitality was there in Bonnevard, that he did not sink in lethargy, and forget himself to stone! But he did not; it is said that when the victorious Swiss army broke in to ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... yielded their uttermost to our guests. The latter would therefore have returned to the drawing-room, where it was possible that one or more of them might go to sleep. Remembering that the chops were loin-chops, we might at all events hope for some slight amount of lethargy. Again we waded through the nettles, we scaled the garden-wall, and worked our way between it and the laurestinas towards the door opposite the kitchen. 'There remained between us and the house an open space of about fifteen yards, fully commanded by the drawing-room window, veiling which, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... is regarded as a disgrace to die of consumption. So it is. But the stigma rests upon the community which permits the ravage of this preventable disease; not upon the victims of it, except as they contribute to the general lethargy. In order to save the feelings of the family, a death from consumption is reported as bronchitis or pneumonia. The man is buried quietly. The premises are not disinfected, as they should be, and perhaps some unknowing victim moves ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... for just such an emergency, were charging the bunch intrepidly. Others made shift with flat sirup-cans with pebbles inside. A few, like Pink and the Silent One, flapped their slickers till their arms ached. Anything, everything that would make a din and startle the cattle out of their lethargy, was pressed into service. ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower

... want of enterprise among its inhabitants, the result of four hundred years of indolence on the one hand and oppression on the other, renders it problematical whether their ample resources will ever be developed. Should Turkey, however, arise from her lethargy, should genuine civilisation spread its branches over the land, we may then confidently anticipate a glorious future for her south-Slavonic provinces, doubting not that they will some day become 'the noblest jewel in ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... Rabbits), the god of wine, at the latter's own request, he believing that he thus would be rendered immortal, and that all others who drank of the beverage he presided over would die. His death, they added, was indeed like the stupor of a drunkard, who, after his lethargy has passed, rises healthy and well. In this sense of renewing life after death, he presided over the native calendar, the count of years beginning with Tochtli, the Rabbit.[1] Thus we see that this is a myth of the returning seasons, ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton

... imagine was to determine. She did determine. Yet, even while making so terrible a resolve, a singular calm seemed to overspread her soul. She complained of nothing—wished for nothing—sought for nothing—trembled at nothing. A dreadful lethargy, which made the old mother declaim as against a singular proof of hardihood, possessed her spirit. Little did the still-idolizing mother conjecture ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... like children reveling in the lore of elves and fairies. As the prattle of a child was the power that awakened Silas Marner from his stupor of despair, so this Norman element of gayety, of exuberant romanticism, was precisely what was needed to rouse the sterner Saxon mind from its gloom and lethargy. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... word of which Ada could understand. So eager had she been, that she did not perceive the condition to which Nina was reduced, believing that she was still asleep from simple fatigue, but her eye falling on her, she burst into loud lamentations of grief, which very nearly awoke her from the lethargy into which she had fallen. It was the means, however, of awaking Marianna, by whose aid she was able to make the little girl comprehend the importance of seeking out Paolo, and bringing him to attend on his sister. She ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... so seating her guests that each may be pleased with his or her neighbor. The centerpiece is of flowers; for this never choose a strongly scented flower like hyacinths or narcissi. The heat, the odor of the food, combined with the scent of the flowers, may induce lethargy, so that the dinner may be "garnished ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... are and pin our faith to the belief that, as the baleful effects of the current misunderstanding become more and more apparent, the mother love, of its own accord, will become sufficiently alarmed, to throw aside its lethargy and seek to make amends by devoting itself more consistently to ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)

... agree to differ. 'Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind' (Rom 14:5). Human arts have been exhausted to prevent that mental exercise or self-persuasion which is essential to a Christian profession. The great object of Satan has ever been to foster indifference, that deadly lethargy, by leading man to any source of information rather than prayerful researches into the Bible. Bunyan's severe discipline in Christ's school would lead him to form a judgment for himself; he was surrounded by a host of sects, and, with such a Bible-loving man, it is an interesting ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... small aid. Her doctrines, as taught by Augustine and Boniface, by Anschar and Sigfrid, were comparatively mild and pure; but she had scarce swallowed the heathendom of the North, much in the same way as the Wolf was to swallow Odin at the 'Twilight of the Gods', than she fell into a deadly lethargy of faith, which put it out of her power to digest her meal. Gregory the Seventh, elected pope in 1073, tore the clergy from the ties of domestic life with a grasp that wounded every fibre of natural affection, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... which can bring the full value and power. Even at present, by mere force of order and authority, the army is the salvation of myriads; and men who, under other circumstances, would have sunk into lethargy or dissipation, are redeemed into noble life by a service which at once summons and directs their energies. How much more than this military education is capable of doing, you will find only when you make it education indeed. We have no excuse for leaving our private ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... takes us to Klingsor's magic castle. Klingsor sees the fool advance, joyous and childish, and summons Kundry, the guilty one, who rests in the dead lethargy of destiny, and in sorrow and anger only follows his command. She longs no more for life, but seeks deliverance in the eternal sleep. She has laughed at the bleeding head of John, laughed when she beheld the Savior bleeding at the cross, and is now condemned ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... whole matter in a philosophical and ultra-pragmatic way. Some observers have hazarded that our postponement of haircuts is due to mere lethargy and inertia, but that is not so. Every time we get our locks shorn our wife tells us that we have got them too short. She says that our head has a very homely and bourgeois bullet shape, a sort of pithecanthropoid contour, which is revealed by a close trim. After five weeks' growth, however, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... up for the admiration and imitation of all those classes of society which profess to have opinions. It would thus become an established element in the temper of the age. Nor need we fear that the result of this would be any flaccidity of conviction, or lethargy in act. A man would still be penetrated with the rightness of his own opinion on a given issue, and would still do all that he could to make it prevail in practice. But among the things which he would no longer permit himself ...
— On Compromise • John Morley

... sprang forward into plans for the summer's campaign. His enthusiasm stirred French to something like vigorous action, and even waked old Mackenzie out of his aboriginal lethargy. That very day Kalman rode down to Wakota to consult his friend Brown, upon whose guidance in all matters he had come more and more to depend. Brown's Canadian training on an Ontario farm before he entered college had greatly enriched his experience, and his equipment ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... faintest movement in his whole body, and his brows were still contracted in the same forbidding frown. If Varvara Petrovna had remained another three minutes she could not have endured the stifling sensation that this motionless lethargy roused in her, and would have waked him. But he suddenly opened his eyes, and sat for ten minutes as immovable as before, staring persistently and curiously, as though at some object in the corner which ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... go through with it!" St. Clair looked across at Langdon and the signaling look of Happy Tom replied. They drew in just a little closer. Now and then they talked to him sharply and briskly, rousing him again and again from the lethargy into ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... cramps, stupor, convulsion, tremor, palsy: or belonging to the excrements of the brain, catarrhs, sneezing, rheums, distillations: or else those that pertain to the substance of the brain itself, in which are conceived frenzy, lethargy, melancholy, madness, weak memory, sopor, or Coma Vigilia et vigil Coma. Out of these again I will single such as properly belong to the phantasy, or imagination, or reason itself, which [892]Laurentius calls the disease of the mind; ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... action on the part of the creoles was discouraged, divisions and factions among them were encouraged and educational opportunities restricted, and the American-born Spaniards gradually sank into idleness and lethargy, indifferent to all but childish honours and distinctions and petty local jealousies. To make matters worse, many of the Spaniards who crossed the seas to the American colonies came not to colonize, not to trade or cultivate the ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring

... touched the bottom before Leith started to transship the provisions that were required for the trip across the island. The sight of land seemed to stir the sallow-faced giant out of the lethargy that had gripped him on the way down from Levuka. He suddenly discovered that the mantle of authority was upon his shoulders, and he bullied the island boys as they lowered ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... was brought to him nightly by Ridgar and the young clerk Gifford, and he would look over things and make a few suggestions, dispose of this and that as a matter of course and fall back into his lethargy. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... if a girl on the thirteenth day. On the twelfth day the mother's bangles are thrown away and new ones put on. The Kunbis are very kind to their children, and never harsh or quick-tempered, but this may perhaps be partly due to their constitutional lethargy. They seldom refuse a child anything, but taking advantage of its innocence will by dissimulation make it forget what it wanted. The time arrives when this course of conduct is useless, and then the child learns to mistrust the word ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... it. I said: "It is a lethargy." I still hoped. I returned to the salon, told Alice that I was going out, but would soon be back, and ran to the Rue Saint Maur. I had hardly reached ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... pleasantly-amused interest in their fate. There is, of course, plenty of distinction in the writing. But I could have wished more or earlier movement. Even the motor-car, whose appearance promised a hint, the merest far-off possibility, of farcical developments, shared in the general lethargy and refused to move from its ditch. In spite, however, of this procrastination I wish it to be understood that the story is in some ways one of unusual charm; it has style, atmosphere and a very sensible dignity. But, lacking the confidence that I fortunately ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various

... a person to sit still in the most complete inactivity, with his hands hanging down, his eyes fixed on the ground, and withdrawn from all other objects, and suppose him at the same time to be encompassed by an atmosphere of gladness, would not a lethargy seize both his head and body, and the vital expansion of his countenance would be contracted, and at length with relaxed fibres he would nod and totter, till he fell to the earth? What is it that keeps the whole bodily system in its due expansion and tension, but the tension of the mind? and ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... That girl! What a keen one! She had caught everything at a glance! And the skipper, to get out of his hole, fell back on violence. "Good God! Have you got ears on your head? Give me a glass, I said." And a glass, for that matter, he really needed, to dispel the mortal lethargy that had settled on his whole body. A sober man he was! But he would drink, and drink and drink till he was drunk, and ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... what we hate to believe, what we fight tooth and nail against. The man who makes us listen to that is the seer and the prophet; he comes upon us like Shelley, or Whitman, or Ibsen, and plumps down horrid truths that half surprise, half disgust us. He shakes us out of our lethargy. To such give ear, though they say what shocks you. Weigh well their hateful ideas. Avoid the vulgar vice of sneering and carping at them. Learn to examine their nude thought without shrinking, and examine it all the more carefully when it most repels you. Naked verity is an acquired taste; it is ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... Hosmer, in art; Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschell, Maria Mitchell, in science; Elizabeth Fry, Dorothea Dix, Mary Carpenter, in prison reform; Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton in the camp—are all parts of the great uprising of women out of the lethargy of the past, and are among the forces of the complete revolution a thousand pens and voices herald at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... not to do others' thinking for them, but to help them to think more vigorously and effectually. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves. The light and life which spring up in one soul are to be spread far and wide. Of all treasons against humanity, there is no one worse than his who employs great intellectual force to keep down the intellect ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... enough that I have said, at first, I have nothing for you? Such lazy vagrants as you hinder a gentleman from walking the streets." Rochefoucault burst into a loud laugh, and awakening the absent man from his lethargy, he was not a little surprised, himself, that he should have taken his friend for an importunate mendicant! La Fontaine is recorded to have been one of the most absent men; and Furetiere relates a most singular instance of this absence of mind. La Fontaine attended the burial of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... defend the cause of truth. It was not thus that our fathers maintained it in the brilliant periods of our history. Prejudice may be trusted to guard the outworks for a short space of time, while reason slumbers in the citadel; but if the latter sink into a lethargy, the former will quickly erect a standard for herself. Philosophy, wisdom, and liberty support each other: he, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave."—Vol. i. pp. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... And in everything I wrote I persistently taught what was for me the sole truth—that our chief object in life should be to secure our own happiness and that of our family. Then, five years ago, supervened a mood of mental lethargy. I grew despondent; my perplexity increased, and I was tormented by the constant recurrence of such questions as—"Why?" and "What afterwards?" And by degrees the questions took a more concrete form. "I now possess six thousand 'desyatins' ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... period contains another notable example of a sudden and unaccountable decline in population. The scene is Spain, which, after playing an active and very prominent part in the world's history, sank quickly into the lethargy from which it has never recovered. It may be noted that here, as in the case of Rome, the decay of population and energy followed a great influx of plundered wealth. On the other hand, the increase of population in our newly-planted North ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... recollection, and a silent tear was observed to trickle down. But when the philosopher described a character so like his own, shame seemed to take entire possession of his soul; and, rousing as from a long and painful lethargy, he softly raised his hand to his head, and tore away the chaplets of flowers, the monuments of his effeminacy and disgrace; he seemed intent to compose his dress into a more decent form, and wrapped his robe about him, ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... of ever going to war, and who, in fact, often did not believe that there was a war. We all felt somewhat relieved one night when we heard that the German fleet was bombarding the English coast, hoping that it would shake the country out of its feeling of smug self-complacency and lethargy. ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... thee And changed the object of thy will, It had been lethargy in me, Not constancy, to love thee still. Yea, it had been a sin to go And prostitute affection so: Since we are taught no prayers to say To such as must to ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... was to watch in the evenings the Spaniards, shedding their usual lethargy, dance the fandango and the bolero with a perfection of grace and agility, even in the villages. The colonel offered them the use of his band, but they, quite rightly, preferred the guitar, the castanets, and a woman's voice; an accompaniment which gave the dance its national ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... skill of which the doctor was capable, and the best part of twenty-four hours of hard work to rouse Anna from the death-like lethargy into which she had fallen. Toward morning she opened her eyes and turning to ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer

... off the lethargy of its morning sleep: there were many men in the street, some riding back and forth, disdaining to walk the distance of a hundred yards from a saloon they had just left to the saloon to which they were going, some sitting their horses in the shade, ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory

... respond to the spur of her will. It became an effort to walk, to swing her arms and stamp her feet, to make any brisk movement that kept the circulation going. She knew what it portended, yet was unable to make greater resistance against the lethargy of cold ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... be in a lethargy or under a partial paralysis; he slowly and weakly rubbed his head with his hand, as if vaguely conscious that ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... the love of true glory is the most legitimate agent of extensive good, and you do right to worship and enshrine it. For me it is dead: it Survived—ay, the truth shall out!—poverty, want, disappointment, baffled aspirations,—all, all, but the deadness, the lethargy of regret when no one was left upon this altered earth to animate its efforts, to smile upon its success, then the last spark quivered and died; and—and—but forgive me—on this subject I am not often wont to ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... insensibleness that makes thee silent? I had rather it were shamefastness, but I perceive thou art become insensible." And seeing me not only silent but altogether mute and dumb, fair and easily she laid her hand upon my breast saying: "There is no danger; he is in a lethargy, the common disease of deceived minds; he hath a little forgot himself, but he will easily remember himself again, if he be brought to know us first. To which end, let us a little wipe his eyes, dimmed with the cloud of mortal things." And having thus said, with a corner of her garment she ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

... and to feel antagonism and even hatred for other nations. With these objects under despotic governments there is direct prohibition against printing and disseminating books to enlighten the people, and everyone who might rouse the people from their lethargy is exiled or imprisoned. Moreover, under every government without exception everything is kept back that might emancipate and everything encouraged that tends to corrupt the people, such as literary works tending to keep them ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... kept her bed for a week or more. She had sunk into a sort of desolate lethargy of mind and body from which nothing could rouse her. Her mother was in despair. Richard Gardner was too ill to come to see the girl he loved, and he did not write. The blow that had fallen upon ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... hang upon their hands. And they who are abroad seem not like the same people. Their step is now measured and slow—the head bent—no salutation greets the passing stranger or acquaintance, or only a few cold words of inquiry, which pass from cold lips into ears as cold. Apathy—lethargy— stupor—seem fast settling over all. They would indeed bury all, I believe, were it not that the parties of the discontented increase in number and power, which compels the friends of the Queen to keep upon the alert. The question of surrender is now openly discussed. 'It is useless,' ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... eggs. This meal over, they sat sleepily blinking their eyes, whisking away flies, and mopping the moisture from their faces until the sound of "Eis! meine Herrschaften!" "Bier! meine Herrschaften!" roused them from their lethargy. Ices and beer and cherries and peaches successively filled up the weary hours until "the tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," carried joy to their hearts. I can never forget the rapturous look of anticipation and satisfaction which those stolid middle-class Teutonic countenances wore ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... also affect the body and limbs. "Every day so many hours and so much energy are required for digestion; a gross torpidity, a carnal lethargy, seizes on mortal men after dinner. This may and can be avoided. Man's knowledge of organic chemistry widens daily. Already he can supplement the gastric glands by artificial devices. Every doctor who administers physic implies that the bodily functions ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... added, with the divination of her sex. Comforted a little by Mrs. Faith, I quickly abandoned this project; indeed, I soon abandoned every other which concerned itself with Helen, and yielded myself with a kind of desperate lethargy, if I may be allowed the expression, to the fate which separated me from her. Of resignation I knew nothing. Peace was the coldest stranger in that strange land to me. I yielded because I could not help it, not because I would ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... see us murder'd by this Moor; But I'll be active, Boys— Therefore, Antonio, you command the Horse; Get what more Numbers to our Cause you can: 'Tis a good Cause, and will advance our Credit. We will awake this King out of his Lethargy of Love, And make him absolute—Go to your Charge, And early in the Morning I'll be with you— [Ex. all but Phil. If all fail, Portugal shall be my Refuge, Those whom so late I conquer'd, shall protect me— But this Alanzo I shou'd make an Interest ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn

... only ones. Human pity awoke from its lethargy. The penalties for wrongdoing became less brutal, the prisons less terrible. No longer did gaping crowds watch shivering wretches brought out of the jails every Monday morning, in batches of twenty and thirty, ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... in which Socrates passed his life. Of his influence it is hardly necessary here to speak at length. In the well-known metaphor put into his mouth by Plato, he was the "gad-fly" of the Athenian people. To prick intellectual lethargy, to force people to think, and especially to think about the conceptions with which they supposed themselves to be most familiar, those which guided their conduct in private and public affairs—justice expediency, honesty, and the like—such was the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... First, they neither murmur nor repine; but with genuine religion and philosophy they recognize in these dreadful visitations the ways of a benign Providence, and find in them cause for thankfulness. The Council of Castile exhort the people of Madrid 'to cast off their lethargy, and purify their manners, and to acknowledge the calamities which the kingdom and that great capital had endured as a punishment necessary to their correction.' General Morla in his address to the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... about us; for thus thou hast made us." We would not escape from our history by fleeing into the wilderness, by hiding our heads in the sands of forgetfulness, or the repentance that comes of pain, or the lethargy of hopelessness. We take it, as our very life, in our hand, and flee with it unto thee. Triumphant is the answer which thou boldest for every doubt. It may be we could not understand it yet, even if thou didst speak it "with most miraculous organ." But thou shalt at ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... certain nervous twitches and starts, in one of which he rose to his feet and looked wildly about him, fell into the strangest confusion of dreams. He carried his papers in a leather case or pocket-book, in an inner breast-pocket of his buttoned travelling-coat; and whatever he dreamed of, in the lethargy that got possession of him, something importunate in those papers called him out of that dream, though he could not wake from it. He was berated on the steppes of Russia (some shadowy person gave that name to the place) with Marguerite; ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins

... on the past with very mixed feelings,—dreaming of the easy-going methods of our forefathers, which gave them leisure for study and reflection, or esteeming their age as an age of lethargy, ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde

... She was a worldly woman, and my conduct seemed perfectly wild to her. She remonstrated, persuaded, then reproached me in impatient, angry tones. My father was a quiet, amiable man, and rarely interfered with my mother in her management, but he fortunately shook off enough of his lethargy to come to my rescue ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... himself from his lethargy, and went forward into the forecastle with the sailors. But the breed of sailors seemed to have changed since the days he had lived in the forecastle. He could find no kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial creatures. He was in despair. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... boys' nerves were so worked upon that they were unable to go to sleep again and tossed on their cots until the gray dawn began to show through the windows. They lay in a sort of lethargy watching the sky grow brighter and brighter until they were aroused to action by the loud voices of men and the clanking of guns in the ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich

... of time and subsidence of excitement which tend to insure dispassionate and impartial treatment by the historian, and a juster proportion of impression in spectators, tend also to produce indifference and lethargy in the people at large; whereas in fact the need for sustained interest of a practical character still exists. Intelligent provision for the present and future ought now to succeed to the emotional experiences of the actual war. The reading public has been ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan

... not now known what the reply was, for just then the prompter came on the stage, rudely twisted the tail of the cow, rousing her from her lethargy, and harshly kicking her in the pit of the stomach, he drove her off the stage, The audience loudly called for a repetition, but the cow ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... not so much intellectual barrenness as their vices, native or acquired,—or because they bring no wisdom to the conduct of life, but dwell in smoky huts, eat unhealthy food, go from starvation to plethora and from plethora to starvation again, exchange the indolent lethargy which is the law of savage life for the frantic struggles of war or the chase which diversify and break up its monotony. Allow the objection; and then what have we accomplished, but carrying the argument one step back? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death.... ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... that once seen, can never be forgotten. He was seeing a nation aroused, preparing to fight. If war came to England it would be no war decreed by a few men. It would be a war proclaimed by the people themselves, demanded by them. The nation was stirring; it was casting off the proverbial lethargy and indifference of the English. Even here, in this usually quiet suburb of London, the home of business and professional men who were comfortably well off, the stirring of the spirit of England was evident. And suddenly the song of the scouts and those who had ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston

... of no small social rank. He was well off in worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury; inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless some shock awoke him from his lethargy. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... asked himself these questions, it was with the impersonality of lethargy, for they were dismissed as ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder

... lion only sleeps! The time may come, when both he and his father will rise from their lethargy, and throw themselves at once into the arms of Scotland. To stimulate the dormant patriotism of these two princes, by showing them a subject leading their people to liberty, is one great end of the victories I seek. None other than a brave king can bind the various interests ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... Anne and Charlotte drooped and languished; Branwell, too, was ill. His constitution seemed shattered by excesses which he had not the resolution to forego. Often he would sleep most of the day; or at least sit dosing hour after hour in a lethargy of weakness; but with the night this apathy would change to violence and suffering. "Papa, and sometimes all of us have sad nights with him," writes Charlotte in the last days ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... and being unfortunate in her first Marriage, has taken a Resolution never to venture upon a second. She has no Children to take care of, and leaves the Management of her Estate to my good Friend Sir ROGER. But as the Mind naturally sinks into a kind of Lethargy, and falls asleep, that is not agitated by some Favourite Pleasures and Pursuits, Leonora has turned all the Passions of her Sex into a Love of Books and Retirement. She converses chiefly with Men (as she has often said herself), but it is only in their Writings; and admits of very few Male-Visitants, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... confusion in the corridor. Men were running, voices were crying questions. As they passed the window they saw Wethermill start up, aroused from his lethargy. They knew the truth before they reached the entrance of the hotel. A cab had driven up to the door from the station; in the cab was an unknown ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... sat watching the dawn his mind began to stir, to shake off its lethargy and stupor, to struggle into ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... Plimsoll followed to the door, lethargy leaving him in the face of disaster though he could not think fast or clearly. Hahn came clattering over the rocks on his horse, his face chalky white. He was reeling in his saddle, the horse spraddling, wild-eyed, almost out of control. Cookie jumped ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... thought brought to his mind another girl. He struck himself viciously across the eyes as though he would crush the memory, and went out to tramp among the ashes till the dawn. His body had no need of rest, for the exercise he had taken to-day had merely served to throw off the lethargy of the jail; and sleep was ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher

... and as a condition of national safety; but they rejected it as a lesson in political wisdom, and as an implicit principle of political action. By so doing they began that career of intellectual lethargy, superficiality, and insincerity which ever since has been characteristic ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... distinctly, and knew that Raymond was speaking to him, but for the life of him he could not rouse himself from his lethargy. He could only think of the lonely walk he had taken fifteen years ago; it was his last look at the fields and woods he had known since he was a child, and now it all stood out in brilliant light, as a picture, before him. Above all there came to ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen

... felt, somehow, that her people were falling away from her. It added one drop to her bitter cup. She began to droop into a sort of calm, despondent lethargy. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... out of sight; yet she worked on him so that he was crooked and shrivelled. Yet he wept and cried to have her ever with him, while he peaked and pined and dwindled away. And her mother, who was once a fine, stately, masterful dame, pined to mere skin and bone, and lay in lethargy; and now she is winding her charms ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge

... and dreaming," she repeated. But the possibility which now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be the shape of Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. She became as restless as she had been before she sat down. She was no longer able to see the world as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze of feverish red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had been all day. Thinking was no escape. Physical movement ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... sheriffs; then suddenly came this war upon us. But nothing aroused him from his lethargy; and all day long he brooded there in silence, day after day, until our creditors would endure no longer, and the bailiff menaced him. Confused and frightened, I implored him to leave the city—jails seeming to me far more terrible than death—and at last ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... aspiration, and love; in a word, all the sanctified emotions of the human heart, which together melt into the supreme emotion of religion, will sometimes arise to sternly rebuke the selfish life, shame us out of our moral lethargy, and comfort those whose one solace is that their honour is intact, though misfortune has stricken them in mind or body, or robbed them of the goods of earth, or the cheer and comfort of friendship and of love. It is hoped that the influence of what is said and done ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... well as from the desire of eating. I was hurt to find even such a temporary feebleness, and that I was so far from being that robust wise man who is sufficient for his own happiness. I felt a kind of lethargy of indolence. I did not exert myself to get Dr Johnson to talk, that I might not have the labour of writing down his conversation. He inquired here, if there were any remains of the second sight. Mr M'Pherson, Minister of Slate, said, he was RESOLVED not to believe it, because it was founded on ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... conception, what a lightning-like execution! Dutifully re-echoing the words uttered by their masters, the partisans of the Administration console themselves by saying that "this invasion of the North will have the effect of stirring up the North from its lethargy." O, you blasphemers! worse blasphemers than ever have been stoned or burned alive! Is the North not pouring forth its blood and its treasures, and are they not ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... (er) the thing which is (pet), evil (ou). Nevertheless the Coptic language has had its literature, like the Chinese, the roots of which, far from being aggregated, scarcely approach each other without immediate contact. We must admit that nations once roused from their lethargy, and tending towards civilization, find in the most uncouth languages the secret of expressing with clearness the conceptions of the mind, and of painting the emotions of the soul. Don Juan de la Rea, a highly estimable ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... few clients to lose one. He now visited Bassett almost daily, and, being himself full of schemes and inventions, he got Bassett, by degrees, out of his lethargy, and he emerged into daylight again; but he looked thin, and yellow as a guinea, and he had turned miser. He kept but one servant, and fed her and himself at Sir Charles Bassett's expense. He wired that gentleman's hares and rabbits in his own hedges. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade

... Struthers that he would stay in town over night. The call for the Buckhorn trip was, of course, a polite fabrication, an expedient pax in bello to permit the dust of battle to settle a little about this troubled house of McKail. All day to-day I have felt rather languid. I suppose it's the lethargy which naturally follows after all violence. Any respectable woman, I used to think, could keep a dead-line in her soul, beyond which the impulses of evil dare not venture. But I must have been wrong.... All week I've been looking for a letter from Peter Ketley. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... in that interval, after the decline of the peers, and before the people had yet experienced their force, the princes assumed an exorbitant power, and had almost annihilated the constitution under the weight of their prerogative; as soon as the commons recovered from their lethargy, they seem to have been astonished at the danger, and were resolved to secure liberty by firmer barriers than their ancestors had hitherto provided ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... alone is a charm and a joy. But their primary value to us is that they are among the rare beings who have possessed "the vision and the faculty divine," who, to quote Ruskin, can "startle our lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment." There is about them nothing incomprehensibly transcendental, nothing "unpractical," nothing aloof from the life we live—if we live it fully—but wholly the contrary. Those who say otherwise are but exposing their own short sight, their ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... came out again, and the various shades of yellow and of orange that played over the wrinkled earth deepened and glowed. Domini had sunk into a lethargy so complete that, though not asleep, she was scarcely aware of the sun. She was dreaming ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... north into Lincolnshire, to the Abbey of Croyland, where, as you know, my brother Theodore is the abbot; there we can rest in peace for a time, and watch the progress of events. If we hear that the people of these parts are aroused from their lethargy, we will come back and fight for our home and lands; if not, I will no longer stay in East Anglia, which I see is destined to fall piecemeal into the hands of the Danes; but we will journey down to Somerset, and I will pray ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty

... dissipation, and the ennui of your own aimless thought, to take up some glowing page of an earnest thinker, and read—deep and long, until you feel the metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat. And away you go in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and at the ripeness of what seemed so crude. The glow of toil wakes you to the ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... a little, thin, grey-headed old man, the traits of whose face showed him to be a person of superior breeding, wrapped in a very threadbare damask dressing-gown. His nose was long and straight, his lips thin and pale, his eyes of a soft blue, with an expression of lethargy or fatigue. His white, dry hands had very prominent veins; and he wore a large signet-ring, with which he kept playing in a nervous, agitated manner all the time ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint

... Pleiads I saw leave to shine in their stead And over the pole-star a lethargy shed And the maids of the Bier[FN22] in black raiment unveiled, I knew that the lamp of ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous

... a coldness and numbness in her limbs, which by degrees affected the nerves (I think the physicians call them), seized the brain, and at last ended in a lethargy. It betrayed itself at first in a sort of indifference and carelessness in all her actions, coldness to her best friends, and an aversion to stir or go about the common offices of life. She, that was the cleanliest ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot

... in this state of indecision; in which I did little, except write detached thoughts and contemplate the sublime and beautiful of my subjects; till I was rouzed from this lethargy of determination by a hint from his lordship, that it was necessary for Themistocles to appear abroad again; lest his enemies should say he was silenced, and his friends fear ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... fairies take an hour longer in the morning, the beasts attend to their young, the redskins feed heavily for six days and nights, and when pirates and lost boys meet they merely bite their thumbs at each other. But with the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are all under way again: if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie

... people's modes of dealing with their children Despair itself would have been like an anodyne Don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side Educational factory Fall silent and think they are thinking Habits, which take the place of self-determination Happiest of souls, if lethargy is bliss He almost lived in his library I dressed his wound and God healed him Judged the hearts of others by his own Leverage is everything Makes men imperious to sit a horse Matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a dozen children Means at least as much as he says Measles ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger

... known to be so throughout the commune—people were sure that Michel Voss was fifty or thereabouts; but there was very little in his appearance to indicate so many years. He was fat and burly to be sure; but then he was not fat to lethargy, or burly with any sign of slowness. There was still the spring of youth in his footstep, and when there was some weight to be lifted, some heavy timber to be thrust here or there, some huge lumbering vehicle ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope

... that will not, there are also two sorts. For the first there are the sort who are so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness, regarding nothing, thinking almost of nothing, no more than if they lay in a lethargy. With them it may so befall that wit and remembrance will wear away and fall even fair from them. And this comfortless kind of heaviness in tribulation is the highest kind of the ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More

... vent to my feelings by tears. The agony of my poor sister, who saw enough to convince her what was the fatal sentence, and who immediately went into violent hysterics, was the first thing that recalled me to myself. The sight of her distress roused me from my lethargy; yet it was with a sort of stupor that I moved to her assistance, and when she had in some degree recovered, my brain was still whirled round and bewildered. I had received such a shock that all the world appeared as one vacant blank before ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt

... strange contrast to the lethargy shown by the British Government in the protection of Anglo-Indian trade interests. In the year 1878 the Sultan of Zanzibar, who held a large territory on the mainland, had offered the control of all the commerce of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... have said has been chiefly appropriate for men. Now my subject widens and shall be appropriate for both sexes. In all ages of the world there has been a search for some herb or flower that would stimulate lethargy and compose grief. Among the ancient Greeks and Egyptians they found something they called nepenthe, and the Theban women knew how to compound it. If a person should chew a few of those leaves his grief would be immediately whelmed with hilarity. Nepenthe passed out from ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... early days of the war. Knowing now the frightful blunders committed at the outset, and the hair's-breadth escape from tremendous tragedy, the miracle of the sudden awakening which enabled France to shake off her lethargy and her vanity, and to make a tiger's pounce upon an enemy which had almost brought her to her knees is one of the splendid things in the world's history which ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... of the saloon. It was very strange, but I was too stupid to arrange things. Once I wondered whether I really was in the cabin along with Mr Frewen, but I got no farther with that line of reasoning, and I was sinking back into my stupor or lethargy when Bob Hampton ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn

... perceive, one of the old breed of '44, Colonel—the men who were in the saddle all day, and on their knees half the night. When shall we see the like of them again? A few such broken wrecks as I are left, with the fire of our youth all burned out and nought left but the ashes of lethargy and lukewarmness.' ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... abort him. Hawkeye rose from her fright triumphant and rejoicing, and down went Stone's Landing! One by one its meagre parcel of inhabitants packed up and moved away, as the summer waned and fall approached. Town lots were no longer salable, traffic ceased, a deadly lethargy fell upon the place once more, the "Weekly Telegraph" faded into an early grave, the wary tadpole returned from exile, the bullfrog resumed his ancient song, the tranquil turtle sunned his back upon bank and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... this time picked up a good deal of Portuguese, and was able to make himself pretty well understood by the Spanish shopkeepers. He, as well as the other officers, was astonished and disgusted at the lethargy that prevailed when, as all now knew, the great Spanish armies were scattered to the winds, and large bodies of French troops were advancing in all directions to crush out the ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty

... length returned she found him lying still, his face to the wall. The black cat was in her path as she crossed the room, so that she had to thrust it out of the way with her foot, and she called it names for moving with such lethargy. ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before, ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... the present day is the extraordinary interest taken in the investigation of those peculiar physical and psychical conditions attending the states now known collectively under the name of hypnotism, varying from lethargy, catalepsy, etc., to somnambulism. Until quite recently these investigations have been frowned upon and tabooed in scientific circles, and the fact that any man of scientific inclinations was known to feel an interest in matters associated with "mesmerism" or "animal ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various

... forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did before,—should we, durst we in our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to the World's Untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the Devil's? Only in the world's last lethargy can such things be done, and accounted safe and pious! Fools! "Do you think the Living God is a buzzard idol," sternly asks Milton, that you dare address Him in this manner?—Such darkness, thick sluggish clouds of cowardice and oblivious ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... simply nodded his head in assent. After this he seemed to me to sink back in a sort of brooding lethargy, as if indisposed to pursue the subject. I left him to go to my uncle, in order to relate what had just passed. Mr. Roger Littlepage was as much astonished as I had been myself, at hearing that one so aged should have detected us through disguises that had deceived our ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper

... division, corps after corps, were moving forward; miles of wagons, miles of cavalry in sinuous columns unending, blackened every valley road. Later, the heavy Parrots and big Dahlgrens of the siege train stirred in their parked lethargy, and, enormous muzzles tilted, began to roll out through the valley in heavy majesty, shaking the ground as they passed, guarded ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... most impressionable years. Enraged at the mental and moral attitude of the rich Conservatives who placidly assumed that Providence meant them to rule the earth and all the lesser horde to bow down to their inspired will, he was dissatisfied with the stolidity and lethargy of the official Liberal party, although he himself was a Liberal. When the Boer War broke out his sense of chivalry and justice was outraged at the thought that a great people like the British nation should attempt to crush a tiny pastoral race, even under some ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot

... ground, and is still upon the losing hand, and it seems will continue so until it pleases the Lord to pour down his Spirit from on high, or else by some sharp awakening dispensation rouse up drowzy souls out of the lethargy wherein they are fallen, &c. It is many years since the sun fell low upon Scotland, many a dismal day hath it seen since 1649. At that time our reformation mounted towards its highest horizon, and since we left our building on that excellent foundation laid by our ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... influences, or what teachings will work the change in the habits of life of those who thus pretend to cultivate the earth? What shall bring them to a clearer realization of their position, their duties, their opportunities, their prospects? This lethargy of ignorance, indifference, and laziness must be shaken off and laid aside in the immediate future, by study and education, by active interest and participation in every discovery or invention which benefits agriculture; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... spectre of the mighty North, slowly rising from lethargy like those Medicean figures of Michael Angelo, which leap from stone to avengers. There was no mutter of coming storm, no clank of coming sabres and bayonets, no creak of great wheels rolling southward, and war in its extremest ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... dark spot in the center of the mass and found two little boys. The head of the smaller was resting in the bosom of the larger, and both were fast asleep. The lethargy which would have been fatal but for the timely rescue had overcome ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... in spite of the lethargy which necessitated at least some artificial feeding, she was not falling away. She seemed, if anything, plump. To all appearances there was really a retardation of metabolism connected with the trance-like sleep. She was actually gaining ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... of rage, futile passion, and hate, there followed a lethargy from which Ernest Churchouse tried in vain to rouse Sabina. He apprehended worse results from this coma of mind and body than from the flux of her natural indignation. He spent much time with her and bade her hope that Raymond might still reconsider ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild glow of animation during his narrative. It relapsed into lethargy at the advent ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... no one is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue. It is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse the Marquesan from his lethargy. Over all the landward shore of Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the trader's store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was nearly full. So ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... village community by the infusion of any intellectual interest, any sense of Art, or any care for honest sport. And here lies the whole secret of the discontent of villages; their inhabitants are conscious of unjust deprivations in their lot; and if they remain villagers, it is rather from lethargy ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... so much pleasure in all these preparations for Christmas, that it occurred to the abbess she might be able so far to interest her unhappy guest in the work as to arouse her from that fearful lethargy which seemed to be destroying both her ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... of sight went by at a dance measure; the eyesight raced with the racing river; the exigencies of every moment kept the pegs screwed so tight, that our being quivered like a well-tuned instrument; and the blood shook off its lethargy, and trotted through all the highways and byways of the veins and arteries, and in and out of the heart, as if circulation were but a holiday journey, and not the daily moil of threescore years and ten. The reeds might nod their heads in warning, and with tremulous gestures tell how ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson

... when Mr Amedroz came down into the hall, dressed for dinner, and saw his figure through the open doors. 'Will,' he said, coming up to him, 'it only wants five minutes to dinner.' Belton started and shook himself, as though he were shaking off a lethargy, and declared that he was quite ready. Then he remembered that he would be expected to dress, and rushed upstairs, three steps at a time, to his own room. When he came down, Clara and her father were already in the dining-room, and he joined ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope

... counsel lethargy?—you, who in an hour or two start for Corsica, and with no more to-do than if bound on ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... no spectre of the mighty North, slowly rising from lethargy like those Medicean figures of Michael Angelo, which leap from stone to avengers. There was no mutter of coming storm, no clank of coming sabres and bayonets, no creak of great wheels rolling southward, and war in its extremest and most deadly phase. Richmond and Virginia ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... conference when Hamilton at last raised his head from his arms. He looked about him dazedly for a little while, as if endeavoring to put himself in touch once again with the humdrum facts of existence. Then, when his brain cleared from the lethargy imposed by the strain to which it had so recently been subjected, he gave a sudden defiant toss of his head, and muttered wrathfully: "Go broke, or starve your men!" He got out of his chair, and paced ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... felt himself sinking; the room was blurred; the excruciating agony of tortured nerves melted into a lethargy that swept through him. Dimly he sensed that the monstrous, quivering, bell-topped thing was still launching its devastating rain of vibrations; they were above the range of hearing; but he felt his body quivering in response to the unheard note. Then even these vague fragments of understanding ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various

... some persons so amazingly destitute of reason, so exceedingly stupid, and of so sleepy a disposition of mind, that neither advice, nor danger, nor punishment are capable of awaking them; they pass through life in a continual lethargy of wickedness, nor can they be obliged to open their eyes even when at ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... extremity of the Island of Bois Blanc. To the officers the sound was unintelligible, for it was the first of the kind they had ever heard, but the young Indians appeared fully to understand its import. Starting from their lethargy, they sprang abruptly to their feet, and giving a sharp answering yell, stamped upon the green turf, and snuffed the hot air, with distended nostrils, like so many wild horses let loose upon the desert. Nor was the excitement confined to these, for, all along the line ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... misreported. In many communities it is regarded as a disgrace to die of consumption. So it is. But the stigma rests upon the community which permits the ravage of this preventable disease; not upon the victims of it, except as they contribute to the general lethargy. In order to save the feelings of the family, a death from consumption is reported as bronchitis or pneumonia. The man is buried quietly. The premises are not disinfected, as they should be, and perhaps some unknowing victim moves into that ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... good-hearted, capable, swayed by generous and noble thoughts, a silent man of strong and tenacious will; he was very brave, too, scorning danger with the scorn of the fatalist for whom destiny has no fears; but in critical moments a fatal lethargy seemed to overcome him; he appeared to become paralyzed in presence of results, and powerless thereafter to struggle against Fortune should she prove adverse. And Maurice asked himself if his were not a special physiological condition, aggravated by suffering; if the indecision and increasing ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... results, belonging almost entirely to the medical side of the question, can have no place in this discussion. They divide the phenomena of hystero-hypnotism, which they also call grande hysterie, into three plainly separable classes, which Charcot designates catalepsy, lethargy, and somnambulism. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various

... year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... neat and pretty, and then let fall into slatternly neglect. She ceased to care for her dress or the child's; the time came when it seemed as if she could scarcely move in the mystery that beset her life, and she yielded to a deadly lethargy which paralyzed all her faculties but ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells

... moment that she could ever have taken a penny from anyone else, before), that title, which he had believed so wholly inapplicable to her, of 'kept' woman. He could not explore the idea further, for a sudden access of that mental lethargy which was, with him, congenital, intermittent and providential, happened, at that moment, to extinguish every particle of light in his brain, as instantaneously as, at a later period, when electric lighting had been everywhere installed, it ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... raising turnips and cabbages about the skirts of the city, hardly able to make both ends meet, until the corporation has cruelly driven streets through their abodes, and they have suddenly awakened out of their lethargy, and, to their ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... our guests. The latter would therefore have returned to the drawing-room, where it was possible that one or more of them might go to sleep. Remembering that the chops were loin-chops, we might at all events hope for some slight amount of lethargy. Again we waded through the nettles, we scaled the garden-wall, and worked our way between it and the laurestinas towards the door opposite the kitchen. 'There remained between us and the house an open space of about fifteen yards, fully commanded by the drawing-room window, veiling which, however, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... and all publicity methods are of great service, but the mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the lethargy which renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The remarkable part is that the people are ready, but they expect the stimulus to come from without ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... three weeks, found that Esperance, if not cured, was at least on the way to convalescence. She would still pass many hours when she failed to recognize people. A kind of coma took possession of her every now and then and kept her for days together in a kind of lethargy. ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt

... beginning to say something about "no bathtubs" when a sound aroused them from their lethargy. Someone was coming down the path. Ricky's hand fell upon her ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton

... none of the narcotic effects of ordinary diet. Irritability, the direct consequence of exhausting stimuli, would yield to the power of natural and tranquil impulses. He will no longer pine under the lethargy of ennui, that unconquerable weariness of life, more to be ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... numerous crosses and medals. He thought he saw some signs of animation, so he had him removed, and carefully conveyed to the house in which Catharine then was. Once there, every possible care was bestowed upon him. By degrees he recovered from his lethargy, and looked ...
— Catharine's Peril, or The Little Russian Girl Lost in a Forest - And Other Stories • M. E. Bewsher

... he studied to oblige individuals, which is sufficient to give you an idea of all the rest. He had indeed some unaccountable illusions, which he pushed to the utmost extremity. The most dangerous kind of illusion in State affairs is a sort of lethargy that never happens without showing pronounced symptoms. The abolishing of ancient laws, the destruction of that golden medium which was established between the Prince and the people, and the setting ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... fiery affair, made worse by all that he did. For having returned from his lethargy, he promptly began to fight anew all his battles with horses, men, and love that had ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... untruthfulness of speech, cupidity, stupefication, vindictiveness, whether arising from any known cause or otherwise, are indications of the quality of Rajas. Stupefaction of judgment, heedlessness, sleep, lethargy, and indolence, from whatever cause these may arise, are to be known as indications of the quality ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... anxious about its issue, especially those between the Alps and the ocean, who take arms at the crash of the neighbouring tumult; whilst you alone go to sleep amidst the clouds of the coming storm. To say the truth, if there was nothing more than shame to awaken you, it ought to rouse you from this lethargy. I had thought you," he continues, "a man desirous of glory. You are young and in the strength of life. What, then, in the name of God, keeps you inactive? Do you fear fatigue? Remember what Sallust says—'Idle enjoyments ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... seemed almost relieved at this intelligence, especially after I had assured her that the surgeon in charge had assured me that the delirium was much to be preferred as a less dangerous symptom than the lethargy of the first ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch

... sanguine temperament, such as mine, there is little danger of such apathy, The danger is not from lethargy but madness. I had escaped this danger. It was surprising, even to myself, how suddenly my spirits had arisen from the pressure that had kept them down. In a moment, as it were, that mocking troop of fears and sorrows which environed ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... be that an occasional slap in the face of the public in respect of artistic matters awakens it from the complacent state of lethargy in which it lies with regard to most ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... could we do? Agathe and I tried every thing that occurred to us, but to no purpose: the pains in the head became so intense that the poor thing would shriek as if some one was piercing her with a knife, then she would lay in a lethargy, and again start and scream until exhausted. Not for a moment did the comtesse allow her darling to be out of her arms. For two days and two nights she neither took rest nor food; absorbed wholly in her child's ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... words of encouragement remained silent. The funeral was to take place at eleven! Those words rang in my brain like a passing bell. And the doctor coming—the doctor of the dead, as Mme Gabin had called him. HE could not possibly fail to find out that I was only in a state of lethargy; he would do whatever might be necessary to rouse me, so I longed for ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... his pupils their minds should defile, And Maclean was engaged to the duke of Argyll; In a deep fit of lethargy Petit had sunk, And theologist Buxton with Bishop was drunk; Bulteel too, and Dykes, much against their own will, Had been both pre-engaged to a party to mill; And philosopher Jenyns was bent on his knees, To electrify ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... bore rather the appearance of a journey than a conquest, and Ottocar, awakened from his lethargy, received the intelligence with astonishment and terror. He now found even his ally Henry, in whose assistance he had confided, serving with his enemies, his Austrian territories invaded by a powerful army, the people hailing the King of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... lay stretched upon his mattress, incapable of thought, in a sort of lethargy; suddenly he became aware of a singular sound, a kind of continuous whistling breathing. It was Tiger, panting, Tiger with eyes that glared in the midst of the darkness, Tiger with gnashing teeth—Tiger gone mad. Another moment and the dog had sprung upon Arthur Pym, who, wound up to the highest ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne

... sign and sanctuary for after-men. A simple rectilinear coffin, of smooth Verona mandorlato, raised on four thick columns, and closed by a heavy cippus-cover. Without emblems, allegories, or lamenting genii, this tomb of the great poet, the great awakener of Europe from mental lethargy, encircled by the hills beneath the canopy of heaven, is impressive beyond the power of words. Bending here, we feel that Petrarch's own winged thoughts and fancies, eternal and aerial, "forms more real than living man, nurslings ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... on, his indifference to success or failure pervaded him like a physical lethargy, and he played his game so recklessly at last that he sometimes caught himself wondering if it were, after all, worth a single flicker of the candle. He still saw Will Fletcher daily; but when the spring came he ceased ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... attitude of the rich Conservatives who placidly assumed that Providence meant them to rule the earth and all the lesser horde to bow down to their inspired will, he was dissatisfied with the stolidity and lethargy of the official Liberal party, although he himself was a Liberal. When the Boer War broke out his sense of chivalry and justice was outraged at the thought that a great people like the British nation should attempt to crush a tiny pastoral race, even ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot

... with the clippings that Simpson floods me with, since I came back," confessed the other. "What have you got up your faultlessly creased sleeve? It's got to be something different to rouse me from a well-earned lethargy." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... been boiled and disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food and rest, and newspapers and tobacco and gossip—but chiefly rest and the joy of lethargy as tissue was rebuilt after the first long sleep, often twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... of the hand the figure turned and swept out of my tent into the darkness. The instant that the fellow disappeared from my sight I recovered from my lethargy which had fallen upon me. Springing to my feet, I rushed to the opening and looked out. A Sepoy sentry was standing leaning upon his musket, ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... knight errant, Huon vowed to deliver these helpless ladies, and, in spite of the armed guards at every doorway, he passed unmolested into Angoulaffre's chamber. There he found the giant plunged in a lethargy, but was rapturously welcomed by the knight's fair betrothed, who had long sighed for a deliverer. In a few hurried sentences she told him that her captor constantly forced his unwelcome attentions upon her; but that, owing to the protection of the ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... once he recognizes that I have guessed correctly, and that these men have been put asleep by means of one of those narcotics of which certain thieves make use to rob their victims. A potion, which he administers to them by forcing their teeth open with a knife, draws them from this lethargy. They open their eyes, and soon are in condition to reply to my questions. They are furious at the trick that has been played upon them; but they do not know the man. They saw him, they swear to me, for the first time that very morning; ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau

... contains another notable example of a sudden and unaccountable decline in population. The scene is Spain, which, after playing an active and very prominent part in the world's history, sank quickly into the lethargy from which it has never recovered. It may be noted that here, as in the case of Rome, the decay of population and energy followed a great influx of plundered wealth. On the other hand, the increase of population in our newly-planted North American colonies must have been extremely rapid for ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... were beginning to beat with their barbaric monotone. Both men walked with their chins sunk upon their breasts, their eyes upon the ground. They had come to the end of hope, they were possessed with a lethargy of despair. Feversham thought not at all of the pine trees on the Surrey hills, nor did Trench have any dread that something in his head would snap and that which made him man be reft from him. They walked slowly, as though their fetters had grown ten times their weight, and without a word. ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... has happened. There are hundreds of parishes in Ireland where one or two men want co-operative societies or village halls or rural libraries. They discuss the matter with their neighbors, but find a complete ignorance on the subject, and consequent lethargy. There is no social organism with a central life to stir. Before enthusiasm can be kindled there must be some knowledge. The countryman reads little, and it is a long and tedious business before enough people are excited to bring them ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... said the page, "complains of lethargy, and looks duller than usual; and the Lady Catherine of Seyton feels her head somewhat more giddy than ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... latitude, which they who give credit (if any such there now be) to the pretended discoveries of De Fonte, affect to wish had been recommended to Captain Cook, has (if that will cure them of their credulity) been satisfactorily made. The Spaniards, roused from their lethargy by our voyages, and having caught a spark of enterprise from our repeated visits to the Pacific Ocean, have followed us more than once into the line of our discoveries within the southern tropic; and have also fitted ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... else could do it, and with her own hands, she ministered to his wants, until he was restored to health. Such was her life. This is merely one case. She was always ready to do her duty. Her interest in good, never left her, for when almost dying, she aroused from her lethargy and asked if Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States, which he was a few days afterwards. She always predicted a civil war, in the settlement of the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... folk the unclosing buds of April brought no awakening; lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire. An immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the gray storm-wrack fled away,—misty, monstrous, gale-driven ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... 16th, 1885, at noon, the column on the march was roused from the lethargy induced by monotonous riding hour after hour under a warm ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... into the night. And Madame sang Polish love-songs in a sweet, pathetic voice, and I recounted one or two American yarns in Yankee vernacular which excited inordinate gaiety, so easily amused were these poor souls with minds dulled by long years of lethargy and despair. And I wondered, as I glanced around the squalid room, how many years had elapsed since its mud-walls had last echoed to the sounds ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... are on your knees if you can. All over the North Sea that night there were desolate places that rang to the cry of parting souls; after vain efforts and vain hopes, the drowning seamen felt the last lethargy twine like a cold serpent around them; the pitiless sea smote them dumb; the pitiless sky, rolling over just and unjust, lordly peer and choking sailor, gave them no hope; there was a whole tragedy in the breasts of all those doomed ones—a tragedy keen and subtle as that ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... And the skipper, to get out of his hole, fell back on violence. "Good God! Have you got ears on your head? Give me a glass, I said." And a glass, for that matter, he really needed, to dispel the mortal lethargy that had settled on his whole body. A sober man he was! But he would drink, and drink and drink till he was drunk, and drown ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... lethargy, and springing up sent not for my shield and spear, but for an "Indicateur des Chemins de Fer." I would go to Tlemcen and get to the bottom of it. I searched the time-table and found two trains, one starting from ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... Then, casting off his lethargy, he hurriedly made for the kitchen, closely followed by Tom and myself, when we closed after us, and thoroughly barricaded, the inner door, while my uncle unfastened and looked out cautiously from that which ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... the factory was brought to him nightly by Ridgar and the young clerk Gifford, and he would look over things and make a few suggestions, dispose of this and that as a matter of course and fall back into his lethargy. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... warmth was at an end. Despite shut windows, the darkening of the stove was presently followed by a very sensible and fast-increasing change of temperature; and this addition to their causes of discomfort roused every one of the company from his temporary lethargy. The growl of dissatisfied voices awoke again, more gruff than before; the spirit of jesting had long languished and now died outright, and in its stead came some low and deep and bitter-spoken curses. Poor Mrs. Renney shook off her somnolency and shook her shoulders, ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... comprised in justice, he embraced the cause of the Greeks. Still young, Byron had traversed Greece, properly so called, and described the moral picture of its inhabitants. He quitted these countries, pitying in his verses the misery of the Greeks, blaming their lethargy, and despising their stupid submission; so difficult is it to know a nation by a rapid glance. What was the astonishment of the poet, when some years later he saw these people, whom he had thought unworthy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various

... had really come At once the place began to hum, And Mariana's, bless her heart! She threw herself into the part Of cooking for the V.A.D. And wholly lost her lethargy. She sent her gardeners off pell-mell (They hadn't kept the gardens well), And got a lady-gardener in Who didn't cost her half the tin, And who, before she'd been a day, Had scraped the blackest moss away. She put a jolly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various

... incomprehensible to Lady Houstoun! She saw not that the life of indulgence, the perpetual gala-day, which she anticipated for her son, would have condemned him to see his highest powers dwindle away and die in the lethargy of inaction, or to waste in repinings against fate those energies given to command success. Time moderated her astonishment, and quiet perseverance subdued her opposition—subdued it the more readily, perhaps, from the knowledge that her son could ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... of the Canadian, the savage howlings resounded with so much fury, that it required nerves of iron not to shudder at them. Gayferos himself, whom the firing had not roused, shook off his lethargy and murmured, in a trembling voice, "Virgen de los Dolores! Would not one say it was a band of tigers howling in the darkness?—Holy Virgin! have pity ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... a note that effectually roused him from the lethargy of his sorrow; and the desire of taking vengeance on the oppressor, who had ruined his fortune, and made his nearest relations miserable, so entirely engrossed his thoughts, as to leave no room for ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... desires had conquered thee, And changed the object of thy will, It had been lethargy in me, Not constancy, to love thee still. Yea, it had been a sin to go And prostitute affection so; Since we are taught no prayers to say To such as must ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... rostrums. But in 1860-61 the unexpected discovery of large deposits of the precious metals in Colorado and in Nevada gave an enormous impulse to the carrying trade of the plains, and the same argument which proved so cogent in California aroused the Western capitalists from their lethargy. Rumors of the new line over the Sierra also found their way East; and the Legislature of Kansas, now a young and vigorous State, passed a joint resolution in March, 1862, urging on Congress the immediate creation of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... amazed, rapturous, floating, soaring; at times so light that they could take their flight out into the infinite; almost prepared to soar away to all eternity. They slept wide-awake, thus sweetly lulled. Oh! splendid lethargy of the real overwhelmed by ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... it would have depressed the spirit of revolt, confirmed the wavering, and attached them to the British interest. It would have opened a passage for supplies to the city, which was in great want of provisions for the inhabitants. It would have shaken off that lethargy in which the British soldiers had been immerged during the winter. It would have convinced the well-affected that the British leader was in earnest. If Washington had retreated the British could have followed. With one of the best-appointed ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... your Fellow Creatures, need not be inform'd, that while you expose the Foulness of those Facts, which renders them deservedly Objects of Reproach, you will [not] forget to pity the Weakness of Humanity and Lethargy of Reason, which at some unguarded Hours, steals on the Souls of even the wisest Men; and tho' I shou'd find, in the Course of your Papers, all the little Inadvertencies of my own Life recorded, I am sensible it will be done in such a Manner ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher

... that. Every thing in excess brings on reaction. The drunkard may abstain long, but the moment he touches spirit, an orgy commences. Men love, because the time and a woman have come—and that hour and person came all at once to arouse me from my lethargy. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... fear, regrets for the past, fervent resolutions for the future, hope, aspiration, and love; in a word, all the sanctified emotions of the human heart, which together melt into the supreme emotion of religion, will sometimes arise to sternly rebuke the selfish life, shame us out of our moral lethargy, and comfort those whose one solace is that their honour is intact, though misfortune has stricken them in mind or body, or robbed them of the goods of earth, or the cheer and comfort of friendship and of love. It is hoped that the influence ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... of tropical temperature suggests the following question: what would happen if I were to chill the creature in its immobile posture? I foresee a more prolonged inertia. The chill, of course, must not be great, for it would be followed by the lethargy into which insects capable of surviving the winter fall when benumbed ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... Fleix's voice which awakened me from this unworthy lethargy—as selfish as it was useless—and, recalling me to myself, reminded me that precious time was passing while I stood inactive. To get at me he had forced his way through the curious crowd, and his face was flushed. He plucked me by the sleeve, regarding ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... body of one of the other two, piercing him in the navel, and then falling on the ground, and lying stretched before him. The wounded man, fascinated and mute, stood looking at the adder's eyes, and endeavouring to stand steady on his legs, yawning the while as if smitten with lethargy or fever; the adder, on his part, looked up at the eyes of the man, and both of them breathed hard, and sent forth a smoke that mingled ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... was seized with apoplexy, and continued speechless, though in possession of his senses, till the early part of Tuesday the 14th, when he sunk into lethargy, and towards evening died without a struggle; so tranquil, indeed, were the last moments of Curran, that those in the room were unable to mark the precise time when his bright spirit passed away from this earth. His age has been variously stated at sixty-seven, sixty-eight, ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker

... courteous little note from Miss Thorne, which he read without emotion, afterward casting them aside or tearing them up. He never answered them. And then one day there came another note which, for no apparent reason, seemed to stir him from his lethargy. Outwardly it was like all the others, but when Signor Petrozinni scanned the sheet his eyes lighted strangely, and he stood staring down at it as though to hide a sudden change of expression in his face. His gaze was concentrated ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... roused Antony from his lethargy. He sailed to Tyre, intending to take the field against the Parthians; but the season was too far advanced, and he therefore crossed the AEgean to Athens, where he found Fulvia and his brother, accompanied by Pollio, Plancus, and others, all discontented with Octavian's government. Octavian ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various

... too much," he answered. "I'm afraid of it developing into hypersomnia. There are cases where it's been known to grow into a sort of lethargy that pretty well ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock

... sleep. After midnight when Cotoner went away he walked in silence through the brilliantly lighted rooms; he prowled around the chamber—entered it to see Josephina in bed, sweating, shaken from time to time by a fit of coughing or in a deathlike lethargy, so thin and small that the bed-clothes hardly showed the childlike outline of her body. Then the master passed the rest of the night in an armchair, smoking, his eyes staring but his brain drowsy ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... hero of Troy in the war with the Greeks, the son of Priam and Hecuba; fought with the bravest of the enemy and finally slew Patroclus, the friend of ACHILLES (q. v.), which roused the latter from his long lethargy to challenge him to fight; Achilles chased him three times round the city, pierced him with his spear, and dragged his dead body after his chariot round Ilium; his body was at the command of Zeus delivered up to Priam and buried with great pomp ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... stimulated, gladdened, and, as I lay on my bunk listening to the merry crackle of the wood fire, I was in a purring lethargy of content. Then I ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... Victoria's reign were marked by aspirations for a better state of things, and discussions between the rival schools of Classicists and Mediaevalists. The latter carried the day, and, after an heroic struggle and many failures, England awoke from her long lethargy, to find herself the possessor of a noble architecture, a true exponent of ecclesiastical art and tradition, although confessedly far from perfect when applied to domestic buildings. For these latter edifices the old manor-houses, with their many mullioned windows and Tudor arcuation, formed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... starting from his painful lethargy, "it is of no consequence, but I have not time to think of it. I am sorry to have been so rough in your presence, and to have driven away that wretch; but 'tis more than I could master. At sight of those people, my blood ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... was all gemmed with particles of ice. The eye reaching through the thin underwood could form for itself picturesque shapes and solitary bowers of broken wood, which were bright with the opaque brightness of the hoar-frost. The great river ran noiselessly along, rapid but still with an apparent lethargy in its waters. The ground beneath our feet was fertile beyond compare, but as yet fertile to death rather than to life. Where we then trod man had not yet come with his axe and his plow; but the railroad was close ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... words quite distinctly, and knew that Raymond was speaking to him, but for the life of him he could not rouse himself from his lethargy. He could only think of the lonely walk he had taken fifteen years ago; it was his last look at the fields and woods he had known since he was a child, and now it all stood out in brilliant light, as a picture, before him. Above all there came to his nostrils ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen

... the woman, snatching up the child. "You're a reg'lar ol' hyeny,—that's what you are—" she added defiantly, roused at last from her lethargy. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... stupefied were all with astonishment. Upon leaving the room he rushed into the street, and, forgetful of his promise to Mr. Armstrong, took his way to his own hut. The tything man, awakening from his lethargy, and a few others recovering their presence of mind, went at last to the door, and gazed up and down the street, but the disturber of the meeting was not in sight, nor, sooth to say, were any of the number sorry, or wished ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... with absinthe, but gained no result. I have read the collected works of Walter Besant. They are said to sap the mental powers. They did not sap mine. Opium has proved useless, and green tea cigarettes leave me positively brilliant. What am I to do? I so long for the lethargy, the sweet peace of stupidity. If only I ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens

... you said, is in a bad way, and it must be awakened from its lethargy. After a period of unexampled prosperity and marvelous development, something has happened. Just what it is you don't really know, but it's very alarming. Instead of working together for Prosperity, the people ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... crawl. I can't sleep; I can only—not think—no, it isn't thinking I do—it's realizing—and everything is terrible. The sunlight makes ripples on my cabin ceiling; they weave and part and wrinkle. I try to fix my attention on them, and hypnotize myself into lethargy. Sometimes I almost succeed, and then I begin realizing again. And in the night I stare at the electric light till my eyes ache, and try to numb my thoughts. Must my little girl know what I am? Can't that be averted? I know it can't—I know, and ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford

... by the state of her mind. The excitement and sharp agony her physician had feared died away as the fever of the brain subsided; but then there settled down a grim, listless lethargy, which obstructed her return to health and vigor. Once she said to Rhoda Gale, "But I have nothing to ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... capacity of human nature, but, on the contrary, is the only motive which will permanently satisfy human nature. Certain of the Socialists have made it their deliberate policy for years to stir up hatred between the poor and the rich, on the ground that hatred alone can overcome the lethargy of the masses and arouse in them the intensity of feeling necessary for conflict. On the contrary, hatred engenders hatred on the opposite side, action provokes reaction. As the individual can be uplifted in his life only by accepting ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler

... this earliest murder into the shade. Nobody could now be unprepared; and yet the tragedies, henceforward, which passed before us, one by one, in sad, leisurely, or in terrific groups, seemed to argue a lethargy like that of apoplexy in the victims, one and all. The very midnight of mysterious awe fell ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... panic, when Zumalacarregui opposed his zeal and energy to the contagion of alarm that was rapidly spreading amongst his men. His precautions, his decided and inflexible character, gave life to a cause apparently at the last gasp. Encouraging some, rousing others from the lethargy into which they were sinking, he proceeded resolutely with the organization of his three battalions, introduced strict discipline and subordination, and procured five hundred muskets, and a supply of cartridges, from Biscay and Guipuzcoa. General ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... of the young Russians upon their hunting-ground, there had been a show of spring—that is, a few days of warm sun—but this had been succeeded by a return of the cold weather, with a fresh fall of snow. The spell of warmth, however, had aroused many bears from their lethargy—some of which had ventured out of their caves, and made short excursions among the hills—in search, no doubt, of the berries, that, preserved all winter by the snow, are sweet and mellow at this season, and a favourite food of ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid

... warm. There was a hot supper and fuel enough to last through the storm. Only a refuge for which one has fought as Ida Mary and I fought to reach that tar-paper shack could seem as warm and safe as Margaret's shack seemed to us that night. In a numb, delicious lethargy we sat around the stove, too tired and ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... in which he was confined remained no longer utterly neglected. Men of the debtor class were freed from that medieval barbarism which gave the creditor the right to levy on the person of his debtor. Even the public schools were dragged out of their lethargy. When Horace Mann was appointed secretary of the newly created Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, a new day dawned for ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... their station in society from the necessity of manual labour. Mental exercise, and mental amusements, are essential to persons in the higher ranks of life, who would escape from the fever of dissipation, or from the lethargy of ennui. The mere physical advantages which wealth can procure, are reducible to the short sum of "meat, fire, and clothes." A nobleman of the highest birth, and with the longest line of ancestry, inherits no intuitive taste, nor can he purchase it from the artist, the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... could understand. So eager had she been, that she did not perceive the condition to which Nina was reduced, believing that she was still asleep from simple fatigue, but her eye falling on her, she burst into loud lamentations of grief, which very nearly awoke her from the lethargy into which she had fallen. It was the means, however, of awaking Marianna, by whose aid she was able to make the little girl comprehend the importance of seeking out Paolo, and bringing him to attend on his sister. She was absent nearly two hours, but at length returned, accompanied by the Italian. ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... followers of Mr. Redmond or Mr. O'Brien we can hardly argue at present, but we should not lose heart on their account, for these men move en masse. One day the consciousness of the country will be electrified with a great deed or a great sacrifice and the multitude will break from lethargy or prejudice and march with a shout for freedom in a true, a brave, and a beautiful sense. We must work and prepare for that hour. Then there is our philosophical friend. I expect him to hear my arguments. When I am done, he may not agree with me on all points; he ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... then sheriffs; then suddenly came this war upon us. But nothing aroused him from his lethargy; and all day long he brooded there in silence, day after day, until our creditors would endure no longer, and the bailiff menaced him. Confused and frightened, I implored him to leave the city—jails seeming to me far ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... profoundly convinced, moreover, that, as he says more than once[45] 'everything in this world depends on government.' He is astonished at the stupidity and ignorance of the provincial population, and ascribes it to the lethargy produced by despotism.[46] He contrasts it with 'the energetic and rapid circulation of wealth, animation, and intelligence of England,' where 'blacksmiths and carpenters' would discuss every political event. And yet he heartily admires some of the results of a centralised monarchy. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... Roland itself, even in its earliest extant form, is comparatively late and unoriginal; while the remainder of French epic poetry, in all its variety, is much less authentic than Roland, sensibly later, and getting rapidly and luxuriantly worse through all the stages of lethargy. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... against any appreciable monetary reward. An extreme lack of money will, of course, hamper them, and must, of course, do harm to the artist in them. An assured plenty of money may conceivably induce lethargy. But the hope of making money by their art will not spur them on, for there is no hope. No! I ought to have said explicitly at the time that I had in mind, not poets, who by the indifference of the ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... melancholy recollection, and a silent tear was observed to trickle down. But when the philosopher described a character so like his own, shame seemed to take entire possession of his soul; and, rousing as from a long and painful lethargy, he softly raised his hand to his head, and tore away the chaplets of flowers, the monuments of his effeminacy and disgrace; he seemed intent to compose his dress into a more decent form, and wrapped his robe about him, which before ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... deliverance. When, however, the moon shone forth, and by the stars I calculated that it was about the eleventh hour, sleep so irresistibly overpowered me that I fell back, involuntarily, behind a cask which stood upon the deck. It was rather lethargy than sleep, for I plainly heard the sea beat against the side of the vessel, and the sails creak and whistle in the wind. All at once I thought I heard voices, and the steps of men upon the deck. I wished to arise and see what it was, but a strange power fettered my ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff

... at home people have a very faint—perhaps a very false—idea of how men think, and act, and suffer, in this same Border State. Your impression may be that a lethargy prevails, where, in reality, dangerous fever is the disease—a fever that must one day break out violently, in spite of the quack medicines administered by an incapable Government—in spite of the restrictions unsparingly employed, by that grim ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... on the verge of waking, which passed like ghosts along the edge of night almost touched by the light of day. It was Rodriguez whom these dreams visited. The farmer and his wife wondered awhile and then slept; Morano slept with all his wonted lethargy; but Rodriguez with his long quest now on the eve of fulfilment slept a tumultuous sleep. Sometimes his dreams raced over the Pyrenees, running south as far as Lowlight; and sometimes they rushed forward and clung like bats to the towers of the great castle that he should win in ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany

... obtain. alcazar m. castle, fortress. alcoba alcove, bedroom. alcornoque m. cork-tree. alegar to allege. alegrar to rejoice. alegre merry, joyful, gay. alegria gayety, mirth. Alejandra Alexandra. alejar to remove; vr. to go off. aletargar vr. to fall into a lethargy. alfombra carpet. alga seaweed. algazara confused noise. algo something, somewhat. alguacil constable, policeman. alguien some one. alguno some, some one. aliento breath, respiration. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... like a trainer, prodding tame animals with sharp prongs out of the lethargy of their caged lives to stir them to viciousness. Turning to ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien

... endangered succession, to his son Ethelwolf, who was a mild and virtuous prince, full of a timid piety, which utterly disqualifies for government; and he began to govern at a time when the greatest capacity was wanted. The Danes pour in upon every side; the king rouses from his lethargy; battles are fought with various success, which it were useless and tedious to recount. The event seems to have been, that in some corners of the kingdom the Danes gained a few inconsiderable settlements; the rest of the kingdom, after being terribly ravaged, was left ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... being discovered, he has returned only to find that the crafty old fellow was aware of the danger all the time, and sneaked off as soon as the coast was clear. But in very cold weather hibernating bears can hardly be wakened from their torpid lethargy. ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... divine Providence to suffer the holy Church to be afflicted, as we see it, with so many storms and troubles, by this opposition to rouse pious souls, and to awaken them from that drowsy lethargy wherein, by so long tranquillity, they had been immerged. If we should lay the loss we have sustained in the number of those who have gone astray, in the balance against the benefit we have had by being again put in breath, and by ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... Mr. Meyer was aroused from a brooding lethargy, by a crowd of shouting underwriters, who rushed into the Captain's room, seized him by the shoulders, and hurried him out and up to ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson

... an air that he seemed to Sybil to be completely transformed. There never had been much deference in his attitude towards Mercer, but he treated him now without the smallest ceremony. He was as a man suddenly awakened from a long lethargy. From that moment to the moment of his departure ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... language has had its literature, like the Chinese, the roots of which, far from being aggregated, scarcely approach each other without immediate contact. We must admit that nations once roused from their lethargy, and tending towards civilization, find in the most uncouth languages the secret of expressing with clearness the conceptions of the mind, and of painting the emotions of the soul. Don Juan de la Rea, a highly estimable man, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... this stirring cry from the heart, the audience seemed but mildly affected and allowed the President to depart with only perfunctory applause. There was no sign of success for his plea that the nation rouse itself from its lethargy and send its sons unselfishly in voluntary enlistment to drive the enemy from our shores. And there were resentful murmurs when the President warned his hearers that compulsory military service might ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett

... trembling anxiety, the consideration of their own and the public danger. A silent consternation prevailed in the assembly, till a senator, of the name and family of Trajan, awakened his brethren from their fatal lethargy. He represented to them that the choice of cautious, dilatory measures had been long since out of their power; that Maximin, implacable by nature, and exasperated by injuries, was advancing towards Italy, at ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... Webb again fired twice to guide the rescuing party, and then with some difficulty caused Burt to swallow a little brandy. He next began to chafe his wrists with the spirits, to shake him, and to shout in his ear. Slowly Burt shook off his fatal lethargy, and by the time the rest of the party ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... tide of superstition and degradation that now flows unimpeded through this community. Oh! my dear friend, let us take courage, and go boldly forth in the cause of truth, and strive to awaken all from the lethargy into which they have fallen—a lethargy for which their priests are alone responsible, for ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans

... weak to stand alone. At last it was rumoured that when the Black Prince died his young son Richard was to be set aside, and that Lancaster was to claim the inheritance of the crown, as an earlier John had claimed it in the place of the youthful Arthur. The Black Prince awoke from his lethargy, and stood forward as ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... ignorant alike of the localities of the country and the forces of the enemy. Samos seemed to them no less remote than the Pillars of Hercules, and mutual fear thus kept the space between the Persian and the Greek fleet free from the advance of either. But Mardonius began slowly to stir from his winter lethargy. Influenced, thought the Greeks, perhaps too fondly, by a Theban oracle, the Persian general despatched to Athens no less distinguished an ambassador than Alexander, the king of Macedon. That prince, connected with the Persians by alliance (for his sister had ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... banished from literature; science was elevated and its dominion extended, the melodrama, comedy, and tragedy recreated, and a new spirit infused into every branch of composition. Amidst the clash of arms and the vicissitudes of long and bloody wars, Italy began to awake from her lethargy to the aspiration for greater and better things, and her intellectual condition soon underwent important changes and improvements. In the eighteenth century, in Naples, Vico transformed history into a new science. Filangeri contended with Montesquieu for the palm of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... the English. The Dutch obtaining the cession of the kingdom of Sukadana from the Rajah of Bantam, and their subsequent measures in different parts of this territory, will show that they had extensive views of firmly establishing themselves on this island; and waking from an age of lethargy, at last began to see the great advantages and unbounded resources these rich possessions were capable of affording them, without any cost or expense whatever. The year they withdrew from Pontiana they had it in contemplation to take repossession ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel

... freely; but he did not go to sleep for all that: he was incessantly backwards and forwards from Dieppe to Arques, from Arques to Dieppe and to the Faubourg du Pollet. Mayenne, on the contrary, seemed to have fallen into a lethargy; he had not yet been out of his quarters during the nearly eight and forty hours since he had taken them. On the 17th of September, 1589, in the morning, however, a few hundred light-horse were seen putting themselves in motion, scouring the country and coming to fire their pistols close ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... Eveninge, havinge in the ease, and plenty, and luxury of that too happy tyme indulged to himselfe with that licence, which was then thought necessary to greate fortunes, but from the beginninge of these distractions, as if he had bene awakened out of a lethargy, he never proceeded with a lukewarme temper. Before the Standard was sett up, he appeared in Warwickshyre against the L'd Brooke, and as much upon his owne reputation as the justice of the cause (which was not so well then understoode) ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... to bear up under such sorrows, but Edgeworth, though he felt them keenly, would not sink into the lethargy of grief, but roused himself to work for the public good. He was on the board appointed to inquire into the education of the people of Ireland, and two of his papers on the subject were printed in the reports ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth

... drew a deep breath, which was followed by something strangely resembling a sigh. I knew it was time to move; and, shaking off a sensation of fast-approaching lethargy, I tried to get rid of the feeling of faintness, and only roused the sharp pain afresh. Still, that spurred me into effort; and as I pressed Sandho's sides lightly, he began to amble gently along, while I raised ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn

... own vigor was slowly failing him; instead of pressing the other he was now obliged to defend himself. He strove to throw off the lethargy irresistibly stealing over him; to shake the leaden movements from his limbs. He vainly endeavored to penetrate the mist falling before his eyes and to overcome the dizziness that made his foeman seem like a figure in a dream. Was it through loss of blood, or weariness, or both?—but ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... removing some buzzing insect from her child's cradle, and, making a sign to enjoin silence, added in a low voice, "She is neither dead nor poisoned. Some philtre has been given to her for a bad purpose. Her breathing is even, and she cannot fail to recover from her lethargy." ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... limb, forming the line of separation between the dead and living structures. The crack deepens till the parts below drop off without loss of blood, and frequently with very little pus. Ergot may cause serious irritation of the digestive tract, or by acting upon the nervous system it may cause lethargy or paralysis. It also operates to cause contraction of the uterus, and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... having slept any the night before, and having passed through a day of fierce battle, was overcome after midnight, and sank into a sleep that was mere lethargy. He awoke once before dawn and remembered, but vaguely, all that had happened. Yet he was conscious that there was much movement in the forest. He heard the tread of many feet, the sound of commands, the neigh of horses and the rumbling of cannon wheels. The Army ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler

... gone out of the barker's spiel; the forced gaiety was dying out of the loud levees where the abandoned of the earth held their nightly carousals. Comanche was in the lethargy of dissolution; its tents were in the shadow of the ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... perhaps sooner than we think, we shall have the true Armageddon, the general strike, when the last sleeping toiler shall have aroused himself from his lethargy to rise up and come into his inheritance." He seemed to detach himself from her, his eyes became ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... thing Granville Kelmscott knew. Some strange shadowy dreams, to be sure, disturbed the lethargy into which he fell soon after; but they were intermittent and indefinite. He was vaguely aware of being lifted with gentle care into somebody's arms, and of the somebody staggering along with him, not without considerable ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... for two or three Years, and being unfortunate in her first Marriage, has taken a Resolution never to venture upon a second. She has no Children to take care of, and leaves the Management of her Estate to my good Friend Sir ROGER. But as the Mind naturally sinks into a kind of Lethargy, and falls asleep, that is not agitated by some Favourite Pleasures and Pursuits, Leonora has turned all the Passions of her Sex into a Love of Books and Retirement. She converses chiefly with Men ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... neither the colonel nor Phil, and a sharp prick of wonder pierced her lethargy of despair. She turned in her chair, obedient still to that inner force that compelled. Yes, they had gone. Only the native remained—an old, bent man, who humbly awaited her pleasure. His face was almost hidden in ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... and behind this mask of me, (Against which years have beat thus blanchingly With their rains!) and behold my soul's true face, The dim and weary witness of life's race; Because thou hast the faith and love to see, Through that same soul's distracting lethargy, The patient angel waiting for his place In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe, Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood, Nor all which others viewing, turn to go, Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed,— Nothing repels thee.—Dearest, teach me ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... many more than that, had depleted our ranks of labor, and there was a paralysis of all our industry, owing to the dislocation of its machinery for purposes of war, the soaring cost of raw material, the crippling effect of high taxation, the rise in wages to meet high prices, and the lethargy of the workers. Ruin, immense, engulfing, annihilating to our strength as a nation and as an empire, stares us brutally in the eyes at the time I write this book, and I find no consolation in the thought that other nations in Europe, including ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... low, earnest tones; but as he advanced in his tale, his voice, though still low, had taken on a penetrating, vibrating quality that thrilled his wife, and reached the ears of the old woman on the couch, seeming to rouse her from her lethargy like a voice from the grave. She had stirred restlessly two or three times, striving ever harder to break the thrall of her weakness: it would have moved the heart of any one beholding her efforts to make herself heard, but she lay unnoticed, for the man was deep in his wonderful narrative, ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter

... disasters were not yet over. Although brave at heart and, for his years, sturdy of frame, he could not withstand the tremendous cold peculiar to those regions of ice and snow; and ere long the fatal lethargy that is often induced by extreme frost began to tell. The first symptom was that Poosk ceased to feel the cold as much as he had felt it some time before. Then a drowsy sensation crept over him, and he looked about for a convenient spot on which to sit down and rest. Alas for the little ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne

... (from whom I hardly knew) That you were fled, and all my joys with you, Like some sad statue, speechless, pale, I stood, Grief chill'd my breast, and stopp'd my freezing blood; No sigh to rise, no tear had power to flow, Fix'd in a stupid lethargy of woe: But when its way the impetuous passion found, I rend my tresses, and my breast I wound: 130 I rave, then weep; I curse, and then complain; Now swell to rage, now melt in tears again. Not fiercer pangs distract the mournful dame, Whose first-born infant feeds ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... cried Drusus, half sunken though he was in a weary lethargy, "do you believe there are ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... In such a relation as that, such a man would think of the union in worship as an essential feature in his plans. And here I am tempted to say, that in a thousand things in England which seem a hopeful improvement on English lethargy, one catches sight of Dr. Arnold as being, behind all, the power that is moving. Hodson, in the East-Indian army, seems so different from anybody else, that you wonder where he came from, till it proves ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... a series of cases destined to fling this earliest murder into the shade. Nobody could now be unprepared; and yet the tragedies, henceforward, which passed before us, one by one, in sad, leisurely, or in terrific groups, seemed to argue a lethargy like that of apoplexy in the victims, one and all. The very midnight of mysterious awe ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... thought which should be at the back of political action. Political action under present conditions must necessarily be deputed to a few representatives, and after the vote is given or the cheering at a meeting has ceased, the individual can do nothing but wait, and his lethargy tends to become still deeper. In the Gaelic revival there is a programme of work for the individual; his mind is engaged, thought begets energy, and this energy vitalises every part of his nature. This makes for the strengthening of character, and so ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett

... condition was most alarming, Albine again gave him her hand to rest his cheek upon. But when she saw that it brought him no relief she wept to find herself powerless. Since he had fallen into the lethargy of winter she had felt too weak to drag him unaided from the nightmare in which he was struggling. She needed the assistance of spring. She herself was fading away, her arms grew cold, her breath scant; she no longer knew how ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... With this admonition in my ears, I pinched my leg and sat staring with heavy eyes out upon the quiet street, where the rolling of the slow wheels over the fallen leaves was the only sound that disturbed the silence. After ten bitter years the city was still bound by the terrible lethargy which had immediately succeeded the war; and on Church Hill it seemed almost as if we had been forgotten like the breastworks and the battle-fields in the march of progress. The grip of poverty, which was fiercer than the grip of armies, still held us, and the few stately houses showed tenantless ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... duties, indeed, had the power of insistence remained to me. But the saner medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—leapt at a bound, probably, from ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... design which they had always in view, and laid their schemes at a great distance for the putting it in execution. The Romans were sensible of this, and reproached themselves for their indolence and torpor, which had thrown them into a kind of lethargy; at a time that the enemy were rapidly pursuing their victories in Spain, which might one day be turned against them. They would have been very well pleased to attack them by open force, and to wrest their conquests ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... vigorous attack of his advance guard he held to be necessary always, to fix the enemy's attention and "paralyse his independent will-power." It was the failure to make this point which, in August 1870, led von Moltke repeatedly into the very jaws of defeat, from which only the lethargy of Bazaine on the one hand and the initiative of his subordinates, notably of von Alvensleben, rescued him. This is the essence of the new Strategic Doctrine of the French General Staff. See the works of Bonnal, ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... which Socrates passed his life. Of his influence it is hardly necessary here to speak at length. In the well-known metaphor put into his mouth by Plato, he was the "gad-fly" of the Athenian people. To prick intellectual lethargy, to force people to think, and especially to think about the conceptions with which they supposed themselves to be most familiar, those which guided their conduct in private and public affairs—justice expediency, honesty, and the like—such was the constant object of his life. That he should ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... their being, and that foulness is painful as the accompaniment of disorder and decay, and always indicative of the withdrawal of Divine support. And the practical analogies of life, the invariable connection of outward foulness with mental sloth and degradation, as well as with bodily lethargy and disease, together with the contrary indications of freshness and purity belonging to every healthy and active organic frame, (singularly seen in the effort of the young leaves when first their inward energy prevails over the earth, pierces its corruption, and shakes its ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... from its lethargy as by the crash of a thunderbolt. A Shawanoe, lately here on a visit, had left his Illinois friends to return home. He now reappeared, crossing the river in hot haste with the announcement that he had met, on his way, an army of Iroquois approaching to attack them. All was panic and confusion. ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... start made by England in exploration, and trade, and even in pilgrimage, is plainly the result—in action and reaction—of the Norse and Danish attacks, waking up the old spirit of a kindred race, of elder cousins that had sunk into lethargy and ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... enjoyment. Accordingly he stole into a dense copse and buried his booty at the foot of a persimmon-tree, then gained his humble quarter and slept so late and soundly that he had to be dragged almost without the door the next morning before he shook off his lethargy. ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... the top.' His birthday he was accustomed to celebrate with lamentations. At length an obscure disease which had always afflicted him, fed in part, no doubt, by his fiery spirit and his fiery discontent, reached his brain. After some years of increasing lethargy and imbecility, occasionally varied by fits of violent madness and terrible pain, he died in 1745, leaving all his money to found a hospital for the insane. His grave in St. Patrick's Cathedral bears this inscription of his own composing, the best possible ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... has once been wakened up from its original lethargy, when we have overstepped the boundary which divides the man from the beast, and are made desirous of improvement, while at the same moment the tumultuous passions that draw us in infinitely diversified directions are called into act, the case becomes exceedingly different. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... said nothing. She only recognized in this lethargy the merciful effects of the drug she had administered to her ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... tried to make her father understand the difficulty in hopes that he would suggest a remedy, but all her efforts were in vain. Carmichael lay with his eyes closed in a kind of lethargy or paralysis. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... she would tell the cabman, "Queen's Square, Bloomsbury." And an hour later, nervous with expectation, she sat in the cab, seeing the streets pass behind her. She was beginning to know the characteristics of the neighbourhood, and in the afternoon light they awoke her out of a trembling lethargy. She recognised the old iron gateway, the open space, the thirsty fountain and the troop of neglected children. She liked the forlorn and rusty square. She experienced a sort of sinking anguish while waiting on the doorstep, lest he might not be at home. But when ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... mind awoke from its lethargy and then he began to remember as a dim, uncertain dream, his experience of the night before. Gradually it became more real but he recalled his failure to find the tent, the fearful groping in the snow, and his struggle ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace

... at the bell, repeated several times, roused him at last to go to the door. His caller was Robert Cramier. And at sight of him, all Lennan's lethargy gave place to a steely feeling. What had brought him here? Had he been spying on his wife? The old longing for physical combat came over him. Cramier was perhaps fifteen years his senior, but taller, heavier, thicker. Chances, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... others, all aglitter with metallic gleams: gold, emerald, blue and purple. They are the humming-birds of the insect-world, the Chrysis-wasps, or Golden Wasps, another set of exterminators of the larvae overcome with lethargy in their cocoons. In them, the atrocious assassin of cradled children lies hidden under the splendour of the garb. One of them, half emerald and half pale-pink, Parnopes carnea by name, boldly enters the burrow of Bembex rostrata at the very moment ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... into its shaft projected an unhinged shutter supported on two saw-horses, with a sheeted burden upon it. As his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom beyond the room's centre, Parish could make out the hunched figure that sat at the head of the body, still mercifully wrapped in something like lethargy and too numbed for full acuteness ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... is alive, alert, active, full of latent energy, ready to act, to do things, to turn his mind to things, to turn his hand to things, to turn his desire to things, to turn his whole being to things. There is no trace in this school of the mental lethargy which, in spite of the ceaseless activity of the teachers, pervades the atmosphere of so many elementary schools; no trace of the fatal inertness on the part of the child, which is the outcome of five or six years of systematic repression and compulsory inaction. The air of the school is electrical ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... they had begun,—on such safer topics as the problem of the social work of modern churches. Her aromatic presence, and in this setting, continually disturbed him: nature's perfumes, more definable, —exhalations of the sea and spruce,—mingled with hers, anaesthetics compelling lethargy. He felt himself drowning, even wished to drown, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over Davenant's "Gondibert," that winter that I labored with a lethargy—which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... through and behind this mask of me, (Against which years have beat thus blanchingly With their rains!) and behold my soul's true face, The dim and weary witness of life's race; Because thou hast the faith and love to see, Through that same soul's distracting lethargy, The patient angel waiting for his place In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe, Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood, Nor all which others viewing, turn to go, Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed,— Nothing repels thee.—Dearest, teach me ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... something else. When there had been nothing else to fill up the time he had stupefied himself with drink. He drank at first, not because he liked drinking, but because it dulled his brain, his heart. It didn't excite him; on the contrary, it brought him to a state of lethargy which, if he was at the club, made him willing to go home, or, if he was at home, made it possible for him to go to bed and sleep. It was only within a month or so that he had begun to suspect that other people noticed it; and ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King

... become dangerous and destructive when once they gain the ascendant in the heart: to soothe the mind to tranquillity by hope, even when that hope is likely to deceive us, may be sometimes useful; but to lull our faculties in a lethargy is poor ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... onslaught, for he was not to be stirred from his lethargy by talk about Slagter's Nek and the missionaries. For a while there was silence, which presently was broken by Jan roaring at me in a loud voice ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard

... of the day, too, Arthur looked through the whole house. Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy from which nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare and lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been there, had long ago started away on lost sunbeams—got itself absorbed, perhaps, into flowers, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... Clarice, appearing like Virgil's Camilla, stirs him from this lethargy. He falls in love at first sight, as Tasso's heroes always do, and vows to prove himself her worthy knight by deeds of unexampled daring. Thus the plot is put in motion; and we read in well-appointed order how the hero acquired his horse, Baiardo, Tristram's magic lance, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... which the king's skilful diplomacy gave way. Holland, roused to a sense of danger by the appearance of French arms on the Rhine, protested and appealed to England for aid; and though her appeals remained at first unanswered, even England was roused from her lethargy by the French seizure of the coast towns of Flanders. The earlier efforts of English diplomacy indeed were of a selfish and unscrupulous kind. Holland, Spain, and France were tempted in turn by secret offers of alliance. A treaty offensive and defensive ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... them; they merely deceive themselves. They are in no wise persecuted; but their unconscious soul fails to perform its duty. Is it less adroit than the others: is it less eager? Does it slumber hopelessly in the depths of its secular prison: and can no amount of will-power arouse it from its fatal lethargy, and force the redoubtable doors that lead from the life that unconsciously is aware of all things to the intelligent ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... receives its share of verification from that theory of development with which in various forms all modern science is prepossessed; so, on the other hand, the philosophy of rest also, of the perpetual lethargy, the Parmenidean assertion of the exclusive reign of "The One," receives an unlooked-for testimony from the modern physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena he deals with—matter, organism, consciousness—began in a state of indeterminate, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... people are tearing their hair, and the welkin rings with such affrighting cries as Downfall and Crisis, the Archbishop's rather solemn and alarmed countenance breaks up into a genial smile. It is when people are immovable in otiose self-satisfaction, when the air is still and when lethargy creeps over the whole body of humanity, that the face of Dr. Davidson hardens. There is nothing he dreads more than apathy, nothing that so stimulates his policy of constant pressure as inertia. Ndengei, the supreme deity of the Fiji Islands, the laziest of all the gods, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic; and fitting it is that a native of the first great stable Republic was drawn to study the European Republic which rose at the touch of William the Silent's genius, and sank back into lethargy of kingship when the blood of the tragic and heroic inauguration was all spilt. The contact of the United Netherlands with American history and future is known to all. From the Netherlands the Puritans set sail to found what proved to be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlands ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... Rollestons? No representative of "The Maples" was present, not even Du Meresq. They had flashed past within a minute; but, like a fresh breeze over still water, the little incident had awakened and roused up Bluebell from her lethargy. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... his transports of rage ended in a lethargy from which he never awoke. His funeral was conducted with a pomp suited to his rank; and, amid discharges of cannon whose dreary roar was echoed from the yawning gulf of the Saguenay, his body was borne to its rest under the rocks of Tadoussac. Good Catholics and good Frenchmen saw in his fate ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a trivial conversation, "is that I didn't think—I didn't think at all. I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones—in a sort of lethargy— stagnant. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... aside their lethargy, if they were made to understand that the question to be decided is not whether this or that type of school should be supported, but whether the present system of education should be entirely discarded in favour of an altogether new plan? ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... help you." And, with a voice which sounded full and clear amid the hissing roar of the gale, La Motte struck up a cheering, merry song, well calculated to arouse even the most apathetic from the lethargy into which they ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston

... usually terrific outbreak of the elements, they seem to have paused even in their ordinary fluctuations, to gather a terrific strength for the great effort. A faint peal of thunder now comes from far off. Like a signal gun for the battle of the winds to begin, it appeared to awaken them from their lethargy, and one awful, warring hurricane swept over a whole city, producing more devastation in the four or five minutes it lasted, than would a half ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... of bells at the door hastened the completion of the meal. The boys might have sat there longer and, like boa-constrictors, gorged themselves into lethargy. ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson

... glittering sentences flew over the heads of the common people, without any impression upon their hearts. Something might be necessary, he observed, to excite the affections of the common people, who were sunk in languor and lethargy, and therefore he supposed that the new concomitants of methodism might probably produce so desirable an effect.[359] The mind, like the body, he observed, delighted in change and novelty, and even in religion itself, courted new appearances and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... modern dynamic electricity owes its development to the principle of economy in production. Practical science most effectively awakens from its lethargy at the call of commerce. Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that electricity was akin to heat—that an interruption of the easy passage of a current produced heat—the minds of men were busy with the question of how to turn the tremendous fact ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

... a sign to enjoin silence, added in a low voice, "She is neither dead nor poisoned. Some philtre has been given to her for a bad purpose. Her breathing is even, and she cannot fail to recover from her lethargy." ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... with deep expulsion of breath, and tingling nerves. He had reached Blake. Whatever his doubts of the man, and they had been many, Pan divined that he could stir him, rouse him out of the lethargy of sordid indifference and forgetfulness. He would free him from this jail, and the shackles of Hardman in any case, but to find that it was possible to influence him gladdened Pan's heart. What would ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... (pet), evil (ou). Nevertheless the Coptic language has had its literature, like the Chinese, the roots of which, far from being aggregated, scarcely approach each other without immediate contact. We must admit that nations once roused from their lethargy, and tending towards civilization, find in the most uncouth languages the secret of expressing with clearness the conceptions of the mind, and of painting the emotions of the soul. Don Juan de la Rea, a highly estimable man, who perished in the sanguinary ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... doing, Ambrose?" asked Stephen, rousing a little from his lethargy. "Methought I heard mine uncle say ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... door jarred Blake from his lethargy. He groaned and sluggishly raised his head. His face was bloodless and haggard, his bloodshot eyes were dull and bleared. He had the look of a man at the ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... amusement. One of these, closer to him than the rest, and who seemed from his dress and bearing to be some officer in authority, held instead of a pike a short sword, the touch of whose pointed steel blade had been the effectual means of awakening him from his lethargy. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... addressing them; then, as if awaking from this state of stupefaction, asked them questions without seeming to hear the reply; and even the presence of the Duke of Bassano and the Duke of Vicenza, whom he summoned more frequently, did not interrupt this condition of preoccupation or lethargy, so to speak. The hours for meals were the same, and they were served as usual; but all took place amid complete silence, broken only by the necessary noise of the service. At the Emperor's toilet the same silence; not a word ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... urgent part of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of existence, unless our means of production can by some stroke of magic ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... through the man who sat in the chair; the lethargy began to clear from his brain, like a morning mist when a breeze rises; he sat a little more upright and gripped the arms of his chair; he said nothing yet, but he felt power and resource flowing back to his brain, and the pulse in his temples quieted. Why, if ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... were possible, in the midst of an absolute vision, clear as the hyaline, but only repellent of falsehood, not receptive of truth. It is the positive by which a man shall live. Truth is his life. The refusal of the false is not the reception of the true. A man may deny himself into a spiritual lethargy, without denying one truth, simply by spending his strength for that which is not bread, until he has none left wherewith to search for the truth, which alone can feed him. Only when subjected to the positive does the negative find ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... meal over, they sat sleepily blinking their eyes, whisking away flies, and mopping the moisture from their faces until the sound of "Eis! meine Herrschaften!" "Bier! meine Herrschaften!" roused them from their lethargy. Ices and beer and cherries and peaches successively filled up the weary hours until "the tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," carried joy to their hearts. I can never forget the rapturous look of anticipation and satisfaction which those stolid ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... fellow must be in pain, for each time there was a sharp wincing, accompanied by a deep sigh, which resulted in the touch being laid on more lightly. It was only to satisfy himself in the darkness that his comrade was sleeping and not sinking into some horrible state of lethargy; and finding at last that there was no apparent need for his anxiety, the watcher directed his attention to listening for sounds out upon the veldt, and divided the time by making surmises as to the experiences through ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn

... without number to the latter, and had become involved in money difficulties to a degree which kept him in constant anxiety and torment. Yet he steadily rejected all his brother's affectionate advice and importunities to shake off the deepening lethargy. He would not write poetry because the Muse did not come of her free will, and he would never do her violence. He had forsworn prose, because he said everybody wrote that, and many so ill that he would not swell the number of magazine story-writers, who, he foresaw, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... comfortable position and encountered a rock, and sluggishly through his benumbed faculties passed a train of associated ideas—rock, rock ledge, loup-cerviers, the boy! With a mighty effort he roused himself from the growing lethargy and staggered ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... at her little window for hours watching the lethargy of village life in the street below, that rural life in which the rector and the schoolmaster were the principal figures. The dullness of it all was maddening. Her aunt's mid-Victorian primness, her snappishness towards the trembling maid, and the thousand ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux

... of following up the career which he had so nobly begun. There was much murmuring, therefore, to which, however, he gave little heed; and several weeks had passed in the manner above described, when an incident occurred to rouse him from the sort of lethargy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... patrician Aetius. From the instinct of a base and jealous mind, he hated the man who was universally celebrated as the terror of the Barbarians, and the support of the republic; [711] and his new favorite, the eunuch Heraclius, awakened the emperor from the supine lethargy, which might be disguised, during the life of Placidia, [72] by the excuse of filial piety. The fame of Aetius, his wealth and dignity, the numerous and martial train of Barbarian followers, his powerful dependants, who filled the civil offices of the state, and the hopes of his son Gaudentius, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... is not to do others' thinking for them, but to help them to think more vigorously and effectually. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves. The light and life which spring up in one soul are to be spread far and wide. Of all treasons against humanity, there is no one worse than his who employs great intellectual force to keep down the intellect of his ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... when he heard the money was gone, and a look of despair came into his half closed eyes. He sat thus for a few moments unheeding the other's advice, then with an effort shook off his lethargy. ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr

... way through the vegetable kingdom upon which he is quartered, for no merit or exertion of his own; and where his career is only to be noted by the ravages of his insatiable jaws. After a brief period of lethargy or pupa state, this good-for-nothing creature flutters forth, powdered, painted, perfumed, scorning the dirt from which he sprung, and leading a life of uselessness and vanity, until death, in the shape of an autumnal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... a lethargy or under a partial paralysis; he slowly and weakly rubbed his head with his hand, as if vaguely conscious that the ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... like ghosts along the edge of night almost touched by the light of day. It was Rodriguez whom these dreams visited. The farmer and his wife wondered awhile and then slept; Morano slept with all his wonted lethargy; but Rodriguez with his long quest now on the eve of fulfilment slept a tumultuous sleep. Sometimes his dreams raced over the Pyrenees, running south as far as Lowlight; and sometimes they rushed forward and clung like bats to the towers of the great castle ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany

... up a swaying motion. Smoke went toward him slowly, scarcely able to will movement through the lethargy that weighed his flesh. He noted that his brain was clear. It was only the body ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... sleep of exhaustion. In this for a time the mind joined in the lethargy of the body. But presently, as the vital currents were aroused, the mind began to play its fantastic tricks. He was a seminary student, he was ordained, he was taking his vows before the bishop, he was a robust and consecrated priest performing his first service, shining, it seemed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... imaginations, sighings, griefe and sorrow without manifest cause, for that it purgeth away melancholy humors" (p. 1343). Poultices applied to the head, of mustard and figs, are recommended for epilepsy and lethargy. Gerarde adopts from Apuleius the virtues of double yellow and white batchelor's buttons, hung "in a linnen cloath about the necke of him that is lunaticke, in the waine of the moone, when the signe shall be in the first degree ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... unhappy parents withdrew, Lord Glenallan, to prevent the old woman from relapsing into her lethargy, again pressed her on the subject of the communication which she proposed to ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... to watch in the evenings the Spaniards, shedding their usual lethargy, dance the fandango and the bolero with a perfection of grace and agility, even in the villages. The colonel offered them the use of his band, but they, quite rightly, preferred the guitar, the castanets, and a woman's voice; an accompaniment which gave the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... Polish love-songs in a sweet, pathetic voice, and I recounted one or two American yarns in Yankee vernacular which excited inordinate gaiety, so easily amused were these poor souls with minds dulled by long years of lethargy and despair. And I wondered, as I glanced around the squalid room, how many years had elapsed since its mud-walls had last echoed to ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton's darkened parlor. As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but her mother gave a cry and ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... him grew A lethargy of sense, a trance, And soon imagination threw Before him her wild game of chance. And now upon the snow in thaw A young man motionless he saw, As one who bivouacs afield, And heard a voice cry—Why! He's killed!— And now he views forgotten foes, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... had entirely ceased, with her coming. A sort of early summer lethargy had apparently settled on the house. Doyle wrote for hours, shut in the room with the desk; the group of intellectuals, as he had dubbed them, had dispersed on summer vacations. But she discovered that there were other conferences being ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... experiences—a few at least. There are many giants in Canaan, very many of them. There is Giant Lust, who has slain thousands. Poor souls! Giant Puff-up, who causes pilgrims to act as foolish as did the toad that saw an elephant and burst itself trying to be as large; Giant Lethargy, who operates an opiate factory in a hollow that runs directly down into Egypt; Giant Covetousness, who decoys pilgrims to the silver-mine run by Balaam and Demas; Giant Pride, an evil giant who has troubled pilgrims for time out of mind; Giant Liar, who uses an abundance ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry

... folks would not mix me up with your private matters." The words rose sharply from the senile prattle and penetrated Mostyn's lethargy. "There's old Jeff Henderson—he had the cheek to come to me to-day to borrow money. Said his family was in rags and starving. Said you euchred him out of all he had and got your start on it. What in the name of common sense does he come to me for? I don't own you, and I knew nothing about that ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... upon. We read in the annals that to emperors of illustrious race, whom their own laches caused to fall from power, succeeded others, at one time similar, at another different; but what dignity could we confer on Charles, who hath not honor for his guide, who is enfeebled by lethargy, and who, finally, hath lost head so far that he hath no shame in serving a foreign king, and in misuniting himself to a woman taken from the rank of the knights his vassals? How could the puissant ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... the back of the seat, seemed to scald his face; his legs were uncomfortable; there was a draught from the window on his back; but, however wretched he was, he did not want to change his position. . . . A heavy nightmarish lethargy gradually gained possession of him ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... most discouraging. They had lost all thought—supposing them to have ever had such thought—of regenerating Central America; and most of them wished no better thing than to fill their bellies, or to escape from Nicaragua. Many of them were sunk into a physical and mental lethargy, thinking of nothing and caring for nothing, and were gone, not a few, even into lunacy. Some cursed General Walker for enticing them there under false pretences. There were men with families who professed to have come there to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... Inn that she had a headache, and shut herself into her room, without food, to gather her scattered forces. She lay wide-awake all the night through, her mind trying to work its way through the lethargy of shock it had received. She remembered falling down the cellar stairs, when she was a little girl, and lying for hours on the hard stone floor, perfectly serene and calm, without pain, until she tried to do so much as move a little finger or lift an ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... aroused, preparing to fight. If war came to England it would be no war decreed by a few men. It would be a war proclaimed by the people themselves, demanded by them. The nation was stirring; it was casting off the proverbial lethargy and indifference of the English. Even here, in this usually quiet suburb of London, the home of business and professional men who were comfortably well off, the stirring of the spirit of England ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske

... of the war. Knowing now the frightful blunders committed at the outset, and the hair's-breadth escape from tremendous tragedy, the miracle of the sudden awakening which enabled France to shake off her lethargy and her vanity, and to make a tiger's pounce upon an enemy which had almost brought her to her knees is one of the splendid things in the world's history which wipe out all ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... others at the entrance of the saloon. It was very strange, but I was too stupid to arrange things. Once I wondered whether I really was in the cabin along with Mr Frewen, but I got no farther with that line of reasoning, and I was sinking back into my stupor or lethargy when ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn

... these opposed shapes My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon 20 Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes The outworn to worse weariness. But soon A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke, And from the evil lethargy I woke. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson

... anti-Bible lecturers, male and female, apologize for, and vindicate this crime. Lord Herbert, the first of the English Deists, taught that the indulgence of lust and anger is no more to be blamed than the thirst occasioned by the dropsy, or the drowsiness produced by lethargy. Mr. Hobbes asserted that every man has a right to all things, and may lawfully get them if he can. Bolingbroke taught that man is merely a superior animal, which is just the modern development theory, and that his chief end is to gratify the appetites and inclinations of the flesh. Hume, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... than blistering or stimulating frictions. Its effects, though perhaps less permanent, are general and diffused over the limb. This process has been found effectual in restoring heat to the lower extremities, and a case of obstinate lethargy was cured by Corvisart by a repeated urtication of the whole body. During the action of the stimulus, the patient, who was a young man, would open his eyes and laugh, but then sink again into a profound sleep. In three weeks, however, his perfect ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport

... not only the best and only way to serve the world, but also the one happy way to satisfy himself. Then, indeed, has he come to himself. Henceforth he knows what his powers mean, what spiritual air they breathe, what ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them all sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness passes away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... thus venting her anguish, she was roused from her lethargy of grief by the chambermaid, who had ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton

... pleasure. She adhered strictly to her habit of rising with the sun, and not the least enjoyable part of the morning was the three hours spent in the solitude of her uncle's luxurious library, while the day was new. Her active mind awoke from its enforced lethargy, and plumed itself for flight with a delightful sense of freedom. The dream of her life was coming true at last, and she was to have a chance to learn. She had learned all that the Sleepy Hollow school could teach her long ago. She would take up chemistry, of ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black

... seem not to know that nine-tenths of the young, educated, and progressive classes are disgusted with them. This explains the lethargy manifested by the above-minded classes toward the Church. The Church, like all other institutions, must be progressive. The fact that these men are keeping the Church back in the dingy past puts them out of sympathy with it. I recently heard a well-known ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various

... name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this street of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... raucous cries, twisted the tails of their kine to port or starboard, or beat them forcibly, and the tram driver, roused from the lethargy engendered by the cool of the early morning, by the shouts and cries, put on his brake, bringing his tram to a stand-still just as, with a terrific clatter of hoofs, Leonie dashed past the front of it with Cuxson at ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... what teachings will work the change in the habits of life of those who thus pretend to cultivate the earth? What shall bring them to a clearer realization of their position, their duties, their opportunities, their prospects? This lethargy of ignorance, indifference, and laziness must be shaken off and laid aside in the immediate future, by study and education, by active interest and participation in every discovery or invention which benefits agriculture; by the exercise of sound judgment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... priest. In the meantime, Justinian, pretending that he knew nothing of what was going on, neither inquired to what part of the world Priscus had been banished, nor ever thought of him again afterwards, but remained silent, as if he had fallen into a state of lethargy. However, he seized the small fortune that ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius

... more silent but even deeper change in the religious temper of the country. It dates, as we have seen, from the work of the Wesleys, but the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy; and the "Evangelical" movement, which found representatives like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the Establishment, made the fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at last impossible. In ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... outward, cooped up with these two and a shy and profoundly depressed mate who read the Bible on Sundays and spent the rest of his leisure in lethargy, three and fifty days of life cooped up in a perpetual smell, in a persistent sick hunger that turned from the sight of food, in darkness, cold and wet, in a lightly ballasted ship that rolled and pitched and swayed. And all the time the sands in the hour-glass of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... alcazar m. castle, fortress. alcoba alcove, bedroom. alcornoque m. cork-tree. alegar to allege. alegrar to rejoice. alegre merry, joyful, gay. alegria gayety, mirth. Alejandra Alexandra. alejar to remove; vr. to go off. aletargar vr. to fall into a lethargy. alfombra carpet. alga seaweed. algazara confused noise. algo something, somewhat. alguacil constable, policeman. alguien some one. alguno some, some one. aliento breath, respiration. alimentar to feed. alma soul. almohada ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... parliament in their debating society, and copied the arts of journalism in the Eton Miscellany. In both fields the young Gladstone took a leading part. The debating society was afflicted with 'the premonitory lethargy of death,' but the assiduous energy of Gaskell, seconded by the gifts of Gladstone, Hallam, and Doyle, soon sent a new pulse beating through it. The politics of the hour, that is to say everything not fifty years off, were forbidden ground; but the execution of Strafford or ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... spirits; and the war was our constant theme. And then the coming and going of traders and strangers on the old trail, the undercurrent of anxiety lest another conspiracy should gather, the Quantrill raid at Lawrence, all helped to keep us from lethargy. We had had our surprise, however. Strangers had to give an account of themselves to the home guard now. But we were softened toward our own townspeople. They were very discreet, and we must meet and do business with them daily. For the sake of young Tell and Jim, we who knew would say nothing. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... sent her maid out to get some headache powders. She had had a good cry when she reached home. She had pondered her little brain into a kink, trying to figure out her campaign. When she had a headache, or a cold, or a sleepless night, or a lethargy, she always put a powder in her stomach. It never did any good, and she was always changing the nostrum, but she never changed ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... had a depressing effect upon its staunch supporters, for they were well aware the failure would not be attributed to its true source —that is, the bitter opposition it had met with from its unprincipled opponents, the lethargy of many of its pretended friends, and from other causes which we have already mentioned in this book. But it would be published "from Dan to Beersheba" that it had received a fair trial and, after being "weighed in the balance and found wanting," had been ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... are hundreds of parishes in Ireland where one or two men want co-operative societies or village halls or rural libraries. They discuss the matter with their neighbors, but find a complete ignorance on the subject, and consequent lethargy. There is no social organism with a central life to stir. Before enthusiasm can be kindled there must be some knowledge. The countryman reads little, and it is a long and tedious business before enough people are excited to bring ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell









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