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More "Turgid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... excessive and hasty generalization, so that his hypotheses, however seemingly brilliant, are often destitute of any sufficient basis in observed facts, whilst his literary style is not unfrequently theatrical and turgid, and a great want of method and order is commonly observable in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... clearer perhaps than in Manfred's farewell line in the play: "Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die." To be sure, Schumann spreads the same solace o'er the close of his setting, with the Requiem. The sombre splendor of romance is throughout, with just a touch of turgid. In the poignant ecstasy of grief we feel vividly the foreshadowing example of Liszt, in his ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... years. At the death of Mendelssohn, the Philistines heralded the coming of a new German national school, founded on his principles (formalism), one that would clarify the artistic atmosphere of the turgid and anarchistic excesses of Wagner and Berlioz and their followers. These critics found already that Beethoven's melodies were too long and his instrumentation too involved. They declared that the further music departed from its natural simplicity the more involved its ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... end of this very difficult bridge they dismount from their steeds and gaze at the wicked-looking stream, which is as swift and raging, as black and turgid, as fierce and terrible as if it were the devil's stream; and it is so dangerous and bottomless that anything failing into it would be as completely lost as if it fell into the salt sea. And the bridge, which spans it, is different from any other bridge; for there never was such a one as this. ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... is far too long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of much higher and riper gifts than Bailey's. It is turgid, untechnical in verse, wordy, and involved. Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style. But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated to the library of things not worth the time ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... stronger proof of the charms of harmonious elocution, than the many, even unnatural scenes and flights of the false sublime it has lifted into applause. In what raptures have I seen an audience, at the furious fustian and turgid rants in Nat. Lee's Alexander the Great! for though I can allow this play a few great beauties, yet it is not without its extravagant blemishes. Every play of the same author has more or less of them. Let me ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... nations, which may be involved in a controversy, are inspired by a reasonably pacific purpose. Only when the masses of the people are inflamed with a passionate desire for war, and in a time of popular hysteria responsible statesmen are helplessly borne along the turgid flow of events as bubbles are carried by the swift current of a swollen river, is ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... preacher, he calls them "preaching shops," and speaks with pity of those who occupy their pulpits: "That must be a dreadful life—dreadful, oh, quite dreadful!" Yet he has a lasting admiration for the sermons of Charles Spurgeon. As to Jeremy Taylor, "I confess that all that turgid rhetoric wearies me." ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... will be, if honest folk can be found. We will be jolly over our cups, we will have all sorts of vices and whimsies; it will be delicious. We will prove that Voltaire has no genius; that Buffon, everlastingly perched upon his stilts, is only a turgid declaimer; that Montesquieu is nothing more than a man with a touch of ingenuity; we will send D'Alembert packing to his fusty mathematics. We will welcome before and behind all the pigmy Catos like you, whose modesty is the prop of pride, and whose sobriety is a fine name for not ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... "why now to MY notion, it is very much in the turgid, in the Asiatic. It gives me dominions from river to river, and from the mountains to the great sea, like Tamerlane or Ghengis Khan; or like George III. 'by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, FRANCE,' &c. &c. whereas, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... peculiar to the warm latitudes of America. With the exception of a slight similarity about the region of the head, the worm bears no resemblance to the parent beetle. When full-grown, it is about 3-1/2 inches in length, having the body large and turgid, and increasing in circumference from the head towards the opposite extremity. The head is of a corneous, opaque substance. It has neither eyes nor the rudiments of the antennae which distinguish the beetle tribe. It is, however, provided with the mandibles and other oral ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... plan of domestic arrangement, or of foreign politics. It tends to produce neither the security of a free Government, nor the energy of a Monarchy that is absolute. Accordingly, the Crown has dwindled away in proportion to the unnatural and turgid growth of this excrescence ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... brigand ship and all its vicinity was enveloped in darkness-mist now—a turgid sable curtain, made more dense by the dissipating heavy fumes of our exploding bombs which settled low over the ship and the rocks nearby. The search-light from our camp strove futilely to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... as if she were trying to realize something. The room was growing greyer as she read on through the turgid catalogue of the heathen gods, so packed with stories and pictures, so unaccountably glorious. At last the light failed, and Mrs. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... those too sophisticated or cynical to respond to natural impulses. Of the half dozen or so of colored women writing creditable verse, Anne Spencer is the most modern and least obvious in her methods. Her lines are at times involved and turgid and almost cryptic, but she shows an originality which does not depend upon eccentricities. In her "Before the Feast of Shushan" she displays an opulence, the love of which has long been charged against the Negro as one of his naive and childish traits, but which in ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... immediately see you are watching a stylistic prestidigitator. The later, more orderly dignity of Dr. Johnson's exquisitely chosen diction is likewise ingeniously studied and self-conscious. When Gray soared into the somewhat turgid pindaric tradition of his day, he too was slaking a thirst for rhetorical complexities. But in the "Elegy" we have none of that. Nor do we have artifices like the "chaste Eve" or the "meek-eyed maiden" apostrophized in Collins and ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... to write some servant girl novels. I believe I could do it. My love-making would either be rather tame and stiff or too intensely early Victorian. But I should like to swing off into an ecstasy of large turgid words and let my mind hear the mushy housemaid cry, "Isn't that ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... attitude recurs with sufficient frequency to stamp it as a staple of comic effect. Many passages would become tiresome and meaningless instead of amusing unless so interpreted. The soliloquy of Mnesilochus in Bac. 500 ff. could be made interesting only by turgid ranting. Similarly in Bac. 530 ff. ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... back in his chair and stared at the turgid, bulging forehead and hard eyes before him. What could be behind them? Had the war brought out a twist in his father's brain? Why ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... statues—from the rude attempt at bold action, which was the peculiarity of Daedalus—the general adoption of this action in the early ages—the traits of savage nature in the face and figure, expressed with little knowledge, but strong feeling—by the narrow loins, turgid muscles of the breast, thighs, and calves of the legs, will all find reason to believe they are copied from the above-mentioned statue." Greece, it must be owned, possessed musicians long anterior to Homer: Chiron the Centaur, regarded ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... former. The merit of these works may be ascertained in some measure, by the rules we have already established. We need only to add further on this head, that among many beauties we meet with examples of the turgid and bombast in the work of Ariosto; from which that of the Greek Poet is wholly free. The two first lines ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... Of turgid efflorescence, Describe in language that would floor Our Cayleys, Rouths, and Besants, How Oxford oars as levers move, While Cambridge mathematics, Though excellent in theory, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... various leading Elizabethan satirists,—the vitriolic bitterness of Nash, the sententious profundity of Donne, the happy-go-lucky "slogging" of genial Dekker, the sledge-hammer blows of Jonson, the turgid malevolence of Chapman, and the stiletto-like thrusts of George Buchanan are worthy of closer and more detailed study than can be devoted to them in a sketch such as this. I regret that Nicolas Breton's ...
— English Satires • Various
... Board, whose "farm" of 1,500 acres, extends from Saltley to Tyburn, two and a half miles, and who have now to deal with the sewage brought there from 188 miles of main sewers, extending as far as King's Norton and Selly Oak, Harborne, Smethwick, &c. The whole of the black and turgid stream of liquid filth brought down by the sewers is utilised upon the farm, some 200 cubic yards of mud being lifted daily from the settling tanks, to be dug in, while the overflow is taken by carriers to the most distant parts, and allowed to filtrate ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... among them nor among those writers who are peculiarly the delight of the spuriously literate: Sallust, who is less colorless than the others; sentimental and pompous Titus Livius; turgid and lurid Seneca; watery and larval Suetonius; Tacitus who, in his studied conciseness, is the keenest, most wiry and muscular of them all. In poetry, he was untouched by Juvenal, despite some roughshod ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... American Knights," "Order of the Star," "Sons of Liberty," and by other equally high-sounding names, which they adopted and discarded in turn, as one after the other was discovered and brought into undesired prominence. The titles and grips and passwords of these secret military organizations, the turgid eloquence of their meetings, and the clandestine drill of their oath-bound members, doubtless exercised quite as much fascination on such followers as their unlawful object of aiding and abetting the ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... Court hung upon his words. The silence was profound, and each listener's eager attention grew in intensity as he proceeded to detail the peculiar power of fascination—snake-like, he called it—possessed by the plaintiff. Without any assistance from turgid rhetoric, or indignant denunciation, he depicted it in a manner so simple, yet so direct, that his audience shivered in response. Then, with consummate art, he played upon their sensibilities by picturing ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... the slave a freeman. 'Tis a change That turns to ridicule the turgid speech And stately tone of moralists, who boast, As if, like him of fabulous renown, They had indeed ability to smooth The shag of savage nature, and were each An Orpheus and omnipotent in song. But transformation of apostate ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... seemed, Altar Valley was a bright and green expanse, where dust clouds did not rise. Forlorn River ran, a slow, heavy, turgid torrent. Belding never saw the river in flood that it did not give him joy; yet now, desert man as he was, he suffered a regret when he thought of the great Chase reservoir full and overflowing. The dull thunder of the spillway ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... from Townsend was turgid thought conveyed, I will not say in commonplace language, for his style could never be that, but in the language of sobriety, good ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... graveyard of Tullichettle and falls into the Earn at the village of Comrie. It is compounded of two Gaelic words—ruadh (red), and tuill (flood). Ruadhthuill, therefore, is the red flood, and any one who has seen the red turgid waters of the Ruchill in time of flood will see that the name is significant of the thing itself. The word occurs in a shorter form—Ruel, a river in Argyllshire, which gives its name to the valley through which it flows—viz., ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... two red lines slowly defined themselves across his face. The theatrical quality of the scene and the turgid rhetorical bathos of the boy's speeches attested his youth and the unformed violence of his emotions. Did they also indicate a rehearsal, or had the boy merely been goaded to vague action by implicit belief in a woman's vagaries? Orde did not know, but the incident brought home to ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... launched. His animation, clear thinking, handsome face and graceful ways made his lectures very popular. Science in his hands was no longer the dull and turgid thing it had before been in the University. He would give a lecture in the hall, and then invite the audience to walk with him in the woods. He seemed to know everything: birds, beetles, bugs, beasts, trees, weeds, flowers, rocks and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... turgid, densely packed on one side of the rachis in three to five rows, sessile or subsessile, sub-globose or ovoid, with unequal tubercle-based bristly hairs on the nerves of the glumes and with short minute hairs on ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... fairer figures known And rich with fruits, lay bounded for his own; Deep thro the centre spreads a branching bay, Full sails ascend and golden rivers stray; Bright palaces arise relieved in gold, And gates and streets the crossing lines unfold. James furrows o'er the plate with turgid tide, Young Richmond roughens on his masted side; Reviving Norfolk from her ashes springs, A golden phoenix on refulgent wings; Potowmak's yellow waves reluctant spread, And Vernon rears his rich and radiant head, Tis here the chief his pointed graver stays, The bank to burnish with a purer ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... o'clock, and the next morning rose at seven and went to work at once on his play. He chose the one that had the greatest emotional possibilities. Gora Dwight had told him that he must learn to "externalize his emotions," and he felt that here was the supreme opportunity. Never would he have more turgid, pent-up, tearing emotions to get rid of than now. He wrote until one o'clock, then, after lunch and two hours on his column, went out and took a long walk; but lighter of heart than since he had met Mary Zattiany. He also reflected with no little ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and I think is likely to bring money to our treasury, which is the consummation most devoutly to be wished. It is nothing more than an interesting melodrama, with the advantage of being written in gentlemanly (noblemanly?) blank verse instead of turgid prose, and being acted by the principal instead of the secondary members of the company. This will suffice to make you appreciate my satisfaction, when I am complimented upon my acting in it, and you will sympathize with the shout of laughter my father and myself indulged in in the park the other ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... and I detained him wilfully, out of a reverent regard to your style. Statius, they tell me, is turgid. As to that other Latin book, since you know neither its name nor subject, your wants (I crave leave to apprehend) cannot be very urgent. Meanwhile, dream that it is one of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the Speaker are wrangling across your mother, who looks alarmed; Burleigh is flirting desperately with Miss Alice Maxwell, who is purring upon his senatorial vanity; your Populist is breaking out into the turgid rhetoric of Mr. Bryan; French has persuaded that charming English girl that he is the most literary man in America, and Miss Carter is condoling with March about an ungrateful State. So be happy, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... The skies were turgid and black and the massed clouds, reflecting the lights of the great city below them, were permeated with an ugly, feverish, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... on his side of the compartment, after a struggle with the thermantidote that refused to work. There was heat enough below the roof to have roasted meat, so that the physical atmosphere became as turgid as the mental after a ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... thence to the banks of Egypt's Nile, and heard the lamentations of priests and wailing of women as a black ox, flower bedecked and wearing a collar encrusted with gems, was drowned in the turgid stream. Time and space ceased to exist for him. Through the murk of cavernous passages he paced, pausing before a pit in which reposed a sarcophagus of huge dimensions; and when the dim company and he had paid tribute to that which lay there, all ascended ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... gardens of the Temple, verdant to-day as when the red-cross knights walked in them, or the fateful red and white roses were plucked there, or the voices of the young declaimers were heard from them, rolling out the turgid lines of Sackville's piece, the somewhat unpromising day-spring which a glorious sun-burst was to succeed. From Lincoln's Inn, in 1613, when the Princess Elizabeth married the elector-palatine and went off to Heidelberg Castle, the students came ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... comes, with advancing years, it brings discomforts, disadvantages, and oftentimes fatal diseases, among which are Apoplexy, Fatty Liver, Diabetes, Bright's Disease and Fatty Heart. The sanguine or entonic variety is distinguished by florid skin, full strong pulse, turgid veins, with firm and vigorous muscular fibres, and the serous or atonic, is denoted by a full, but frequent and feeble pulse, smooth and soft skin, plump but inexpressive figure, and general languor or debility ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... levee it was even as Mr. Baptiste had said. The 'long-shoremen, the cotton-yardmen, and the stevedores had gone out on a strike. The levee lay hot and unsheltered under the glare of a noonday sun. The turgid Mississippi scarce seemed to flow, but gave forth a brazen gleam from its yellow bosom. Great vessels lay against the wharf, silent and unpopulated. Excited groups of men clustered here and there among bales ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... Nareda, which only five years ago came into national being as a protectorate of the United States. Its territory lies just north of the mountain Highlands of Haiti, Santo Domingo and Porto Rico. A few hundred miles of tumbled Lowlands, embracing the turgid Nares Sea, whose bottom is the lowest point of all the Western Hemisphere—some thirty thousand ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... gun. In his madness he tried to move, to reach her, but he could not; he was sinking. His legs sagged under him, let him down to his knees, and but for the wall he would have fallen. Then a change transformed him. The black, turgid, convulsed face grew white and ghastly, with beads of clammy sweat and lines of torture. His strange eyes showed swiftly ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... Kentucky would certainly refuse to become a Spanish province, and that all that was possible to hope for was separation and an alliance with Spain. He was on intimate terms with the separatist leaders of all shades, and broached his views to them as far as he thought fit. His turgid oratory was admired in the backwoods, and he was much helped by his skill in the baser kinds of political management. He speedily showed all the familiar traits of the demagogue—he was lavish in his hospitality, and treated young and old, rich and poor, with jovial good-fellowship; so that ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... directness of a manner free from the least trace of dogmatic assumption.' 'Not long before,' says this witness, 'I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Chalmers, whose force and energy, and vehement but rather turgid eloquence, carried for the moment all before him—his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... plays, by Zeus, no goat-stag there you'll see, Such figures as are blazoned forth in Median tapestry. When first I took the art from you, bloated and swoln, poor thing, With turgid gasconading words and heavy dieting, First I reduced and toned her down, and made her slim and neat With wordlets and with exercise and poultices of beet, And next a dose of chatterjuice, distilled from books, I gave ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... unclean hand to lift it, hesitate to touch it with lips that were not pure—but as certainly one sees that, if hand and lip are clean, and one may raise it to oneself, there is intoxication within that cup. Though its brilliant walls are white, they are not so because they hold thin water or turgid milk or yet vacancy. Of the nature of porcelain, they are clear and brilliant, for as such they left the potter's hands; but that faint flush stealing through them tells us that that within is wine. ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... was a lawyer bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as pleading eloquently. The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses, turgid enough, even to his own judgement. Poets would have failed at such a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured. He was a wild man, cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter the ranks of the soberly blissful. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... them so soon as they reached the provost-marshal's office. Just before leaving Point Lookout Jack received a much-directed letter that gave signs of having been in every mail-bag in the Army of the Potomac. It was from Barney Moore, bristling with wonder and turgid with woful lamentation at Jack's coldness in not writing him. He had been sent by mistake to Ship Island, near New Orleans, to join his regiment, and had only at the writing of the letter reached Washington, where the Caribees were expected every day to move to the Peninsula in McClellan's ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... latter had more than once brushed accidentally with the back of her head against the front of her father's trousers, and on the last occasion distinctly felt his prick, which was evidently in a slightly turgid state, and his trousers also slightly projected in the ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... greeted the decision. Aunt Jane wept, and Chris wept, and said this never could have happened to him if his aunt had lived. Oaths flowed from Captain Magnus in a turgid stream. Nevertheless the twain were led away, firmly bound, and guarded by Dugald, Cuthbert and the negro. And the remarkable program proposed by Cuthbert Vane was triumphantly carried out. Six prisoners now occupied the old cave ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... indeed favoured himself by choosing those parts which most easily admit the ornaments of English poetry. He had least success in his lyric attempts, in which he seems to have been under some malignant influence; he is always labouring to be great, and at last is only turgid. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... "demands of more Occidental civilisation," as Tom put it, and also that unless we intended to be medical students for ever it was necessary to become medical men. Lastly, it began to dawn upon Tom that "Francesca: a Tragedy" was a somewhat turgid performance, and on me that a holiday on Sunday was demanded by six ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... before hissed over the precipice, in a small transparent ribbon of clear glass—green, sprinkled with white foam, and then threaded its way round the large rocks in its capacious channel, like a silver eel twisting through a dry desert, now changed in a moment to a dark turgid chocolate colour; and even as we stood and looked, lo! a column of water from the mountains pitched in thunder over the face of the precipice, making the earth tremble, and driving up from the rugged face of the everlasting rocks in smoke, and forcing the air into ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... had the immediate effect of opening the flood-gates of his wife's poetic temperament, for she replied at once to her spouse's effort with an epistle conceived in the terza rima employed by Dante, and though the poem is turgid in diction and shallow in thought, full of classical names and allusions, "a parade of all the treasures of the school-room," it exhibits the graceful ease and high scholarship which mark all Vittoria's ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... performed. Again, it is found that the puncta, specially the lower one, are themselves very often to blame, in cases of watery eye, sometimes because they are inverted or everted, more often because, sympathising with the lid, they are turgid, angry, and inflamed, pouting and closed like the orifice of the ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... fastidious feminine sense than her 'stylish' appearance. For her language, flowery and grandiloquent, was excruciatingly genteel, one moment conveyed by minced words through a pursed mouth, and the next carried away on a turgid tide of rhetoric—the swimmer in this sea of sentiment flinging out braceleted arms, and bawling appeals to the 'Wim—men—nof—Vinglund!' The crowd ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... overwhelming. His fear of her delicacy diminished with her struggles, for her resistance inflamed him. He did not know, nor did she just then, that the animal instinct to conquer was what she had taught him, and that the turgid stream of his blood was finding new strength and unreason, a strange new impetus in every struggle. She saw her danger and was powerless to prevent it. She looked over her shoulder helplessly in the direction in ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... thousand years of the world's history, it is full and good and accurate, its standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he lived in an age when Johnson's turgid periods had corrupted our literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's pomposity. A paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You are wafted upwards, with this lucid ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... way, not quite equal to that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines, really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect which the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France, is only to be found ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... crisis, the crystal grew cloudy before his eyes. For long hours, she had gone into the deep places of her life, had stirred up from its very source the spring of her being, and the superficial clearness had grown turgid with the dregs that had lain undisturbed and unsuspected there. Hatred and black despair were boiling in the heart which Thayer had thought so calm and cool, so peaceful in its dainty whiteness. Before it, he stood silent. Was this the true Beatrix Lorimer? ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... unfair!' he said, and pathos faded from him in his rage. All the vague thoughts, dark and turgid, of the last two nights took ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... of what is now China, along the banks of the Yellow River. They were agricultural, and had already reached a fairly high level of civilization—much higher than that of any other part of Eastern Asia. The Yellow River is a fierce and terrible stream, too swift for navigation, turgid, and full of mud, depositing silt upon its bed until it rises above the surrounding country, when it suddenly alters its course, sweeping away villages and towns in a destructive torrent. Among most early agricultural ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... a paid official, it was his duty to obey and to be silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and falling man must have rushed to his head at the humiliation. His letter to Mr. Erskine, subsequently Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent phrases, to a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity. He had been muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, by his paltry salary as an exciseman; alas! had he not a family to keep? Already, he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... commensurate with the darkness? What could he know? What does he tell? He tells so little that the question as to the value of his authorities is reduced to nearly nothing; and, of that little which we learn from his wordy and turgid pages, the smallest fraction only is of any ethnological interest. Indeed, Gildas is most worth notice for what he leaves unsaid. The rebellion of Maximus he mentions; but he is not answerable for the migration from Britain to Brittany, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... you will never hear from it again. In the first place, you do not write correctly; in the second, you have nothing to say. We cannot afford to print words merely—much less pay for them. What is worse, many of your sentences are so unnatural and turgid as to suggest that you sought in stimulants a remedy for paucity of ideas. Take friendly advice. Attempt something that you are capable of doing, and build your hopes on that. Any honest work—even sawing wood—well done, is better than childish efforts ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... following words and use them in sentences: railed, maundered, coxcomb, parasite, conclave, turgid, folio, overture. ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... have turned deaf ears to others— Me you shall hear. Out of the mouths of turbines, Out of the turgid throats of engines, Over the whistling steam, You shall hear me shrilly piping. Your mills I shall enter like the wind, And blow upon your ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... victim, forward! forward! while the crashing thunder pealed above his head; he shook his impious hand against the sky, and still darted onward, till the horse stopped, snorting on the beach; and there as the great sea, rolled in foaming and turgid, there, he saw it plain in yon glare of livid lightning, on the crest of every curling wave, a dark haired lady lay, glaring at him with eyes that looked like coals of fire; a monster wave came rolling in, and the frightened horse turned, and seizing the bit between ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... scolop'd embosments on either side, as full as it could be stuft, the stomach and guts were as full as they could hold; the peristaltick motion of the gut grew quick, and the justling motion of II accordingly; multitudes of milk-white vessels seem'd quickly filled, and turgid, which were perhaps the veins and arteries and the Creature was so greedy, that though it could not contain more, yet it continued sucking as fast as ever, and as fast emptying it self behind: the digestion of this Creature must needs be very quick, for though I perceiv'd ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of specifying,—the true secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never turgid. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... not want it, this furnace, this draught-maddened fire which mounts up my arms making them swell with turgid, ungovernable strength. ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... affliction and persecution by Richelieu, and from the commencement of her Regency, these returning exiles and liberated prisoners had been gathering round her until at last, formed into a faction, they gave themselves out as the Queen's party, and by adopting a high-flown, turgid, and mysterious style of phraseology, and assuming bombastic and braggart airs of authority, coupled with an affectation of capacity and profundity, obtained for themselves from the wits of the Court and city the nickname ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... earlier in date is MNASALCAS of Plataeae, near Sicyon, on whom Theodorides wrote an epitaph (/Anth. Pal./ xiii. 21), which speaks of him as imitating Simonides, and criticises his style as turgid. This criticism is not born out by his eighteen extant epigrams in the Palatine Anthology, which are in the best manner, with something of the simplicity of his great model, and even a slight austerity of style which takes us back to Greece Proper. The /Garland/ of Meleager ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... and wing it away into the drear Eternities of the night: and I could not but heave the sigh: 'Alas for us two poor waifs and castaways of our race, little bits of flotsam and seaweed-hair cast up here a moment, ah me, on this shore of the Ages, soon to be dragged back, O turgid Eternity, into thy abysmal gorge; and upon what strand—who shall say?—shall she next be flung, and I, divided then perhaps by all the stretch of the trillion-distanced astral gulf?' And such a pity, and a wringing of the heart, seemed in things, that a ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... immediately regains its color and dimensions. After that, if you leave the vein free and tie and compress the arteries at some distance from the heart, you will see, on the contrary, their included portion grow excessively turgid, the heart becoming so beyond measure, assuming a dark-red color, even to lividity, and at length so overloaded with blood as to seem in danger of suffocation; but when the obstruction is removed it returns to its normal condition, in ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... than he decided with impulsive ardor that he had been too long without a "career,"—and a "career" he must have in order to win distinction for his wife's sake. Therefore, summoning his secretary, Neville to his aid, he plunged headlong into the seething, turgid waters of English politics, and shut himself up in his library day after day, studying blue-books, writing and answering letters, and drawing up addresses,—and with the general proneness of the masculine mind to attend to one thing only at a time, he grew so absorbed in his ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... Missouri, is represented as being elegantly diversified with woodlands, prairies, and rich bottoms, and the banks are lined with a luxuriant growth of plants and flowers. Before reaching the Missouri, the water of the Mississippi is perfectly limpid; but, from the mouth of that river it becomes turgid and muddy—flows through a flat, inundated country, and seems more like an immense flood, than an old and deep-channelled river. As far as great things can be compared to small, it much resembles, within its banks, the Rhone when flooded, as it sweeps through the department of Vaucluse, after ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... Vancouver Island to Alaska. As luck would have it, Vancouver, the Englishman, and Gray, the American, are both hovering off {322} the mouth of the Columbia in April of 1792, but a gale drives the ships offshore, though turgid water plainly indicates the mouth of a great river somewhere near. Vancouver goes on up north. Gray, the American, comes back, and so Vancouver misses discovering the one great river that remains unmapped in America. Up Puget Sound, named after his lieutenant, up Fuca Straits, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... tract called Relatio de Standardo. This last is an account of the Battle of the Standard (1138), better blown than the similar account by Richard of Hexham, but less trustworthy, and in places obscured by a peculiarly turgid ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... same time avoiding such as are mean and vulgar: let it be, in short, what the lowest may understand; and, at the same time, the most learned cannot but approve. The whole may be adorned with figure and metaphor, provided they are not turgid or bombast, nor seem stiff and laboured, which, like meat too highly ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... goddess, Des," he said, his weary eyes roving out over the turgid, yellow stream, "and she has been kind to you, though, God knows, you have played a man's part in all this. She has placed in your possession something for which at least five men have died in vain, ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... spare of the way in which he allowed the spirit of party to cloud his judgment. His relations with Lord Chatham give lamentable proof of the violence of his personal antipathies. As an orator, his speeches are often turgid, wanting in self-control, and full of those ample digressions in which Mr. Gladstone delighted to obscure his principles. Yet the irritation did not conceal a magnificent loyalty to his friends, and it was in his days of comparative poverty that he shared ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... his material from a Saxon Chronicle, like that of Winchester, but he has also matter peculiar to himself; and this raises a question whether he took such matter from a Saxon Chronicle now lost. He is grandiloquent and turgid to an extent which often obscures his meaning. In him we perceive all the word-eloquence of Saxon poetry, striving to utter itself through the medium of a Latinity ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... the fact that an iron bridge or a railway engine may be artistically done—these will not be "art" objects, but hostile novelties. And, on the other hand, we can pretty confidently foretell a spacious future and much amplification for that turgid, costly, and deliberately anti-contemporary group of styles of which William Morris and his associates have been the fortunate pioneers. And the same principles will apply to costume. A non-functional class of people ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... mad moments which followed, Marishka was barely conscious. She was pushed roughly back into the turgid crowd and would have fallen had not an arm sustained her. Men seized the assassin and hurried him away. There were hoarse shouts, glimpses of soldiers, as the machine of death pushed its way through the mass of people, and always the strong ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... (ALLEGHANY PLUM.) Leaves lanceolate to oblong-ovate, often long-acuminate, finely and sharply serrate, softly pubescent when young, smooth when old; fruit globose-ovoid, under 1/2 in., very dark purple, with a bloom; stone turgid, a shallow groove on one side and a broad, flat ridge on the other. A low, straggling bush, occasionally a tree, 3 to 15 ft. ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... overwhelms my soul! From shame, I in Heaven's light my grief control; Thou art its fountain, which each night o'erflows. My couch! that oft hath woo'd me to repose, 'Mid sorrows vast—Love's iv'ried hand hath stole Griefs turgid stream, which o'er thee it doth roll, That hand which good on all but me bestows. Not only quiet and sweet rest I fly, But from myself and thought, whose vain pursuit On pinion'd fancy doth my soul transport: The multitude I did so long defy, Now as my hope and ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... out; and the bountiful, cold air of the night and the pure glory of the stars received him on the threshold. He looked round him, breathing deep of earth's plain fragrance; he looked up into the great array of heaven, and was quieted. His little turgid life dwindled to its true proportions; and he saw himself (that great flame-hearted martyr!) stand like a speck under the cool cupola of the night. Thus he felt his careless injuries already soothed; the live air of out-of-doors, the quiet of the ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated. The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the Songs of the Pixies, is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only doing a natural thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted terms; but the young ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... either of these passages, and such as these, or of others more buoyant and above-ground, and especially of the most sublime, is now submitted to the decision of the reader, to whom I am ready enough to confess that I have not at all consulted their approbation, who account nothing grand that is not turgid, or elegant that is not bedizened ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... leaders would be "unspeakably shocked and frightened" if anything came of their "foolish and wicked words." The letter was lengthy, and contained some telling phrases such as Mr. Churchill has always been skilful in coining; but the "turgid homily—a mixture of sophistry, insult, and menace," as The Times not unfairly described it, was less effective than the terse and simple rejoinder in which Mr. Bonar Law pointed out that Mr. Churchill's onslaught wounded his father's memory more deeply than ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... rings false—statue, inscription, everything,' said Frank. 'These insufferable allegorical groups sprawling round a dead hero are of the same class as the pompous and turgid prose of Doctor Johnson. The greatest effects are the simplest effects, and so it always was and so it always will be. But that little bit of Latin is ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... arch of sky visible through the curving panels of the dome, thinking the turgid thoughts that always came when action was near. His chest was full of the familiar weakness—not fear exactly, but a tight, helpless feeling that grew and grew ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... forty years of age. I sized him up. In the corners of his eyes I saw humor and laughter and kindliness. As for the rest of him, he was a brute-beast, wholly unmoral, and with all the passion and turgid violence of the brute-beast. What saved him, what made him possible for me, were those corners of his eyes—the humor and laughter and kindliness of the ...
— The Road • Jack London
... excellence, and immovable principles common to all languages, founded in the nature of our passions and affections, yet it has its ornaments and modes of address which are merely arbitrary. What is approved in the Eastern nations as grand and majestic, would be considered by the Greeks and Romans as turgid and inflated; and they, in return, would be thought by the Orientals to express themselves in a cold and ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... to a more ripened taste.[5] He complained that nobody who had read it observed that it was touching, not remembering that even the most tender feeling fails to touch us, when it has found stilted and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection were prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a certain patient sweetness ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers, whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence carried, for the moment, all before them,—his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... character I was to assume, and I proceeded to cast them from me. I neglected my hair. I avoided my playmates. I frowned abstractedly. I didn't eat as much as was good for me. I took lonely walks. I brooded in solitude. I not only committed to memory the more turgid poems of the late Lord Byron—"Fare thee well, and if forever," &c.—but I became a despondent poet on my own account, and composed a string of "Stanzas to One who will understand them." I think I was a trifle ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... to the council of the savage tribes which had terrorized his people of Kentucky. From the ramparts of Fort Chartres (once one of the mighty chain of strongholds to protect a new France, and now deserted like Massacre), I gazed for the first time in awe at the turgid flood of the Mississippi, and at the lands of the Spanish king beyond. With never ceasing fury the river tore at his clay banks and worried the green islands that braved his charge. And my boyish fancy pictured to itself the monsters which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... news, old news of its kind, yet great news too, but now and then he would linger in the odour of the bloom that sprayed the gean-tree like a fall of snow, or he would cast an eye admiring upon the turgid river, washing from bank to bank, and feel the strange uneasiness of wonder and surmise, the same that comes from mists that swirl in gorges of the hills or haunt old ancient woods. The sigh of the wind seemed to be for his peculiar ear. The nod of ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... from the trench. There was a roar higher up the ravine, and a turgid flood, streaked with frothy lines, came pouring down the new channel, bearing with it small nut bushes and great clumps of matted grass. By degrees it subsided, and the men, gathering about the edge of the muskeg, hot and splashed with mire, lay down ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually ominous and grave. I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man was calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this was his panacea,—to rend the old country from end to end, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these periodicals that we first find the familiar essay. Its only predecessors are such serious essays as those of Bacon, Cowley, and Temple, the turgid paragraphs of Shaftesbury, the vigorous but crude and rough papers of Collier, and the 'characters' of Overbury and Earle. These 'characters' had always been entirely typical; they were treated rather from the abstract than from the human point of view, and had no names or other ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... the visitor's while to walk by the broad muddy Rhone, and observe the clumsy picturesque vessels moored there, or gliding down the turgid stream. So clumsy is the construction that some are provided with two rudders, one being found insufficient to direct ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... unsolved in itself; for he that wants judgment in the liberty of his fancy may as well shew the want of it in its confinement." [Footnote: Preface to Four New Plays: ib. 498.] Besides, he adds in effect on the next page, so far from "confining the fancy" rhyme is apt to lead to turgid ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... through the flood. The turgid stream was not wide and it was not a long fight. But there was the peril of mules, wagon and man being swept out into the main stream of the flood ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... own glorious and free country—("Looking out for a few niggers this morning?" occurred to me),—and made some severe reflections—not, I admit, altogether undeserved—on the Government of England. This man was fluent, though turgid. He seemed resolved to act the orator throughout, and certainly to me appeared in point of talent far—far a-head of Henry Clay. Bravos and hoohoos in abundance greeted Mr. Prentiss. He spoke long; but the noise of the suburbs prevented my hearing ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... that were not pure—but as certainly one sees that, if hand and lip are clean, and one may raise it to oneself, there is intoxication within that cup. Though its brilliant walls are white, they are not so because they hold thin water or turgid milk or yet vacancy. Of the nature of porcelain, they are clear and brilliant, for as such they left the potter's hands; but that faint flush stealing through them tells us that that within is wine. And as the purity of a cup like this is different from that of a clean, thick, common ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... by furloughs granted them so soon as they reached the provost-marshal's office. Just before leaving Point Lookout Jack received a much-directed letter that gave signs of having been in every mail-bag in the Army of the Potomac. It was from Barney Moore, bristling with wonder and turgid with woful lamentation at Jack's coldness in not writing him. He had been sent by mistake to Ship Island, near New Orleans, to join his regiment, and had only at the writing of the letter reached Washington, where the Caribees were expected ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... and Nature had been pouring into his sick senses her healing balm; while the medicaments of peace and sleep and quiet labour had been having their way with him, he had been reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid silt of dissipation. For his sins and weaknesses there had been no ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Turgid Talmage must likewise unload; Talmage, who presumes to teach not only theology but political economy; who interlards his sermons with strange visions of Heaven, dreams of Hell, and still more wonderful hints on how to make ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Tullichettle and falls into the Earn at the village of Comrie. It is compounded of two Gaelic words—ruadh (red), and tuill (flood). Ruadhthuill, therefore, is the red flood, and any one who has seen the red turgid waters of the Ruchill in time of flood will see that the name is significant of the thing itself. The word occurs in a shorter form—Ruel, a river in Argyllshire, which gives its name to the valley through which it ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... thunder, but none of his lightning. Even the blank-verse reads like that of one accustomed to rhyme, and unable to get out of his wonted rut. And the versification runs, throughout, in a stilted monotony, the style being made thick and turgid with high-sounding epithets; while we have a perfect flux of learned impertinence. As for truth, nature, character, poetry, we look for them in vain; though there is much, in the stage noise ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... on rewards and punishments, on the poor laws, on education, on law reform, on the codification of laws, on special legislative measures, on a vast variety of subjects. His style, at first simple and direct, became turgid, involved, and obscure. He was in the habit of beginning the same work independently many times, and usually drove several horses abreast. He was very severe in his strictures upon persons in authority, and upon current ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... our little weaknesses. That of Ludwig of Bavaria was that he was a poet. He was so sure of this that he not only produced yards of turgid verse, defying every law of construction and metre, but he even had some of it printed. A volume of selections from his Muse, entitled Walhalla's Genossen, was published for him by Baron Cotta, and, like the Indian shawls of Queen Victoria, did regular duty as a wedding-gift. One effort ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... 3, 4. Four CHIVES two long and two short. TIPS at first large, turgid, oval, touching at bottom, of a yellowish colour, and often spotted; lastly changing both their form and situation in ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... notice by his personal beauty and by the rather turgid eloquence which was his chief talent. In 1342 he took the most prominent part in an embassy from the citizens to Clement VI; and though he failed to induce the Pope to return to Rome, which at that time he seems to have regarded as the panacea for the evils of the time, he gained sufficient ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of entry (Mauser), in the left supra-spinous fossa of the scapula; exit, between the eleventh and twelfth ribs of the right side. Complete motor and sensory paralysis, with absence of reflexes from mid-dorsal region downwards. Upper intercostals working. Retention of urine, penis turgid. Sensation perfect to lower extremity of sternum. Early trophic sacral bed-sores developed and steadily increased in depth and extent, slighter ones developed on the heels. The paralysis was flaccid throughout. The patient gradually emaciated with fever, ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... denouncing his country's shame and prophesying disaster to Europe. Yet do you not feel with me that while Shakespeare, using great words on the lowlier subject, contrives to make them appropriate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, the same or similar words have become tumid, turgid? ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Dr. Burney has here fallen into a most extraordinary mistake. In the very page to which he refers, Elmham, in his turgid manner, assures us that at Henry's coronation the tumultuous clang of so many trumpets made the heavens resound with the roar of thunder. He then describes the sweet strings of the harps soothing the souls of the guests by their ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... published all these productions privately. They came out of course under every disadvantage, and could only reach the hands of learned persons, and those to whom they were really of interest, by the merest chance. Further, Froebel, as has already abundantly appeared, was but a poor author. His stiff, turgid style makes his works in many places most difficult to understand, as the present translators have found to their cost, and he was therefore practically unreadable to the general public. In his usual self-absorbed fashion, he did not perceive these deficiencies of his, nor could he be ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... port, but plies stemming nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes always instead of specifying,—the true secret of the ideal treatment in which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never turgid. Tasso begins ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... a short and chopping sea. A turgid sea indicates its constraint. Even in a fog the entrance into a strait may be known by the boiling-like appearance of the waves. And thus it was, for they were unconsciously coasting Aurigny. Between the west of Ortach and the Caskets and the east of Aurigny the sea is hemmed in and cramped, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Browning, and Heine have left for the perplexity of posterity, and not only to read and admire but to imitate. My letters to Nettie, after one or two genuinely intended displays of perfervid tenderness, broke out toward theology, sociology, and the cosmos in turgid and startling expressions. No doubt they puzzled ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... doleful character I was to assume, and I proceeded to cast them from me. I neglected my hair. I avoided my playmates. I frowned abstractedly. I didn't eat as much as was good for me. I took lonely walks. I brooded in solitude. I not only committed to memory the more turgid poems of the late Lord Byron—"Fare thee well, and if forever," &c.—but I became a despondent poet on my own account, and composed a string of "Stanzas to One who will understand them." I think I was a trifle too hopeful on that point; ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... For it was the old grief come back in her, the old loss, the pain of the old life, the dead husband, the dead children. This was sacred to her, and he must not violate her with his comfort. For what she wanted she would come to him. He stood aloof with turgid heart. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the banks of Egypt's Nile, and heard the lamentations of priests and wailing of women as a black ox, flower bedecked and wearing a collar encrusted with gems, was drowned in the turgid stream. Time and space ceased to exist for him. Through the murk of cavernous passages he paced, pausing before a pit in which reposed a sarcophagus of huge dimensions; and when the dim company and he had paid tribute to that which lay ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... forward! while the crashing thunder pealed above his head; he shook his impious hand against the sky, and still darted onward, till the horse stopped, snorting on the beach; and there as the great sea, rolled in foaming and turgid, there, he saw it plain in yon glare of livid lightning, on the crest of every curling wave, a dark haired lady lay, glaring at him with eyes that looked like coals of fire; a monster wave came rolling ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... greater diplomatist than himself. Maxwell and the Speaker are wrangling across your mother, who looks alarmed; Burleigh is flirting desperately with Miss Alice Maxwell, who is purring upon his senatorial vanity; your Populist is breaking out into the turgid rhetoric of Mr. Bryan; French has persuaded that charming English girl that he is the most literary man in America, and Miss Carter is condoling with March about an ungrateful State. So be ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... immediate effect of opening the flood-gates of his wife's poetic temperament, for she replied at once to her spouse's effort with an epistle conceived in the terza rima employed by Dante, and though the poem is turgid in diction and shallow in thought, full of classical names and allusions, "a parade of all the treasures of the school-room," it exhibits the graceful ease and high scholarship which mark all Vittoria's writings. Meanwhile, unblest ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... soul! From shame, I in Heaven's light my grief control; Thou art its fountain, which each night o'erflows. My couch! that oft hath woo'd me to repose, 'Mid sorrows vast—Love's iv'ried hand hath stole Griefs turgid stream, which o'er thee it doth roll, That hand which good on all but me bestows. Not only quiet and sweet rest I fly, But from myself and thought, whose vain pursuit On pinion'd fancy doth my soul transport: The multitude I did so long defy, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Nikitin, and Shevchenko, the great glory of southern Russia; sometimes, perhaps, a man whose abilities have been overrated as in the instance of Slepoushkin. Lemonosov is more praised than read by his countrymen. His turgid odes, stuffed with classical allusions, in praise of Anne and Elizabeth, are still committed to memory by pupils at educational establishments. His panegyrics are certainly fulsome, but probably no worse than those of Boileau in praise of Louis XIV., ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... "home ranch" as distinctive from a ranch presided over by employes only), the house and improvements of which are said to be the finest in Western Nebraska. Taking dinner at North Platte City, I cross over a substantial wagon-bridge, spanning the turgid yellow stream just below where the north and south branches fork, and proceed eastward as " the Platte " simply, reaching Brady Island for the night. Here I encounter extraordinary difficulties in getting supper. Four families, representing the Union Pacific force at this place, all ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... men seem often unable to discriminate between the turgid and melodramatic, and the spontaneous and temperamental. The first all must abhor, but the last is sincere and deserves to be respected. It is by his best that we must judge a man, and taking his best and undoubtedly authentic work, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... value of the alliance, and mismanaged it badly. He knew that there was a Whig dogma against letting England be taken in tow by Hanover. The great propounder of the doctrine was William Pitt, who now rose to power. Frederic did not know that this turgid declaimer was as able, as powerful, as ambitious as himself, and did not divine that he would make the German quarrel and the compulsory defence of Hanover the means of occupying the military forces of France until the contest for' oceanic empire was decided in favour of ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... River. They were agricultural, and had already reached a fairly high level of civilization—much higher than that of any other part of Eastern Asia. The Yellow River is a fierce and terrible stream, too swift for navigation, turgid, and full of mud, depositing silt upon its bed until it rises above the surrounding country, when it suddenly alters its course, sweeping away villages and towns in a destructive torrent. Among most ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... wind blew, and the air was heavy and turgid. On my way back, I had to pass a little copse which lay in a dell, and having noticed a little stream of water, I climbed over the fence in order to get a drink. Then, feeling deadly tired, I stretched myself at full length on the undergrowth, ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... grasp the fact that an iron bridge or a railway engine may be artistically done—these will not be "art" objects, but hostile novelties. And, on the other hand, we can pretty confidently foretell a spacious future and much amplification for that turgid, costly, and deliberately anti-contemporary group of styles of which William Morris and his associates have been the fortunate pioneers. And the same principles will apply to costume. A non-functional ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... mouth is better able to respond. On her side, such contact is often instinctively desired. Just as the sexual disturbance of pregnancy is accompanied by a sympathetic disturbance in the breasts, so the sexual excitement produced by the lover's proximity reacts on the breasts; the nipple becomes turgid and erect in sympathy with the clitoris; the woman craves to place her lover in the place of the child, and experiences a sensation in which these two supreme objects of her desire ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a strange goddess, Des," he said, his weary eyes roving out over the turgid, yellow stream, "and she has been kind to you, though, God knows, you have played a man's part in all this. She has placed in your possession something for which at least five men have died in vain, ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... middle realm, by fairer figures known And rich with fruits, lay bounded for his own; Deep thro the centre spreads a branching bay, Full sails ascend and golden rivers stray; Bright palaces arise relieved in gold, And gates and streets the crossing lines unfold. James furrows o'er the plate with turgid tide, Young Richmond roughens on his masted side; Reviving Norfolk from her ashes springs, A golden phoenix on refulgent wings; Potowmak's yellow waves reluctant spread, And Vernon rears his rich and radiant head, Tis here the chief his pointed graver stays, The bank to burnish with ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... passage which wore on Ross's nerves, made Karara suddenly reach out and clasp fingers about the wrists of the two men she walked between; it was a crushing sensation of age, of a toll of years so long, so heavy, as to make time itself into a turgid flood which tugged at their bodies, mired their feet as they trudged after the Foanna. This sense of age, of a dead and heavy past, was so stifling that all three Terrans ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... however, being smooth, all hands were saved; and now, since the boats lay forlorn on the vast, with nothing but the Boodah's swarm of moons to move to, for the Boodah they started, while Frankl cast twinkling fingers to the sky, and cursed that night, as the oars with slow wash journeyed through turgid murk toward the very ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... and it was wondrous bad, and he paused at all the specially turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for he was proud of those sentences, as I knew he ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... years of familiarity with the turgid and obscure statements issued by American railway corporations, and which are usually of such a character that the more they are studied the less the shareholder knows of the affairs of the corporation, it is very refreshing to read the report of the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... the trench. There was a roar higher up the ravine, and a turgid flood, streaked with frothy lines, came pouring down the new channel, bearing with it small nut bushes and great clumps of matted grass. By degrees it subsided, and the men, gathering about the edge of the muskeg, hot and splashed with mire, lay down to smoke and wait, ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... those genuine feelings. Never was there a jar or discord between genuine sentiment and sound policy. Never, no, never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another. Nor are sentiments of elevation in themselves turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest forms. The Apollo of Belvedere (if the universal robber has yet left him at Belvedere) is as much in Nature as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt or any clown in the rustic revels ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Such men as Robert T. Lincoln, the president of the company, and Norman B. Ream are but representatives of Marshall Field, whose name has never been identified with the property he so largely owns and controls." That fulsome writer, with the usual inaccuracies and turgid exaggerations of "popular writers," omitted to say that although Field was long the controlling figure in the management of the Pullman works, yet other powerful American multimillionaires, such as the Vanderbilts, had also become ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... material from the surrounding landscape, transmuting matter to its special purposes. It needed sugar, salt, water and many other things but never failed to have them. It was still working. And at the delivery end, where the packaging devices had been broken down, it turned out a steady turgid stream on the ...
— Sweet Their Blood and Sticky • Albert Teichner
... Now first has passed the seed (engendered Within their members by the ripened days) Are in their sleep confronted from without By idol-images of some fair form— Tidings of glorious face and lovely bloom, Which stir and goad the regions turgid now With seed abundant; so that, as it were With all the matter acted duly out, They pour the billows of a potent stream ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... one might wrap the skin about the bones. The reason whereof, according to the opinion deliver'd, may be easily rendred to be, A great Consumption of the Stock of Liquors, that in Health kept the Vessels turgid; Which Vessels I suppose to make up those Muscles. But when the Pores are obstructed, that the nourishment is hindred (which then also uses to be but sparingly administred) and sweats, either spontaneous, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... From the heights where the laughing Naeiads dwell, And cascades leap from the craggy fell, Where the mountain streamlets brattle and brawl, 'Midst the mountain maidens' echoing call, Through pools where the water-kelpies wait For the rider who dares the roaring spate. Rain-fed, proud, turgid, and swollen, Now foaming wild, now sombre and sullen; Dragging the rushes from banks and braes, Tearing the drooping branches of trees, Rolling them down by scallop and scaur, Involving all in a watery war— Turned, and whirled, and swept ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... her model, contrived to decorate the past. It is, moreover, written in a style so opaque that it obscures her images from view as effectually as a piece of ground glass. To describe the approach of twilight—an hour beloved by writers of romance—she attempts a turgid paraphrase ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the sanction of antiquity is always admired; what is present, is sure to be condemned. Can we doubt that there have been critics, who were better pleased with Appius Caecus [h] than with Cato? Cicero had his adversaries [i]: it was objected to him, that his style was redundant, turgid, never compressed, void of precision, and destitute of Attic elegance. We all have read the letters of Calvus and Brutus to your famous orator. In the course of that correspondence, we plainly see what was ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... the river-side from the glen to the town, a bearer of news, old news of its kind, yet great news too, but now and then he would linger in the odour of the bloom that sprayed the gean-tree like a fall of snow, or he would cast an eye admiring upon the turgid river, washing from bank to bank, and feel the strange uneasiness of wonder and surmise, the same that comes from mists that swirl in gorges of the hills or haunt old ancient woods. The sigh of the wind seemed ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... and was its author's first successful effort in writing, much emphasis should not be laid on it except in noting the better power to express tumultuous feeling, and in marking the implications which show an expansion of character. Insubordinate to France it certainly is, and intemperate; turgid, too, as any youth of twenty could well make it. No doubt, also, it was intended to secure notoriety for the writer. It makes clear the thorough apprehension its author had as to the radical character of the Revolution. It is his final and public renunciation of the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... all that was possible to hope for was separation and an alliance with Spain. He was on intimate terms with the separatist leaders of all shades, and broached his views to them as far as he thought fit. His turgid oratory was admired in the backwoods, and he was much helped by his skill in the baser kinds of political management. He speedily showed all the familiar traits of the demagogue—he was lavish in his hospitality, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... All his new-found buoyancy of spirits had suddenly left him. He cursed the imagination which lifted his feet from the white decks and dragged his eyes from the sparkling blue sea to the rain-soaked, smut-blackened fields riven by that long thread of bleak, turgid water. The horrors of a murderous passion beat upon his brain. He saw himself hastening, grim and blind, on his devil-sped mission. Then the haze faded from before his eyes. Somehow or other he accomplished his errand. He was in the library, standing in front of those many ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... except in those too sophisticated or cynical to respond to natural impulses. Of the half dozen or so of colored women writing creditable verse, Anne Spencer is the most modern and least obvious in her methods. Her lines are at times involved and turgid and almost cryptic, but she shows an originality which does not depend upon eccentricities. In her "Before the Feast of Shushan" she displays an opulence, the love of which has long been charged against the Negro as one of his naive and childish ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... moving, while two red lines slowly defined themselves across his face. The theatrical quality of the scene and the turgid rhetorical bathos of the boy's speeches attested his youth and the unformed violence of his emotions. Did they also indicate a rehearsal, or had the boy merely been goaded to vague action by implicit belief in a woman's ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... my lot to dine in the City, as the guest of the Honourable Company of Tile-Glazers and Mortar-Mixers. As I swam forlornly through a turgid ocean of turtle-soup and clarified punch towards an unyielding continent of fish, irrigated by brown sherry, mechanically rehearsing to myself the series of sparkling yet statesmanlike epigrams with which I proposed to reply to the toast of his ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... stubborn hindrance, the river grows black and turgid. It rumbles and threatens as if confident of an access of strength that laughs at resistance. From far up the hillside comes a sound, at first soft and soothing as the fountains of Lindaraxa, then rolling ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... involved in a controversy, are inspired by a reasonably pacific purpose. Only when the masses of the people are inflamed with a passionate desire for war, and in a time of popular hysteria responsible statesmen are helplessly borne along the turgid flow of events as bubbles are carried by the swift current of a swollen river, ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... now swinging far to the west to avoid a ranch, now circling east along a water-course, again doubling back around the base of a mesa, but in the main going steadily northward. Up past the brown Maricopas they worked, across the turgid Gila, skirting Lone Butte desert; up, up and on until in the distance glistened the bald ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... historical student, who may correct him by others or others by him, the ecclesiastic, to whom is here offered so graphic a picture of the conditions surrounding early Christianity, and the literary man, who finds the limpid stream of Hellenic diction far from its source grow turbid and turgid in turning the mill wheels for this dealer in [Greek: onkos]. Dio's faults are patent, but his excellencies, fortunately, are patent, too; and the world may rejoice that in an age of lust and bloodshed this serious-minded magistrate ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... this work has been censured by some shallow criticks as involved and turgid, and abounding with antiquated and hard words. So ill-founded is the first part of this objection, that I will challenge all who may honour this book with a perusal, to point out any English writer whose language conveys his meaning with equal force and perspicuity. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... can receive it with a minimum of mental friction if we can only get to know the music. All really good music corresponds to such a standard; that is, if it is needlessly involved, abstruse, diffuse, or turgid, it is in so far not music of the highest artistic worth. In this connection we must always remember that music does not "stay put," like a picture on the wall. We cannot walk through it, as is the case with a cathedral; turn back, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... down Holborn Hill past the Fleet Market, over Blackfriars Bridge, and so, turning sharp to the right, along a somewhat narrow and very grimy street between rows of dirty, tumble-down houses, with, upon the right hand, numerous narrow courts and alley-ways that gave upon the turgid river. Down one of these alleys the fluttering cloak turned suddenly, yet when Barnabas reached the corner, behold the alley was quite deserted, save for a small and pallid urchin who sat upon a rotting stump, staring at the river, with a pallid ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... work at once on his play. He chose the one that had the greatest emotional possibilities. Gora Dwight had told him that he must learn to "externalize his emotions," and he felt that here was the supreme opportunity. Never would he have more turgid, pent-up, tearing emotions to get rid of than now. He wrote until one o'clock, then, after lunch and two hours on his column, went out and took a long walk; but lighter of heart than since he had met ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Seneca, the declaimer. Be the author of them who he may, there can be but one opinion on the merit of the compositions. The style is nervous and replete with beauties, but, according to the corrupted taste of the time in which they were written, abounds too much with ornament, is often turgid and inflated. Those tragedies, however, contain much good morality, conveyed in brilliant sentences and illustrated by ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... would like to write some servant girl novels. I believe I could do it. My love-making would either be rather tame and stiff or too intensely early Victorian. But I should like to swing off into an ecstasy of large turgid words and let my mind hear the mushy housemaid cry, "Isn't ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Luxembourg, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugene, and Charles XII. Of the poets he selected the so-called Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, and the masterpieces of the French theatre; but he especially affected the turgid and declamatory style of Ossian. In romance, English literature was strongly represented by forty volumes of novels, of course in translations. Besides a few works on arts and sciences, he also had with him twelve volumes of "Barclay's Geography," and three volumes of "Cook's ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... physical anguish permeate in every part. I rally my self-reverence, my nobility of soul. I make efforts. By day I visit spots of natural beauty and objects of art. But these refuse to gratify me. My thought is too turgid to receive the impress of them. Concentration is impossible to me. Feverish agitation perverts my imagination. My ideas are fugitive. I endure a chronic delirium. This by day," he extended one hand with a despairing ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... age from which he was emerging. In a curious passage written not many years after this, Horace, when grouping the poets according to their styles and departments,[4] places Vergil in a class apart. He mentions first a turgid epic poet for whom he has no regard. Then there are Varius and Pollio, in epic and tragedy respectively, of whose forceful directness he does approve. In comedy, his friend, Fundanius, represents a homely plainness which he commends, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... stomach and guts were as full as they could hold; the peristaltick motion of the gut grew quick, and the justling motion of II accordingly; multitudes of milk-white vessels seem'd quickly filled, and turgid, which were perhaps the veins and arteries and the Creature was so greedy, that though it could not contain more, yet it continued sucking as fast as ever, and as fast emptying it self behind: the digestion of this Creature must needs be very quick, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... pleased with your continuation of the "Essay on Epitaphs," [1] It is the only sensible thing which has been written on that subject, and it goes to the bottom. In particular I was pleased with your translation of that turgid epitaph into the plain feeling under it. It is perfectly a test. But what is the reason we have no ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... bore upon its tower-like and sturdy stem, a countenance prepossessing from its good-humour, and amazing for its plumpness and rubicundity. His cheeks were swollen out into billows of fat—his eyes overhung with turgid and most majestic lids, and his chin double, triple, ay ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... the main keep his promise. The simple, straightforward style of the book, which occasionally rises into real and 'unaffected eloquence' where the subject inspires him to make an appeal to the hearts of his readers, presents a striking and favourable contrast to the obscure and turgid phraseology in which the perverted taste of the times caused him generally to shroud ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... neither among them nor among those writers who are peculiarly the delight of the spuriously literate: Sallust, who is less colorless than the others; sentimental and pompous Titus Livius; turgid and lurid Seneca; watery and larval Suetonius; Tacitus who, in his studied conciseness, is the keenest, most wiry and muscular of them all. In poetry, he was untouched by Juvenal, despite some roughshod verses, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... probably find, even if you draw forth a discourse which cost much labor. You cannot use it as it stands. Possibly it may be structural and essential Veal: the whole framework of thought may be immature. Possibly it may be Veal only in style; and by cutting out a turgid sentence here and there, and, above all, by cutting out all the passages which you thought particularly eloquent, the discourse may do yet. But even then you cannot give it with much confidence. Your mind can yield something better than that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Rollin took place in 1842. His first speech was delivered on the subject of the secret-service money. The elocution was easy and flowing, the manner oratorical, the style somewhat turgid and bombastic. But in the course of the session M. Rollin improved, and his discourse on the modification of the criminal law, on other legal subjects, and on railways, were more sober specimens of style. In 1843 and 1844 M. Rollin frequently spoke; but though his speeches ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... to the terrific roar of the explosion, I do not think I heard it. But the form of the rocks completely changed in my eyes—they seemed to be drawn aside like a curtain. I saw a fathomless, a bottomless abyss, which yawned beneath the turgid waves. The sea, which seemed suddenly to have gone mad, then became one great mountainous mass, upon the top of which the raft ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... His Chronicle closes with the last year of Eadgar's reign. He took much of his material from a Saxon Chronicle, like that of Winchester, but he has also matter peculiar to himself; and this raises a question whether he took such matter from a Saxon Chronicle now lost. He is grandiloquent and turgid to an extent which often obscures his meaning. In him we perceive all the word-eloquence of Saxon poetry, striving to utter itself through the medium of a Latinity ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... in the Irish Parliament, lauding the transcendent merits of the Wexford magistracy, on a motion for extending the criminal jurisdiction in that county, to keep down the disaffected. As he was closing a most turgid oration by declaring "that the said magistracy ought to receive some signal mark of the Lord-Lieutenant's favor," John Egan, who was rather mellow, and sitting behind him, jocularly whispered, "and be whipped at the ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... of the world's history, it is full and good and accurate, its standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he lived in an age when Johnson's turgid periods had corrupted our literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's pomposity. A paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You are wafted upwards, with this lucid and just spirit by ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to relegate Madame de Berny to the position of an ordinary friend, and felt the delightful agitation, followed by bitter mortification, of his intercourse with Madame de Castries, we must remember that from time to time he received a flowery epistle from Russia, written in the turgid and rather bombastic style peculiar to ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... extraordinary increase, or, at least, became remarkably evident. The pulsation of the carotid arteries was uncommonly strong; the radial arteries seemed ready to burst from their sheaths; the veins, especially the jugulars, in which there was often a pulsatory motion, were every where turgid with blood. The countenance was high coloured, and commonly exhibited the appearance of great health; but, when he was indisposed from catarrh, this florid red changed to a livid colour; which also, after an attack of epilepsy, was observable for two or three days on the face and hands. This ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... unattended and unafraid, to the council of the savage tribes which had terrorized his people of Kentucky. From the ramparts of Fort Chartres (once one of the mighty chain of strongholds to protect a new France, and now deserted like Massacre), I gazed for the first time in awe at the turgid flood of the Mississippi, and at the lands of the Spanish king beyond. With never ceasing fury the river tore at his clay banks and worried the green islands that braved his charge. And my boyish fancy pictured to itself ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here, To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear? Though themes of innocence amuse him best, Yet still obscurity's a welcome guest. If inspiration should her aid refuse To him who takes a Pixy for a muse, Yet none in lofty ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... They had arrived at the upper edge of a bank overlooking a hill stream which was pouring noisily down in a flood made turgid by the rain, and the "rough bit of bog and boulder" was a sort of natural bridge across the torrent, formed by heaps of earth and rock, out of which masses of wet fern and plumy meadow-sweet sprang in tall tufts and garlands, which though beautiful ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... ever preached. For he has preached it not only to those in the high places, but to the common men, to the great sweating thong of common men who hear and understand yet stand agape at Carlyle's turgid utterance. Do the thing to your hand, and do it with all your might. Never mind what the thing is; so long as it is something. Do it. Do it and remember Tomlinson, sexless and soulless Tomlinson, who was denied at ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... white; the high hat that was pushed far on the back of his head was highly polished. Opulence, self-indulgence, good-nature, and a certain element of fanatical fire mingled in the atmosphere of the postmaster's office, and made it somewhat turgid. ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... two and a half miles, and who have now to deal with the sewage brought there from 188 miles of main sewers, extending as far as King's Norton and Selly Oak, Harborne, Smethwick, &c. The whole of the black and turgid stream of liquid filth brought down by the sewers is utilised upon the farm, some 200 cubic yards of mud being lifted daily from the settling tanks, to be dug in, while the overflow is taken by carriers to the most distant parts, and allowed to filtrate through the soil, until the ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... whativer becomes of all the wather?" exclaimed Jimmie, as they passed the mouth of the Ohio, and could see the great flood of turgid water that was pouring into the Mississippi, there having evidently been something of a rain to ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... the last case exception is made for "le celebre M. Garic," whose only teacher is declared to be Nature. As regards the rest, M. Rouquet thus describes the prevailing style:—"The declamation of the English stage is turgid, full of affectation, and perpetually pompous. Among other peculiarities, it frequently admits a sort of dolorous exclamation,—a certain long-drawn tone of voice, so woeful and so lugubrious that it is impossible not to be depressed by it." This reads like a recollection ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... reader laugh or yawn, rather than listen, by the ill-timed elaboration of his phrases: "to call upon the sun for peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should overwhelm us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly." So much must be admitted. Johnson is often turgid and pompous, often grandiose with an artificial and undesired grandiloquence. No one, however, who has read his prose works will pretend that this is a fair account of his ordinary style. You may read many Ramblers in succession ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... With the exception of a slight similarity about the region of the head, the worm bears no resemblance to the parent beetle. When full-grown, it is about 3-1/2 inches in length, having the body large and turgid, and increasing in circumference from the head towards the opposite extremity. The head is of a corneous, opaque substance. It has neither eyes nor the rudiments of the antennae which distinguish the beetle tribe. It is, however, provided ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... pale student, shivering in his shoes, Sees from his theme the turgid rhetoric ooze; And the born soldier, fate decreed to wreak His martial manhood on a class in Greek, Popkin! How that explosive name recalls The grand old Busby of our ancient halls Such faces looked from Skippon's grim platoons, Such figures rode ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "Sons of Liberty," and by other equally high-sounding names, which they adopted and discarded in turn, as one after the other was discovered and brought into undesired prominence. The titles and grips and passwords of these secret military organizations, the turgid eloquence of their meetings, and the clandestine drill of their oath-bound members, doubtless exercised quite as much fascination on such followers as their unlawful object of aiding and abetting the Southern cause. The number of men thus enlisted in the work of inducing ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... into the enjoyment of opportunity with almost pathetic vigour. It was eleven o'clock when he rose, and the debate must needs stand adjourned at midnight. When twelve o'clock struck, Sir Ellis was still in the full flow of his turgid eloquence. His speech was constructed on the principle of, and (except, perhaps, in the matter of necessity) resembled, the long bridge ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Her eyes narrowed to slits and stabbed me with their spite. Her dark face grew turgid with impotent anger. As I stood there she was like to have killed me. Then like a flash her expression changed. With a dirty bejewelled hand she smoothed her tousled hair. Her coarse white teeth gleamed in a gold-capped smile. There was honey in ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines, really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect which the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France, is only ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... strongly. He felt an awful, enjoyable power over her, an instinctive cherishing very near to cruelty. For she was a victim. He felt that she was in his power, and he was generous. The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge. But she was ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... uneducated a man is,—in which condition his ordinary language must of necessity be proportionately idiomatic,—the greater pains he takes, when he has formed the resolution of composing, to be splendid and expansive in his style. He racks his brains until he rummages out imperfect memories of the turgid paragraphs of cheap newspapers and novels which he has some time or other read, and forthwith struts off with all the finest feathers in the dictionary rustling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the phrase "Eat ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... one vegetable production deserving notice from its importance as an article of food to the Fuegians. It is a globular, bright-yellow fungus, which grows in vast numbers on the beech-trees. When young it is elastic and turgid, with ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... discharge of blood, mucus, and disintegrated mucous membrane. The actively growing cells of the uterine lining membrane undergo rapid destructive changes, the fabric of the half-formed decidua tumbles to pieces, the turgid capillaries burst and pour out the menstrual flow, which sweeps away all the useless debris. The irritation sets up reflex uterine contractions, and so the blood is squeezed out of the distended capillaries and washes ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... first part of the Peytel act of accusation; it is as turgid and declamatory as a bad romance; and as inflated as a newspaper document, by an unlimited penny-a-liner:—"The department of the Ain is in a dreadful state of excitement; the inhabitants of Belley come trooping from their beds,—and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... up to see my patient. He had been lifted from the floor, and was now lying upon the bed. Sure enough, his face was purple and his breathing laboured, but somehow the symptoms did not indicate apoplexy. Every vein in his head and face was turgid, and he lay perfectly stupid, but still I saw no clear indications of an actual or approaching congestion of ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... For some reason he disliked the thought of swimming that stream, of having his skin laved by the turgid ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... between the genius which created Andrugio and the genius which created Vindice is at least as wide as the points of resemblance or affinity between them are vivid and distinct. While Marston's imaginative and tragic power was at its highest, his style was crude and quaint, turgid and eccentric; when he had cured and purified it—perhaps, as Gifford suggests, in consequence of Ben Jonson's unmerciful but salutary ridicule—he approved himself a far abler writer of comedy or tragicomedy than before, but his right hand had forgotten ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... euphuist[obs3], euphemist. V. ornament, overlay with ornament, overcharge; smell of the lamp. Adj. ornament &c. v.; beautified &c. 847; ornate, florid, rich, flowery; euphuistic[obs3], euphemistic; sonorous; high-sounding, big- sounding; inflated, swelling, tumid; turgid, turgescent; pedantic, pompous, stilted; orotund; high flown, high flowing; sententious, rhetorical, declamatory; grandiose; grandiloquent, magniloquent, altiloquent[obs3]; sesquipedal[obs3], sesquipedalian; Johnsonian, mouthy; bombastic; fustian; frothy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... these statues—from the rude attempt at bold action, which was the peculiarity of Ddalus—the general adoption of this action in the early ages—the traits of savage nature in the face and figure, expressed with little knowledge, but strong feeling—by the narrow loins, turgid muscles of the breast, thighs, and calves of the legs, will all find reason to believe they are copied from the above-mentioned statue." Greece, it must be owned, possessed musicians long anterior ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... and many others, that in men with defects of the cranial wall the volume of the brain decreases during sleep. At the same time, the volume of any limb increases as the peripheral parts of the body become turgid with blood. In dogs, the brain has been exposed, and the cortex of that organ has been observed to become anaemic during sleep. It is a matter of ordinary observation that in infants, during sleep, the volume of the brain becomes less, since the fontanelle is found to sink in. It has been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... plains, and among the withered brown stubbles, does animal life abound in India; but the rivers, lakes, and creeks teem with fish of every conceivable size, shape, and colour. The varieties are legion. From the huge black porpoise, tumbling through the turgid stream of the Ganges, to the bright, sparkling, silvery shoals of delicate chillooahs or poteeahs, which one sees darting in and out among the rice stubbles in every paddy field during the rains. Here a huge bhowarree (pike), or ravenous ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... Bird, flower, grass, cloud, wind, and the immense expanse of sunny prairie, swelling up into undulations like a woman's breasts turgid with milk for a hungry race. I forgot myself and my position in the world, my loneliness, my strange passenger, the problems of my life; my heart swelled, and my throat filled. I sat looking at it, with the tears trickling ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... are turgid, densely packed on one side of the rachis in three to five rows, sessile or subsessile, sub-globose or ovoid, with unequal tubercle-based bristly hairs on the nerves of the glumes and with short minute hairs on the outer surface of the glumes, ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... bulky, massive, immense, gross, voluminous, capacious, extensive; pregnant; arrogant, overbearing, lordly, magisterial, pompous; bombastic, grandiose, grandiloquent, highflown, sesquipedalian, inflated, turgid. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... already, in fact. It quite puts Sally in spirits—the rapid crescendo of the hissing steam, the gleaming boiler-dome that might be the fruitful mother of all the helmets that hang about her skirts, the sudden leaping of the whole from the turgid opacity behind and equally sudden disappearance into the void beyond, the vanishing "Fire!" cry from which all consonants have gone, leaving only a sound of terror, all confirm her view of the fog as a lark. For, you see, Sally believed the Major ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... blooming on the stony banks, and I also, found a white scabious. Green hellebore and wild madder flourished amidst the broken limestone. A forest of brown maize-stalks, from which the golden corn had been gathered, followed the windings of the river, now turgid and tumultuous, and dyed sienna-red by the washings from the hills. Every day the increasing water as it descended the weirs made a wilder tumult. These weirs are a great beauty to the Lot, for they generally ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... and cry of Keenan sent a tingle of apprehension up and down her body. She asked herself, vaguely, if all the rest of her life was to be made up of this brawling and fighting in unlighted chambers of horror; if, now that they were in the more turgid currents for which they had longed, there were to come no moments of peace amid ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... inlet from Vancouver Island to Alaska. As luck would have it, Vancouver, the Englishman, and Gray, the American, are both hovering off {322} the mouth of the Columbia in April of 1792, but a gale drives the ships offshore, though turgid water plainly indicates the mouth of a great river somewhere near. Vancouver goes on up north. Gray, the American, comes back, and so Vancouver misses discovering the one great river that remains unmapped in America. Up Puget Sound, named after his lieutenant, up Fuca Straits, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... be navigable much farther but for a series of waterfalls. Nearly thirty miles wide toward the mouth, its muddy current discolors the ocean's blue forty miles out in the Pacific, I am told. In fact, I think {139} it must have been that distance that I last saw the great turgid stream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow the river becomes very rough on windy days. Consequently, when I wished to go across to Wuchang, I found that the motor boat couldn't go, so tempestuous were ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... with suspended respiration or very difficult breathing. After a few respirations it cries out and then falls asleep quietly, or the attack may last an hour or so, when the face will become pale, veins in the neck become turgid and feet and hands contract spasmodically. In mild cases the attacks will only occur once during the night, but may ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... stands to reason that a party fresh from the East, where the horns has been knocked offen everythin' for two or three hundred years, an' conditions genial is as soft as a goose-ha'r pillow, is goin' to notice some turgid changes when he lands in Arizona. But a shorthorn, that a-way, should reserve his jedgment till he gets acquainted, or gets lynched, or otherwise experiences the West in its troo colors. While Arizona, for speciment, don't go up an' put her arms about the neck of every towerist that comes chargin' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
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