"Lethargy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cried Drusus, half sunken though he was in a weary lethargy, "do you believe there are ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... In such a relation as that, such a man would think of the union in worship as an essential feature in his plans. And here I am tempted to say, that in a thousand things in England which seem a hopeful improvement on English lethargy, one catches sight of Dr. Arnold as being, behind all, the power that is moving. Hodson, in the East-Indian army, seems so different from anybody else, that you wonder where he came from, till it proves ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... a series of cases destined to fling this earliest murder into the shade. Nobody could now be unprepared; and yet the tragedies, henceforward, which passed before us, one by one, in sad, leisurely, or in terrific groups, seemed to argue a lethargy like that of apoplexy in the victims, one and all. The very midnight of mysterious awe ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... thought which should be at the back of political action. Political action under present conditions must necessarily be deputed to a few representatives, and after the vote is given or the cheering at a meeting has ceased, the individual can do nothing but wait, and his lethargy tends to become still deeper. In the Gaelic revival there is a programme of work for the individual; his mind is engaged, thought begets energy, and this energy vitalises every part of his nature. This makes for the strengthening of character, and so ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... condition was most alarming, Albine again gave him her hand to rest his cheek upon. But when she saw that it brought him no relief she wept to find herself powerless. Since he had fallen into the lethargy of winter she had felt too weak to drag him unaided from the nightmare in which he was struggling. She needed the assistance of spring. She herself was fading away, her arms grew cold, her breath scant; she no longer knew how ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... With this admonition in my ears, I pinched my leg and sat staring with heavy eyes out upon the quiet street, where the rolling of the slow wheels over the fallen leaves was the only sound that disturbed the silence. After ten bitter years the city was still bound by the terrible lethargy which had immediately succeeded the war; and on Church Hill it seemed almost as if we had been forgotten like the breastworks and the battle-fields in the march of progress. The grip of poverty, which was fiercer than the grip of armies, still held us, and the few stately houses showed tenantless ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... duties, indeed, had the power of insistence remained to me. But the saner medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—leapt at a bound, probably, from ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... design which they had always in view, and laid their schemes at a great distance for the putting it in execution. The Romans were sensible of this, and reproached themselves for their indolence and torpor, which had thrown them into a kind of lethargy; at a time that the enemy were rapidly pursuing their victories in Spain, which might one day be turned against them. They would have been very well pleased to attack them by open force, and to wrest their conquests ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... vigorous attack of his advance guard he held to be necessary always, to fix the enemy's attention and "paralyse his independent will-power." It was the failure to make this point which, in August 1870, led von Moltke repeatedly into the very jaws of defeat, from which only the lethargy of Bazaine on the one hand and the initiative of his subordinates, notably of von Alvensleben, rescued him. This is the essence of the new Strategic Doctrine of the French General Staff. See the works of Bonnal, ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... which Socrates passed his life. Of his influence it is hardly necessary here to speak at length. In the well-known metaphor put into his mouth by Plato, he was the "gad-fly" of the Athenian people. To prick intellectual lethargy, to force people to think, and especially to think about the conceptions with which they supposed themselves to be most familiar, those which guided their conduct in private and public affairs—justice expediency, honesty, and the like—such was the constant object of his life. That he should ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... their being, and that foulness is painful as the accompaniment of disorder and decay, and always indicative of the withdrawal of Divine support. And the practical analogies of life, the invariable connection of outward foulness with mental sloth and degradation, as well as with bodily lethargy and disease, together with the contrary indications of freshness and purity belonging to every healthy and active organic frame, (singularly seen in the effort of the young leaves when first their inward energy prevails over the earth, pierces its corruption, and shakes its ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... from its lethargy as by the crash of a thunderbolt. A Shawanoe, lately here on a visit, had left his Illinois friends to return home. He now reappeared, crossing the river in hot haste with the announcement that he had met, on his way, an army of Iroquois approaching to attack them. All was panic and confusion. ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... start made by England in exploration, and trade, and even in pilgrimage, is plainly the result—in action and reaction—of the Norse and Danish attacks, waking up the old spirit of a kindred race, of elder cousins that had sunk into lethargy and ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... enjoyment. Accordingly he stole into a dense copse and buried his booty at the foot of a persimmon-tree, then gained his humble quarter and slept so late and soundly that he had to be dragged almost without the door the next morning before he shook off his lethargy. ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... the top.' His birthday he was accustomed to celebrate with lamentations. At length an obscure disease which had always afflicted him, fed in part, no doubt, by his fiery spirit and his fiery discontent, reached his brain. After some years of increasing lethargy and imbecility, occasionally varied by fits of violent madness and terrible pain, he died in 1745, leaving all his money to found a hospital for the insane. His grave in St. Patrick's Cathedral bears this inscription of his own composing, the best possible ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... has once been wakened up from its original lethargy, when we have overstepped the boundary which divides the man from the beast, and are made desirous of improvement, while at the same moment the tumultuous passions that draw us in infinitely diversified directions are called into act, the case becomes exceedingly different. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... said nothing. She only recognized in this lethargy the merciful effects of the drug she had administered to her ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... tried to make her father understand the difficulty in hopes that he would suggest a remedy, but all her efforts were in vain. Carmichael lay with his eyes closed in a kind of lethargy or paralysis. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... she would tell the cabman, "Queen's Square, Bloomsbury." And an hour later, nervous with expectation, she sat in the cab, seeing the streets pass behind her. She was beginning to know the characteristics of the neighbourhood, and in the afternoon light they awoke her out of a trembling lethargy. She recognised the old iron gateway, the open space, the thirsty fountain and the troop of neglected children. She liked the forlorn and rusty square. She experienced a sort of sinking anguish while waiting on the doorstep, lest he might not be at home. But when ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... mind awoke from its lethargy and then he began to remember as a dim, uncertain dream, his experience of the night before. Gradually it became more real but he recalled his failure to find the tent, the fearful groping in the snow, and his struggle ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... at the bell, repeated several times, roused him at last to go to the door. His caller was Robert Cramier. And at sight of him, all Lennan's lethargy gave place to a steely feeling. What had brought him here? Had he been spying on his wife? The old longing for physical combat came over him. Cramier was perhaps fifteen years his senior, but taller, heavier, thicker. Chances, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... others, all aglitter with metallic gleams: gold, emerald, blue and purple. They are the humming-birds of the insect-world, the Chrysis-wasps, or Golden Wasps, another set of exterminators of the larvae overcome with lethargy in their cocoons. In them, the atrocious assassin of cradled children lies hidden under the splendour of the garb. One of them, half emerald and half pale-pink, Parnopes carnea by name, boldly enters the burrow of Bembex rostrata at the very moment ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... into its shaft projected an unhinged shutter supported on two saw-horses, with a sheeted burden upon it. As his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom beyond the room's centre, Parish could make out the hunched figure that sat at the head of the body, still mercifully wrapped in something like lethargy and too numbed for full acuteness ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... is alive, alert, active, full of latent energy, ready to act, to do things, to turn his mind to things, to turn his hand to things, to turn his desire to things, to turn his whole being to things. There is no trace in this school of the mental lethargy which, in spite of the ceaseless activity of the teachers, pervades the atmosphere of so many elementary schools; no trace of the fatal inertness on the part of the child, which is the outcome of five or six years of systematic repression and compulsory inaction. The air of the school is electrical ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... they had begun,—on such safer topics as the problem of the social work of modern churches. Her aromatic presence, and in this setting, continually disturbed him: nature's perfumes, more definable, —exhalations of the sea and spruce,—mingled with hers, anaesthetics compelling lethargy. He felt himself drowning, even wished to drown, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... years ago, though it had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself over Davenant's "Gondibert," that winter that I labored with a lethargy—which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... through and behind this mask of me, (Against which years have beat thus blanchingly With their rains!) and behold my soul's true face, The dim and weary witness of life's race; Because thou hast the faith and love to see, Through that same soul's distracting lethargy, The patient angel waiting for his place In the new heavens; because nor sin nor woe, Nor God's infliction, nor death's neighborhood, Nor all which others viewing, turn to go, Nor all which makes me tired of all, self-viewed,— Nothing repels thee.—Dearest, teach me ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... something else. When there had been nothing else to fill up the time he had stupefied himself with drink. He drank at first, not because he liked drinking, but because it dulled his brain, his heart. It didn't excite him; on the contrary, it brought him to a state of lethargy which, if he was at the club, made him willing to go home, or, if he was at home, made it possible for him to go to bed and sleep. It was only within a month or so that he had begun to suspect that other people noticed it; and ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... become dangerous and destructive when once they gain the ascendant in the heart: to soothe the mind to tranquillity by hope, even when that hope is likely to deceive us, may be sometimes useful; but to lull our faculties in a lethargy is poor ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... onslaught, for he was not to be stirred from his lethargy by talk about Slagter's Nek and the missionaries. For a while there was silence, which presently was broken by Jan roaring at me in a loud voice ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... of the day, too, Arthur looked through the whole house. Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy from which nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare and lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been there, had long ago started away on lost sunbeams—got itself absorbed, perhaps, into flowers, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Clarice, appearing like Virgil's Camilla, stirs him from this lethargy. He falls in love at first sight, as Tasso's heroes always do, and vows to prove himself her worthy knight by deeds of unexampled daring. Thus the plot is put in motion; and we read in well-appointed order how the hero acquired his horse, Baiardo, Tristram's magic lance, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... which the king's skilful diplomacy gave way. Holland, roused to a sense of danger by the appearance of French arms on the Rhine, protested and appealed to England for aid; and though her appeals remained at first unanswered, even England was roused from her lethargy by the French seizure of the coast towns of Flanders. The earlier efforts of English diplomacy indeed were of a selfish and unscrupulous kind. Holland, Spain, and France were tempted in turn by secret offers of alliance. A treaty offensive and defensive ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... them; they merely deceive themselves. They are in no wise persecuted; but their unconscious soul fails to perform its duty. Is it less adroit than the others: is it less eager? Does it slumber hopelessly in the depths of its secular prison: and can no amount of will-power arouse it from its fatal lethargy, and force the redoubtable doors that lead from the life that unconsciously is aware of all things to the intelligent ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... receives its share of verification from that theory of development with which in various forms all modern science is prepossessed; so, on the other hand, the philosophy of rest also, of the perpetual lethargy, the Parmenidean assertion of the exclusive reign of "The One," receives an unlooked-for testimony from the modern physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena he deals with—matter, organism, consciousness—began in a state of indeterminate, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... people are tearing their hair, and the welkin rings with such affrighting cries as Downfall and Crisis, the Archbishop's rather solemn and alarmed countenance breaks up into a genial smile. It is when people are immovable in otiose self-satisfaction, when the air is still and when lethargy creeps over the whole body of humanity, that the face of Dr. Davidson hardens. There is nothing he dreads more than apathy, nothing that so stimulates his policy of constant pressure as inertia. Ndengei, the supreme deity of the Fiji Islands, the laziest of all the gods, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... Lothrop Motley, historian of the Dutch Republic; and fitting it is that a native of the first great stable Republic was drawn to study the European Republic which rose at the touch of William the Silent's genius, and sank back into lethargy of kingship when the blood of the tragic and heroic inauguration was all spilt. The contact of the United Netherlands with American history and future is known to all. From the Netherlands the Puritans set sail to found what proved to be a colony and Republic. The extent to which the Netherlands ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Rollestons? No representative of "The Maples" was present, not even Du Meresq. They had flashed past within a minute; but, like a fresh breeze over still water, the little incident had awakened and roused up Bluebell from her lethargy. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... his transports of rage ended in a lethargy from which he never awoke. His funeral was conducted with a pomp suited to his rank; and, amid discharges of cannon whose dreary roar was echoed from the yawning gulf of the Saguenay, his body was borne to its rest under the rocks of Tadoussac. Good Catholics and good Frenchmen saw in his fate ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a trivial conversation, "is that I didn't think—I didn't think at all. I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones—in a sort of lethargy— stagnant. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... aside their lethargy, if they were made to understand that the question to be decided is not whether this or that type of school should be supported, but whether the present system of education should be entirely discarded in favour of an altogether new plan? ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... help you." And, with a voice which sounded full and clear amid the hissing roar of the gale, La Motte struck up a cheering, merry song, well calculated to arouse even the most apathetic from the lethargy into which they ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... usually terrific outbreak of the elements, they seem to have paused even in their ordinary fluctuations, to gather a terrific strength for the great effort. A faint peal of thunder now comes from far off. Like a signal gun for the battle of the winds to begin, it appeared to awaken them from their lethargy, and one awful, warring hurricane swept over a whole city, producing more devastation in the four or five minutes it lasted, than would a half ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... of bells at the door hastened the completion of the meal. The boys might have sat there longer and, like boa-constrictors, gorged themselves into lethargy. ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... glittering sentences flew over the heads of the common people, without any impression upon their hearts. Something might be necessary, he observed, to excite the affections of the common people, who were sunk in languor and lethargy, and therefore he supposed that the new concomitants of methodism might probably produce so desirable an effect.[359] The mind, like the body, he observed, delighted in change and novelty, and even in religion itself, courted new appearances and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... modern dynamic electricity owes its development to the principle of economy in production. Practical science most effectively awakens from its lethargy at the call of commerce. Nevertheless, from the earliest moment in which it became known that electricity was akin to heat—that an interruption of the easy passage of a current produced heat—the minds of men were busy with the question of how to turn the tremendous fact ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... a sign to enjoin silence, added in a low voice, "She is neither dead nor poisoned. Some philtre has been given to her for a bad purpose. Her breathing is even, and she cannot fail to recover from her lethargy." ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... with deep expulsion of breath, and tingling nerves. He had reached Blake. Whatever his doubts of the man, and they had been many, Pan divined that he could stir him, rouse him out of the lethargy of sordid indifference and forgetfulness. He would free him from this jail, and the shackles of Hardman in any case, but to find that it was possible to influence him gladdened Pan's heart. What would ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... (pet), evil (ou). Nevertheless the Coptic language has had its literature, like the Chinese, the roots of which, far from being aggregated, scarcely approach each other without immediate contact. We must admit that nations once roused from their lethargy, and tending towards civilization, find in the most uncouth languages the secret of expressing with clearness the conceptions of the mind, and of painting the emotions of the soul. Don Juan de la Rea, a highly estimable man, who perished in the sanguinary ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... doing, Ambrose?" asked Stephen, rousing a little from his lethargy. "Methought I heard mine uncle say ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... door jarred Blake from his lethargy. He groaned and sluggishly raised his head. His face was bloodless and haggard, his bloodshot eyes were dull and bleared. He had the look of a man at the ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... amusement. One of these, closer to him than the rest, and who seemed from his dress and bearing to be some officer in authority, held instead of a pike a short sword, the touch of whose pointed steel blade had been the effectual means of awakening him from his lethargy. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... addressing them; then, as if awaking from this state of stupefaction, asked them questions without seeming to hear the reply; and even the presence of the Duke of Bassano and the Duke of Vicenza, whom he summoned more frequently, did not interrupt this condition of preoccupation or lethargy, so to speak. The hours for meals were the same, and they were served as usual; but all took place amid complete silence, broken only by the necessary noise of the service. At the Emperor's toilet the same silence; not a word ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... urgent part of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of existence, unless our means of production can by some stroke of magic ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... through the man who sat in the chair; the lethargy began to clear from his brain, like a morning mist when a breeze rises; he sat a little more upright and gripped the arms of his chair; he said nothing yet, but he felt power and resource flowing back to his brain, and the pulse in his temples quieted. Why, if ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... were possible, in the midst of an absolute vision, clear as the hyaline, but only repellent of falsehood, not receptive of truth. It is the positive by which a man shall live. Truth is his life. The refusal of the false is not the reception of the true. A man may deny himself into a spiritual lethargy, without denying one truth, simply by spending his strength for that which is not bread, until he has none left wherewith to search for the truth, which alone can feed him. Only when subjected to the positive does the negative find ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... meal over, they sat sleepily blinking their eyes, whisking away flies, and mopping the moisture from their faces until the sound of "Eis! meine Herrschaften!" "Bier! meine Herrschaften!" roused them from their lethargy. Ices and beer and cherries and peaches successively filled up the weary hours until "the tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," carried joy to their hearts. I can never forget the rapturous look of anticipation and satisfaction which those stolid ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... fellow must be in pain, for each time there was a sharp wincing, accompanied by a deep sigh, which resulted in the touch being laid on more lightly. It was only to satisfy himself in the darkness that his comrade was sleeping and not sinking into some horrible state of lethargy; and finding at last that there was no apparent need for his anxiety, the watcher directed his attention to listening for sounds out upon the veldt, and divided the time by making surmises as to the experiences through ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... without number to the latter, and had become involved in money difficulties to a degree which kept him in constant anxiety and torment. Yet he steadily rejected all his brother's affectionate advice and importunities to shake off the deepening lethargy. He would not write poetry because the Muse did not come of her free will, and he would never do her violence. He had forsworn prose, because he said everybody wrote that, and many so ill that he would not swell the number of magazine story-writers, who, he foresaw, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... comfortable position and encountered a rock, and sluggishly through his benumbed faculties passed a train of associated ideas—rock, rock ledge, loup-cerviers, the boy! With a mighty effort he roused himself from the growing lethargy and staggered ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... at her little window for hours watching the lethargy of village life in the street below, that rural life in which the rector and the schoolmaster were the principal figures. The dullness of it all was maddening. Her aunt's mid-Victorian primness, her snappishness towards the trembling maid, and the thousand ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... of following up the career which he had so nobly begun. There was much murmuring, therefore, to which, however, he gave little heed; and several weeks had passed in the manner above described, when an incident occurred to rouse him from the sort of lethargy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... patrician Aetius. From the instinct of a base and jealous mind, he hated the man who was universally celebrated as the terror of the Barbarians, and the support of the republic; [711] and his new favorite, the eunuch Heraclius, awakened the emperor from the supine lethargy, which might be disguised, during the life of Placidia, [72] by the excuse of filial piety. The fame of Aetius, his wealth and dignity, the numerous and martial train of Barbarian followers, his powerful dependants, who filled the civil offices of the state, and the hopes of his son Gaudentius, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... is not to do others' thinking for them, but to help them to think more vigorously and effectually. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves. The light and life which spring up in one soul are to be spread far and wide. Of all treasons against humanity, there is no one worse than his who employs great intellectual force to keep down the intellect of his ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... when he heard the money was gone, and a look of despair came into his half closed eyes. He sat thus for a few moments unheeding the other's advice, then with an effort shook off his lethargy. ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... way through the vegetable kingdom upon which he is quartered, for no merit or exertion of his own; and where his career is only to be noted by the ravages of his insatiable jaws. After a brief period of lethargy or pupa state, this good-for-nothing creature flutters forth, powdered, painted, perfumed, scorning the dirt from which he sprung, and leading a life of uselessness and vanity, until death, in the shape of an autumnal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... a lethargy or under a partial paralysis; he slowly and weakly rubbed his head with his hand, as if vaguely conscious that the ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... like ghosts along the edge of night almost touched by the light of day. It was Rodriguez whom these dreams visited. The farmer and his wife wondered awhile and then slept; Morano slept with all his wonted lethargy; but Rodriguez with his long quest now on the eve of fulfilment slept a tumultuous sleep. Sometimes his dreams raced over the Pyrenees, running south as far as Lowlight; and sometimes they rushed forward and clung like bats to the towers of the great castle ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... up a swaying motion. Smoke went toward him slowly, scarcely able to will movement through the lethargy that weighed his flesh. He noted that his brain was clear. It was only the body ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... sleep of exhaustion. In this for a time the mind joined in the lethargy of the body. But presently, as the vital currents were aroused, the mind began to play its fantastic tricks. He was a seminary student, he was ordained, he was taking his vows before the bishop, he was a robust and consecrated priest performing his first service, shining, it seemed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... imaginations, sighings, griefe and sorrow without manifest cause, for that it purgeth away melancholy humors" (p. 1343). Poultices applied to the head, of mustard and figs, are recommended for epilepsy and lethargy. Gerarde adopts from Apuleius the virtues of double yellow and white batchelor's buttons, hung "in a linnen cloath about the necke of him that is lunaticke, in the waine of the moone, when the signe shall be in the first degree ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... unhappy parents withdrew, Lord Glenallan, to prevent the old woman from relapsing into her lethargy, again pressed her on the subject of the communication which she proposed to ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... ground, and is still upon the losing hand, and it seems will continue so until it pleases the Lord to pour down his Spirit from on high, or else by some sharp awakening dispensation rouse up drowzy souls out of the lethargy wherein they are fallen, &c. It is many years since the sun fell low upon Scotland, many a dismal day hath it seen since 1649. At that time our reformation mounted towards its highest horizon, and since we ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... to watch in the evenings the Spaniards, shedding their usual lethargy, dance the fandango and the bolero with a perfection of grace and agility, even in the villages. The colonel offered them the use of his band, but they, quite rightly, preferred the guitar, the castanets, and a woman's voice; an accompaniment which gave the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... Polish love-songs in a sweet, pathetic voice, and I recounted one or two American yarns in Yankee vernacular which excited inordinate gaiety, so easily amused were these poor souls with minds dulled by long years of lethargy and despair. And I wondered, as I glanced around the squalid room, how many years had elapsed since its mud-walls had last echoed to ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... May, a throbbingly sunshiny day, full of a fierce hot vigor of vitality, Lydia was with her mother in the Melton's darkened parlor. As so often, the two women had been crying and now sat in a weary lethargy, hand in hand. There came a step on the porch, in the hall, and in the doorway stood a tall stranger. Lydia looked at him blankly, but her mother gave a cry and ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... him grew A lethargy of sense, a trance, And soon imagination threw Before him her wild game of chance. And now upon the snow in thaw A young man motionless he saw, As one who bivouacs afield, And heard a voice cry—Why! He's killed!— And now he views forgotten foes, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... had entirely ceased, with her coming. A sort of early summer lethargy had apparently settled on the house. Doyle wrote for hours, shut in the room with the desk; the group of intellectuals, as he had dubbed them, had dispersed on summer vacations. But she discovered that there were other conferences being ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... experiences—a few at least. There are many giants in Canaan, very many of them. There is Giant Lust, who has slain thousands. Poor souls! Giant Puff-up, who causes pilgrims to act as foolish as did the toad that saw an elephant and burst itself trying to be as large; Giant Lethargy, who operates an opiate factory in a hollow that runs directly down into Egypt; Giant Covetousness, who decoys pilgrims to the silver-mine run by Balaam and Demas; Giant Pride, an evil giant who has troubled pilgrims for time out of mind; Giant Liar, who uses an abundance ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... folks would not mix me up with your private matters." The words rose sharply from the senile prattle and penetrated Mostyn's lethargy. "There's old Jeff Henderson—he had the cheek to come to me to-day to borrow money. Said his family was in rags and starving. Said you euchred him out of all he had and got your start on it. What in the name of common sense does he come to me for? I don't own you, and I knew nothing about that ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... upon. We read in the annals that to emperors of illustrious race, whom their own laches caused to fall from power, succeeded others, at one time similar, at another different; but what dignity could we confer on Charles, who hath not honor for his guide, who is enfeebled by lethargy, and who, finally, hath lost head so far that he hath no shame in serving a foreign king, and in misuniting himself to a woman taken from the rank of the knights his vassals? How could the puissant ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the back of the seat, seemed to scald his face; his legs were uncomfortable; there was a draught from the window on his back; but, however wretched he was, he did not want to change his position. . . . A heavy nightmarish lethargy gradually gained possession of him ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... most discouraging. They had lost all thought—supposing them to have ever had such thought—of regenerating Central America; and most of them wished no better thing than to fill their bellies, or to escape from Nicaragua. Many of them were sunk into a physical and mental lethargy, thinking of nothing and caring for nothing, and were gone, not a few, even into lunacy. Some cursed General Walker for enticing them there under false pretences. There were men with families who professed to have come there to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Inn that she had a headache, and shut herself into her room, without food, to gather her scattered forces. She lay wide-awake all the night through, her mind trying to work its way through the lethargy of shock it had received. She remembered falling down the cellar stairs, when she was a little girl, and lying for hours on the hard stone floor, perfectly serene and calm, without pain, until she tried to do so much as move a little finger or lift an ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... aroused, preparing to fight. If war came to England it would be no war decreed by a few men. It would be a war proclaimed by the people themselves, demanded by them. The nation was stirring; it was casting off the proverbial lethargy and indifference of the English. Even here, in this usually quiet suburb of London, the home of business and professional men who were comfortably well off, the stirring of the spirit of England ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the last half century. I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is lethargy. It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to public education and to a thousand interferences with their private self-seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera was necessary before men could be brought to consent ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... of the war. Knowing now the frightful blunders committed at the outset, and the hair's-breadth escape from tremendous tragedy, the miracle of the sudden awakening which enabled France to shake off her lethargy and her vanity, and to make a tiger's pounce upon an enemy which had almost brought her to her knees is one of the splendid things in the world's history which wipe out all ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... others at the entrance of the saloon. It was very strange, but I was too stupid to arrange things. Once I wondered whether I really was in the cabin along with Mr Frewen, but I got no farther with that line of reasoning, and I was sinking back into my stupor or lethargy when ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... these opposed shapes My eyelids sank in stupor, that dull swoon 20 Which drugs and with a leaden mantle drapes The outworn to worse weariness. But soon A sharp and clashing noise the stillness broke, And from the evil lethargy I woke. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... anti-Bible lecturers, male and female, apologize for, and vindicate this crime. Lord Herbert, the first of the English Deists, taught that the indulgence of lust and anger is no more to be blamed than the thirst occasioned by the dropsy, or the drowsiness produced by lethargy. Mr. Hobbes asserted that every man has a right to all things, and may lawfully get them if he can. Bolingbroke taught that man is merely a superior animal, which is just the modern development theory, and that his chief end is to gratify the appetites and inclinations of the flesh. Hume, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... than blistering or stimulating frictions. Its effects, though perhaps less permanent, are general and diffused over the limb. This process has been found effectual in restoring heat to the lower extremities, and a case of obstinate lethargy was cured by Corvisart by a repeated urtication of the whole body. During the action of the stimulus, the patient, who was a young man, would open his eyes and laugh, but then sink again into a profound sleep. In three weeks, however, his perfect ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... not only the best and only way to serve the world, but also the one happy way to satisfy himself. Then, indeed, has he come to himself. Henceforth he knows what his powers mean, what spiritual air they breathe, what ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them all sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness passes away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... thus venting her anguish, she was roused from her lethargy of grief by the chambermaid, who had ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... pleasure. She adhered strictly to her habit of rising with the sun, and not the least enjoyable part of the morning was the three hours spent in the solitude of her uncle's luxurious library, while the day was new. Her active mind awoke from its enforced lethargy, and plumed itself for flight with a delightful sense of freedom. The dream of her life was coming true at last, and she was to have a chance to learn. She had learned all that the Sleepy Hollow school could teach her long ago. She would take up chemistry, of ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... seem not to know that nine-tenths of the young, educated, and progressive classes are disgusted with them. This explains the lethargy manifested by the above-minded classes toward the Church. The Church, like all other institutions, must be progressive. The fact that these men are keeping the Church back in the dingy past puts them out of sympathy with it. I recently heard a well-known ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... awake and live My last brief moment as the man I was, Than lapse from life's long lethargy to death Without one conscious interval. At least I repossess my past, am once again No courtier med'cining the whims of kings In muffled palace-chambers, but the free Friendless Vesalius, with his back to the wall And all the world against him. O, for that Best gift of all, Fallopius, take ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... name the street which they were entering. Indeed, though her breathing was tense, lethargy seemed to have fallen on her, and she slackened her pace and made him halt with her at the kerb, where they were necessarily jostled by the press of squalid people, lurching with drink or merely with rough manners, that streamed up and down this street of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... raucous cries, twisted the tails of their kine to port or starboard, or beat them forcibly, and the tram driver, roused from the lethargy engendered by the cool of the early morning, by the shouts and cries, put on his brake, bringing his tram to a stand-still just as, with a terrific clatter of hoofs, Leonie dashed past the front of it with Cuxson at ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... what teachings will work the change in the habits of life of those who thus pretend to cultivate the earth? What shall bring them to a clearer realization of their position, their duties, their opportunities, their prospects? This lethargy of ignorance, indifference, and laziness must be shaken off and laid aside in the immediate future, by study and education, by active interest and participation in every discovery or invention which benefits agriculture; by the exercise of sound judgment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... lethargy the intellectual activity that we meet with everywhere in Jewish quarters. No settlement in which we find a minyan (ten men necessary for divine worship), but there we will also find a cheder, a school in which the Bible and the Talmud are taught. Indeed, study is the first duty of the ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... priest. In the meantime, Justinian, pretending that he knew nothing of what was going on, neither inquired to what part of the world Priscus had been banished, nor ever thought of him again afterwards, but remained silent, as if he had fallen into a state of lethargy. However, he seized the small fortune that ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... more silent but even deeper change in the religious temper of the country. It dates, as we have seen, from the work of the Wesleys, but the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy; and the "Evangelical" movement, which found representatives like Newton and Cecil within the pale of the Establishment, made the fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at last impossible. In ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... outward, cooped up with these two and a shy and profoundly depressed mate who read the Bible on Sundays and spent the rest of his leisure in lethargy, three and fifty days of life cooped up in a perpetual smell, in a persistent sick hunger that turned from the sight of food, in darkness, cold and wet, in a lightly ballasted ship that rolled and pitched and swayed. And all the time the sands in the hour-glass of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... alcazar m. castle, fortress. alcoba alcove, bedroom. alcornoque m. cork-tree. alegar to allege. alegrar to rejoice. alegre merry, joyful, gay. alegria gayety, mirth. Alejandra Alexandra. alejar to remove; vr. to go off. aletargar vr. to fall into a lethargy. alfombra carpet. alga seaweed. algazara confused noise. algo something, somewhat. alguacil constable, policeman. alguien some one. alguno some, some one. aliento breath, respiration. alimentar to feed. alma soul. almohada ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... parliament in their debating society, and copied the arts of journalism in the Eton Miscellany. In both fields the young Gladstone took a leading part. The debating society was afflicted with 'the premonitory lethargy of death,' but the assiduous energy of Gaskell, seconded by the gifts of Gladstone, Hallam, and Doyle, soon sent a new pulse beating through it. The politics of the hour, that is to say everything not fifty years off, were forbidden ground; but the execution of Strafford or ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... spirits; and the war was our constant theme. And then the coming and going of traders and strangers on the old trail, the undercurrent of anxiety lest another conspiracy should gather, the Quantrill raid at Lawrence, all helped to keep us from lethargy. We had had our surprise, however. Strangers had to give an account of themselves to the home guard now. But we were softened toward our own townspeople. They were very discreet, and we must meet and do business with them daily. For the sake of young Tell and Jim, we who knew would say nothing. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... sent her maid out to get some headache powders. She had had a good cry when she reached home. She had pondered her little brain into a kink, trying to figure out her campaign. When she had a headache, or a cold, or a sleepless night, or a lethargy, she always put a powder in her stomach. It never did any good, and she was always changing the nostrum, but she never changed ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... had a depressing effect upon its staunch supporters, for they were well aware the failure would not be attributed to its true source —that is, the bitter opposition it had met with from its unprincipled opponents, the lethargy of many of its pretended friends, and from other causes which we have already mentioned in this book. But it would be published "from Dan to Beersheba" that it had received a fair trial and, after being "weighed in the balance and found wanting," had been ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... are hundreds of parishes in Ireland where one or two men want co-operative societies or village halls or rural libraries. They discuss the matter with their neighbors, but find a complete ignorance on the subject, and consequent lethargy. There is no social organism with a central life to stir. Before enthusiasm can be kindled there must be some knowledge. The countryman reads little, and it is a long and tedious business before enough people are excited to bring ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell |
