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More "Monotonous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... song of its engine came down to the men as Blake swept in a great circle about the big ship. He was looking it over, but he began his inspection at a distance, and the orbit of his plane made a tightening spiral as he edged for a closer look. He was still swinging in the monotonous round when the ship made ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... but delicate structure of airy stories, hanging galleries, fragile colonnades, gilded cornices, and resplendent frescoes—was throbbing throughout its whole perilous length with the pulse of high pressure and the strong monotonous beat of a powerful piston. Floods of foam pouring from the high paddle-boxes on either side and reuniting in the wake of the boat left behind a track of dazzling whiteness, over which trailed two dense black banners flung from ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of favours, yes. And even in matter of visits, to a certain degree,—their life is so monotonous that novelty has a great charm. Reuben used to go and read to them almost every day on his way from school, but I found it best to make ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... narrow canals, the banks of which were covered with high reeds and heavy, tropical, confused, untidy vegetation. The air was still and stifling—absolutely unmoved, screened as it was on all sides by vegetation. The sailors sang a monotonous cadence, and the boat glided along for some three hours until we arrived at the mouth of the Piri river, hardly wide enough for a couple of boats to go through simultaneously, and so shallow that rowing was ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... that youthful companionship, and Marius' admiration for his friend's poetry?... that delightful language of the third century—a new Latin, a season of dependency, an Indian summer full of strange and varied cadences, so different from the monotonous sing-song of the Augustan age; the school of which Fronto was the head. Indeed, it was Pater's book that first suggested to me the idea of the book I am writing. But perhaps you do not know I am writing a book.... Did my mother ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... sake let up on that cayuse!" Rowdy cried petulantly. "I wish I'd never got sight of the little buzzard-head; I've had him crammed down my throat the last day or two till it's getting plumb monotonous. Pink, that cayuse never saw Oregon. He was raised right on this flat, and he belongs to old Rodway. I've got to lead him back there and turn him ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... Hilo was as dull and monotonous as our upward journey had been. At last we reached the pier, where we found the usual little crowd waiting to see us off. The girls who had followed us when we first landed came forward shyly when they thought they were unobserved, and again encircled me with leis of gay and fragrant ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... proposed was somewhat like that of the Quakers, but less respectable,—a rustic cousin to it, or rather a caricature; namely, a close coatee, with stand-up collar, and very short skirts,—skirtees, they might be called,—the color gray; pantaloons and vest the same;—making the wearer a monotonous gray man throughout, invisible at twilight. The proposers of this metamorphosis, to make it go, selected an individual of small and agreeable figure, and procuring a suit of fine material, and a good fit, placed him on a platform ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... of the needles had an effect of commonplace which helped to restore Bertha to her self-possession, and in a little time her tears ceased, and moving to the window she stood there looking out upon the landscape. The monotonous click of the needles ceased, and she knew that her mother had laid down her work in her lap and was regarding her. She turned, with a ghost ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... musical clang from the bucket under the van which struck against something now and then. The Professor was sitting in front, with a lighted lantern hanging from the peak of the van roof. He was humming some outlandish song to himself, with a queer, monotonous refrain: ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... dismay. He had about given up when, in the last quarter of the horizon he saw, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, what looked like a fine trickle of blackish smoke that appeared to rise from a shapeless mound that bulged above the monotonous level. ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... tantamount to saying that never do the broad tendency and the general scope of a work become immediately apparent. Similarly does the entry to every town—the entry even to the Capital itself—convey to the traveller such an impression of vagueness that at first everything looks grey and monotonous, and the lines of smoky factories and workshops seem never to be coming to an end; but in time there will begin also to stand out the outlines of six-storied mansions, and of shops and balconies, and wide perspectives of streets, and a medley of steeples, columns, statues, and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... energetic language and unfamiliar conceptions would have presented insuperable difficulties. Between Dante and Alfieri no Italian poet except Michael Angelo expressed so much deep thought and feeling in phrases so terse, and with originality of style so daring; and even Michael Angelo is monotonous in the range of his ideas and uniform in his diction, when compared with the indescribable violence and vigour of Campanella. Campanella borrows little by way of simile or illustration from the outer world, and he never falls into the commonplaces of poetic phraseology. ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... Art's mighty means and perfect rudiment," the place where the divine in man "defied the invincible gesture of necessity." And nothing can so glorify the classics as to bring them into the field and into the shop and let them become woven into the tasks that might else seem monotonous or menial. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... son-in-law. He brought little gifts to the young lady, artificial flowers, bonbons on New-Year's day and pretty boxes for her birthday. Twenty-six years of age, a worker working without purpose, steady as a girl, monotonous and apathetic, holding cafes, cigars, and horsemanship in detestation, going to bed regularly at ten o'clock and rising at seven, gifted with some social talents, such as playing quadrille music on the flute, which first brought him into favor with the Saillards and the Baudoyers. He was moreover ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... iii. 1; in Ovid's Metamorphoses, xv. 871 seq.; and in Martial, x. 27 seq. Among French sonnetteers Ronsard attacked the theme most boldly. His odes and sonnets promise immortality to the persons to whom they are addressed with an extravagant and a monotonous liberality. The following lines from Ronsard's Ode (livre i. No. vii.) 'Au Seigneur Carnavalet,' illustrate his habitual treatment of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... except fall off his pony, and knock chips out of gate posts with his trap. Even that became monotonous after a time. He objected to whist, cut the cloth at billiards, sang out of tune, kept very much to himself, and wrote to his Mamma and sisters at Home. Four of these five things were vices which the "Shikarris" objected to and ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... were so ardent in religion that they spent day and night in teaching their son the story of the gospel and the psalms. They desired first of all that he should be a good Christian and a bearer of the faith—but they wearied the growing boy with long hours of study and monotonous recitals of religious hymns and proverbs when he was eager to be ranging the hills or playing with his fellows. At that time he had no particular desire to be a priest, and, like most boys, was far more interested in the stories of ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... first day the dance was slow and funereal, in honor of the Yo-kai-a chief who died a short time before. The music was mournful and simple, being a monotonous chant in which only two tones were used, accompanied with a rattling of split sticks and stamping on a hollow slab. The second day the dance was more lively on the part of the men, the music was better, employing airs which had a greater range of tune, and ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... Dewey did not suspect it, was at that moment in a very uncomfortable position indeed, and he himself was menaced by a peril already near at hand against which his helpless condition allowed of no defence. His lonely and monotonous life was destined to be varied that evening ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... which tell most on the character, are unmarked by any notable events. A steady, orderly routine, a gradual progression, perseverance in hard work, often do more to educate and form than a varied and eventful life. Erica's two years of exile were as monotonous and quiet as the life of the secularist's daughter could possibly be. There came to her, of course, from the distance the echoes of her father's strife; but she was far removed from it all, and there was little to disturb her mind in the quiet Parisian school. There ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... then clinging by the mane of his horse, he scrambled for the bridle, which was under the other horse's feet—reached it, and, well satisfied with himself, looked round at Paddy, who looked back to the chaise-door at my angry servants, "secure in the last event of things." In vain the Englishman in monotonous anger, and the Frenchman in every note of the gamut, abused Paddy: necessity and wit were on Paddy's side; he parried all that was said against his chaise, his horses, himself, and his country, with invincible comic dexterity, till at last, both ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... grows monotonous, even when you know it will be printed, and this I did not know; my prose was very faulty, and my ideas were unsettled, I could not go to the tap and draw them off, the liquor was still fermenting; and partly because my articles were not very easily disposed ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... towards Garrat, my attention was attracted by a pretty mansion, which pleased my eye, though the monotonous blows of its adjoining oil-mill annoyed my ear. The owner, Mr. Were, politely exhibited its details; and more mechanical ingenuity than is here displayed could not well be applied to aid the simple operation ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... upon the land. One may almost hear the roar of the continual fires, the throb of the engines, the heavy beat of the trip-hammers, and the rattle of the spindles, by which the work of the world is done; and their noises, blended by the distance into one monotonous sound, seem like the voice of the restless, hard-working, unsettled spirit of gain. Manchester is built and is worked for profit, not for pleasure; beauty is driven away from her as a thing at variance with practical life; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... by and the monotonous rainy season had just began. Then a swelling the size of a peach developed in young Kung's breast, which increased over night until it was as large as a tea-cup. He lay on his couch groaning with pain, and unable to eat or to sleep. ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... always observed," continues Mr. Finlay, "that he adopted a very simple and even monotonous tone, when he had to say any thing not quite in the ordinary style of conversation. Whenever he had begun a sentence which showed that the subject interested him, and which contained sublime thought, he would check himself suddenly, and come to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... properties only small quantities may be eaten. No tree lover will ever forget his first meeting with the sugar pine. In most pine trees there is the sameness of expression which to most people is apt to become monotonous, for the typical spiral form of conifers, however beautiful, affords little scope for appreciable individual character. The sugar pine is as free from conventionalities as the most picturesque oaks. No two are alike, and though they toss out their immense arms ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... are coming into my valley every day, and, while they increase the danger of fires, I welcome them. They are all advocates of the forest. As one man said: 'The mountains supplement the plains. They give color and charm to the otherwise monotonous West.' I confess I couldn't live on the prairies—not even on the plains—if out of sight of the mountains. If I should ever settle down to a home it would be in a canon like this, with a great peak at ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... yet it could hardly be called monotonous. Whenever wearied of their darksome waiting, the young men would steal again into the hollow image of Huitzil', there to utilise the cunningly arranged peepholes, now looking out upon the priests, or listening ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... argumentative. Their constant discussions were a strong link in the chain of esteem; for they had a tendency to enliven their solitude, and to give a zest to lives that, without them, would have been exceedingly monotonous. Their ordinary subjects were theology and war; the chaplain having some practical knowledge of the last, and the captain a lively disposition to the first. In these discussions, the clergyman was good-natured and the soldier polite; circumstances that tended ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... monotonous gallop of the animals the youths were startled by the sound of a laugh, which suddenly rang out on the still air. It was brief and hearty, such as a man emits who is highly pleased over something ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... mind was analytical, and he loved to take a theme and unfold it, peeling it like an onion, layer by layer. For Douglas, an oration was a pile of ideas, three hours high. Lincoln's voice was a high dusty tenor, with small range, and monotonous; Douglas's voice was a magnificent vocal instrument, extending from the flute-like tone to the deepest roar. Lincoln lacked every grace of the great orator; Douglas had every art that makes the ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the opposite inlets he saw people struggling into the piazza, while above them paper lanterns, held aloft on sticks, were waving uncertainly to and fro. A rude monotonous chant made a distinctly traceable strand of noise, across which screams, whistles, gibing chants in piping boyish voices, the beating of drums, and the ringing of little bells, met each other in confused din. Every now and then one of the dim floating ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... A monotonous key; but it's about the same as fetching a breath after a run; only, true, it lasts too long—not healthy! Skepsey will bring me my letters. I was down in the country early this morning, looking over the house, with Taplow, my architect; and he speaks fairly well of the contractors. Yes, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it, and only one solitary bush standing out on the hill-top against the sky-line, on the summit of what was then a very steep hill through which the cutting has since been made. The hills on the Newmarket Road, which have also since been cut through, were equally bare and monotonous in colour, at least during most of the year; and the Heath was then destitute of those graceful patches of charming spring and autumn natural tints which the plantations of to-day give to the neighbourhood ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... want to tell it to you and see if you all approve and think me equal to it. It used to come to me in flashes, after this Fairy Godmother of mine opened an avenue for my surplus energy by sending me out as a story-teller; but lately I have n't had any heart for it. Work grew monotonous and disagreeable and hopeless, and I 'm afraid I had no wish to be useful or helpful to myself or to anybody else. But now everything is different. I am not so rich as I was (I wish, Mr. Bird, you would not smile so provokingly ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... awful dasher plunges and creaks. Above all the winds howl, and the waves roll, and sometimes slap the ship till she shivers and leaps, and then the "Wreck of the Hesperus" recommences. Things get gloomy, the variations of storm grow monotonous, nothing delights us, no wish arises for beef tea, nothing makes gruel palatable. Neither sun nor stars have been visible for some days; the only sunshine we see is the passing smile of the ship's boys, who are almost constantly employed baling ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... She lay down and slept, awoke, moved her body for more comfort, slept again. And through her sleep and dreams and wakeful moments she heard the quiet voices of the men who had no beds to go to; that monotonous sound and an occasional clink of glass and bottle neck or the rustling of shuffled cards. Once she got up and looked through a hole in the canvas; she had taken off her shoes and made no noise to draw attention to her spying. It must have been chance, therefore, which ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... tack, coffee, canned baked-beans, canned tomatoes, and canned "roast beef." Before we arrived at Key West the baked-beans had all been eaten and the water in the tanks had gone rotten—we carried no condenser—so that we were reduced to the rather monotonous diet of tomatoes for breakfast, tomatoes and canned roast beef for dinner, and tomatoes again for supper; with a full allowance of coffee and hard tack ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... voice of the girl was singularly compelling; there was something vividly impressive about her just now, though her pallid, prematurely mature face and the thin figure in the regulation black dress and white apron showed ordinarily only insignificant. "Tell me now," she repeated, with a monotonous emphasis that somehow moved Sarah to obedience against her will, greatly to her ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... mend! to mend! to mend!" The monotonous calls of London hawkers are a strange mixture of sounds—at one moment attractive, at another repelling; they are, perhaps, more like the cry of a bird in distress ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... to have more enjoyment,' she pursued courageously. 'Think of the numbers of people who live a dull, monotonous life just because they can't help it. How they would envy us, with so much money to spend, free to do just what we like! Doesn't it seem a pity to sit ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... camp was pitched in a grey wilderness of rock and forest, far from any house; as he sat with his mates about the evening fire, the trains passing on the track were their next, and indeed their only, neighbours, except the wild things of the wood. Lovely weather, light and monotonous employment, long hours of somnolent camp-fire talk, long sleepless nights, when he reviewed his foolish and fruitless career as he rose and walked in the moonlit forest, an occasional paper of which he would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the verdant woods, in the coppice, and even on the lonely moors. He flits from one stunted tree to another and utters his notes in company with the wild song of the Ring Ousel and the harsh calls of the Grouse and Plover. Though his notes are monotonous, still no one gives them this appellation. No! this little wanderer is held too dear by us all as the harbinger of spring for aught but praise to be bestowed on his mellow notes, which, though full and soft, are powerful, and may on a calm morning, before ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... feels the influence of any woman, purifying, chastening, abashing, strengthening him against temptation, shielding him from evil, ministering to his self-respect, medicining his weariness, peopling his solitude, winning him from sordid prizes, enlivening his monotonous days with mirth, or fancy, or wit, flashing heaven upon his earth, and mellowing it for all spiritual fertility,—there is the element of marriage. Wherever woman pays reverence to man,—wherever any woman rejoices in the strength of any man, feels it to be God's agent, upholding her weakness, ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... no resistance but sank down limply where Jarrold left her and watched him as he slouched over to the fire. She sought to hear their words, to read the looks on their faces. But she caught only a monotonous mutter, unintelligible but evil, and saw only the bottle passing from one to the other. Brodie finished it and hurled it from him so that it broke noisily. A few times she heard them laugh; she could distinguish ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... his son she was oracular. Consequently, Pownal only laughed at her, when she spoke of himself, as well, indeed, he might, but when she referred to his father, the case was altered. Not that any clear, well-defined danger presented itself, but as in low, monotonous tones the squaw proceeded, darkly hinting at what she would not explain, an oppression fell upon his spirits as strange as it was painful. We can liken it to nothing with more propriety than to that dim sense of terror and discomfort which is sometimes observed in the inferior animals at the approach ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... are very handsome, with elegant fountains which relieve the somewhat monotonous regularity. Some of the squares are of immense size. There is a very large lazaretto, which is said to be one of the best managed in the world. The cafes are like small palaces, and the shops rival the ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... continued to pour down on the roofs and on the tombs with a monotonous plash. "But what is to be ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... said, by great simplicity, natural and pleasing metaphor, and extremely soft and melodious rhyme. They sing their poems to certain popular airs, which are committed to memory. Malay music, though plaintive and less excruciating than Chinese and Japanese, is very monotonous and dirge-like, and not pleasing to a European ear. The pentatonic scale is employed. The violin stands first among musical instruments in their estimation. They have also the guitar, the flageolet, the aeolian flute, a bamboo in which holes are cut, which ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... whole landscape. In this volume there is so much gloom! Suffering and death have met us so often! Can you wonder, my dear reader, that the historian of such an epoch longs to escape, when he can, from the gloom of the tragedy, and paint those scenes of comedy which occasionally broke the monotonous drama? To write this book is not agreeable to me. I wear out a part of my life in composing it. To sum up, in cold historic generalities that great epoch would be little—but to enter again into the hot atmosphere; to live once more that life of the past; to feel the ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... respects, the time at "The Briars" was dull and monotonous, and he complained bitterly to Cockburn of the inadequate accommodation. The most exciting times were on the arrival of newspapers from Europe. The reports just to hand of riots in England and royalist excesses in France fed his hopes of general ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... to have no kind of worship, and their sports are few. The children swing, bathe, and sail small canoes. The grown-up people have their dance—a very poor sort of thing. A band of youths, with drums, stand close together, and in a most monotonous tone sing whilst they beat the drums. The dancers dance round the men once or twice, and all stop to rest a bit. I have been twice present when only the women danced. They bury their dead, and place houses over the graves, which they fence round, planting crotons, bananas, etc., ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... feeling happy, in a still, unreasoning way. She had not had an easy youth. It had been full of poverty and fears, and her later life had been lived on one monotonous level of satisfying her own bare wants and finding nothing left for luxury. But something, some singing inner voice, was always, in these later days, bidding her take hope. She was not expectant of definite delights; she only cherished an irresponsible certainty. When the door opened ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... gloomy, savage-looking country, and seemed to me well suited to be the home of so dreadful an animal. There were few animals to be seen here. Even birds were scarce, and a few chattering monkeys were almost the only creatures that broke the monotonous silence and ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... grass and bordered with acacia-bushes covered with feathery leaves and a profusion of yellow ball-shaped flowers that perfumed the air with their fragrance. The view up and down these winding flower-bordered streams was lovely. We rode for miles over this monotonous country, gradually rising to higher ground. Suddenly, almost at our very feet, a little bowl-shaped valley about half a mile in circumference opened to view. The upper rim all around was covered with smooth green grass, and the sides ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... calm the opening of the door of the salon, with the sudden uplifting of voices in the hall, told Paul that Yerba's guests were leaving. He heard Dona Anna's arch accents—arch even to Colonel Pendleton's monotonous baritone!—Milly's high, rapid utterances, the suave falsetto of Don Caesar, and HER voice, he thought a trifle wearied,—the sound of retiring footsteps, and all was ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... be pleasant to those who make nature a study. There is a vast book open before us and every one who chooses can open a page. The study will never grow monotonous, for nature is constantly changing and with lavish hand showers upon her children from her great store house innumerable blessings, to those who "see books in running brooks, sermons in stones ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... doing its every-day work; and in the reading, the lessons for the previous day were to be those of the examination day. By an evil fortune, the reading for the day was the dramatic "Marco Bozzaris." The master shivered inwardly as he thought of the possibility of Thomas Finch, with his stolidly monotonous voice, being called upon to read the thrilling lines recording the panic-stricken death-cry of the Turk: "To arms! They come! The Greek! The Greek!" But Thomas, by careful plodding, had climbed to fourth place, and the danger ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... difference between the week behind him, with all its ups and downs, its quarrels, its ennuis, its moments of delightful intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, and those threadbare monotonous weeks into which he was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in him a mad inconsequent sting of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... into Third Avenue, a long street, which, commencing just below the Cooper Institute, runs out to Harlem. A man came out of a side street, uttering at intervals a monotonous cry which sounded like ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... and beset with a homicidal mania for the past three years, reduced to one idea through mental impoverishment, that of murder, having lost the faculty for even the lowest order of reasoning, the poorest of journalists, save for pikemen and Billingsgate market-women, so monotonous in his constant paroxysms that the regular reading of his journal is like listening to hoarse cries from the cells of a madhouse.[3146] From the 19th of August he excites people to attack the prisons. "The wisest and best course to pursue," he says, "is to go armed to the Abbaye, drag out the traitors, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... an hour a day in exercise. In an hour one can, without making too great haste, walk three miles. At this rate, a year's walking represents over a thousand miles. Relaxation is essential to keep up the spirit and prevent life from becoming monotonous, as if one were sentenced to perpetual treadmill. Recreation is necessary, and the pursuit of pleasure is sometimes ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... day from his early childhood, living all the time under the conditions forced upon the English proletarian? It is still the same thing since the introduction of steam. The worker's activity is made easy, muscular effort is saved, but the work itself becomes unmeaning and monotonous to the last degree. It offers no field for mental activity, and claims just enough of his attention to keep him from thinking of anything else. And a sentence to such work, to work which takes his whole time ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... house was such a house, but it was more. It was mysterious, uncommunicative. In the midst of the commonplace residence block, with its white cottages, its monotonous lawns and uninteresting gardens, the contrast was startling, secretive, contemptuous. The tall grass waved ironically at the neat grassplots which flanked it. The great untrimmed elms sent branches to beat against the decaying shingles, or downward into the faces of passers-by, with patrician ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... moments when the camels halted there could not be felt the slightest breeze, so that the air as well as the sands seemed to slumber in the warmth, in the light, and in the stillness. The caravan had just ridden upon a great monotonous level ground, unbroken by khors, when suddenly a wonderful spectacle presented itself to the eyes of the children. Groups of slender palms and pepper trees, plantations of mandarins, white houses, a small mosque with ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... expensive estates of the mill-owners, the wealthiest class in the community. Between the villages, in fact, upon all the roads, every turn brings in sight pleasing views which never repeat themselves or become monotonous. The cemetery is itself one of the most beautiful spots in the neighborhood. A massive granite gateway is being put up, the gift of the late Thomas Allen. For a long distance the road leads through a thick forest of maple, pine and oak trees. A swiftly-running ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... the weird spot as the noise of their spades became monotonous, relieved only by the throwing aside of the great lumps of moist earth; a mist was rising from the river flowing near, of which in the first stillness of our coming I could just catch the ripple of the water. It seemed to me that ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... races working side by side should possess so many opposite traits of character. The white man has strong will and convictions and is set in his ways. He lives an indoor, monotonous life, restrains himself like a Puritan, and is inclined to melancholy. The prevalence of Populism throughout the South is nothing but the outcome of this morbid tendency. Farmers and merchants are entirely absorbed in their business, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... flames, above the drawing and sighing of the wind, there now came a strange sound which seemed to proceed from the fire-tinted clouds above. Now and then branches of the nearby trees stirred mysteriously, and at times a wild shriek rose above the monotonous chattering. ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson
... a sickly child, who dreads its mother's departure, was the only sound to which I could compare that wretched man's voice. He held me with a force almost supernatural; but his tongue uttered supplications in a feeble monotonous tone, and with the most humble and beseeching manner. 'Leave him,' exclaimed he, 'leave him a little while longer. He will forgive me; I know he will. He spoke that horrible word to rouse my conscience. But I heard him and came back to him. I would have toiled and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... his lower jaw and jumping on his bare feet. He bowed again as if saluting a fetish, and again and again. Ceaselessly he bowed to the tomtoms, always jumping softly from the pavement. His long hair fell over his face and back upon his shoulders with a monotonous regularity that imitated the tomtoms, as if he strove to mould his life in accord with the fetish to which he offered adoration. Flecks of foam appeared upon his lips, and the asceticism in his eyes changed to a bestial glare. His whole ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... economic statesman. The existing system works very badly in respect to supplying the farmer with necessary labor. In every period of prosperity the tendency is for agricultural laborers to rush off to the towns and cities for the sake of the larger wages and the less monotonous life; and when a period of depression follows, their competition lowers the standard of living in all organized trades. If the supply of labor were regulated, and its efficiency increased as it would be under the proposed system, agricultural laborers would not ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... to time, then disappearing through a partition beyond. She would emerge again presently carrying an embroidered reticule, and would wander round among the crowd, holding out the bag by its chain, and repeating in tones of somewhat monotonous appeal: "For the starving poor of Paris, ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... in the palace of truth from all of you gentlemen here, would be countless in their differences. I hear explanations of the present state of things all day long. I like to hear them. You think it may become monotonous. No: not at all; because there is so much, I will not say of random variety, but there is so much independent use of mind upon the facts that we have to deal with, that I listen with endless edification and instruction. But, I think, and I wish I could think otherwise with all my heart—that ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... I," she answered; "the terror to me was that you had learned in the Quartier lessons to make your after-life monotonous. I ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... this apparition of the supermon i' the air-r," continued Tam in the monotonous tone he adopted when he was evolving one of his romances, "the enemy fled, emittin' spairks an' vapair to hide them from the veegilant ee o' young Mr. Lasky, the Boy Avenger, oor the Terror o' the Fairmament. They darted heether and theether wi' their remorseless pairsuer on their heels an' the ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... between two thousand years before Christ and two thousand years afterward. Still disasters fall upon our lives, sometimes as swift in their assault as wild beasts leaping from an unsuspected ambush. Still troubles come, long drawn out and wearying, like the monotonous dripping of water with which old torturers used to drive their victims mad. Still sins bring shame to the conscience and tragic consequence to the life, and tiresome work, losing the buoyancy of its first inspiration, drags itself out into purposeless effort and bores us with ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... sombre hues of the earth. The forest trees appear with their foliage freshly expanded—some; as the tulip-tree, the dogwood, and the white magnolia, already in the act of inflorescence. The woods no longer maintain that monotonous silence which they have preserved throughout the winter. The red cardinal chatters among the cane; the blue jay screams in the pawpaw thicket, perhaps disturbed by the gliding of some slippery snake; while the mock-bird, regardless of such danger, from the top of the tall ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... known what fires he was recklessly stirring up he might have held his peace. Winterborne was silent a long time. The darkness had closed in round them, and the monotonous drip of the fog from the branches quickened as ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... days life on the trail was monotonous. Whenever Ted could be spared from the herd he and Stella and Hallie Croffut, and sometimes Ben or Kit, took long rides off the trail with their rifles, after a pronghorn or black-tail deer, and frequently ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... The rhythms are joyously, barbarically, at times almost frenetically, free. They are finely various and depart almost entirely from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makes monotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march with some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of the orchestral processionals of a Moussorgsky and a Borodin. And one has the sense of having encountered only in sumptuous Eastern ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... sun's heat poured down in floods. A monotonous locust was chirr-chirr-chirring from a nearby cottonwood ... and in the long hedge of Osage oranges moaned ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... every minute of the day, and the harder Fran tried to fill her place, the more he resented it. He divined that Fran hated the routine, the monotonous forms of charity, the duplicated copies of kind acts, the rows of figures representing so many unfortunates. Instead of acknowledging to himself that his daughter did the work from a yearning for his love, from a resolution to save him from the Grace-infatuation ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... wrapped in a commissary blanket and covered by a cast-off tall hat, crouched against the wall of the station looking stolidly at nothing. The station itself, a long, rambling building containing its entire accommodation for man and beast under one monotonous, shed-like roof, offered nothing to attract the eye. Still less the prospect, on the one side two miles of arid waste to the stunted, far-spaced pines in the distance, known as the "Barrens;" on the other an apparently limitless level with darker patches of sage brush, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... country so dangerous as this, to which I came through pure obedience and against my own inclination. Here duplicity passes for wit, and frankness is looked upon as folly. I am neither cunning nor mysterious. I am often told I lead too monotonous a life, and am asked why I do not take a part in certain affairs. This is frankly the reason: I am old; I stand more in need of repose than of agitation, and I will begin nothing that I cannot, easily finish. I have never ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and windows, and shouting "Merry Christmas!" to one another across the street as they hurried to get home. The drays ran over the pavement with muffled sounds; winter had set in with a heavy snow-storm. In the big hall the monotonous click of checkers on the board kept step with the clock. The smothered exclamations of the boys at some unexpected, bold stroke, and the scratching of a little fellow's pencil on a slate, trying to figure out how long it was yet till ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... change be too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful, for then change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in extreme and fantastic degrees of it. This is the diseased love of change of which we ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... and went breaking bread, pouring wine, and so on, with quiet mechanical precision. His head and body above the tablecloth had a rigid immobility. This firebrand, this great agitator, exhibited the least possible amount of warmth and animation. His voice was rasping, cold, and monotonous in a low key. He could not be called a talkative personality; but with his detached calm manner he appeared as ready to keep the conversation going as to drop it at ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... were filled to suffocation, the neighboring streets were jammed with people clamoring for admittance and hungry for news from within. Then began the long, tedious task of selecting a jury. Public opinion had run so high that this was no easy undertaking. As day after day went by in the monotonous examination and challenge of talesmen, as panel after panel was exhausted with no result, not only did the ridiculous shortcomings of our jury system become apparent, but also the fact that the Mafia had, as usual, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... last gazing on the sea, which seemed to mock his hopes and fears with its monotonous roll and roar, and fixed his eyes on the dim outline of the Heogue, which his sister had named "Boden's purple crown;" and he wondered if Signy could see the dear old hill from her place amid the waves. He would not think that the Osprey ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... us. Our heartbeats, the taste of water, the rising and setting of the sun, or, in the case of a child, milk, or the presence of its mother, or of its brothers, do not seem to become, in sound health, distressingly monotonous. But 'artificial' things, however pleasant at first—a tune on the piano, the pattern of a garment, the greeting of an acquaintance—are likely to become unbearable if often exactly repeated. A newspaper is an artificial thing in this sense, and one of the arts of the newspaper-writer ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... with what an endless number of monotonous jokes the goldfinches that fairly overran the Heuscheuer Mountains used to furnish us? When we approached a bare bush or tree, it would suddenly sway to and fro and scatter gold leaves. We interpreted that as meaning mountains of gold. In the evening we dined on goldfinches, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... midnight; and you still sat by my side. All others had departed from the chamber of Death. They had deposited me in the coffin. The lamps burned flickeringly; for this I knew by the tremulousness of the monotonous strains. But suddenly these strains diminished in distinctness and in volume. Finally they ceased. The perfume in my nostrils died away. Forms affected my vision no longer. The oppression of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom. A dull shot like that of electricity pervaded ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... one do if one happens to be a sea serpent?" Anko inquired. "There is nothing in the sea that can hurt me, and I cannot commit suicide because we have no carbolic acid or firearms or gas to turn on. So it isn't a matter of choice, and I'd about as soon be alive as dead. It does not seem quite so monotonous, you know. But I guess I've stayed about long enough, so I'll go home to dinner. Come and see me when ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... canal business. He plodded along wearily upon the bank, driving his still wearier horse before him, and carrying ore down to Pittsburg with such grace as he best might; but it didn't somehow quite come up to his fancy picture of the seaman's life. It was dull and monotonous, and he didn't care for it much. In genuine American language, "he didn't find it up to sample." The sea might be very well in its way; but a canal was a very different matter indeed. So after a fair trial, James finally gave the business up, and returned to his mother on the little homestead, ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... and as if her ears had been opened to the voices of the world, she heard, beyond the rampart of sea-wall, the swell of yesterday's gale breaking on the beach with monotonous and solemn vibrations, as if all the earth had been a ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... be indecorous, nothing grotesque: The personages were to speak, not as men, but as heroes; to whom, as statuaries have assigned a superiority of stature, so these poets have given an uniform grandeur of feeling and of expression. It may be thought, that this monotonous splendour of diction would have palled upon an English audience, less pleased generally with refinement, however elegant, than with bursts of passion, and flights of novelty. But Dryden felt his force in the line which he chose to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... bright and joyous holiday."[37] It was a delight to him to work under Phayre, whose noble and lovable character he had already learned to appreciate two years before in Pegu. Then, too, Yule has spoken of the intense relief it was to escape from the monotonous scenery and depressing conditions of official life in Bengal (Resort to Simla was the exception, not the rule, in these days!) to the cheerfulness and unconstraint of Burma, with its fine landscapes and merry-hearted ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... went wisely and quickly, although life at Drumloch was far from being monotonous. Mary had the quick, nervous temperament which is eager for change and movement. She went frequently into Glasgow to give and to attend entertainments, for Drumloch was yet in the hands of painters and upholsterers. But she always went alone. She had fully made up her mind that it would not be well ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... and mumbled. Fontenoy, undaunted, began to harangue on certain minutiae of factory law with a monotonous zest of voice and gesture which seemed to Tressady nothing ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... though a little nervous. She had often longed to go to Baronmead, and she was already thoroughly at her ease with the master thereof, who sat and conversed beside her in that rather monotonous, tired drawl of his. It was only the thought of Anne that made her nervous. Warmly as she admired her, she was ever so slightly afraid of the stately lady of the Manor, who made friends with so few and for all her queenly ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... conscientious objector from Tennessee, a big, scared Pole, and the disdainful Celt whom he had sat beside on the train—the two former spent the evenings in writing eternal letters home, while the Irishman sat in the tent door whistling over and over to himself half a dozen shrill and monotonous bird-calls. It was rather to avoid an hour of their company than with any hope of diversion that, when the quarantine was lifted at the end of the week, he went into town. He caught one of the swarm of jitneys that overran the camp each evening, and in half an hour was set down in front ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... standing beside the dripping rail outside the pilot-house. Far below them, in the spacious depths of the steamer, a bugle sounded long-drawn notes and the monotonous calls of stewards warned ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... times was essentially dun-colored and monotonous in tint, learned the means of irradiating its smoky atmosphere through its political vicissitudes, which brought it under the successive dominion of Burgundy, Spain, and France, and threw it into fraternal relations with Germany ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... treachery." But this was only a facon de parler with him: the idea of secret perfidy, that was constantly moving under ground, gave an interest to the progress of the war, which else tended to the monotonous. It was a dramatic artifice for sustaining the interest, where the incidents might happen to be too slightly diversified. But that he did not believe his own charges was clear, because he never repeated them in his "General History of the Campaigns," which was a resume, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... chin and upper lip were shaven, and his snow-white, close-cropped whiskers ran in two straight lines from his jaw up to a level with his piercing, hawk-like eyes. He would probably have been about seventy-five years of age, but he did not carry it well. In a low, monotonous voice he bade me welcome, and pointed to a ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... often alone, and for the most part on small river boats where there is no deck space for exercise. Mail arrives irregularly and there were no newspapers. After one or two days the unceasing panorama of tropical forests, native villages, and naked savages becomes monotonous. Even the hippopotami which you see in large numbers, the omnipresent crocodile, and the occasional wild elephant, cease to amuse. You are forced to fall back on that unfailing friend ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... short-lived and factitious passion, the descent of the unique male to the ordinary level of males, the births of her three girls and their rearing and training: all these things seemed as trifles to her, mere excrescences and depressions in the vast tableland of her monotonous and placid career. She had had no career. Her strength of will, of courage, of love, had never been taxed; only her patience. 'And my life is over!' she told herself, insisting that her life was over without being able ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... many are unable to move their elbows. Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the Philippine edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy limbs to sustain it, Philippine life will again become monotonous, without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains, without the actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... was quiet and monotonous until after we left Salt Lake City at dawn this morning. Nothing happened until we were about a hundred miles east of Reno. We had taken elevation to cross the Stillwater Mountains and were skimming low over them, my plane trailing the T. A. C. plane by about half a mile. I was not ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... more of monotonous patience, and Miss Hyde was thirty-six. Her hair had thinned, and was full of silver threads; a wrinkle invaded either cheek, and she was angular and bony; but something painfully sweet lingered in her face, and a certain childlike innocence of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... be quite right. But if he drew the conclusion that the clock was not contrived for a purpose, he would be quite wrong. On the other hand, imagine another death-watch of a different turn of mind. He, listening to the monotonous "tick! tick!" so exactly like his own, might arrive at the conclusion that the clock was itself a monstrous sort of death-watch, and that its final cause and purpose was to tick. How easy to point to the clear relation of the whole mechanism to the pendulum, to the fact that ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... been proved by his colleagues. In addition, any speaker except the last one on each side, may, if he thinks best, give an outline of the argument to follow. In making these summaries, a debater must always avoid stating them in so bald and crude a form as to make them monotonous and offensive. He ought rather to use all the ingenuity at his command in an attempt to ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... that this renders the language too monotonous, it may be observed, on the other hand, that it prevents ambiguities and obscurities in rapid speaking, as the accent marks the initial syllable of polysyllables. Declaimers, of either sex, have often found their ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... it. Moreover the jealousy expressed by Don Garcia is neither sufficiently terrible to frighten, nor ridiculous enough to amuse the audience; he always speaks and acts as a prince, and hence, he sometimes becomes royally monotonous. ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... question stood within a few yards of that on which Karl, Caspar, and Ossaroo were perched. It was just before their eyes, whenever they looked in a horizontal direction; and occasionally, when tired with watching the monotonous movements of the elephant, one or other of them did look horizontally. The scanty foliage upon the sycamore enabled them to see its trunk and most of its larger limbs, without any obstruction of ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... brightened upon us some change appeared in the loved royal sufferer, and though it was not actually for the better in itself, yet any change was pronounced to be salutary, as, for some days pas'' there had been a monotonous continuation of the same bad symptoms, that had doubly depressed us all. My spirits rose immediately ; indeed, I thank God, I never desponded, though many times I stood nearly alone in ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... thought sufficed to occupy her mind, and under its influence she would live her whole life over again, from the birth of her son, whom she had pictured rising amid glory to the highest rank, till she came down to mean and narrow garrison life, the dull, monotonous existence of nowadays, that stranding in the post of a quartermaster, from which Burle would never rise and in which he seemed to sink more and more heavily. And yet his first efforts had filled ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... strange that two races working side by side should possess so many opposite traits of character. The white man has strong will and convictions and is set in his ways. He lives an indoor, monotonous life, restrains himself like a Puritan, and is inclined to melancholy. The prevalence of Populism throughout the South is nothing but the outcome of this morbid tendency. Farmers and merchants are entirely absorbed in their business, and the women, especially the married ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... man in blue mantle stood outside; he did not enter but looked around him a little while and then sat down, laughing softly to himself. Fergus, Conail and Lugard rose simultaneously, glad of the pretence of warning off the intruder as a relief from their monotonous watch. ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... of expression, which had gained for these amiable maidens the somewhat singular cognomens of Really! Indeed! and Impossible! for their conversation, if conversation it could be called, consisted almost wholly of these interjections, pronounced in an unvarying, monotonous voice, while no shadow of emotion was perceptible on the cloudless expanse of their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... began, in an assured voice, but not in that monotonous tone adopted by the Italians, with which the French so justly reproach us. The French would be the best reciters if they were not constrained by the rhyme, for they say what they feel better than any other people. They have neither the passionate ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... long while on the cope watching the sea below me; I hear its dull, monotonous roar at this moment below the shrieking of the wind; and there came ever recurring to my mind the verse I am so ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would apparently meet the case so well or be more satisfactory. They, of course, had not yet arrived at the idea that God is a personal Spirit whose nature is revealed in the constitutive characteristics of the human soul, and who carries on his works from eternity to eternity without monotonous repetition or wearisome stagnancy, but with perpetual variety in never ceasingmotion. Whatever commences must also terminate, they said, forgetting that number begins with one but has no end. They did not conceive of the universe of being as an eternal line, making ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... present (though indeed a manuscript of Henry IV's reign quotes Chaucer's book of "25 good women"). It is by no means necessary to suppose that all these nine stories were written continuously; maybe, too, Chaucer, with all his virtuous intentions, grew tired of his rather monotonous scheme, at a time when he was beginning to busy himself with stories meant to be fitted into the more liberal framework of the "Canterbury Tales." All these illustrations of female constancy are of classical origin, as Chaucer is glad to make known and most of them are ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... We wrote to each other for several years, and our friendship continued as fervent as ever. These letters were the only drops of comfort in the monotonous loneliness of my life after I lost Lili. When I was about seventeen, I received a letter which told me that her father had decided to go to America. She promised to write again as soon as they were settled in their new life. I ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... walk was to the grey convent where she now passed her monotonous days. Every evening I returned, and often I stood gazing at her prison and thinking of Flaminia as I used to know her. One evening Fabiani found me thus, and made me follow him home. He spoke to me with unusual solemnity in his voice, but with great kindness. I ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... with some particles of wax. What seemed most singular was, that this female emitted a very distinct sound, or clacking from her prison. It was still more audible in the evening, and even consisted of several monotonous ...
— New observations on the natural history of bees • Francis Huber
... to take for the long weary hours! for travellers know that sight-seeing is hard work, and that the ocean wave may become monotonous. I cannot carry a whole library with me. Yes, even this can be done; mother's thoughtfulness solves the problem, for she gives me Shakespeare, in thirteen small handy volumes. Come, then, my Shakespeare, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... narrative sometimes slides into theology. Besides the position of the author, the difference of the subject justifies a change in the treatment. The examination of Protestantism in the rest of the world pointed with monotonous uniformity to a single conclusion. Everywhere there was the same spectacle and the same alternative: either religion sacrificed to the advancement of learning, or learning relinquished for the preservation of religion. Everywhere the same antagonism between intellectual progress ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Shall I be suspected of a quaint perversity of national prejudice if I say that Herr Chamberlain's war pamphlets are distinctly better reading than the great majority of their kind? They are much more individual, much less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as an oasis in the desert of ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... winter nights, when the fishermen's wives whose husbands are out at sea are scared from their uneasy sleep by the rising of the tempest, they listen breathlessly for certain sounds to which they attach a fatal meaning. If they hear a low, monotonous noise of waters falling drop by drop at the foot of their bed, and discover that it has been caused by unnatural means and that the floor is dry, it is the unerring token of shipwreck. The sea has made them widows! ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... spectacles on their nose, without glass: music and lights were set before them; and one of them was characterized as Midas, with the ears of an ass, and the addition of a peacock's tail, spread behind him. He sang, while all the others played the same parts of a monotonous tune, without either taste or measure; and the unfeeling public turned into derision the unfortunate actors in this infamous scene. This ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Separatism even in the temperate form in which this had been illustrated by Robinson and the Pilgrim church. The successive companies of emigrants as they arrived, ship-load after ship-load, each with its minister or college of ministers, followed with almost monotonous exactness the method adopted in the organization of the church in Salem. A small company of the best Christians entered into mutual covenant as a church of Christ, and this number, growing by well-considered accessions, added to itself ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... of those lyrics, of which there are many in Gaelic poetry, that are intended to imitate pipe music. They consist of three parts, called Urlar, Siubhal, and Crunluath. The first is a slow, monotonous measure, usually, indeed, a mere repetition of the same words or tones; the second, a livelier or brisker melody, striking into description or narrative; the third, a rapid finale, taxing the reciter's or performer's powers to their utmost pitch of expedition. The heroine of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... repeat this passage?" she said, humming the air with soft modulations; "I have always regarded the monotonous repetition of this strain" (and she indicated it lightly by a few touches of the keys) "as rather a blemish of an otherwise perfect composition. But as you play it, it is anything but monotonous. You put into this ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... lay in bed in the back bedroom, he fell asleep facing the dreary prospect of another monotonous imprisonment the following day, and the next day, and the day after that, and after that—and after that—and so on—and on—and on—forever and ever, as long as life should last. This, then, was to be the end of all his dreams, this drudgery in a country town ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... that sublime humility of heart which gives the power to make those strange sacrifices of the entire Past, of the whole Future; those immolations as courageous as mysterious; those mystic and utter holocausts of self, not temporary and changing, but monotonous and constant,—through whose might alone tenderness may justly claim the higher word devotion? Has not the force of genius its own exclusive and legitimate exactions, and does not the force of woman consist in the abdication of all exactions? Can the purple and burning flames of ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Republic vast, flat to rolling, monotonous plateau; scattered hills in northeast ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... weariness that comes when there are no duties. There are plenty of places where all these things can be done, and with no sort of anxiety about the weather from week to week, and with the added advantage that the women and children can take care of themselves. But for those who find such a life monotonous there are other resources. There is very good fishing in the clear streams in the foot-hills, hunting in the mountains for large game still worthy of the steadiest nerves, and good bird-shooting everywhere. ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... needles had an effect of commonplace which helped to restore Bertha to her self-possession, and in a little time her tears ceased, and moving to the window she stood there looking out upon the landscape. The monotonous click of the needles ceased, and she knew that her mother had laid down her work in her lap and was regarding her. She turned, with a ghost of ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... against Aziru and his father Abd-Ashera come from Rib-Addi of Gebal. His utterances rival the Lamentations of Jeremiah both in volume and in monotonous pathos. One of these many letters, the contents of which are often stereotyped enough, is also noticeable for its revelation of the connection of Rib-Addi, who must already have been an elderly man, ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... in the darkness, chanting in a dialect not altogether familiar to me, a monotonous wailing chant, with a single recurrent phrase: "Kamaina! Kama-aina!" It began on a high note, descending in weird chromatics to the lowest tone the human ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... call tone—tone in the metre and in the sound of the words, as well as in the images and the feelings expressed. The weariness, the dreariness, the dark mysterious waste, exist alike within and without, in the slow monotonous pace of the metre and the words, as well as in the boundless fen, and the heart of her who, "without hope of change, in sleep ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... now; in fact I could hardly name the place I should like to be in now, unless it were Europe or the Sandwich Islands; but I love Linwood and its dear inhabitants, and under other circumstances should be only too happy to be there. I was regretting the other day that our life was now so monotonous; almost longed for the daily alarms we had when under Yankee rule in Baton Rouge. Stirring times are ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... soldiers were drilled on deck till Nic pretty well knew the ordinary routine, and Lieutenant Lance laughingly asked him if he would like to take command. The convicts came up morning by morning and had their exercise in the old monotonous way; and Nic went round with the doctor to see the men in their quarters and visit patients. But there was no rising or mutiny, nothing to break the even course of the voyage but a little tossing among the huge waves that ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... knew well enough what that meant. I could not hear his groans. His plaints could not reach my ears, but they reached my heart. The refrain varied little: 'How long shall I cry and Thou wilt not hear?' - that was the monotonous burden of the moans, though sometimes I fancied it changed to: 'Lord how long shall the wicked, how long shall ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... himself so. She was there beside him on the yellow brocade ottoman. She was much too good for him; but she liked him. Should he do it—now? he asked himself, as he watched the slender gloved hand swaying the feather fan with monotonous languor. ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... down into the river, which flowed on, as my years were flowing, monotonous, dark, and slow,—as they must flow on for ever. John asked me what I was ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... she said. "I did not consider your own character well enough. You tire of things. You will tire of the woman you love now. And you will come back to me, just because I have been less sentimental, and, so, less monotonous than some others. Whether or not I shall receive you time will determine. Is that the way you want ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... residence. The air of this immense hall is, then, heavy and corrupted. At intervals, the silence of night is interrupted, now by plaintive moans, now by profound sighs, uttered by the feverish sleepers; then all is quiet, and naught is heard but the regular and monotonous tickings of a large clock, which strikes the hours, so long for sleepless suffering. One of the extremities of this hall was almost plunged into obscurity. Suddenly was heard a great stir, and the noise of rapid footsteps; a door was ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... I had read of the Congo I expected a broad sweep of muddy, malaria-breeding water, lined by low-lying swamp lands, gloomy, monotonous, depressing. ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... her husband's death, five years before, she had lost her taste for New York society; she had felt no interest in the price of stocks, and very little in the men who dealt in them; she had become serious. What was it all worth, this wilderness of men and women as monotonous as the brown stone houses they lived in? In her despair she had resorted to desperate measures. She had read philosophy in the original German, and the more she read, the more she was disheartened that so much culture ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... speaking, the ear-drums; keys forced into hateful marriage that are miles asunder, or else too closely related for aural matrimony; no form, that is, in the scholastic formal sense, and rhythms that are so persistently varied as to become monotonous—what kind of music, I repeat, is this that can paint a "crystal sigh," the blackness of prehistoric night, the abysm of a morbid soul, the man in the moon, the faint sweet odours of an impossible fairy-land, and the strut of the dandy from Bergamo? (See the Guiraud ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... wash of the waves on the shore, the mournful sighing of the evening wind among the groaning trees, the monotonous ticking of a dainty buhl clock, and the light fall of the cinders sounded abnormally loud in the dead silence of ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... interesting sight at nighttime, when the blazing fires were surrounded by men who were cooking and passing the time in various ways. Some were cleaning and loading their guns, others mended their clothes. Here and there you would find some genius playing dreamy, monotonous Spanish airs on the guitar, in the midst of a merry group of dancing and singing young Mexicans, many of whom were not older than I. Card-playing seemed, however, to be their favorite pastime; all Mexicans are inveterate gamesters, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... foremost, one essential is that the country is full of youth. I have discovered this for myself, and I have learned what the fact means and how it affects the country. I had heard this said over and over again. It used to irritate me to hear a monotonous repetition of the words, 'Sir, we are a young county.' Young? At least, it is three hundred years old; nor was it till I had passed through New England, and seen Buffalo and Chicago—those cities which stand between the east and time west—and was able to think and compare, that I began to understand ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... in the monotonous menu, but doubtful of the experiment, poured a teaspoon of syrup over a teaspoon of beans, conveyed the mixture to his mouth, and made a hurried trip to the door. "Say! was that a joke?" he demanded, when he ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... is neglected. Nature demands that young people should have variety, and furnishes it in abundance. The stolid farmer too often ignores nature and the cravings of youth, and insists on the heavy monotonous work of his specialty, early and late, the year around, and then wonders why in his declining years there are no strong young hands to lighten his toil. The boy who might have lived a sturdy, healthful, independent life among his native hills ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... pine-trees spread above our heads a mournful-looking vault, and gave forth a kind of long, sad wail, while at either side their straight, slender trunks formed, as it were, an army of organ-pipes, from which seemed to issue the low, monotonous music of the wind ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... was the usual tirade. It is strange I have met no one yet who seems to comprehend an honest difference of opinion, and stranger yet that the ordinary rules of good breeding are now so entirely ignored. As the spring comes on one has the craving for fresh, green food that a monotonous diet produces. There was a bed of radishes and onions in the garden, that were a real blessing. An onion salad, dressed only with salt, vinegar, and pepper, seemed a dish fit for a king, but last night the soldiers quartered near ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... several of the subsequent emperors fell victims to their plots. The T'ang dynasty, which for over a hundred years had governed firmly and for the good of the nation, began to decline. The history of the 8th and 9th centuries is for the most part a monotonous record of feeble governments, oppressions and rebellions. Almost the only event worth chronicling is the iconoclastic policy of the emperor Wu-tsung (841-847). Viewing the increase of monasteries and ecclesiastical establishments ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the men at the pumps to pump until they dropped dead, if necessary, but to raise the boat at least one yard. The men obeyed in grim silence. Presently the last candle went out. "It's all over, boys," said some one, and the pumps stopped. The only sound that now broke the silence was the monotonous splash of water leaking down on ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... lowered it, scores of reverent, blanketed figures stood silent, awed, for it is the highest, holiest festival of the year. Then the wild, strange chant arose—the great pagan ritual was being intoned by the fire-keeper, his weird, monotonous tones voicing ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... except a distant beating of tobols coming from a black tent across desert spaces, while she had lain at night in the house of Maieddine's friends; or the faint, pure note of a henna-dyed flute in the hand of some boy keeper of goats—a note pure as the monotonous purling of water, heard in ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... enjoyment was separated from labour, the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Man himself eternally chained down to a little fragment of the whole, only forms a kind of fragment; having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the perpetually revolving wheel, he never develops the harmony of his being; and instead of imprinting the seal of humanity on his being, he ends by being nothing more than the living impress of the craft to which he devotes himself, of the science that he cultivates. ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... after his marriage he accepted an adjutancy in the Northumberland Yeomanry. For four uneventful years he was stationed at Newcastle, where the work was monotonous and the opportunities ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... with her face against the floor: There with her milkwhite arms and shadowy hair She made her face a darkness from the King: And in the darkness heard his armed feet Pause by her; then came silence, then a voice, Monotonous and hollow like a Ghost's Denouncing judgment, but ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... and as representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, gave force to what he said. His son, Matthew ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... in events, is for me most memorable, for it is the commencement of my monotonous life as a prisoner. I spend the greater portion of my time reading. Pen, ink, and paper are forbidden to political prisoners, as are also newspapers, reviews, and other works dealing with current events. Even the books allowed, although they have already been passed by the Public Censor, are ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the voices of the children filled the room. Their mother, lying on their narrow couch, held them both in her arms and said over and over again in a monotonous voice: ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Monsieur that it was a little monotonous. The air was difficult to breathe for a length of time consecutively. The cold was very severe. One needed youth and strength to bear it. However, having them and the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... found him distributing knives to the ferocious hags, who received the presents chanting a low monotonous song, that recalled the losses of their people, in various conflicts with the whites, and which extolled the pleasures and glory of revenge. The appearance of such a group was enough of itself to ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... was not one who wore his emotions where they could be read by all who ran, or even by those who sat and openly studied him with malice and amusement. His face was as serene as usual, and his envied gift of turning events of the monotonous everyday veld life into interesting topics of conversation remained unimpaired. He had even risen, as always, with his air of careless courtesy, to open the door for the woman who walked ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... elegant to satisfy the advancing standards of taste and refinement. Among the marked features of the building are several small casements, lighting closets and staircases, which give variety to the monotonous symmetry of windows all of a size, one on top of another, and where all the openings for egress or light are in straight lines and of equal dimensions. It is many years since my visit, and I hope you will see it, for much that was ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... by with the royal family-monotonous, sad, and dreary. No greeting of love, no ray of hope came in from the outer world, to lighten up the thick walls of the old building. No one brought the prisoners news of what was transpiring without. They were too well watched for any of their friends to be able ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... success anywhere in life save through the constant pressure of the will driving a reluctant and protesting set of nerves and muscles to their daily tasks. The day labourer comes home from his work with his muscular strength exhausted, but he has to go back to the same monotonous task on the morrow: his family has to be fed and clothed and he cannot permit himself to say, "I am tired and will stay away from work to-day." The business or professional man comes back from his office with a wearied brain that makes any thought ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... conventions have gone, or are changed, and we are all glad of it. Wordsworth effected a wholesome deliverance when he attacked the artificial diction, the personifications, the allegories, the antitheses, the barren rhymes and monotonous metres, which the reigning taste had approved. But while welcoming the new freshness, sincerity, and direct and fertile return on nature, that is a very bad reason why we should disparage poetry so genial, so simple, so humane, and so perpetually pleasing, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... whole was a defeated aspiration after gentility. The more auspicious houses were marked by white stones, the steps being scrubbed and hearthstoned almost daily; the gloomier doorsteps were black, except on Sundays. Thus variety was achieved by houses otherwise as monotonous and prosaic as a batch of fourpenny loaves. This was not the reason why the little South London side-street was called Baker's Terrace, though it might well seem so; for Baker was the name of the builder, a worthy gentleman whose years and virtues may still be deciphered on a doddering, ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... wall near the window was a big, red-faced man, whom I knew as a Copperhead. He had been drinking, evidently, for he was making boozy efforts to stand very straight. There were only heard a subdued buzz of whispers and the monotonous voice of the reader, as he stood there in the center, his newspaper in one hand and a ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... magnificent Chambord certainly is, and much more attractive on the north facade, where the chateau is reflected in the waters of the Cosson, than from the cafe where we were seated. The long line of buildings in the south front is somewhat monotonous, even broken as it is by the several towers, and the great central lantern, which appears to the best advantage from this side. Rich as is all the ornamentation of Chambord, it is skyward that it breaks forth into the greatest exuberance ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... gentle, lovely Mexican land, would have thought Pancha's love of home quite incomprehensible; for her home, the house in which she dwelt, was not lovely to eyes brought up with a rigorous faith in right angles and the monotonous regularity of American city walls. In point of fact, persons of this sort might have held—and, after their light, with some show of justice—that Pancha's home was not a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... we reach the mountain, we have to pass over absolutely level cultivated plains, without a single eminence in sight. To most they would appear dull, monotonous, uninteresting. There is no horizon to which the eye can wander and find satisfaction in remote distance. There is no hill to which to raise our eyes and our souls with them. The outlook is confined within the narrowest limits. Palm trees, banyan ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Girao the scenery is grand enough, but monotonous in the extreme. The island is girt by a sea-wall, more or less perpendicular; from this coping there is a gentle upslope, the marvellous terracing for cultivation being carried up to the mountain-tops. The lower ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... lost itself in the broken spaces of the London temple, dimmed rather than illumined by the electric blaze in the choir; a monotonous chanting filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest period of the church, and the sense of something pagan that had arisen again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, the emotion that had long lain in wait for me. St. Paul's, like ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... is not formidable in the flesh, the evil that he does lives after him. Freeman's view of Froude is not now held by any one whose opinion counts; yet still there seems to rise, as from a brazen head of Ananias, dismal and monotonous chaunt, "He was careless of the truth, he did not make history the business of his life." He did make history the business of his life, and he cared more for truth than for anything else in the world. Freeman's ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... trombone introduces the hard practical note, the necessary corrective. His monotonous grunt is used to remind the audience of marriage as it is lived in real life, of the girl at breakfast in unmarcelled hair, of the man dropping cigarette-ash on the best carpet, of double income-tax, of her family, of his, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... sailer; we thought it a good run if she made eight knots an hour, so no wonder we did not reach Singapore till May 23, 1848. It was a long monotonous voyage, but we were well occupied, and I do not remember ever finding it dull. The sea was all I ever fancied by way of a companion, and, like all one's best friends, made me happy or unhappy, but was never stupid. Then we had to learn Malay and its Arabic characters, ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... of the taller of the twin poplars that flanked the picket gate opening upon the Gwynnes' little garden sat a robin, his head thrown back to give full throat to the song that was like to burst his heart, monotonous, unceasing, rapturous. On the door step of the Gwynnes' house, arrested on the threshold by the robin's song, stood the Gwynne boy of ten years, his eager face uplifted, himself poised ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... bear in a saucer, which he at once upset. Then the women and girls danced round the cage, their faces turned towards it, their knees slightly bent, rising and hopping on their toes. As they danced they clapped their hands and sang a monotonous song. The housewife and a few old women, who might have nursed many bears, danced tearfully, stretching out their arms to the bear, and addressing it in terms of endearment. The young folks were less affected; they laughed as well as sang. Disturbed by the noise, the bear began to rush ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... In a monotonous world it is a pity to spoil a striking effect, yet one must be vigilant. It has escaped the attention of writers who have reproduced this lively scene, that Madame de Pompadour was dead before the volumes containing Powder and Rouge were born. The twenty-one ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... of the river, abruptly we came abreast of vomiting furnaces, thousands of electric lights strung like beads over the crest of a hill, and, below these, dim rows of houses, all of a sameness, stretching along monotonous streets. A munitions town ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... not hear the monotonous roar that fills The ravine where the Yassn river sullenly flows; He did not see the starlight on the Laspur hills, Or the ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... manner of saying grace on this occasion was indeed peculiar. A kettle being brought, hot and smoking from the fire, and placed in the center of the council house, there proceeded from a single person, in a high shrill key, a prolonged and monotonous sound, resembling that of the syllable wah or yah. This was immediately followed by a responsive but protracted tone, the syllable whe or swe, and this concluded grace. It was impossible not to be somewhat mirthfully affected at the first hearing ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... Standards fringed with gold slanted in the last rays of the sun, sabres glimmered, curving upward from the thronged rifles, and over all sounded the shuffle, shuffle of worn shoes in the dust, a mournful, monotonous cadence, a hopeless measure, whose burden was despair, whose beat was the rhythm of ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... thought there was such a thing as having purposes in reading that were too big. It seemed to him that a man who spent nearly all his strength when he was reading a book, in trying to use it to swallow a universe with, must find it monotonous. He said he had tried reading a great book without any purpose whatever except its tangents or suggestions, and he claimed that when he read a great book in that way—the average great book—the monotone of innumerable possibility wore on him. He wanted to feel that a book was coming to ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of course, have also the great advantage of the advice and guidance of the experts of the Institute. Formerly the penniless Negro youth, who graduated even most creditably from the agricultural department of Tuskegee, had before him nothing better than a greater or less number of years of monotonous drudgery as a mere farm or plantation laborer. Now, he may at once take up his own farm at Baldwin and begin immediately to apply all he has learned in carving out his own fortune and future. Thus did Booker Washington ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... of about fifteen, but of a sturdy build and manner that might lead one to suppose him older, stood by the gateway of the Ellison farm, looking down across the fields towards the mill. It was busy grinding and, as its monotonous tones came up to him, the boy shook his head sadly. An expression as of anger overspread his manly young ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... there was the old, happy, tempting life at Winchcomb, the pleasant home where she might now return, and live with the dear brothers and sisters without feeling herself a burden upon her father's strained resources; and there was the quiet monotonous daily round at Ivy House, the exacting invalid, the uncongenial work, the lack of all young companionship, that already ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... find unsuspected stores in this underground community. You will each be registered and studied by physicians, surgeons, and psychologists; and each of you will have prescribed for him the exact diet that is necessary for his best development. You will find this diet somewhat monotonous, compared to our normal fare of natural products, since it is wholly synthetic; but that is one of the minor drawbacks that must be endured. Chief Pilot Breckenridge and I will not be with you. In some small and partial recompense ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... impassioned common-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and formless vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond all beginning—then next a dim lotos of human consciousness, finding itself afloat upon the bosom of waters without a shore—then ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... perceived that distant child to have been, silently Sunday after Sunday bearing her legs. Then one Sunday something snapped inside her, and she heard her own voice floating out into the void above the heads of the mumbling worshippers, and it said with a terrible distinctness in a sort of monotonous wail: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"—and a second time, in the breathless suspension of mumbling that followed upon this: "I only had a cold potato for breakfast,"—and a third time she ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... and left him to be carried home, a bundle of aches and bruises. After this the tongues of the gossips were quiet; no one was willing to answer for guesses or rumors at the end of Rauchen's staff; and the father and daughter resumed their monotonous mode ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... air was full of the odor of moist earth and the sweetness of growing corn. The colt she was driving held his head high, glancing from side to side with youthful eagerness for a sensation, and shying at nothing now and then in sheer excess of emotion over the demand of his monotonous life. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... corners of his lips and the twinkle in his eyes. Bud liked to travel this way, though it took them all day long to cover as much distance as he had been wont to slide behind him in an hour. He liked it—this slow, monotonous journeying across the lean land which Cash had traversed years ago, where the stark, black pinnacles and rough knobs of rock might be hiding Indians with good eyesight and a vindictive temperament. Cash ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... here. He takes after me. Got the gamblin' germ in our systems. Want to git somethin' fo' nothin'," she went on with grim humor. "I reckon Ed's right but, land-sake, doin' the same thing, day in an' out—gits mighty monotonous. Bein' a woman, you're more tied than a man. I tried to work my extry energy out in politics but it all come ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... more than a year in the island of Jersey. She had lived her lonely and monotonous existence, and made no moan. It was a dreary exile; but it seemed to her that there was little else for her to do in life but dawdle through the long slow days, and bear the burden of living; at least until she came of age, and was independent, ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... gave nothing but the scales, compelling the youth to practice them over and over again. The second year it was the same, the third, and the fourth, the conditions of the bargain being the only reply to any question in relation to a change from such monotonous drill. The fifth year the teacher introduced chromatics and thorough bass, and, at its close, when Caffarelli looked for something more brilliant and interesting, the master said: "Go, my son, I can teach you ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the school-master's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... mounds of rubbish the bearers had resumed their slow procession, a picturesque frieze of tattered, indigo-robed, ebony figures, baskets on heads, against a cloudless cobalt sky, and again the hot air was invaded with the monotonous rise and fall of ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... walled fort of the chieftain as well as the defenceless hovel of the peasant," seized him for his own; the father also paid the debt of nature in the capital of Affghanist[a]n, but not before the young Khan Shereef had seen the light. Growing up to manhood and wearying of the monotonous life a residence in C[a]bul entailed, he pursued his way across the frontier mountains of Toorkisth[a]n, and arrived at the court of Meer Moorad Beg. Here he performed good service in the field, and becoming his master's personal ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... floating population, and how strict must be the discipline necessary to keep so many men healthy, contented, and efficient. There were a few other civilians going home on leave, but we were the only so-called "indulgence passengers." The time passed all too quickly, the monotonous hours of all shipboard life, between the six-thirty dinner and bedtime, being whiled away by listening to ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... never finished. Over the monotonous complaint of the rain rose a sound which made their hearts stand still. From the very depths of the narrow valley floated up to them that unmistakable trumpet ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... weariness Phyllis at last consented to John's suggestion; he would make a preliminary survey and she should be called into counsel only in promising cases. They were few enough. She walked up and down monotonous streets while John was indoors; to be told, time after time, that was ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... now pass from the contrast of characters and situations of the most general kind to contrasts of a more particular sort. Let us consider the use of language first. Light conversation must not last too long or it becomes monotonous, as we all know. But if the writer can pass sometimes rapidly from tight conversation to serious narrative, both the light dialogue and the serious seem the more expressive for the contrast. The only thing to be considered is, can you do it with perfect ease and grace? If you cannot, better let ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... He began at once upon the handsome gentleman, who had paid him so well; all his sympathy was with him, and both he and his wife only wished he might overtake his wicked wife, and punish her as she deserved. And then the conversation took a turn, not uncommon to those whose lives are quiet and monotonous; every one seemed to vie with each other in telling about some horror; and the savage and mysterious band of robbers called the Chauffeurs, who infested all the roads leading to the Rhine, with Schinderhannes at their head, furnished many ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... when he adopted her, a child of Protestant parents, while Jean had been taken, when a mere babe, after his parents had been killed and scalped by Indians. Madame Roussillon, a professed invalid, whose appetite never failed and whose motherly kindness expressed itself most often through strains of monotonous falsetto scolding, was a woman of little education and no refinement; while her husband clung tenaciously to his love of books, especially to the romances most in vogue when he took ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... one man is in some sort true of another; manifestations may differ, but the essential elements and spring of action are the same. On the surface, everything about us just now looks prosaic and mechanical; you see only a sort of bark-mill grinding over of the same dull, monotonous grist of daily trifles. But underneath all this there is an earnest life, rich and beautiful with love and hope, or dark with hatred, and sorrow, and remorse. That fisherman by the riverside, or that woman at the stream below, with her wash-tub,—who knows what ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... copy should be kept. If you write few they may be copied by hand into a book kept for the purpose, but if many the use of a copying-press saves a great deal of monotonous labour, ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... evidently impressed his congregation, who were usually accustomed to the somewhat monotonous reading of his uncle, and ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter—from a gifted friend who died too young—these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there MUST be one system that ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... ascertained afforded him a fair prospect of sport. Arrived there he dropped his keeleg—a large stone serving the purpose of an anchor—overboard and settled down comfortably to enjoy his favourite pastime, and also provide an exceedingly welcome addition to the somewhat monotonous ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... light as air, yet stronger than brass or iron. And everywhere is the machinery ready, though different in its frame and operation in different torture-chambers, to crush out the budding skepticism, and to mould the mind into the monotonous decency of general conformity. Foe or Fetish, King or Kaiser, Deity itself or the vicegerents it has appointed in its stead, are answerable for it all. God himself has looked upon it, and it is very good, and there is no appeal from that approval of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... much like what I have heard before on the islands—a monotonous chant with pauses on the high and low notes to mark the rhythm; but the harsh nasal tone in which he sang was almost intolerable. His performance reminded me in general effect of a chant I once heard from a party of Orientals I was ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... and to remain with the Prince. They have however been enabled, while thus stationary, to collect a good deal of oral information,—especially respecting the tract of country to the west and southwest of Ghat: which, instead of being a monotonous desert, proves to be intersected by many fertile wadys with plenty of water. Among these novel features, not the least interesting is a lake, between Ghat and Tuat, infested with crocodiles. At the date ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... whistling note. Comparatively small as are these wonderful performers, their voices made a considerable item in the evening concert. Before they had ceased, the tree-frogs chimed in with their "Quack, quack! drum, drum! hoo, hoo!" accompanied by melancholy nightjars, which for long kept up their monotonous cries. ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical treatment of 'the pangs of despised love' or the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of contemporary criticism. The air soon rang with sarcastic protests from the most respected ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... stood, and he tried to move a few steps. On all sides curious looks were directed upon him, but no one offered to make way, and still the monotonous singing continued until he felt himself deafened, as he faced the ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... with wonder at this unlooked-for event, I paused for a moment to collect my scattered senses, when the sound of a low, monotonous voice breaking upon my ear from the direction of the library, I approached and found Mr. Harwell reading aloud from his late employer's manuscript. It would be difficult for me to describe the effect which this simple discovery made upon me at this time. There, ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... Raphael. Really Lesueur is as nearly conventional as Lebrun. He has at any rate far less force; and even if we may maintain that he had a more individual point of view, his works are assuredly more monotonous to the scrutinizing sense. It is impossible to recall any one of the famous San Bruno series with any particularity, or, except in subject, to distinguish these in the memory from the sweet and soft "St. Scholastica" in the Salon Carre. With ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... or change In a weary monotonous burden, Be the keynote of mourning or mirth; Free, but free not to range; Taking for crown and for guerdon ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... out upon the dreary and monotonous waste through which the shaking steamboat was coughing ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... next room, closed the door, and made herself comfortable in a large arm-chair. There was a long table in the middle of the room, and the walls were covered with shelves and yellow books of a most monotonous binding. The air was musty and close. She quietly opened one of the windows, and having resumed her seat, she pulled a wash-rag from her leather bag and began ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... rejoined the policeman. "It gets rather monotonous crossing the street continually, and there's some danger in it too. Poor Morgan was run over only three months ago, and injured so much that he's been obliged to leave the force. Then some of the ladies get frightened when they're halfway over, and make a scene. I remember one old woman, who ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... should hardly hear more of their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that nature utters are delightful,—at least in this country. I should not perhaps find the roaring of lions in Africa, or of bears in Russia, very pleasing; but I know no beast in England ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... risen with the morning, and while it invigorated the travellers in these wastes it seemed to increase their loneliness, for it broke upon nothing, and it removed the interest of the eye from the monotonous sad land to the charge and change of the torn sky above, but in a sense also it impelled us, as though we were sailing before it as it swept along the edge of the bank and helped us to forget ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... possessed such an altogether delightful specimen of womanhood as his "bride." She was so sweet, so good, so unselfish, and in addition to these sterling qualities, she was so cheerful, so spontaneous, so unexpected, that it was impossible for life to grow dull and monotonous while she was at the head ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... might express her approval, and upon being assured that Paris was responsible for many of the gowns present, continued in her monotonous but kindly drawl, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... about forty-five miles in length and from four to twelve in breadth. Drained successively by Roman, by Goth, and by pope, they successively relapsed into their natural state, until the perseverance of Pius VI. completed the work. It is now largely cultivated, but the scenery is monotonous and the journey tedious. The few inhabitants found here get their living by hunting and by robbery, and are distinguished by their pale and sickly appearance. At this time the disturbed state of Italy, and particularly of the papal dominions, made traveling ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... and violent, but they wear a dagger just above it. Italian women are lascivious. The English are exalted and melancholy, cold and unnatural. The German women are tender and sweet, but colorless and monotonous. The French are spirituelle, elegant, and voluptuous, but ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... water, refusing to have it filtered. They claim, and probably with reason, that this Nile water is very nutritious. The Egyptian fellah or peasant seldom enjoys a hot meal. He chews parched Indian corn and sugar cane, and eats a curious bread made of coarse flour and water. Despite this monotonous diet the native is a model of physical vigor, with teeth which are as white and perfect as ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... was untuned, when he had been removed from that stormy assembly of which he thoroughly knew the temper, and over which he possessed unbounded influence, to a small, a torpid, and an unfriendly audience, say that his speaking was then, for the most part, a low, monotonous muttering, audible only to those who sat close to him, that when violently excited, he sometimes raised his voice for a few minutes, but that it sank again into an unintelligible murmur. Such was the Earl of Chatham, but such was not William Pitt. His figure, when he first appeared ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was to domestic eyes visibly cross, and her half-year at home had rendered her much less capable of concealing ill-humour. Something was owing to wear and suspense, together with the effects of the summer heat and confined monotonous life without change or luxury; but much was chargeable on the manifestations of temper to which she had given way in the home circle. She told Wilmet the trouble, which Ferdinand wished to have kept from open discussion till ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... curiously conservative country the American improvement of the double curved handle has not yet been adopted. Chip after chip fell in the ditch, or went spinning out into the field. The axe rose and fell with a slow, monotonous motion. Though there was immense strength in every blow, there was no vigour in it. Suddenly, while it was swinging in the air overhead, there came the faint, low echo of a distant railway whistle, and the axe was dropped at once, without even completing ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... not the charm of variety; they are painfully monotonous:—The Greek Church is "dead," and "non-missionary." Certainly non-missionary, if dead! To say of any organization, church or other, that it is dead and non-progressive, is to say the worst that could ...
— Hymns from the Morningland - Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service - Books of the Holy Eastern Church • Various
... been a long time at sea, the enemy did not appear—and there was no chance either of bringing him to action, or of returning into port. Indeed nothing can be more dull and monotonous than a blockading cruise "in the team," as we call it; that is, the ships of the line stationed to watch an enemy. The frigates have, in this respect, every advantage; they are always employed on shore, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... all this, the centre of the scene, The white-haired matron with monotonous tread Plied the swift wheel, and with her joyless mien Sat, like a fate, and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... Translated Way "And Yet It Is a Gentle Art." Occasionally Jim and Bill When Nobody Listens Office Mottoes Metaphysics Heads and Tails An Election Night Pantoum I Can Not Pay That Premium Three Authors To Quotation Melodrama A Poor Excuse, but Our Own Monotonous Variety The Amateur Botanist A Word for It The Poem Speaks Bedbooks A New York Child's Garden of Verses Downward, Come Downward Speaking of Hunting The Flat Hunter's Way Birds and Bards A Wish—An Apartmental Ditty The ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... the withdrawal of stimuli, or their monotonous repetition, are factors which do undoubtedly stand out as primary causes of sleep. We may suppose, if we like, that consciousness depends upon a certain rate of vibration which takes place in the brain structure. This vibration is maintained by the stimuli of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... Streets of appalling uniformity and directness were ploughed through Paris in all directions. "Nothing is more brutal than a straight line," says Victor Hugo, and there is little of interest in the monotonous miles of dreary coincidence which constitute the architectural legacy of ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... artillery and the roar of the dynamite above the howl and cracking of the flames continued with monotonous regularity. Such noises had been bombarding the ears of the panic-stricken people since the earthquake of forty-eight hours before. They ceased to hear the sound and rush pell-mell, drowning their senses in a bedlam of ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... at me with a mild austerity and again lowered his eyes. I cannot now but wonder how the rhythm of a voice so soft, so monotonous, could give such pleasure to the ear. I almost doubted my own eyes when I looked upon his yellow, on that unmoved, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... of authorship, or the Demon, if you prefer it, was so precise, refined, exquisite in manner, and so transcendentally moral in ethics, that he had become almost insufferable to his master, Apollo. The God was a little tired, if the truth were known, with the monotonous chant of Pope, in spite of his wit. He began to think that something more was required, to satisfy the soul than polished periods and abstract didactic morality,—and was not much surprised when he observed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... reduction of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties, which require treatment and spacious expansion, inevitably dry up and perish. The State requires a taxpaying machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public, monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... bending them over like bows until the other ends were also made fast in the earth. Then over these poles a skin tent, made by sewing a number of dressed deerskins together, was thrown. Taking his medicine bag and magic drum into this tent, the conjurer disappeared. Soon the monotonous drumming began. In addition there were heard the barks and howls and cries of nearly all the animals of the forest and prairies. The sounds were like that proceeding from a wild beast show when all the animals are let louse ...
— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young
... side to side of the valley; but the lake behind followed us as steadily as the one before us receded. It was only the mirage that tantalizes travellers in these scorched valleys, all the long eight months of the rainless season. It seemed beautiful at first, then monotonous; and long before the day was out we hated it with a most ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... assent, reads in a rapid and monotonous voice.] "At a Board Meeting held the 31st of January at the Company's Offices, 512, Cannon Street, E.C. Present—Mr. Anthony in the chair, Messrs. F. H. Wilder, William Scantlebury, Oliver Wanklin, and Edgar Anthony. Read letters from the Manager dated January 20th, 23d, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... realms of Equity; but what should interest us more to-night is the fact that the greater part of "Pickwick" was written in Furnival's Inn, which, as Dickens describes it, was "a shady, quiet place echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers there, and rather monotonous and ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... thrown down upon a bald place. Some of the critics in the daily press were fond of saying of his books, "Yes, yes: this is all very good no doubt, but it does look as if page after page is simply a monotonous recital of catching trout that are very much alike by processes that have a strong family likeness." A careless surveyor of the page perhaps would think in this way, and never for the life of him perceive the point sought to be made by the writer of ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... snow-white, close-cropped whiskers ran in two straight lines from his jaw up to a level with his piercing, hawk-like eyes. He would probably have been about seventy-five years of age, but he did not carry it well. In a low, monotonous voice he bade me welcome, and pointed to ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... to take the children away from Pap," Johnnie said in a curious voice, rapid and monotonous, as though she were reciting something to herself. "I have obliged to do it. There must be a law somewhere. God won't let ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... latent images; or half reveal to us by a sudden flash the thoughts of many hearts. Often the rapid transition from one image to another is pleasing to us: on the other hand, any single figure of speech if too often repeated, or worked out too much at length, becomes prosy and monotonous. In theology and philosophy we necessarily include both 'the moral law within and the starry heaven above,' and pass from one to the other (compare for examples Psalms xviii. and xix.). Whether such a use of language is puerile or noble depends upon the genius of the writer or speaker, and ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... generous physique was singing in a shrill, nasal voice a pathetic ballad. She sang without expression, bringing her hands with monotonous gestures alternately to her breast. Her squat, matronly figure, beef from the heels up, looked singularly absurd in her short skirt. Her face was excessively over-painted, her mouth good-naturedly large, and her eyes out of their slit-like ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... from the chimney sagged in the gray air until it lay like a rope of mist along the roof. It was so light now that she could see the sodden carpet of yellow leaves under the maples, and she noticed that the crimson pennons of the sumacs drooped and dripped and clung together. The monotonous clatter of the wheels had fallen into a rhythm, which pounded out steadily and endlessly certain words which were the refrain of her purpose: "Afterward, they will say I had the right to see him." Sometimes she reminded herself, meekly, that he no longer loved her. But there was no trace ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... three," came in monotonous tones from the old man. Completely gone was his sense of rhythm now. "One, two, three; one, two, three," he continued, trying to collect his scattered thoughts. "Does it mean that she is my—my— Oh, God! I must be mad, crazy! Barwig, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... his work in certain hours and taking his pleasure in certain other hours, so in the factory he earns his money by ten hours of dull work and spends it in three hours of lurid and unprofitable pleasure in the evening. Both in the school and in the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness of adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to a day filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomes more apparent to those who are endeavoring to ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... wore on, the orderlies slept and woke, stumbled in and out; the telephonists droned out in monotonous voices to the telephone, or "buzzed" even more monotonous strings of longs and shorts on the "buzzer." And in the open about them, and all unheeded by them, men fought, and suffered wounds and died, or fought on in the scarce lesser ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... Love born, flame of the flame, flushing the dark river beneath him and the virgin snows above. His wings were infinite, his youth eternal; the sun was a jewel on his finger as he passed it in benediction over the world. Creation, no longer monotonous, acclaimed him, in widening melody, in brighter radiances. Was Love a column of fire? Was he a torrent of song? Was he greater than either—the touch of a man on ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... especially in the vicinity of Urrugne (10-1/2 miles), a village in which the Spanish element is noticeable, but the succession of poplars along the roadside all the way—more or less—to Behobie, was very monotonous. At Behobie (14-1/2 miles) the road to Hendaye leaves the direct route to Spain and branches off to the right. Following this, we were soon at the frontier. Hendaye (16 miles) is celebrated for its cognac and a certain liquor called by its name, as well ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... days and without end over the soft, unpacked snow. It was hard, monotonous work, with none of the joy and blood-stir that went with flying over hard surface. Now one man to the fore in the snowshoes, and now the other, it was a case of stubborn, unmitigated plod. A yard of powdery ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... falls is heard at Stonington, and the gradual increase of this sound is one of the agreeable features of this delicious walk. I know not why the rush of waters is so delightful to the ear; all other monotonous sounds are wearying, and harass the spirits, but I never met any one who did not love to listen to a waterfall. A rapid stream, called the "Branch Creek," was to be crossed ere we reached the spot where the falls ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... right and leaving the Rye behind them, they ascended a long, monotonous, and very ugly road composed of artificial little houses, each set in a portion of very metallic garden. These continued all the way to the top of a long hill, straggling into a piece of waste ground where there were ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... fall in love with her at all, that catastrophe should be postponed beyond six months from their first acquaintance. Nor did it seem extraordinary to her that she should actually look forward to those visits, and take pleasure in that monotonous intercourse. Her life was very quiet; it was natural that she should take whatever diversion came in her way, and should even be thankful for it. Mr. Juxon was an honest gentleman, a scholar and a man who had seen the world. If what he said was not always very original ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... Then in Youth and Art, in Dis Aliter Visum, in Bifurcation, in The Lost Mistress, and in Too Late, he records the opposite fate, and in characters so distinct that the repetition of the motive is not monotonous. These are studies of ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the bearing, and almost to a minute of her allowed time. At any moment, as he sat on the bridge without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply by reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was—the precise spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster's round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its people. Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... sorrow, light shot with dark, will be unrolled before us— but of anything more we are really ignorant. We know that certainly the great majority of us will be alive at the close of this New Year; but who will be the exceptions? A great many of us, especially those of us who are in the monotonous stretch of middle life, will go on substantially as we have been going on for years past, with our ordinary duties, joys, sorrows, cares; but to some of us, in all probability, this year holds some great change which may darken ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... speaking with his wife, children, and friends, no other word but 'Ali!' ever passed his lips. If he wanted food or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants still by repeating 'Ali!' Begging or buying at the bazaar, it was always 'Ali!' Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on his monotonous 'Ali!' Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up and down the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up into the air, and shriek our, all the while, at ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... advent of the United States, the history of the world's efforts at republicanism was a monotonous record of failure. Your very school-boys are taught the reason. It was because the average of intelligence and morality was too low; because they lacked the self-restrained, self-governing quality developed in the Anglo-Saxon bone and fiber through all the centuries since Runnymede; because ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... the Quathlamba Range; but in the lower grounds, and even on the plateau of the Karroo they are absent. The general aspect of the vegetation on the Karroo, and eastward over the plateau into Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, is to the traveller's eye monotonous—a fact due to the general uniformity of the geological formations and the general dryness of the surface. In Natal and in Mashonaland types different from those of either the Cape or the Karroo appear, and I have never ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... in early childhood roamed those dark, solemn woods, or sat at night on the lowly cottage stile, gazing on the wild, grotesque shadows cast by the moonbeams from the huge, forest trees; or how she listened to the solemn hootings of the lonesome owl, the monotonous cuckoo, and sudden whippoorwill; or laughed at the glowworm's light in the dark swamps, and asked her aunty if they were not a group of stars come down to play bo-peep ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... wonderfully refreshed by the night's sleep, and built the fire at the cavern mouth. Beatrice was still asleep, and he was careful not to waken her. The days would be long and monotonous for her, he knew, and the more time she could ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... some time their course lay through a principal thoroughfare of the city; but by degrees the sounds became less frequent, and in time entirely died away, and all that caught his ear was the regular and monotonous stroke of ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
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