"Lifeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the same year—1852—our poor little Francisca died of severe bronchitis. Three days the poor child was struggling with death. It suffered so much. Its little lifeless body rested in the small back room; we all moved together into the front room, and when night approached, we made our beds on the floor. There the three living children were lying at our side, and we cried about the little angel, who rested cold and ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... seem that lifeless faith does not become living, or living faith lifeless. For, according to 1 Cor. 13:10, "when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away." Now lifeless faith is imperfect in comparison with living faith. Therefore when living faith comes, lifeless faith is done ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... is one of the most fascinating tricks of the visible world, and which even a harsh town full of chimneys can sometimes take on when seen in given moments and lights. And it was astonishing to see into what lifeless imitative verse his most original and passionate ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... There, in the shadow of the woods, lay the skirmishers, their muskets beside them, and there, in regular ranks, lay the line of battle, sleeping, as it seemed, the profound sleep of utter exhaustion. But the first man that was touched was cold and lifeless, and the next, and the next; it was the bivouac ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood! A man all light, a seraph-man, On every ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... though she found relief in talking. Her voice sounded thick, somehow, and lifeless ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... trafficker; in the rush of battle he holds scales, and for the golden coin you spend on him he sends you back lifeless shapes of men; they sent out men, the loving friends receive back well-smoothed ashes from the funeral pyre. They sing the heroic fall of some—all for another's wife; and some murmur discontent against the sons of Atreus, and some ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... war without any recourse to useless and hateful cruelties. Returning to the city, he addressed the insurgents, and, to his unspeakable satisfaction, they at once came to lay at his feet those arms which the Austrian soldiers could only have torn from their lifeless bodies. Thus did the good pastor, by disarming, save ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... nigh? They once were friendship, truth, and love! Oh, die to thought, to memory die, Since lifeless to my heart ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... She started back, a shudder ran through her frame as a ripple on the face of the still water when a sudden breeze sweeps over it. But as soon as she recognized her lover, she screamed and beat her breast, embracing the lifeless body, pouring tears into its wounds, and imprinting kisses on the cold lips. "O Pyramus," she cried, "what has done this? Answer me, Pyramus; it is your own Thisbe that speaks. Hear me, dearest, and lift that drooping head!" ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... blood as Massimiliano was. On the evening of June 5, in 1593, his men attacked Lelio Buonvisi, while returning with Lucrezia from prayers in an adjacent church. Lelio fell, stabbed with nineteen thrusts of the poignard, and was carried lifeless to his house. Lucrezia made her way back alone; and when her husband's corpse was brought into the palace, she requested that it should be laid out in the basement. A solitary witness of this act of violence, Vincenzo di Coreglia, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Heaven, Terence," answered Jack, warding off a blow which a Malay who had leaped forward made at his head. The next moment the savage rolled over, a lifeless corpse, down the embankment. For another minute the desperate struggle continued with unabated fury. Then a sound was heard which made the hearts of the British seamen leap within their bosoms—it was the loud report of ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation, is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew."—Burke, on Taste, p. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... my entrance. At the next, we observed this form: Had all things ready when the men were had eaten, say at twenty-five minutes past twelve, and then took them to the chapel for the usual prayer and remarks, which ended, we conducted them in file through the reception-room for leave-taking of their lifeless comrade, the body being there laid out with some little taste, and then they passed on to the shop. This method is chaste and appropriate, hinders nothing about the shop labor, and manifests ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... country and among people to whom such outward peace is a physical necessity. His feeling for nature, especially for her minutest and seemingly most insignificant phenomena, is closely akin to religion; there is an infinite charm in his description of the mysterious life of apparently lifeless objects; he renders all the sensuous impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary talent, he had dreamed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... antagonism to Farrar. I was revolving this very thing in my mind one day as I was paddling back to the inn after a look at my client's new pier and boat-houses, when I descried Farrar's catboat some distance out. The lake was glass, and the sail hung lifeless. It was near lunch-time, and charity prompted me to head for the boat and give it a tow homeward. As I drew near, Farrar himself emerged from behind the sail and asked me, with a great show ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... For six long weary years he had battled with poverty, disappointment, and despair, to reach at last in joy the goal of his life; he weds at last his beloved dame, and lo, the close of the first year of his paradise finds mother and babe lying side by side—lifeless. Lessing laughs. He writes to a friend: "The poor little fellow hath early discovered the sorrows of this earth, so he quickly hied himself hence, and lest he be lonely, took his mother along." There is laughter here, indeed, but the soul here laughs with a bleeding, torn, agonized heart. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... from the soil by the rare moisture, a silent token of its latent fertility. On the way there were no houses, no fences, no cleared fields. The land lay in the dawn as empty as when the keels of restless white men first split the Western ocean; and more lifeless, for the great buffalo herds that of old gave the men of the plains and foothills food and raiment ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... full of agony. "The excitement and alarm of to-day have exhausted my strength. That is all. Besides, a new grief threatens us, of which you as yet know nothing. The king is ill. A sudden dizziness seized him, and made him fall almost lifeless at my side. I came to bring you the king's message; now duty calls me to my husband's sickbed. ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... obstacle between him and the goal of his ambition, the cadetship at West Point; here lay the son of the man probably most prominent in the conspiracy against the absent shareholders of Silver Shield; here, in fine, lay the almost lifeless body of the youth he had seen spying upon their arrival at ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... resumed her work. The new light in her eyes, the new expression in her face, faded little by little and died out. In another minute the face was as vacant and as lumpish as before; the hands did their work again with the lifeless dexterity which had so painfully impressed me when she first took up the brush. Miserrimus Dexter appeared to be ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... trail was haunted; of prospectors who had verged from that dim path and had been lost in the wilderness, where their bones were found by Indians or white hunters long after; of strange stories of wild beasts; of all the weird sounds of the jungles; of places where a misstep would send one lifeless to the jagged feet of huge precipices. And through that trail of ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... saw the Queen seated in her golden chair of state, robed and serene, dead. At her feet lay Iras, lifeless. The faithful Charmion stood as if in waiting at the back of her mistress' chair, giving a final touch to the diadem that sat upon the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... believe this, for not only the skin, but the very flesh of the old doctor seemed bloodless and lifeless. ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... champions advanced between the camps. The Petchenegan warrior laughed in scorn on seeing his beardless antagonist. But when they came to blows he found himself seized and crushed as in a vice in the arms of his boyish foe, and was flung, a lifeless body, to the earth. On seeing this the Petchenegans fled in dismay, while the Russians, forgetting their pledge, pursued and slaughtered them ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... but more fearlessly than before. As I wound down the hill, the moonlight fell full upon the remarkable and lonely tree I had observed in the morning. Bare, wan, and giant-like, as it rose amidst the surrounding waste, it borrowed even a more startling and ghostly appearance from the cold and lifeless moonbeams which fell around and upon it like a shroud. The retreating animal I had driven before me, paused by this tree. I hastened my steps, as if by an involuntary impulse, as well as the enfeebled animal ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... passengers and crew—and in the morning it was announced along that coast, that an unknown ship had gone down, in storm and fire, with every soul on board! But no—one little babe had been taken from the arms of its dead mother, and though apparently lifeless, was restored, by Nelly O'Flaherty, the schoolmaster's wife, who took it home to her cabin, where it was doing well. There was no mark upon the few fragments of clothing which remained upon the mother and child, when they reached the shore, by which it could ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... at once?" she whispered. The blood had forsaken even her lips. Her face was the face of a statue—white, beautiful, lifeless. ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... cruelly murdered. The details are preserved in the Santa Cruz Mission archives, but are not given to the public. The capulin tree which the Indians made use of to make it appear that the Father's death was a natural one, was at the time in full bloom, and in a few hours became a dry lifeless trunk. A remarkable ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... her woes with the by-play of his mobile features. Wherever he sat, his large, white, solemn visage had a fascination for Madame Modjeska, and from the time she caught sight of it until Camille settled back lifeless in the final scene, she played "at him." He repaid this tribute by distorting his face in agony when Camille was light-hearted, and by breaking into noiseless merriment as her woes were causing handkerchiefs ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Christianity and science are blended, have agreed—"without some reasonable and due idea of the destiny and end of man, it is impossible to form just and consistent opinions on the progress of events, and the development and fortunes of nations. History stripped of philosophy becomes simply a lifeless heap of useless materials, without either inward unity, right purpose, or worthy result; while philosophy severed from history results in a disturbed existence of different ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... modern restorer would have delighted to supply sham-antique saints for them, imitating fifteenth-century work (and deceiving nobody), and to complete the mutilated canopies by careful matching, making the window entirely correct and uninteresting and lifeless and accomplished and forbidding. The very blue-bottles would be afraid to buzz against it; whereas here, in the old church, with the flavour of sincerity and simplicity around them, at one with the old carving and the spirit of the ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... one wrench. The tooth came out as though the patient were a block of marble. There was not a cry or a movement, such as one notes when nitrous oxide is administered. Hilda Wade was to all appearance a mass of lifeless flesh. We stood round and watched. I was trembling with terror. Even on Sebastian's pale face, usually so unmoved, save by the watchful eagerness of scientific curiosity, I saw ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... shot down like a dog, and William Lloyd Garrison was dragged half naked and half lifeless through the streets of Boston, and other outrages of like import were being perpetrated all over the North, it was carefully given out that those deeds were not the work of irresponsible rowdies, but of "gentlemen"—of merchants, manufacturers, and members of the professions. They claimed the ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... for all the fine arts. In sculpture they were much indebted to the ancients, but painting seems to have been purely a development. In the Middle Ages it was comparatively rude. No noted painter arose until Cimabue, in the middle of the thirteenth century. Before him, painting was a lifeless imitation of models afforded by Greek workers in mosaics; but Cimabue abandoned this servile copying, and gave a new expression to heads, and grouped his figures. Under Giotto, who was contemporary with Dante, drawing became still more correct, and coloring ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... in the woods with the grass o'ergrown, A grave in the heart of his mother — His clay in the one lies lifeless and lone; There is not a name, there is not a stone, And only the voice of the winds maketh moan O'er the grave where never a flower is strewn But — his memory lives ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... mean, petty, dull, sickly, and stodgy thing mere domesticity can be. Yes! it can be all that for people who let it be all that. Even love that once was passionate cannot redeem the life of two people unless there is something there to redeem. Two lifeless and stupid people living together can make of life something duller than either could make alone. If it be part of general wisdom to try to live widely and fully, and to use as much of our natures as is possible, ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... discord shall be heard Where Father Tagus rolls, or on the banks Of olive-bordered Betis; to the rocks Or in deep caverns shall my plaint be told, And by a lifeless tongue in living words; Or in dark valleys or on lonely shores, Where neither foot of man nor sunbeam falls; Or in among the poison-breathing swarms Of monsters nourished by the sluggish Nile. For, though it be to solitudes remote The hoarse vague echoes of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the other side of the large bed in the outer room, and there, in an easy-chair, his head leaned back, I recognised the pale and seemingly lifeless face of the stranger, Mason. His linen on one side and one arm was ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... men whom the Senator had captured were bound. After a while some pieces of rope and leather straps were found by Buttons. With these all the bandits were secured more firmly. The men whom the Senator had captured were almost lifeless from the tremendous weight of his manly form. They made their captives squat down in one corner, while the others possessed themselves of their guns and watched them. The wretches looked frightened out of their wits. They were Neapolitans ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... breakfast was over they all went into the Magician's big workshop, where the Glass Cat was lying before the mirror and the Patchwork Girl lay limp and lifeless upon ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... remainder of the distance on foot. Apparently all the burghers had escaped across the plain, and their field-cornet was preparing to lead them to another position when a solitary horseman, a mere speck of black against a background of brown, lifeless grass, issued from a rocky ravine below the kopje occupied by the enemy, and plunged into the open space. Lee-Metfords cracked and cut open the ground around him, but the rider bent forward and seemed to become a part of his horse. ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... waited a little while longer, and afterwards he ordered the muskrat to go down; but the muskrat did not like the idea, for he had seen the beaver coming up lifeless. So he had to flatter him a little in order to induce him to go down, by telling him, "Now, muskrat, I know that thou art one of the best divers of all the animal creation; will you please go down and ascertain the depth of the water, and bring up some ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... never weep, Nor weary hands be crossed in sleep, Nor hair that fell from crown to wrist, Be brushed away, caressed and kissed. And as in awe I gazed on her, I saw the sculptor's chisel fall— I saw him sink, without a moan, Sink lifeless at the feet of stone, And lie there like a worshiper. Fame crossed the threshold of the hall, And found a statue—that ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... had been his idol, his grief was deep. It stirred his whole being. Her last testimony had convinced him that there is a Savior, that he is interested in mankind, and that he is able to keep in every affliction. Standing by the cold, lifeless form of his little daughter, he promised God that he would meet her ...
— The value of a praying mother • Isabel C. Byrum
... I wonder if I could wake one of those fellows up," and Miss Derwent splashed water over one of the stony clusters. They remained lifeless. ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... last two years, those of us who have been affected by the hard times, and truthfully say that we did not begin at the giving end to economize? It seems to me that this is just where we all make our mistakes. Is not this just the reason why our church work is so cold and lifeless? We are trying to do Christ's work in man's way and we can no more do it than the Indian we are told about, who tried to run the machine controlled by electricity in his own way rather than in the ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 1, January, 1896 • Various
... our bows. Behind me, in the darkened chart-room, the Filipino quartermaster gently swung the wheel from time to time in response to the direction of the needle on the illuminated compass-dial. So lifeless was the sea that our foremast barely swayed against the stars. The smoke from our funnel trailed across the purple canopy of the sky as though ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... require all the help of recessed shadows and projections to catch the light; whereas in textiles, form is assisted by colour, and smoothness of surface is a primary consideration. The strongly accentuated design for wood-carving becomes poor and lifeless when deprived of its essential conditions and raison d'etre, and the pattern which looks charming, outlined and filled in with colour, could be hardly seen incised on a flat stone surface. This seems a truism, but the neglect of these plain axioms causes many mistakes in decorative art. Mr. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... I went toward the right to rejoin my chief, and found his lifeless body a few feet in rear of the line, in charge of his faithful orderly, Lehman, who was mourning bitterly and loudly the death of the great soldier whom he adored. At that supremely critical moment—for the fight was ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... mounted his impatient charger, and rushed forth to conquest. He waved his sword aloft, and cried "TETE D'ARMEE." The feverish vision broke—the mockery was ended. The silver cord was loosed, and the warrior fell back upon his bed a lifeless corpse. THIS WAS THE END OF EARTH. ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... latter lifted the boy and laid him in the morris chair. The small, cold body, partially covered by the rags of Grandpa's old undersuit, was so white and limp that it seemed lifeless. Hastily the longshoreman threw his own coat over Johnnie, after which he swept together the several lengths of clothesline and flung them out ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the wrongness of a medical or pedagogical practise is both made manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the living like the lifeless and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... on this very spot, I had looked down on that fair pale face, and then it had given me back a gaze as lifeless as this. ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... and expert swimmer as the ex-minister was, he was compelled to relinquish his hold of the wounded man; and Jude, after one or two fitful struggles against his fate, drifted lifeless down the stream and into eternity, while the widowed mother regained her child. The man of God, the chivalrous Frenchman and the brutish Mike slowly returned to their camp; but no one who met them could imagine, from their looks, that they were either of ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... deal with local sick, and after that arrangement very few of the cases sent down from the front came our way. For the first few days the number of incoming sick could be dealt with adequately. But as time went on, and the mercury rose higher and higher in the lifeless air, the number increased and became formidable. Long lines of ambulance wagons and bullock tongas crept steadily from every quarter to the hospital. Beds were crowded into every corner of the wards. We had no fans. Imagine, you who live in civilisation, what an electric fan ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... dust or mould. As lifeless as the rocks, and cold, But life's fair Tree is living. And fadeless green leaves we shall be, Because the Fountain of that Tree Eternal ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... her toe into a little mound of snow quite a minute after Ruth had left her. She had not even glanced up when, in response to her friend's last declaration, she had said, "Very well; I'll be on hand," and her voice had sounded so flat and lifeless that Ruth thought it better to hasten off before the words could be recalled. When Nan spoke in that half-hearted tone Ruth had no faith in her strength of purpose. She walked home in a doubtful frame of mind, wondering if, after all, the ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... climate, acted powerfully as a sedative, ending in speedy dissolution,—even more speedy than in a colder climate. The effects on Coleridge seemed to run parallel to this. At first he remarked that he was relieved, but afterwards speaks of his limbs "as lifeless tools," and of the violent pains in his bowels, which neither opium, ether, nor peppermint, separately or combined, could relieve. These several states he minuted down, from time to time, for after-consideration or ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... he had ignored, catching up lost ends, flinging a contrast into a paradox and reducing it to a coherent and succinctly stated truth—in short, flashing his luminous genius in a blaze of fire over pages erstwhile dull and heavy and lifeless. ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... corridor, with the aid of the pincers and of her nails, which she tore, and her fingers, which she cut, La Louve succeeded in drawing out the spikes which fastened the door. At length the door was opened. Martial, pale, his hands covered with blood, fell almost lifeless into the ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... chin so violent that it sent the head back so as to lean on the coat collar; at last he put it in its proper position, he then operated upon the arms and legs of the image actor in the same manner, and so perfectly lifeless did he appear, that many new comers who had not heard the introductory speech of the showman, absolutely thought that it was on inanimate figure made to imitate a man that was before them, as the orator always designated his piece of still life his mecanique, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... the words out of my uncle's mouth, when a whizzing was heard for a second, and then something fell down within a foot of where they stood, with a heavy crash. They started—turned round—the adopted heir lay lifeless at their feet, and their legs were bespattered with his blood and his brains. The poor boy, seeing his lordship below, had leaned out of one of the upper windows to call to him, but lost his balance, and had fallen head foremost upon the wide stone pavement ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... the well before any one else reached the spot. Bruce had had the forethought to cut down a swing and bring the rope. In a very few minutes Miss Custer—or what was believed to be her lifeless body—was lying wet upon the grass and the doctor, also dripping, was making a hasty examination of her condition. "I think she will live," was his verdict, "but we must get ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... found to be the true role of the kinetic part of the acoustic process applies equally to sounds which are emitted by living beings, and to those that arise when lifeless material is set mechanically in motion, as in the case of ordinary noises or the musical production of tone. There is only this difference: in the first instance the vibrations of the sound-producing organs have their origin in the activity of the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... of the old ex-engineers at Bob Slattery's saloon, had stopped and greeted him. Dock looked as if he had tramped, had drank, was dirty, coat had holes, soles of his boots badly worn, wheezing, seemed hungry and lifeless, been eating poor food, and was in a general run-down condition. Gun had "set out his packing" by feeding him and put him in a bed at the Grand Central Hotel—nicknamed the "Grayback's Corral." Gun thought he would have to reform, before the M. M. put ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... movable disc, sunk down to the bottom by the smashing of the partition-breaks and the escape of the water, three bodies lay apparently lifeless. Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michel Ardan— did they still breathe? or was the projectile nothing now but a metal coffin, ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... Climbing-plants, grasses and other herbs, forced their way through the moss of dying trees; they crept along their bending trunks, found nourishment in their dusty cavities, and a passage beneath the lifeless bark. Thus decay gave its assistance to life, and their respective productions were mingled together. The depths of these forests were gloomy and obscure, and a thousand rivulets, undirected in their course by human industry, preserved in them ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... last night of his life; and, before another night, it was but a lifeless corpse that the attendants were bearing back to her ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... struggling for utterance; but they gave place to a low moaning sound, and then to the silence of death. The one moment of happiness, that recompensed years of sorrow, had been her last. Her son laid the lifeless form upon the pillow, and gazed with fixed eyes on ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tears. Of all things upon this earth she had loved the grand old mansion where her childhood had been spent. She had so little else to love, poor lonely child, that it was scarcely strange she should attach herself to lifeless things. How fondly she had remembered the old place in all those dreary years of exile, dreaming of it as we dream of some lost friend. And it was gone from her for ever! Her father had bartered away ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... stand. Retail stores and banks fronted on three sides of it, but the fourth was occupied by a long low adobe building which was very old and had been converted into a museum of local antiquities. It was dark and lifeless at night, and in its shadow-filled verandah he was to ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... her cubs not yet rising to follow her, she returned to them again, and, with signs of inexpressible fondness, went round first one and then the other, pawing them and moaning all the time. Finding them at last cold and lifeless, she raised her head towards the ship and began to growl in an indignant manner, as if she were denouncing vengeance against the murderers of her young; but the sailors levelled their muskets again, and wounded her in so many places that she dropped down between her young ones; yet, even while she ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... this time I may be dead." He turned to his couch and saw himself stretched lifeless upon it. He hastened to the window and opened it; but the night air was so chilly that he closed it, lighted a fire, and began to pace the floor once more, saying mechanically: "I must be more composed. I will write to my parents, in case of accident." He took a sheet ...
— Bel Ami • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... Was it an omen? Was everything going to stand still, time to be at an end, and eternity begin? From the congregation rose some stifled cries, and, lifeless with terror, some bodies dropped on the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... galaxy, looking for other worlds with life forms. A check on diverging evolutions, they had called it—uncounted thousands of suns without planets, bypassed. Thousands of planetary systems, explored, or merely looked at and rejected. Heavy, cold worlds with methane atmospheres and lifeless rocks without atmospheres and even earth-sized, earth-type planets, with oceans and oxygen and warmth. But no ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... is deformed and almost lifeless; it is a seven months' child," said Beauvouloir clinging to the count's arm. Then, with a strength given to him by the excitement of his pity, he clung to the father's fingers, whispering in a broken voice: "Spare yourself a crime, the ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... morning, we must eat now," said Thor, "and I think I can provide a good meal for us all." He went over to where his goats stood in the hollow beside the chariot of brass, and, striking them with his hammer, he left them lifeless on the ground. He skinned the goats then, and taking up the bones very carefully, he left them down on the skins. Skins and bones he lifted up and bringing them into the house he left them in a hole above the peasant's fireplace. "No one," said he in a commanding ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... could not use it. This sword Beowulf seized gladly. Angrily he struck the sea-wolf, and the sword passed through her neck. Down on the ground she sank. The warrior rejoiced in his work. He looked through the great dwelling and saw Grendel lying lifeless. With a strong blow Beowulf cut off the head of the monster, but the hot blood melted the sword and nothing was left but the hilt. The blade melted away as ice melts when the Father, who has power over the seasons, unbinds the ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... spot of painting, A lifeless, loveless hue; Though your heart be sick to fainting It says not a word to you; A bird knows nothing of gladness, Is only a song-machine; A man is a reasoning madness, A woman a ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... bright blaze of light; and, looking up, he beheld his reforming neighbour, Mr. Dulberry, metamorphosed into a pillar of salt. His mouth was wide open; the whites of his eyes were raised to the ceiling; one hand was clenched; the other hung lifeless by his side. The Courier had sunk with one end into the fire; a roaring flame was springing up and enveloping the whole: and, before Mr. Dulberry returned to his self-possession, the newspaper with all its world of history and prophecy was ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... stood on the narrow ledge of shore below, to wait the moment for action. At length—after what appeared almost a hopeless conflict with the dashing waters—Rodolph appeared through the cloud of foam and slowly and feebly swam towards the shore, still supporting the lifeless burden that seemed almost to drag him ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... there was a strange look—one which had lately been habitual to her, but which neither her mother nor Bela were able to interpret: it was a look which conveyed the thought of resignation or indifference or both, but also one which was peculiarly lifeless, as of a soul who had touched the cold ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... contempt. "Such contempt might perhaps be due to the naked youths who appeared on foot in the fields of Troy, and lurking behind a tombstone, or the shield of a friend, drew the bow-string to their breast, [9] and dismissed a feeble and lifeless arrow. But our archers (pursues the historian) are mounted on horses, which they manage with admirable skill; their head and shoulders are protected by a casque or buckler; they wear greaves of iron on their legs, and their bodies are ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... fragrant flowers around her, to take away, if possible, the horror and ghastliness of death. She did not look at all like the Miriam I had known and loved. Her features were sharp and pinched, and her face looked careworn, and anxious—if anything so lifeless can be said ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... late, the little monster (for he is one in his way) feels the treacherous hook, "indignant at the guile," he springs aloft, makes for his well known hold, or resting place, exhausts his strength in the unequal contest, and floats almost lifeless into the landing net held out for his reception. He has fallen a legitimate prize to the skill of his captor, who has only to extract the hook from his gills, before he again makes another light and deadly cast. Thus ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... alone she raised him from her knee. With both arms clasped round him, the miserable woman lifted his lifeless face to hers and rocked him on her bosom in an agony of tenderness beyond all relief in tears, in a passion of remorse beyond all expression in words. In silence she held him to her breast, in silence she devoured his forehead, his cheeks, his lips, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the officers ordered the men to keep back—it was right that the sick and wounded should first be removed. No one obeyed; a hundred and fifty men crowded into her. They shoved off, a sea rushed on, they were hid from view; the shattered boat and their lifeless corpses alone reached the shore. Eight hundred human beings, it is supposed, had by this time perished. Those few who now reached the shore, aided chiefly, I have a right to boast, by my party, reported the dreadful condition of the remainder. Numbers were dying of hunger; the decks ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... Yet it would be dishonest not to warn your lordship, that if my letters have had any intrinsic recommendation, they must lose of it every day. Years and frequent returns of gout have made a ruin of me. Dulness, in the form of indolence, grows upon me. I am inactive, lifeless, and so indifferent to most things. that I neither inquire after nor remember any topics that might enliven my letters. Nothing is so insipid as my way of passing MY time. But I need not specify what my letters speak. They can have no spirit left; ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... they heard of his fate, all the Mice were seized with fierce anger, and bade their heralds summon the people to assemble towards dawn at the house of Bread-nibbler, the father of hapless Crumb-snatcher who lay outstretched on the water face up, a lifeless corpse, and no longer near the bank, poor wretch, but floating in the midst of the deep. And when the Mice came in haste at dawn, Bread-nibbler stood up first, enraged at his son's death, and ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... fore-shoulder; and though he still continued his course to the river, I knew by the jet of blood which followed my shot that his fate was sealed. Near the river he made a sudden turn, striking his head against a hemlock tree, and at the same instant a shot from my companion stretched him lifeless on the ground. And thus concluded an exciting chase ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... scream, in the usual fashion of fools and cowards, she entered the cabinet from the ante-room, just as the door of Eveline's chamber opened, and the soldier appeared, bearing in his arms the half-undressed and lifeless form of the Norman maiden herself. Without speaking a word, he placed her in Rose's arms, and with the same precipitation with which he had entered, threw himself out of the opened window from which Rose ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... the colour left her cheeks as, in her fancy, she again beheld the tragic city—that line of quays stretching away in a furnace-like blaze, the deep moat of the river, with its leaden waters obstructed by huge black masses, lighters looking like lifeless whales, and bristling with motionless cranes which stretched forth gallows-like arms. Was that ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... tokens of love are for the most part barbarous, cold and lifeless, because they do not represent our life. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Therefore let the farmer give his corn; the miner his gem; the sailor coral or shells; the painter his picture, and the poet his poem." To persons of refined nature, whatever the friend creates takes added value ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... foliage in its roof. Within, directly under the beams, all by itself, on an upright chair beside a small table, sat an incongruous, startling, awe-inspiring apparition—a grimy old man of Mongolian aspect. He might have been frozen to stone, so immobile, so lifeless were his features. Belated visitors passed near the entrance of the shrine, peered within as at some outlandish and sinister freak of nature, and moved on with jocular words. Nobody ventured to overstep the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... forced him under water again, but in a deeper place; yet his great muscular power once more enabled him to raise himself and cling to the rock. At this moment a forcible blow was given with a club, and he fell down lifeless. The savages then hauled his corpse upon the rock, and ferociously stabbed the body all over, snatching the dagger from each others' hands to wreak their sanguinary vengeance on the slain. The body was left some time exposed upon the rock; and as the islanders gave way, ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... tumbling and bounding headlong down through the rocks, and fell with a fearful impetus just before his horse's hoofs and there lay like a huge palpitating carcass. The horse was scared, as, indeed, was his rider, too, and more so when this apparently lifeless thing sprang up to his legs, and throwing his arms apart to bar their further progress, advanced his white and gigantic face towards them. Then the horse started about, with a snort of terror, nearly ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... living or lifeless, upon this strange earth, there is but one which, having reached the mid-term of appointed human endurance on it, I still regard with unmitigated amazement. I know, indeed, that all around me is wonderful—but I cannot answer it with wonder:—a ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... was unable to eat, and so he died. At Enniskillen, a poor girl, who had been sent for Indian meal, fell down near her dwelling and expired. She had not gone out more than eight or nine minutes, when she was discovered lifeless, and clutching a small parcel of Indian meal tied up in a piece of cloth. In parts of Ulster, the applications for employment on the Government works were very numerous; in one parish alone (Ballynascreen) there were sixteen hundred such applications. ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... unlike this was the fate of Halcyone, a queen of Thessaly, who dreamed that her husband Ceyx had been drowned, and on waking hastened to the shore to look for him. There she saw her dream come true,—his lifeless body floating towards her on the tide; and as she flung herself after him, mad with grief, the air upheld her and she seemed to fly. Husband and wife were changed into birds; and there on the very ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... having its spring and principle within itself). But this fundamental idea he overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crude [30] egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy: while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere Ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exoterice to call GOD; and his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish, mortification of the natural passions and desires. In Schelling's Natur-Philosophie, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... mystery to him. He could not understand, for instance, how his own offspring could be so unresponsive to the attractions of the things of the mind, and so interested in mere machinery and the methods of moving a living or a lifeless object from one spot on the earth's surface to another. Mr. Prohack admitted the necessity of machinery, but an automobile had for him the same status as a child's scooter and no higher. It was an ingenious device for locomotion. And there for him the matter ended. ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... distinction; to take up the poor little book into which all the toil of so many wasted days could breathe no breath of life, formless, uninspired, unnecessary. Think of the pathos of the illusion that has waved 'its purple wings' around these lifeless products, endowing with sensitive expression the wooden lineaments that have really been dead and unexpressive all the time, never glowed at all save to the wistful yearning eye of their befooled creator. Yet if nature be thus cruel to afflict, she is no less kind to console: ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... were terrified eyes. Maggie went back to her chair. After that, she sat there during the slow evolution of Eternity; Eternity unrolled itself before her, on and on and on, grey limitless mist and space, comfortless, lifeless, hopeless. She had been for many weeks leading a thoroughly unwholesome life in that old house with those old women. She did not herself know how unhealthy it had been, but she knew that she missed ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... very warm during the evening and windy. By bedtime there was a hot, lifeless gale blowing from the southeast. Now and then the moon shone out brightly through the smother of tearing clouds, and was visible for a moment in all her glory, only to be submerged the next moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to splash so loudly ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris |
