"Somnolent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in arousing the somnolent Slingsby, who, lifting a drowsy head, blinked sleepily, and ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence, he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a peering suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the other silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an amazing and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken black hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage properties of a stupid and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the preparation of food, and in the labors of the loom and spindle; while young children, half-naked, play around the house doors and through the lanes with an activity in strong contrast with the prevailing tone of grave and somnolent repose. ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... movement in the crowd, which parted. At the farther end of the lane thus made, a flashy young gypsy was seen, with a somnolent ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... Harpe, and many billions beside of bilious people. Whereas, of all the shameful people (equally billions and not less bilious) that have presumed to quarrel with Milton, not one has thought him ludicrous, but only dull and somnolent. In 'Lear' and in 'Hamlet,' as in a human face agitated by passion, are many things that tremble on the brink of the ludicrous to an observer endowed with small range of sympathy or intellect. But no man ever found the starry heavens ludicrous, though many find them dull, and prefer ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Spiritual Railway Society—it is under Him the safest of all associations yet established. The arrangements are admirably adapted for the projects in view. All the seats are delightfully soft, and as somnolent as church pews, to which they bear a close resemblance. The machine men, and all those appointed to situations on the line, are mostly in orders; but belong to different denominations. The scheme originated in Oxford, and has spread rapidly throughout the length and breadth of the land. Several ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Lambert only spread out his legs and shut his eyes. Ransome was not only a good speaker but also one of the cleverest men in the 'Varsity, and he scored time after time without disturbing Lambert's equanimity. I think that Lambert's enormous and somnolent bulk must have annoyed Ransome, for he went on to make an attack which was virulently sarcastic. In his speech Lambert had been foolish enough to say nothing in favour of modern novels, he had taken it for ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... the acquaintance of a great blonde man, who talked incessantly about beautiful women, and painted them sometimes larger than life, in somnolent attitudes, and luxurious tints. His studio was a welcome contrast to the spitting and betting of the tobacco shop. His pictures—Doré-like improvisations, devoid of skill, and, indeed, of artistic perception, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... enfant terrible of the drawing-room. There was one particularly long poem which he had read aloud to my mother and father; a seemingly harmless thing, from which they never recovered. Out of the mentions made of this effusion I gathered that it was like a moonlit expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool, and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness, often glowed upon Alcott's features and trembled in his voice. I believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy which pictured ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... high up, apparently, as the private dares to go, unless he considers the somnolent iniquity of the Colonel quite beyond the range of the bugle. But the pathetic appeal was too much for Crittenden, and he got up, stepping into a fragrant foot-bath of cold dew and out to a dapple gray wash-basin that sat on three wooden stakes just outside. Sousing his head, he sniffed ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... more favourable opportunity to carry my bold scheme into effect than that which at that moment presented itself to me. I quietly emerged from my place of concealment and, once more crouching low among the ferns, crept slowly and with infinite caution toward the somnolent Jose, gradually working my way round until I could just see him clear of the corner of the capstan-house. Some twenty minutes of this work brought me right up to the gable end of the building, from which position I again reconnoitred Jose. He was unmistakably fast asleep, and therefore practically ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... lesson to you," he concluded, drawing the ninepin dexterously from his pocket, "for it took nigh a quart of the best forty-rod whisky to bring that child to." Not only did Mary firmly believe him, but for weeks afterwards "Julian Amplach"—this unhappy twin—was kept in a somnolent attitude in the cart, and was believed to have contracted dissipated habits from the effects of his ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... and this is tantamount to saying that he was not capable of ignoring the somnolent influences of human nature. To his own extreme surprise his head fell forward with an abrupt nod while he was engaged in the act of depicting Big Waller's nose, and he found, on resuming work, with an imbecile smile at what he deemed his weakness, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... where Greenstream village lay somnolent beneath the refulgent day. The chairs before the office of the Bugle were unoccupied, from within came the monotonous, sliding rattle of the small footpress. Gordon sat absently revolving the possibilities ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and the two young men went hunting or fishing in the deep forests or played golf around the somnolent course—games which John diplomatically allowed his host to win—or swam in the mountain coolness of the lake. John found Mr. Washington a somewhat exacting personality—utterly uninterested in any ideas ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... true story of Col. John James Waldron," continued Old Grumps, with a groan which was very somnolent, as if it were a twin to a snore. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... with a lifted upper lip and his most somnolent tiger-cat expression. After Blackwell had finished and been withdrawn from circulation he rolled and ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... into Harrimay only ten minutes later. It was a pretty but rather somnolent place, just a string of white-painted, green-blinded houses and two or three stores along both sides of an oiled highway. It was a long ten-minute jitney ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... dream; the oldest of races knew better. The race that was first to dream the beautiful dream of a Millennium was the first to discard it. Nay, was it even a beautiful dream? Every man under his own fig-tree, forsooth, obese and somnolent, the spirit disintegrated! Omnia ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... piece of gold sewn in her dress; and when she came to consider the lateness of the hour, and the somnolent habits of Mrs Jarley, and to imagine the state of consternation in which they would certainly throw that good lady by knocking her up in the middle of the night—and when she reflected, on the other hand, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... one hundred and ninety-eight. He gave me another somnolent grin, and fell into deeper slumber. I would have made him move about, but I might as well have tried to make Cleopatra's needle waltz around the room with me. Tom's breathing became stertorous, and that, in connection with morphia ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... the water. Under the planks of the deck the engines toiled without ceasing. Steam hissed and panted. At intervals the engine-room bell jarred upon the car. At intervals, also, the tiller-chains slid to and fro with a dull, rattling sound. Yet, owing to the somnolent stillness settled upon the river, these sounds escaped, failed to ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... preaching, and the congregation paid a very languid attention, but suddenly a curious little sound went through the church—one of those scarcely perceptible noises which no comparison can explain; it was a quick attraction of all eyes, an arousing of somnolent intelligences, a slight, quick drawing-in of the breath. The listeners had heeded very indifferently Mr Gray's admonitions to brotherly love and charity as matters which did not concern them other than abstractedly; but quite suddenly they had realised that ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... often sullen and morose, often violent and even hysterical. To calm his nervous agitation the court physician ordered warm baths, which he spent hours in taking. Then again he was irregular in his habits, being often somnolent during the daytime, but as frequently breaking his rest at midnight to set the pens of his secretaries scampering to keep pace with the flow of his speech. With old friends he was coarse and severe: even the brutal Vandamme confessed ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... is sounded, usually at five, but sometimes at four; or, in the case of emergency, at any hour of the night. But generally it comes just as the attitude necessary to comfort has been discovered, and the somnolent individual is ready for the luxury of what I may call a half and half snooze. It is at that moment, in that mysterious borderland of sleeping and waking, that the strident and compelling sound of the bugle falls upon the unwilling ear. There ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... Quatre-Bras; There Kellermann's cuirassiers will promptly join you To bear the English backward Brussels way. I go on towards Fleurus and Ligny now.— If Blucher's force retreat, and Wellington's Lie somnolent in Brussels one day more, I gain that city sans a ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... smart carriages passed and the high-stepping horses, which were indeed the exception, for the majority ambled along half somnolent from careless coachmanship, one sought in vain for some idea of what they were doing it all for. They did not seem to enjoy it. If they did not enjoy it, why did they do it? The expression that was common and universal to almost all was their seriousness. The Volunteer colonel took himself ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... time on voyages to the Cape (especially nearing the Equator), and are the joy of the genial-hearted. Even those who have no little games of their own are wont to look on sympathetically, or, better still, to turn away the understanding eye. The long, lazy, somnolent days and the magic nights, star-spangled above and lit with phosphorescent seas below, lend themselves to the dangerous kind of flirtation that says little and looks much, and if there is any place in the world ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... King not well. He has a slight stricture, of which he makes a great deal, and a bad cold. He seemed somnolent; but ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... which he believed his attempts at pulpit eloquence were sure to be defeated. Though he could compass the hardihood to discourse to an assemblage of distracting schoolboys several hours every week-day, he could not summon the courage to address an audience of somnolent adults two ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Board did but exist to chequer his importance. Five days in the week for seven hours a day he wrote, and thought, and wove the threads of its business, and this lot came down once a week for two or three hours, and taught their grandmother to suck eggs. But watching that red-cheeked, white-haired, somnolent figure, his smile was not so contemptuous as might have been expected. For after all, the chairman was a wonderful old boy. A man of go and insight could not but respect him. Eighty! Half paralysed, over head and ears in debt, having gone the pace all his life—or ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... use their flyer? That would not gain them any time, what with launching it and landing, for so short a flight. And a bandit flyer could not very well land unseen or unnoticed, even in somnolent Nareda. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... sighing to the rather somnolent Vere de Vere, he scornfully yanked his extra pairs of thick, white-streaked, yellow cotton socks from the wicker ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... intimate friends that day, Saint Mars Montalvin, Tom Sheffield, and his cousin, Madame de Rhouel, a Creole, who laughed as incessantly as a bird sings. It was growing dusk, and the distant rumbling of the carriages in the Avenue of the Champs-Elysees sounded like some somnolent rhythm. There was a delicate perfume of flowers; the lamps had not been brought in yet, and chatting and laughing filled the room ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... writes in the Theosophical Review: "It has been translated into no less than twenty different languages, and may be said without the faintest risk of contradiction, to have been the busiest instrument of Buddhist propaganda for many a day in the annals of that long somnolent dharma. The least that learned Buddhists of Ceylon can do to repay the debt of gratitude they owe to Colonel Olcott and other members of the Theosophical Society who have worked for them, is to bestir themselves to throw some light on their own ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... would wait till after luncheon, then in that somnolent hour when all men's thoughts are a bit dulled, and vigilance least awake, he would find some road, on good hard land, ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... luminous with the light of electric signs as with the radiance of some lurid and sinister moon. The voice of London sounded in Kirkwood's ears, like the ominous purring of a somnolent brute beast, resting, gorged and satiated, ere rising again to ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... The long somnolent game was suddenly awakened by two blissful errors, which gave the audience something to jeer at. A tally slipped home for Boston. A sharp double play redeemed the errors and closed the inning. The first man up for the Yankees drove a clean two-bagger down the right ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... as an armour over wariness, holding craft in reserve: his aim was at the refreshment of honest fellowship: by no means to discover that the coupling of his native bias with his professional duty was unprofitable nowadays. Wariness, however, was not somnolent, even when he said: 'You know, I am never the lawyer out of my office. Man of the world to men of the world; and I have not lost by it. I am Mrs. Barman Radnor's legal adviser: you are Mr. Victor Radnor's friend. They are, as we see them, not on the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Somnolent, vast, inert, the darkness lay Waiting for dawn. Across the ocean stirred A luminous haze, not light, but whispering light, So softly yet, the islands had not heard. The mystery of sleep was in the trees And on the weary stars. A little cry That broke the silence ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... the fall of darkness and the larger silence of darkness, the veldt awoke. Animals that had dozed through the hot hours and grazed through the cooler hours in somnolent content now quivered alert. There were runnings here and there, the stamp of hoofs, sharp snortings as taut nerves stretched. Zebras uttered the absurd small-dog barks peculiar to them; ostriches boomed; jackals yapped; unknown birds uttered hasty wild calls. Numerous hyenas, near and far away, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... away for about three years; some months before it had entirely perished, though I stood motionless, every thing which I looked at seemed in motion to and fro. A stiff cloudy vapor seemed to have settled on my forehead and temples, which usually occasions a sort of somnolent pressure upon my eyes, and particularly from dinner till evening. So that I often recollect what is said of the poet Phineas ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... indeed, they have been swarming in since Prague came into her own some few years ago and became the capital of a free and independent republic. In former years, when Prague was still accounted a small provincial town of somnolent habits, there were only two or three hotels that counted at all as accommodation for foreigners; now there are many yet inadequate to the number of visitors. As to those that are drawn to Prague, their numbers ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... pale, listened to her. Beauclair had positively told him that the cure would come like a lightning flash, that under the influence of extreme excitement a sudden awakening of will so long somnolent would take place ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... shout behind me; and, glancing back, saw my pursuers, three now, with my full-bodied cousin for whipper-in—change their course as I leapt a brook and headed for the crowded enclosure. A somnolent fat man, bulging, like a feather-bed, on a three-legged stool, dozed at the receipt of custom, with a deal table and a bowl of sixpences before him. I dashed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... somewhat somnolent, of which you may be sure Miss Frankland took no notice. She retired to her own room when we went for our recreation. My sisters scolded me for not coming to them the previous night, but I told them that Miss F. had continued to move about her room for so long a time that I had ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... 13 inches; tail, 5-1/2 inches. Hodgson kept some of this species in his garden for some time. They were somnolent by day, active by night, and did not hybernate in Nepal. They were fed on grain and fruit, and would chatter a good deal over their meals, but in general were silent. They slept rolled up into a ball, were tame and gentle usually, but ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... to return in a few hours; and Brendon joined Albert in his sleeping apartment. For a time they were alone together and then came Jenny with some soup. She stopped to chat for a little while and, finding her uncle apparently somnolent and disinclined to talk, turned to Mark and spoke under her breath. She was still agitated and ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... few minutes stewards and other members of the crew were sent round to arouse the people. Some utterly refused to get up. The stewards had almost to force the doors of the staterooms to make the somnolent appreciate their peril, and many of them, it is believed, were drowned ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... to sink into a somewhat somnolent condition owing to its immunity from direct attack, has been now rudely awakened. Fires commencing in earnest yesterday, after a few half-hearted attempts made previously, have been raging in half a dozen different places in this huge compound; and one ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... and swore; others shook their sides with merriment; others reasoned and remonstrated with their neighbors; some very composedly stretched themselves upon the sofas, having first borrowed chair-cushions enough to support their somnolent heads; other bivouacked on three chairs, while some, not finding a convenient couch, stretched themselves flat on the floor of the House, with, perhaps, a volume of the Laws of the United States ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... pine woods. It all looked dreary and desolate, and I could not think what I should do there. Returning in the afternoon, I stretched myself, dead tired, on a hard couch, awaiting the long-desired hour of sleep. It did not come; but I fell into a kind of somnolent state, in which I suddenly felt as though I were sinking in swiftly flowing water. The rushing sound formed itself in my brain into a musical sound, the chord of E flat major, which continually re-echoed in broken forms; these broken chords seemed to ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... night before, such threatening prognostics of a future full of misery. The vicar was not a man to get up without a fire. He rang to let Marianne know that he was awake and that she must come to him; then he remained, as his habit was, absorbed in somnolent musings. The servant's custom was to make the fire and gently draw him from his half sleep by the murmured sound of her movements,—a sort of music which he loved. Twenty minutes passed and Marianne ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... had long been sitting with half-closed eyes, and hands which bestowed no encouragement upon his somnolent steeds save an occasional flicking of the reins against their flanks; whilst Petrushka had lost his cap, and was leaning backwards until his head had come to rest against Chichikov's knees—a position which necessitated his being awakened with a cuff. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... vigils. His mitre—for he was a mitred Abbot, and had a seat in parliament—rested on a table beside him: near it stood a silver flagon of Gascony wine, ready, no doubt, for the pious uses of the morrow. Fasting and watching had made him more than usually somnolent, than which nothing could have been better for the purpose of the Saint, who now appeared to him radiant in all the colors of ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... lying comfortably somnolent on the outskirts of life, heard light footsteps, but hardly heeded them. He knew that some one came into the room and stood silently by his couch for some seconds. He lazily unclosed his eyelids for a moment, not in order to see who ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... two o'clock of a late September morning. There was an easterly haze driving in from the Baie des Chaleurs and the darkness was so saturated with chilly moisture that an honest downpour of rain would have been a relief. Two or three depressed and somnolent travelers yawned in the waiting room, which smelled horribly of smoky lamps. The telegraph instrument in the ticket office clicked spasmodically for a minute, and then relapsed into a gloomy silence. The imperturbable station master was tipped back against the wall in a wooden armchair, with ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... splendid, any single nation was not of a speed that showed slackening and regular expulsion. More of it was renounced and a slave a real slave is somnolent, a real slave rests in potatos ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... earl, on the evening in question, was triumphant. As he sat in his easy-chair after dinner he hardly winked above once or twice; and when he had taken the large bowl of tea, which he usually swallowed in a semi-somnolent condition, he ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... to wake up in various different ways. There is the clear and beautiful dawn of new and balanced effort, easy, unresting, planned, assured, and there is also the blundering-up of a still half-somnolent man, irascible, clumsy, quarrelsome, who stubs his toe in his first walk across the room, smashes his too persistent alarum clock in a fit of nerves, and cuts his throat while shaving. All patriotic vehemence ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... curve the Colorado River split the red walls from north to south. When the wind was west a sullen roar, remote as of some far-off driving mill, filled the valley; when it was east a dreamy hollow hum, a somnolent song, murmured through the cottonwoods; when no wind stirred, silence reigned, a silence not of serene plain or mountain fastness, but shut in, compressed, strange, and breathless. Safe from the storms of the elements as well as of the world was ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... a somnolent head up from a pile of lumber near the tracks and yawned welcome to the recruit. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... feverishly on the search for opportunities, i. e. for creative and productive use. In the hands of the Government it is apt to lose a good deal of its fructifying energy and ceaseless striving and to sink instead into placid and somnolent repose. ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... prayer could he bring to its due conclusion, for either his eyes closed before he came to the "Amen," or else worldly images crowded round him, and forced him to begin his devotions again from the beginning, when he had succeeded in recollecting himself. In this half-somnolent state he obtained not one moment of inward collectedness, of quiet reflection; not even when he gazed up at the starry heavens, or looked down on the oasis, veiled in night, where many others like himself ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... marching upon Rome, an echo woke in many a poet's heart "by rose hung river and light-foot rill," but left Ibsen simply disconcerted. If Rome was to be freed from Papal slavery, it would no longer be the somnolent and unupbraiding haunt of quietness which the Norwegian desired for the healing of his spleen and his moral hypochondria. In October the heralds of liberty crossed the Papal frontier; on the 30th, by a slightly prosaic touch, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... principle holds good regardless of size. The whole fringe of Arabia, from Antioch to Aden and from Mocha to Mascat, has been the scene of incoming and outgoing activities, has developed live bases of trade, maritime growth, and culture, while the inert, somnolent interior has drowsed away its long eventless existence. The rugged, inaccessible heart of little Sardinia repeats the story of central Arabia in its aloofness, its impregnability, backwardness, and in the purity of its race. Its accessible coast, forming a convenient way-station ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... reach of Puget Sound basked in its normal midsummer haze, the day Stella started for Vancouver. That great region of island-dotted sea spread between the rugged Olympics and the foot of the Coast range lay bathed in summer sun, untroubled, somnolent. But nearing the international boundary, the Charlotte drove her twenty-knot way into a thickening atmosphere. Northward from Victoria, the rugged shores that line those inland waterways began to appear blurred. Just north of Active Pass, where the steamers take to ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... whip of scorpions, lashing the mother's naked soul. Will ethical teachers say that there is no salutary moral lesson in this vivid picture? To many it seems better than a cart-load of dull tracts or somnolent homilies. Poor, pathetic little Jeanne, lying there in the cemetery of Passy—where later was erected the real tomb of Marie Bashkirtseff, though dead she yet spoke a lesson of contrition to her mother. And though the second marriage of Helene has been styled an anti-climax, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... He has found the rooms. The somnolent boots will carry our things upstairs. Which of the two rooms will I have? They are en suite. I make no choice. It is, I protest, a matter of perfect indifference to me; but one room being infinitely superior to the other, I select it, apologetically. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... rebellious vanity and a strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... weather and sundry other topics of similar piquancy. Elsie invited all of us to a welsh rarebit party she was giving at eleven-thirty, and then they got to work at the bridge table, poor George Hazzard cutting in occasionally. This left Billy Smith and me free to make up a somewhat somnolent two-some. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... thanksgiving) the young man chanced upon a somnolent and bedraggled hack, at rest in the stenciled shadows of the Third Avenue elevated structure. Its pilot was snoring lustily the sleep of the belated, on the box. With some difficulty he was awakened, and Maitland dodged into the musty, dusty body of the vehicle, grateful ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... middle of the road, turned, and waited. His action attracted little attention. Coldstream was indoors, somnolent with the afternoon heat. Across the street the proprietor of the general store ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... of our itinerary, but Oxford cannot be viewed in a day, and we found much to delight our senses south of the High Street. Finally, a languorous journey by punt from the Barges to Magdalen Bridge more than compensated us for the somnolent half-hour which we had been proposing to spend under the shadow of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... of light from the clouded moon, skulking affrighted somewhere in the grim and sullen purlieus of the sky? She listened, thinking to hear the stir of horses in their stalls, some sound from barn or byre, the wakening of the restless poultry, all snugly housed; but the somnolent stillness of the muffled earth continued unbroken, and only the frantic wind screamed ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... with fat hands, a red, minutely wrinkled face, and very small eyes. Greeted with the respect due to the owner of Cocknage Gardens, a sporting resort where all the best foot-racing and rabbit-coursing took place, he accepted it in somnolent indifference, and immediately took off his coat and sat down in cotton shirt-sleeves. Then he pulled out a red handkerchief and his tobacco-box, and set them on the table. Big ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... calmly awaiting his return; and this feeling presently grew so strong within him that he could scarcely credit his eyes when, upon passing through the screen of concealing foliage, he saw only the three seamen curled up in the boat. They roused themselves from their semi-somnolent condition and sat up to receive him, with glances of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... from memory, but I believe my words are pretty correct. When Lord Brougham had delivered this emphatic utterance, he proceeded with his address, which was a dull affair and did not inspire the least enthusiasm. It was, indeed, a somewhat somnolent discourse, and his audience hardly seemed to wake up till he reached his peroration, which closed with a ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... or otherwise (the amatory ones were the worst), usually faded slowly, like the light from the setting sun or an exhausted coal in the grate, about the end of Puffin's second tumbler, and the gentlemen after that were usually somnolent, but occasionally laid the foundation for some disagreement next day, which they were too sleepy to go into now. Major Flint by this time would have had some five small glasses of whisky (equivalent, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... extreme old age. "The excitable weakness of the old man brings him into great danger of becoming a criminal. The excitability is opposed to slowness and one-sidedness in thought; he is easily surprised by irrelevancies; he is torn from his drowse, and behaves like a somnolent drunkard.... The very old individual is a fanatic about rest—every disturbance of his rest troubles him. Hence, all his anger, all his teasing and quarreling, all his obstinacy and stiffness, have a single device: 'Let me ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... was stated and told off on the frauelein's fingers, Deidrick nodded a resigned acquiescence, and at the finish was fast asleep. Every evening after that Deidrick proposed in perfect good faith, the girl repeated her objections with equal candour, and they were received with somnolent approval. Love-making is very agreeable, and by the usuage of long years it becomes a confirmed habit. In less than a decade it became impossible for Katrina to enjoy her supper without the regular proposal, and Deidrick could not sleep of a night without the preliminary nap ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... summit of our eastern hill." From its clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of theological association—a vague reverberation of old Calvinistic sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent quality. The three years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should suppose, among the happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... connects itself with the main stem from which branch off the rest of his virtues and vices. However, there it was, and perhaps some shrewder psychologist may be able to explain how such a passion could be begotten in a nature otherwise so somnolent. ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... the morrow or indeed even for the day. He was entirely incapable of earning a living and had been successively an actor, a lecturer, a preacher, and a pedagogue. He was a fine scholar of Latin and could quote Terence, Horace, and Plautus in a way that could stir the somnolent soul even of a school-boy. His chief enemy, next to laziness, was drink. He would disappear for days at a time into his study, and afterward explain that he had been engaged in the preparation of his magnum opus, which periodically was just on the ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... more than he had told and Wilding again decided that his only chance of gaining any real information would be at Maryville. Accordingly, he got an automobile and started for that somnolent village on ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... is the offspring of a lioness, by a leopard that coerces her, and, for this reason, cheetas are sterile like mules and all other hybrids. No animal of the same size is as weighty as the cheeta. It is the most somnolent animal on earth. The best are those that are 'hollow-bellied,' roach backed, and have deep black spots on a dark tawny ground, the spots on the back being close to each other; that have the eyes bloodshot, small and narrow; the mouth 'deep and laughing'; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... it loomed ahead. He began to climb upward, almost on all-fours, digging his finger nails into the yellow clay in an instinctive effort to pull himself forward. Finally he gained the top ... The street, somnolent with approaching noon, was deserted—the child had disappeared. He recovered his whirling senses and looked again. This time he saw that the door of the shack stood open. He took a step forward. A figure loomed in the doorway. He shaded his ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... and for whom will the End be? All grows, and seeks and endures its destinies: consider likewise how much grows, as the trees do, whether we think of it or not. So that when your Epimenides, your somnolent Peter Klaus, since named Rip van Winkle, awakens again, he finds it a changed world. In that seven-years' sleep of his, so much has changed! All that is without us will change while we think not of it; much even that is within us. The truth that was yesterday a restless Problem, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... inconvenience, by abandoning as far as we can a fleshy diet? and let us remember, that even on the score of comfort, the pain of indigence is much milder than that which is produced by repletion. We should thus free ourselves at once from a heavy and somnolent condition of body, from many and vehement diseases, from the want of medical assistance, from "the crassitude of the corporeal bond," and above all, from that savage and unnatural strength which incites to base actions, so as to escape ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... day was spent by us in the little town of S——, a comfortable place very slightly disturbed by the fact that it had been already the scene of four battles; there was just this effect, as it seemed to me, that the affairs of the day were carried on with a kind of somnolent indifference.... "You may order your veal," the waiter seemed to say, "but whether you will get it or no is entirely in the hands of God. It is, therefore, of no avail that I should hurry or that you should ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... whites of his eyes caught and reflected the light. The tattooing that framed them appeared like black holes from which the sparks glinted uncannily, and the kava mounting to his brain or to mine gave those sparks a ghastliness that fascinated me in my keen, somnolent state. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... to fly; squeaking and blinded by the luster of the sun, they flew aimlessly about the tree. But after a while from the lower opening there stole out, like lightning, a real tenant, in the person of a monstrous boa, who evidently, digesting the remnants of the last feast in a semi-somnolent state, had not become aroused and did not think of safety until the smoke curled in his nostrils. At the sight of the strong body, which, like a monstrous spring, darted out of the smoking interior of the tree, Stas ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the bridge, the girls laughed and chatted together, but involuntarily they hushed their voices on entering the green shadow of the little town under its slow-marching procession of great trees; and the spell of somnolent silence seized them. ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... warning to all somnolent old ladies, it may not be amiss to enter a little more fully into detail. The attack commenced by her sitting bolt upright in her chair, with her eyes so very particularly open, that it seemed as if, in her case, Macbeth ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... sous le porche, dans l'ombre. L'homme posa sa malle par terre, je le payai, et il s'en alla bien vite.... Derrire lui l'norme porte se referma lourdement, lourdement.... Bientt aprs, un portier somnolent, tenant la main une grosse ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... cows low at gates and fences; when sheep-bells tinkle faintly; when the weary toiler, seated sideways on his weary horse, fares, homewards, nodding sleepily with every plodding hoof-fall, but rousing to give one a drowsy "good night," then who can resist the somnolent charm of the place, save only the "Bull" himself, snorting down in lofty contempt—as rolling of eye, as curly of horn, as stiff as to tail as any indignant bull ever ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... Dana shall raise On a futile foundation of hope, And its glories shall blaze In the somnolent haze Of the mythical ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... office with detached scrutiny while William Rufus Le ffacase occupied it? Somnolent in a leather armchair, he opened tiny, sunken eyes to regard us with less than interest as we entered. Under a shiny alpaca coat he wore an oldfashioned collarless shirt whose neckband was fastened with a diamond ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Average Jones' clean cut, agreeable, but rather stolidly neutral face underwent a subtle transformation. Another personality looked out from the deep-set, somnolent, gray eyes; a personality resolute, forceful and quietly alert. It was apparently belied by the hesitant drawl, which, as all who had ever seen the Ad-Visor at his chosen pursuits well knew, signified awakened or intensified interest in the matter ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... upon his desk from all sides. For a time he struggled manfully: for a time thereafter he wallowed desperately. Then he sent out a far cry for help. The cry smote upon the ear of McGuire Ellis, "Hoong!" ejaculated that somnolent toiler, coming up out of deep waters. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... new life. If she thought at all, 'twas in the symbol of the old Apostle, "in Him we live and move and have our being." She recalled that God had been defined in the consciousness of the race as Love. Deep draughts of new existence whelmed her. No longer life coursed somnolent through unconscious veins. Life ran riotous of gladness tingling to a living joy so poignant it became pain. Was it fool-joy born of swifter pulse and time-old inheritance in the flesh? Was it the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... somnolent elder at the end of the table, whose nobly cut face was seared with lines of physical pain endured and outlived, withdrew a very small pipe from his mouth ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... bedraggled, chattering in a high fever; a case of acute pneumonia. Her delirium had kept Tilda—who was preternaturally sharp for her nine years—awake and curious during the better part of two night-watches. Thereafter, for a day and a night and half a day, the patient had lain somnolent, breathing hard, at intervals feebly conscious. In one of these intervals her eyes had wandered and found the child; and since then had painfully sought her a dozen times, and found her ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... bloodless and sallow. He lay quite motionless except for the scarcely perceptible rise and fall of his chest; his eyes were nearly closed, his features relaxed, and, though he was not actually asleep, he seemed to be in a dreamy, somnolent, lethargic state, as if under the influence of ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... like the dogs you are!' cried the Captain"—with feet perched high she swooped down the slope, her heart pounding with excitement, narrowly escaping collision at the bottom with an empty van, crawling through the heat, manned by a somnolent, huddled driver. Its hollow, cumbrous rattling pointed sharply the loneliness of the silent road, almost bare now of houses, for they were on the very outskirts of the village, and in a flash Caroline knew it for what it was, ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... the Chamberlain push knew that even English-Canada, long somnolent under a colonial regime, was not in the mood to accept the radical innovations that were being planned in Whitehall; and he knew, still better, that his own people would be against the programme to a man. The colonialism of the French-Canadians was ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... Monday night arrived which was to bring the final test of strength. Picture the large, ponderous structure of black granite—erected at the expense of millions and suggesting somewhat the somnolent architecture of ancient Egypt—which served as the city hall and county court-house combined. On this evening the four streets surrounding it were packed with thousands of people. To this throng Cowperwood has become an astounding figure: his wealth fabulous, his heart iron, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Beholding the somnolent proprietor, he advanced quietly to the middle of the big room. Then, with malicious enjoyment of the effect, he banged his riding-crop violently upon the table, close to ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... time, how the north had streamed, and the neighboring houses had been rosy red. But at this hour of the brooding, sultry fall, there was a bitter fragrance in the air, and the world seemed tuned to the somnolent sound of crickets, singing the fields to sleep. That one little note brooded over the earth, and all the living things upon it: hovering, and crooning, and lulling them to the rest decreed from of old. The homely beauty of it smote upon him, though it could not cheer. A hideous progress seemed to ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... torpor of the soul, a somnolent sense of comfort in spite of the pains which still continued, but which, however, had ceased to make themselves felt. It was one of those sensations which we are willing to endure and not any of those frightful wrenches against which our ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... lovely seneschal! so somnolent, so statuesque! Come forth you exquisite grotesque! half woman and ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... lazily; but in this laziness there was a certain peculiar grace, and it would seem that behind the laziness was concealed a huge force, an unconquerable force, as yet unconscious of itself, not having, as yet, created for itself clear desires and aims. And the absence of consciousness in this half-somnolent existence cast upon its whole beautiful expanse a shade of melancholy. Submissive patience, the silent expectation of something new and more active was audible even in the call of the cuckoo, as it flew with the wind from ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... retreat almost at once from surroundings that sorted so ill with his habits. Later on, perhaps, he would accustom himself and grow resigned to this luxurious inactivity. In the meantime the novelty of it fretted him, and it was into the presence of a peevish and rather somnolent M. de Kercadiou that Andre-Louis was ushered in the early hours of the afternoon of that Sunday in June. He was unannounced, as had ever been the custom at Gavrillac. This because Benoit, M. de Kercadiou's old seneschal, had accompanied his seigneur ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... them. Down the quiet, tree-shaped sidewalk, Mr. Penfield Evans strode into the somnolent afternoon, turning down Huron Street. At the remote end of the block and before her large frame mansion of a thousand angles and wooden lace work, Mrs. Harvey Herrington's low car sidled to her curb-stone, racy-looking as a hound. That lady herself, large and modish, was ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... thought of that calamity. An hour and a half, perhaps an hour and three-quarters, if the doctor was long-winded, and then would begin again that active agony from which, even in the dull ache of the present, he shrunk as from the bite of fire. He saw, in a vision, the family pew, the somnolent cushions, the Bibles, the psalm-books, Maria with her smelling-salts, his father sitting spectacled and critical; and at once he was struck with indignation, not unjustly. It was inhuman to go off to church, and leave a sinner in suspense, unpunished, unforgiven. ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... well. He tossed restlessly in the caressing softness of his bed. He turned a knob in the head panel of his bed, tried to yield to the soothing music that seemed to come from nowhere. He turned another knob, watched the marching, playing, whirling of somnolent colors on the domed ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... A somnolent atmosphere, still touched by the smell of gunpowder, greeted him as he strode majestically down the halls. Somehow each person who bowed to him seemed to do it with the melancholy precision of one who has been up for six nights in ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... one of the most tremendous roars I ever heard. It was so chose to me that, in the confusion of my sleepy brain, it seemed to be far more terrible than that even of the gorilla. I was mistaken in this, however, and no doubt my semi-somnolent condition tended to increase ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... which the Transcontinental trains thunder, is faced by a long, straggling green, and fringing the green is a row of wooden shops and houses equally straggling. They have a somnolent and spiritless air. Behind is a wedge of pretty dwellings stretching down to the river, tailing off into an Indian encampment by the stream, where, about dingy tepees, a dozen or ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... appearance of eyes that could sparkle; besides, his whole countenance possessed the configuration of one who had been born for a life of activity. On the contrary, however—whether from a malady or some other cause—the man appeared as somnolent and immobile as if both his visage and body were carved out of marble. In a word, with all the exterior marks that denote the possession of an active and ardent soul, Pepe the Sleeper appeared the most inactive and apathetic ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... minutes past five Dick Bellamy stopped Melchard's car outside the booking-office of somnolent Harthborough's dead-alive station—the junction of the single-line track to Whitebay and its bathing machines with the double-track branch of the G.N.R. ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still higher, on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... less than Claggett Chew's cabin, the door of which had been left open so that Osterbridge Hawsey could watch the fight with the least possible discomfort. He sat, somnolent, in a comfortable chair, his long legs stretched out before him, smoking a clay pipe. His attention wandering, as it so often did, he failed to see the mouse who ran under his legs into the shadow beneath them. The frantic mouse now determined, in the seconds left to it for decision, to attempt ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... unbroken. A far-off commiserating murmur indicated that Mrs. Harkutt was receiving her guests. The cool breath of the wet leaves without slightly stirred the white dimity curtains, and somewhere from the darkened eaves there was a still, somnolent drip. Presently a hurried whisper and a half-laugh appeared to be suppressed in the outer passage or hall. There was another moment of hesitation and the door opened suddenly and ostentatiously, disclosing Phemie, with a taller and slighter young woman, her elder ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... and lit a cigarette, he essayed for the second time to arouse the Baron; but getting nothing but the most somnolent responses, he set out for a stroll, visiting the gardens, stables, kennels, and keeper's house, and even inspecting a likely pool or two upon the river, and making in the course of it several useful acquaintances among the ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... way to the other end of the street, where Cousin Tryphena's tiny, two-roomed house stood, we always laid bare the secrets of her somnolent, respectable, unprofitable life; we always informed our visitors that she lived and kept up a social position on two hundred and fifteen dollars a year, and that she had never been further from home than to the next village. We always drew attention ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... himself up among the hay, unobserved by the somnolent driver, and had ridden thus an hour or more in that delicious state between waking, and sleeping, ere the waggoner discovered him, whereupon ensued the ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... that he might have to leave it. He had his spring work and his autumn work; in the winter he ordained various small indoor jobs for himself; and in the summer, in common with the rest of the place, he grew somnolent. He sat by the hacked and stained kitchen-table (which he seldom scrubbed, and on which he tried his knife, sawed bones, and chopped meat) and slept the afternoons away in the ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... admired. As a general rule, the members speak shamefully ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and so are the fines. The Ballot Question—oldest of dialectic nightmares—is often found astride of a somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of GENERAL-UTILITY men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and they fill as many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the 'Princess's,' which I found doing duty on one evening ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... line of railway darted past Kingcombe, in the vain hope of waking that somnolent town. It was a pleasant whirl across the usual breezy flats of moorland, by some meadows where a network of serpentine streams flashed in the sun. Agatha felt more like her own self; with her, the spirit of Nature was always an exorciser of internal demons; ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... auriferous insect, who was for four years comptroller of the currency, is remembered in Washington chiefly for a remarkable burst of speed displayed one night when his timorous mind conceived the idea that a somnolent hackman was going to rob him. He had his dress suit case in one hand and his plug hat in the other, and he covered three blocks in ten seconds. The cabby, whom he had hired, waked in time to discover the meteoric dash, and was the ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of Steens, and a trifle over, lies the market town of Helston (or 'Helleston' as men wrote it in 1734, and ought to write it still); on the road to nowhere and somnolent then as now, but then as now waking up once a year, on the 8th of May, to celebrate the Feast of Flora and welcome back the summer. She is brought in at daybreak with green boughs and singing, and at noon the citizens dance through the streets ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... remaining taxi without asking me to share it and vanished in a cloud of gasoline smoke. I was in no mood for waiting; besides I was going to be democratic. I took a surface car up Lexington Avenue and stood between the distended knees of a fat and somnolent Italian gentleman for thirty blocks. The car was intolerably stuffy and smelled strongly of wet umbrellas and garlic. By the time I reached the cross-street on which I lived it had begun to pour. I turned up my coat collar and ran to ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... this hour?" murmured Mr. Welles. His voice was sunk to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his waistcoat moved slowly and rhythmically with his breathing. It was evident that he did not in the least care whether it was a train ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... few pianists get a real sostenuto. An "Allegro Patetico" (op. 12), "Medea" (op. 13), and a set of small pieces (one of them a burlesque called "A Caudle Lecture," with a garrulous "said she" and a somnolent "said he") make up his rather short ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... tree meant a lot more'n what it let on, pointin' up this way!" Casey muttered, staring down upon a somnolent wilderness blanketed with hushed midnight. "If it thinks it's got Casey whipped, it better think agin and think quick. I'll give it somethin' to point at, 'fore I ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... or two of muslin, an end or two of ribbon collected for conversion into doll-millinery. The doll, duly night- capped and night-gowned, lay in its cradle; she was rocking it to sleep, with an air of the most perfect faith in its possession of sentient and somnolent faculties; her eyes, at the same time, being engaged with a picture-book, which lay open ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... best episodes of the Ramayana are quite omitted by Kalidasa: for example, the story of the jealous humpback who eggs on Queen Kaikeyi to demand her two boons; the beautiful scene in which Sita insists on following Rama into the forest; the account of the somnolent giant Pot-ear, a character quite as good as Polyphemus. Other fine episodes are so briefly alluded to as to lose all their charm: for example, the story of the golden deer that attracts the attention of Rama while Ravana is stealing his wife; the ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... went on their way till night, when Skrymir gave up his wallet of provisions to Thor and his two companions, and bade them supply themselves,—he meanwhile composing himself to sleep, snoring so loudly that the forest trembled. Thor could not undo the giant's wallet, and in his wrath he smote the somnolent lubber with his mallet, a crushing blow. Skrymir simply awoke, and inquired whether a leaf had not fallen upon his head from the oak-tree under which he was lying. Conceive the chagrin and shame ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... &c. v.;shilly-shally &c. (irresolute) 605. sleeping, &c. v.; asleep; fast asleep, dead asleep, sound asleep; in a sound sleep; sound as a top, dormant, comatose; in the arms of Morpheus, in the lap of Morpheus. sleepy, sleepful[obs3]; dozy[obs3], drowsy, somnolent, torpescent[obs3], lethargic, lethargical[obs3]; somnifacient[obs3]; statuvolent[obs3], statuvolic[obs3]; heavy, heavy with sleep; napping; somnific[obs3], somniferous; soporous[obs3], soporific, soporiferous[obs3]; hypnotic; balmy, dreamy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Drummond, that placid pool in the somnolent shades, and Mr. P. put up at the house of a melancholy man, with a fur cap, who lived in a cabin on the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... At somnolent Cordoba I left the line to Vera Cruz for that to the southward. The car was packed with the dirty, foul-tongued wives and the children and bundles of a company of soldiers recently sent against the rebels of Juchitan. Ever since leaving Boca del Monte the day before I had been coming ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... room he stood at gaze like a kitten of good family beholding a mangy mongrel asleep in its pink basket. For on his bed was Mrs. Zapp, her rotund curves stretching behind her large flat feet, whose soles were toward him. She was noisily somnolent; her stays creaked regularly as she breathed, except when she moved ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... the disadvantage of following upon a speaker who had reduced the House to a state of somnolent despair. Lord Selborne has an episcopal appearance, the manner of an author of hymns, and the unctuous delivery of a High Church speaker. But like most of the orators of the House of Lords, he considered ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... opportunity for this), temperance in food, and especially—in the light of what has been said above—temperance in drink, are all incidentally of value as aids to the maintenance of purity. So also is the avoidance of the habit of lying in bed in a semi-somnolent condition after true sleep has finally departed. A Christian's body is meant to be a temple of the Holy Ghost, and no other spirit, whether of impurity or of sloth, should be allowed to have ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... befell, too, that the following noon—this day being a Sunday, warm, clear, and somnolent—Anne Charteris and Rudolph Musgrave sat upon the lawn before Matocton, and little Roger Musgrave was with them. In fact, these two had been high-handedly press-ganged by this small despot to serve against an enemy then ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... long time, during these after-dinner evening visits, he had often allowed himself to lapse into occasional silence that was slightly somnolent, and was accustomed to fall into the easy attitudes of an old friend who does not stand on ceremony. But now he seemed suddenly to rouse himself and to show the alertness of men who do their best to be agreeable, who take thought as to what they ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... the somnolent street and idly turned the pages. There were several pictures, but he had seen them all many times and only the one labelled "'Varsity Athletic Field—Gymnasium Beyond" claimed his interest for a moment. ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... I did not sleep, tired as I was—I was more than half afraid to close my eyes, and when I finally did summon up sufficient courage to do so, there ensued a series of disturbances that successfully banished any further somnolent inclination for ...
— Six Days on the Hurricane Deck of a Mule - An account of a journey made on mule back in Honduras, - C.A. in August, 1891 • Almira Stillwell Cole
... was always in the habit of giving precedence to his mistress, and he really had forgotten for a moment that the somnolent Nym was to be regarded as his Sovereign. So his future Majesty, with Bertram's assistance, mounted the bay charger, and his sister Alianora was placed on the pillion ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... to get moving pictures of a rhino charge. Mr. Akeley had a machine and our plan of action was simple. We would first locate the rhino, usually somnolent under a thorn tree or browsing soberly out in the open. We would then get to the leeward of him and slowly advance the machine; Mr. Akeley in the middle and Stephenson and I on each side with our double-barreled cordite rifles. In case the charge became too ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... (irresolute) 605. sleeping, &c v.; asleep; fast asleep, dead asleep, sound asleep; in a sound sleep; sound as a top, dormant, comatose; in the arms of Morpheus, in the lap of Morpheus. sleepy, sleepful^; dozy^, drowsy, somnolent, torpescent^, lethargic, lethargical^; somnifacient^; statuvolent^, statuvolic^; heavy, heavy with sleep; napping; somnific^, somniferous; soporous^, soporific, soporiferous^; hypnotic; balmy, dreamy; unawakened, unawakened. sedative &c 174. Adv. inactively &c adj.; at leisure &c 685. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... wilderness of rock and forest, far from any house; as he sat with his mates about the evening fire, the trains passing on the track were their next, and indeed their only, neighbours, except the wild things of the wood. Lovely weather, light and monotonous employment, long hours of somnolent camp-fire talk, long sleepless nights, when he reviewed his foolish and fruitless career as he rose and walked in the moonlit forest, an occasional paper of which he would read all, the advertisements ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... its old weather-beaten church or public building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood- red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled"; Burntisland where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my pupils. The sensibility to hypnotic phenomena is due to the anterior portion of the middle lobe of the brain—to the portion which is developed one inch behind the external angle of the eye, by exciting which we bring on the somnolent condition. The predominance of this region renders the person liable to the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... which human power could not go, even in suffering. It was a merciful nature asserting itself. Her eyes closed, slowly, gently, with a drowsy helplessness. Once her elbow slipped from the sill of the window and awoke her. A somnolent thought that she would go to bed passed dully through her mind. But she did not act upon it. She propped her head upon her hand once more, and, in a moment, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... Persia until Persia had become of a strength to threaten the world. Lu was growing strong; and Ts'i—renowned military Ts'i—thought she ought to be doing something. Thus in our own time, whenever somnolent obsolete Turkey tried to clean her house, Russia, land-hungry and looking to a Thanksgiving Dinner presently, felt a call to send down emissaries, and—see that the cleaning should not ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... suspense—this horrible oppression of acknowledged failure. To be under further obligations to Herr Renwick was an added bitterness to her wounded pride, but hope had already beggared her and she could not choose. She got into coat and hat, and after another careful scrutiny of her somnolent guardian, quietly opened the shutters of the side window, stepped out into the shadow of the hedge, and made her way ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... Christina protracted on that very account. She then dressed and bandaged the arm, and proceeded to skim—as no one else in the castle would do—the basin of soup, with which she then fed her patient as he leant back in the corner of the settle, at first in the same somnolent, half-conscious state in which he had been ever since the relief from the severe pain; but after a few spoonfuls the light and life came back to his eye, and he broke out, "Thanks, thanks, gracious lady! This is the Lady Baroness for me! My young lord was the only wise man! Thanks, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge |
