"Soporific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and colour, because she knew he enjoyed them. She had a delightful touch. He sometimes felt as if they walked the English lanes together. His intimacy with her neighbours, and her neighbourhood, was one of his relaxations. He found himself thinking of old Doby and Mrs. Welden, as a sort of soporific measure, when he lay awake at night. She had sent photographs of Stornham, of Dunholm Castle, and of Dole, and had even found an old engraving of Lady Alanby in her youth. Her evident liking for the Dunholms had pleased ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rather the fusion of realism with romance more simply happy and harmonious: the rescue of the injured wife by a faithful lover from the tomb in which, like Juliet, she has been laid while under the soporific influence of a supposed poison could hardly have been better or more beautifully treated by any but the very greatest among Heywood's fellow-poets. There is no merit of this kind in the later play: but from the dramatic if not even from the ethical ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... turned from the path, and, followed by L'Isle, was soon ascending the hill. Moodie, somewhat under the influence of his soporific draughts, was in a reverie, wondering whether Lord Strathern would get his letter in time to send a troop of horse after the fugitives, and whether it might not come within the provisions of the military code to have L'Isle ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... they could last much longer; but their powers of endurance were greater than he had supposed. It will readily be imagined that German songs with a good chorus, the solo parts being very short, and received with the utmost impatience by the chorus, were even less soporific in their effect than the flirtations—though boisterous beyond all conventional propriety—of German housemaids ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... Republican whisky. Bottle after bottle, was passed down the line, and as it gurgled down the throats of these enthusiastic marchers they smacked their lips with as much gusto as did Rip Van Winkle when partaking of the soporific potation that produced his twenty years' sleep. One of the cardinal principles of the Democracy, at that time was to "love rum and hate niggers." As the entire stock was disposed of before the club resumed its line of march, the ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... of June was too strong a soporific for Remember's desire to keep awake and hear the catamounts scream, as he had heard they did in those woods. Hannah was left quite alone to keep watch and to tend the fire, her heart in her mouth, jumping and starting at every shadow cast ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... with the same secret motive of preserving unsuspected the character assumed, he took a deck passage in the packet. It coming on to rain violently, he stole down into the forecastle, dimly lit by a solitary swinging lamp, where were two men industriously smoking, and filling the narrow hole with soporific vapors. These induced strange drowsiness in Israel, and he pondered how best he might indulge it, for a time, without imperilling the precious documents ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... went on reading, though my cough was very troublesome in the mornings and at night.... Sometimes Ivan Matveitch made me play the piano. But music always had a soporific influence on his nerves. His eyes closed at once, his head nodded in time, and only rarely I heard, 'C'est du Steibelt, n'est-ce pas? Jouez-moi du Steibelt!' Ivan Matveitch looked upon Steibelt as ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... incautiously fortified himself for the ordeal by taking a drink before arriving. He was nervously early, and immediately took a seat in the empty church near the open door. The quiet of the building, the drowsy buzzing of flies, and perhaps the soporific effect of the liquor caused his eyes to close and his head to fall forward on his breast repeatedly. He was recovering himself for the fourth time when he suddenly received a violent cuff on the ear, and was knocked backward ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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; unawakened, unawakened. sedative &c. 174. Adv. inactively &c. adj.; at leisure &c. 685. Phr. the eyes begin to draw straws; "bankrupt of life yet prodigal of ease" [Dryden]; " better ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his skittish references to the coming Conference on the Second Chamber. When he expressed the hope that Lord CURZON would make an explicit statement, on the ground that their Lordships' House was in no need of a soporific, I fully expected one of the occupants of the mausoleum to rise and reprove him in the words of Dr. JOHNSON, "Sir, in order to be facetious it is not necessary to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... state. My appetite served me sufficiently to eat with, but not for enjoyment. Nothing has a zest in my present widowed state. [Thus far I had written, when Mr. Emerson called.] After dinner, I lay down on the couch, with the Dial in my hand as a soporific, and had a short ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... A soporific quality lurked in the quiet solitude, and Varney, sunk in a deck-chair, yawned. They had decided at dinner that they would do nothing that night but go to bed, for it seemed plain that there was nothing else to do: little ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... they progress when they have a certain sufficient amount of variability in their nature. This seems to be the old style of explanation by occult qualities. It seems like saying that opium sends men to sleep because it has a soporific virtue, and bread feeds because it has an alimentary quality. But the explanation is not so absurd. It says: 'The beginning of civilisation is marked by an intense legality; that legality is the very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together; but that legality—that ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... cannot remember where I read it. The baffling thing about this fiction is that it expresses nothing, and therefore is not really a part of literature. The features of my colleagues when absorbing a first-rate soporific of this nature remind me of the symptoms of catalepsy enumerated in a treatise of forensic medicine which I once read. The influence is even physical. It is generally associated with a recumbent position, repeated yawning, and excessive languor. Loss of memory, too, is only ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... the attack as being in the very air and so forth. I felt it personally, but the Germans did not feel it or, at least, the British did not want them to feel it. There was no more sign of an earthly storm brewing as one looked at the field than of a thunderstorm as one looked at the sky. Perfect soporific tranquillity possessed the surroundings except for shell-bursts, and their meagerness intensified the aspect, strangely enough, on that battlefield where I had never seen a quieter afternoon since the Somme offensive had begun. One could ask nothing better than that ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... teeth he cut the broken leg off, and went away. It was supposed that he would not come again; but two nights afterwards he was found fast in a trap—in each case tempted by the castoreum. The stake was always licked, or sucked, clean. The substance seems to act as a soporific, as the creatures, after tasting it, always remain a day without coming out of their houses. So wary generally are the beavers, that a trapper is always careful not to leave his scent on the spot. To avoid this he frequently cuts down a tree, and walks on its branches ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... delightedly on the subject, as do all of Lawyer Putney's friends, in Mr. Howells's story, "Annie Kilburn"; and yet even the united testimony of Hatboro' fails to clear up our lingering doubts concerning Mr. Putney's wit. The dull people of that soporific town are really and truly and realistically dull. There is no mistaking them. The stamp of veracity is upon every brow. They pay morning calls, and we listen to their conversation with a dreamy impression that we have heard it all many ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... principles—for a generation somewhat obscured, it must be confessed, by the Shining Sword and the Almighty Dollar, by the lengthening shadow of Imperialism and the soporific haze of Historic Rights and the Survival of the Fittest—it is to these principles, these "glittering generalities," that the minds of men are turning again in this day of desolation as a refuge from the cult ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... soporific and very restful. We begin to distinguish individuals amongst the many passengers, but so far no one seems particularly conspicuous. They are rather good-looking as a crowd, and one or two children are like angels—at least we ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... and Elinor felt sure he would be glad of the opportunity now, if Burleigh would only go, but Burleigh wouldn't. In monotonous monologue his voice came floating up to the second floor, drowsy, unbroken in its soporific flow, and the girls themselves, after the morning's drive in the clear, bracing air, felt as though forty winks would be a blessing. Could it be that Burleigh lingered on in hopes of their reappearance below? Might ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... but he was not the same easy tripping sinner and flippant soul. He was in that yeasty condition of his years when action and reflection alternately usurp the mind; remorse succeeded dissipation, and indulgences offered the soporific to remorse. The friends of the two imagined that Algernon was, or would become, his evil genius. In reality, Edward was the perilous companion. He was composed of better stuff. Algernon was but an airy animal ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in snags and of a deeper and more luscious purple than any of them. Near its junction with the Mandragora it runs uphill for several miles, with the result that the canoes were constantly capsizing. The waters of Mandragora are of a curiously soporific character, while those of the River Madeira have a toxic quality which renders them dangerous when drunk ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... and exercise act as a soporific! That was a better chance than the new promise which Honora was vexed to find nurse holding out to poor little Owen, that if he would be a good boy, he was going to papa. She was puzzled how to act towards a person not exactly under ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "all the fine flavour and exhilarating properties of coffee, without any of its deleterious effects. The plant being of a soporific nature, the coffee made from it when drank at night produces a tendency to sleep, instead of exciting wakefulness, and may be safely used as a cheap and wholesome substitute for the Arabian berry, being equal in substance and flavour to ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... and munificently reward those whose assiduity promotes the general welfare; oblige nature by your industry to open her immense stores, to become propitious to your exertions; do these things, and the gods will oppose nothing to your felicity. Leave to idle thinkers, to soporific dreamers, to waking visionaries, to useless enthusiasts, the unproductive task, the unfruitful occupation, of fathoming depths, from which ye ought sedulously to divert your attention; enjoy with moderation, the benefits attached to your present existence; augment their number ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... is impossible longer to "look" at him, what shall she do! Tell her woe to the world, seek a soporific, repudiate the scheme of things, or from the vantage point of her failure turn to the untried relations of her life, call upon ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... better fitted for his work. He came, a Scotsman, to a colony one-third Scottish, and the name of Bruce was itself soporific to the opposition of a perfervid section of the reformers. His wife was the daughter of Lord Durham, whom Canadians regarded as the beginner of a new age of Canadian constitutionalism. He had been appointed by a Whig Government, ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... forelegs gathered under him, and his muzzle on the mole-hills; so that he had five supportings from his mother earth. Moreover, the linhay itself was full of very ancient cow dung; than which there is no balmier and more maiden soporific. Hence I resolved, upon the whole, though grieving about breakfast, to light a pipe, and go to sleep; or at least until the hot sun ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... abstractedly out of the windows to the wondering envy of the little ones. A faint hum, as of invisible insects, gradually pervaded the school; the more persistent droning of a large bee had become dangerously soporific. The hot breath of the pines without had invaded the doors and windows; the warped shingles and weather-boarding at times creaked and snapped under the rays of the vertical and unclouded sun. A gentle perspiration broke out like a mild epidemic ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... proves that he is right. Slowly and gapingly the audience arises, strolls sleepily out of the door, and entering wrong stages, is carried to all manner of wrong destinations. So strong is the soporific influence of the Phillipic drama, that not until hours after the play is over, does the average spectator become sufficiently wakeful to express an intelligible regret that Mr. WALLER and Mrs. MOLLENHAUER should not have made their reappearance ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... nerve-rending fault of readers who vainly endeavour to personate the characters in dialogue, and to give impressiveness in the descriptive portions. She never made a remark, or asked her hearer's opinion. If the Countess was in the humour to sleep, the reading was soporific; if she desired to listen, she felt that her companion was not trying to bias her judgment by the introduction of dramatic intonation and effect. With an even, untiring correctness of utterance, Miss ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... RADCLIFF, &c. &c. They also assert, that the policy of the royalist-party was not unconnected with this propagation of cavernous, cadaverous adventures, ideas, and illusions, intended, they say, by the impression of a new moral terror to infatuate their countrymen again with the dull and soporific prestiges of popery. They see with joy that the taste for pleasure has assumed the ascendency, at least in Paris, and that novels in the English style no longer make any one tremble, at night by the fireside, but the old beldams ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... it; nothing much more exciting than a crop failure ever happened there. The main topic of conversation was the weather and, as Mark Twain said, everybody talked about it, but nothing was done. Within sixty days this soporific village became a roaring bedlam; every town lot was leased, derricks rose out of chicken runs, boilers panted in front yards, mobs of strangers surged through the streets and the air grew shrill with their ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... me, as a sort of joke. Clearly Wagner, according to my way of thinking, then deserves to rank among the most effective narcotics known to modern science. I have tried all sorts of other things—sulfonal, trionel, bromide powders, and all the rest and not one of them produced anything like the soporific results that two doses of Wagner brought about in one instant, and best of all there was no reaction. No splitting headache or shaky hand the next day, but just the calm, quiet, contented feeling that goes with the sense of having got ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... of one of the many knightly orphans of romance, exposed in woods to the nurture of bears, his father slain, his mother dead of grief—a ditty he had perhaps chosen for its soporific powers—when a gay bugle blast rang through ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of such hard metal, in spite of its liability to the fleshly weaknesses of standing in need of repose after chops, and of requiring to be coaxed to sleep by the soporific agency of sweet-breads, that it utterly set at naught the predictions of Mrs Wickam, and showed no symptoms of decline. Yet, as Paul's rapt interest in the old lady continued unbated, Mrs Wickam would not budge an inch from the position she had taken up. Fortifying and entrenching ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... In the soporific scent of the lilies and the stocks, the night drowsed in the darkness of the garden; Mike unlocked the gate and passed into the shadows, and hypnotized by the heavenly spaces, in which there were a few stars; by the earth ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... man whose connubial rights seemed to stand in his way. Full of impatience for the consummation of the diabolical project when once he had determined on its execution, and having given to his victim a strong soporific, which threw him into a heavy sleep, he proceeds to urge on the faithless wife to the act of stabbing her unconscious husband. This tragedy she performed with one of the unhappy man's own instruments of trade, under ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... concert. I have been reading Mme. Blavatsky's latest book, and getting quite interested in occult philosophy. Unfortunately I have to do all my reading in bed, and I don't find the book as soothing a soporific as most new books. For keeping one awake I find Theosophy as ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... our good pastor, who was much afflicted with what Mrs. Partington calls "brown creeturs." He had harped on one string of his vocal apparatus so long that like Jeshuran of old "it waxed fat and kicked." Exceedingly monotonous and soporific was his voice, and it was necessary to strain every nerve to tell whether he was preaching, praying or reading, the words were much ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... social charms; but the enormity of the offence will be greatly modified by a brief review of the attending circumstances. If you will but consider that the crackling of burning wood in a huge Franklin stove is strongly soporific in its tendencies,—that the cushion of a capacious arm-chair, constructed and adjusted as if with a single eye to a delicious dose, nay, to a long succession of doses, is a powerful temptation to a sleepy soul,—that the regular, and, it must be confessed, somewhat monotonous click, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Ben put the question calmly, considering his elation at his good luck. He had made up his mind that he might have to spend days in this soporific hamlet. ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... your pardon, sir, but I don't know who you are; and if you mean Miss Wilkins, by 'her,' she is very ill, but we hope not dying. She was very ill, indeed, yesterday; very dangerously ill, I may say, but she is having a good sleep, in consequence of a soporific medicine, and we are ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... do the infant Hercules his work even on bread and water. Then the governor deprived the obstinate little dog of his chapel. "If you won't work, I'm [participle] if you shall pray." The boy missed the recreation of hearing Mr. Jones hum the Liturgy; missed it in a way you cannot conceive. Your soporific was ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... cup to the health of an apotheosized recusant, who was his supererogatory patron, and an assistant recognizance in the immobile nomenclature of interstitial molecular phonics. The contents of the vase proving soporific, a stolid plebeian took from its cerements a heraldic violoncello, and, assisted by a plethoric diocesan from Pall Mall, who performed on a sonorous piano-forte, proceeded to wake the clangorous echoes of the Empyrean. They bade the prolyx Caucasian gentlemen not to misconstrue ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... 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. Phr. the eyes begin to draw straws; bankrupt of life yet prodigal of ease [Dryden]; better 50 years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay [Tennyson]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... reading from a book written in the dead language, is to read from a book that is unintelligible. To listen to such makes no tax upon the intellect, and with the right accessories is soporific, restful, pleasing and to be commended. If it does not supply an idea, it at least imparts a feeling. Mrs. Eddy's success in literature arose from the extreme muddiness of her thinking ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... you shall sing me to sleep every night, especially with that song of Marlena; it is soporific ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... instead of repeating these soporific banalities, ought to have been able to discuss seriously the fundamental thesis of socialism, which, through the social ownership of the land and the means of production, tends to assure to every individual the conditions of an ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... The Sunken Bell exert a very unpropitious influence upon the mood of the average theatre-goer. These poems are not plays; and the innocent spectator, being told that they are, is made to believe that poetic drama must be necessarily a soporific thing. And when this belief is once lodged in his uncritical mind, it is difficult to dispel it, even with a long course of Othello and Hamlet. Paolo and Francesca was a good poem, but a bad play; and its weakness as a play was not excusable by its beauty as a poem. Cyrano ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... spent the hours in loneliness and misery. Mr. Wyvern called, but even him she begged through a servant to excuse her; her mother likewise came, and her she talked with for a few minutes, then pleaded headache. At nine o'clock in the evening she went to her bedroom. She had a soporific at hand, remaining from the time of her illness, and in dread of a sleepless night she ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... probably unacquainted. Leo, whose knowledge of the Eskimo tongue was rapidly extending, sought to counteract the patient's ferocity by preaching forgiveness and patience. Being unsuccessful, he had recourse to a soporific plant which he had recently discovered. To administer an overdose of this was not unnatural, perhaps, in a youthful doctor. Absolute prostration was not the precise result he had hoped for, but it was the result, and it had the happy effect ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... quietude: not a sound even was heard throughout the whole vast palace. Outside, however, the guards of honor on duty, and the patrol of musketeers, paced up and down; and the sound of their feet could be heard on the gravel walks. It seemed to act as an additional soporific for the sleepers, while the murmuring of the wind through the trees, and the unceasing music of the fountains whose waters tumbled in the basin, still went on uninterruptedly, without being disturbed at the slight noises and items ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... T'yonni and I spent an hour at my house before they walked home to bed, and Choti read as a soporific, with a few bottles of Munich beer, the "Sermon to the Fishes" of St. Antonius. As he read, we heard the joyous stridence of an accordion in a hula harmony. The upaupahura was beginning in the grove where Uritaata lived. The austere St. Antonius had lectured long ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... impossible for her to quit the hotel, and he could not very well separate himself from her. She continued for some time in shrieking hysterics, varied by fainting fits; and when she became quieter, under the influence of a soporific administered by the doctor, she declared herself quite too ill and exhausted to rise from her bed. Her husband remained with her night and day, until the second morning, when he escaped from her sight and ken for a couple of hours, and absolutely refused to tell her where he had been. His refusal ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... there was not any soporific in adopting was not agonising. There had not come to be division. There was that article. They saw that away. It was not a comfort. They had that to keep the place away. They were not blameworthy. They had ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... flowers came from the borders and the house seemed to be sleeping in the hot sunshine. Everything was beautiful, well-ordered, and tranquil, but he knew if he stayed there long he would hear the cry of the black geese and the clang of flung-down rails ring through the soporific calm. Something in the girl's face indicated that she might find the calm oppressive and ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... is really exciting in a way, we must expect something more soporific. Martesie takes the place of her absent mistress to some extent, and a good deal of what might be mistaken for "Passerelle"[169] flirtation takes place, or would do so, if it were not that Cyrus would, of course, die rather than pay attention to anybody but Mandane ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... It exhales a soporific, world-forgotten fragrance. There is no market here, no commercial or social life, save a few greybeards discussing memories on some doorstep; the only mirthful note is a swarm of young boys playing hockey on the sand-heaps, amid furious ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... villages of denial. It was one of those numberless books everybody is supposed to have read. For that reason he had found it almost impossible to begin. But he was desperate enough to read even a classic. He hoped that it would be a soporific. That was his definition of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... hard, out of doors, all day. When evening comes he gets his newspaper, sits down by the fire and pretends to read. But I have noticed that he rarely reads ten minutes before he drops asleep. When he comes to church the same phenomenon occurs. He cannot resist the soporific tendencies of the furnaces. By the time Mr. Work gets fairly into secondly, Farmer Faragon is sound asleep. So he does not even listen to the preaching. Is he then a drone? Suppose you make a calculation how many mouths he feeds indirectly by the products of his farm. I cannot even guess. ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... in the same condition, was soon after seen his wife, who, of weaker conformation, had more quickly yielded to the soporific effect of the upas poison, from which, when it has once pervaded the blood, there is no ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... crushed out, their souls are twisted and deformed just as toil twists and deforms their bodies. They are on the same level as the city laborer. It makes me wild to think of it. The very religion they hear is a soporific. They are taught to be content here that they may be happy hereafter. Suppose ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... whispered in the ear of his host, "I did not know that I was such a friend of yours." A Roman knight having died enormously in debt, Augustus ordered them to buy him his bed-pillow at the auction, observing: "The pillow of a man who could sleep when he owed so much must be truly soporific." A man who had been removed from a cavalry command and asked for an allowance, "not from any mercenary motive, but that I may seem to have resigned upon obtaining the grant from you," he dismissed with the words: "Tell ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... of rousing Christophe, on whom academic art had acted as a soporific, Sylvain Kohn proposed to take him to certain eclectic theaters,—the very latest thing. There they saw murder, rape, madness, torture, eyes plucked out, bellies gutted—anything to thrill the nerves, and satisfy ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... corner of Africa. He was amused by the southern exuberance and joviality of a doubtlessly corpulent man. He seemed a salacious, gay crony compared with the Christian apologists who lived in the same century—the soporific Minucius Felix, a pseudo-classicist, pouring forth the still thick emulsions of Cicero into his Octavius; nay, even Tertullian—whom he perhaps preserved for his Aldine edition, more than for the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the right, and receive moral leadership, show that they have in their souls as much of the valor of righteousness as the men of 1860 and of 1776. The literary bureau at Washington has acted as a soporific on the mind and conscience of the American people. Fine words, designed to work confusion between right and wrong, have put them to sleep. But they ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... preferable, or is any thing in fact but a lingering remnant of the old doctrine of occult causes; the very absurdity which Moliere so happily ridiculed when he made one of his pedantic physicians account for the fact that opium produces sleep by the maxim, Because it has a soporific virtue. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... pages of most of these old papers are as soporific as a bed of poppies. Here we have an erudite clergyman, or perhaps a Cambridge professor, occupying several successive weeks with a criticism on Tate and Brady, as compared with the New England version of the Psalms. ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Following his vein, Sidney, after innumerable adventures, pastoral and warlike scenes, disappearances, unexpected meetings, scenes of deep love, of criminal, sweet or foolish love, comes at last to a sort of conclusion. King Basilius drinks a soporific draught; he is given up as dead. Queen Gynecia is accused of being the author of the deed; Zelmane, who has been found out to be a man is adjudged an accomplice; both are about to be executed. At that point, fortunately, the dead king springs ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... shoulder. At first, I fancied it was a dream, but as I opened my eyes, I saw one of my Indians with his fingers upon his lips to enjoin me to silence, while his eyes were turned towards the open prairie. I immediately looked in that direction, and there was a sight that acted as a prompt anti-soporific. About half a mile from us stood a band of twenty Indians, with their war-paint and accoutrements, silently and quietly occupied in tying the horses. Of course they were not of our tribe, but belonged to the Umbiquas, a nation ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... Manilla cheroots is peculiar to themselves, being quite different from that made of any other sort of tobacco; the greatest characteristic probably being its slightly soporific tendency, which has caused many persons, in the habit of using it, to imagine that opium is employed in the preparatory treatment of the tobacco, which, however, is not ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... he cried; but there was a want of energy in his words, and five minutes after his efforts had grown feeble in the extreme. In another, he too had succumbed, not to a dangerous soporific vapour, but to the weariness produced by long exertion, and slept as soundly as his companion, and as if there ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... painfully the night before could be molded so that they fell roundly from the tongue in shapely phrases, hurting nobody. He was sufficiently sure of his command of language at length to look at Katharine and again at Denham. All this talk about Shakespeare had acted as a soporific, or rather as an incantation upon Katharine. She leaned back in her chair at the head of the tea-table, perfectly silent, looking vaguely past them all, receiving the most generalized ideas of human heads against pictures, against yellow-tinted walls, against curtains ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the even tenor of her way, the Colonel's fidgets had a soporific effect on her nerves and created no corresponding alarms; her idol, Freddy, was satisfied with the new administration, and ceased to wage internecine warfare with his nurse; and certainly the unwonted tranquillity consequent ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... his heart. Dreading a wakeful night, one of those enervating attacks of insomnia brought about by agitation of the spirit, he thought he would try to read. How many times had a short reading served him as a narcotic! So he got up and went into his library to choose a good and soporific work; but his mind, aroused in spite of himself, eager for any emotion it could find, sought among the shelves for the name of some author that would respond to his state of exaltation and expectancy. Balzac, whom he loved, said nothing to him; he disdained ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... in these rambling fancies I had leaned my head against a pile of reverend folios. Whether it was owing to the soporific emanations for these works; or to the profound quiet of the room; or to the lassitude arising from much wandering; or to an unlucky habit of napping at improper times and places, with which I am grievously afflicted, so it was, that I fell into a doze. Still, however, my imagination ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... sweetly in their sleep under the shower of grass; they did not awake because the lettuces had been so soporific. ...
— A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories • Beatrix Potter
... in Toronto, informs me that she finds it impossible to sleep when she has no infant in hearing distance, and for that reason she never asks for a vacation. Her normal sleep has evidently come to depend upon continuous soporific suggestions from a child. In another point, also, her experience confirms my observations, viz., the child's movements, preliminary to waking, awake her, when no other movements of the child do so—the consequence being that she is ready for the infant ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... concerning which men cannot reason ill with impunity. We think it, under these circumstances, an absolute duty to expose the fallacy of their arguments. It is no matter of pride or of pleasure. To read their works is the most soporific employment that we know; and a man ought no more to be proud of refuting them than of having two legs. We must now come to close quarters with Mr Bentham, whom, we need not say, we do not mean to include in this observation. He charges ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... agonizing gasp Mott was awakened and suddenly sat erect and stared stupidly about him, the good-hearted, but boyishly irreverent audience, it is safe to affirm, was decidedly more interested in the slumbering sophomore than in the soporific speaker, though few doubtless thought them related as ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... need! ... Not the old religion of abnegation, the impossible myths that come to us out of the pessimistic East, created for a relief, a soporific, a means of evasion,—I do not mean that as religion. But another faith, which abides in each one of us, if we look for it. We rise with it in the morning. It is a faith in life apart from our own personal fate.... Because we live on ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... door, sniffing the air cautiously as he advanced. To his nostrils gradually came a slight scent, which though almost imperceptible made his senses reel. As he approached the hall door he found the atmosphere heavy with the soporific vapors from the broken vial, and he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... enjoyed his aunt's talk. She was the only person born in the cloister who seemed to have freed herself from the soporific influence of the church. She loved the Cathedral, as being her ancient roof-tree, but she did not retain much respect for the saints in the chapels, nor for the human dignitaries who sat in the choir. She laughed with the happiness of a healthy and placid ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... both with a soporific humidity; and equally immersed in one unconscious thought, we remained there side by ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... impulse of the crew, the sharp quick beat of the paddles on the water, and the roll of their shafts against the gunwale, with the continuous hiss and ripple of the stream cleft by the curving prow, combine to make a most soothing soporific. ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... breaths, until he has filled his lungs completely, when he begins slowly to emit the smoke from his nose, little by little, until it is all gone. The object of this with the Indian is to steep his senses more deeply with the narcotizing soporific. The tobacco they smoke is generally ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... o'clock, precisely, Anthony Dexter's old housekeeper rang the rising bell. Drowsy with the soporific he had taken, the doctor did not at once respond to the summons. In fact, the breakfast bell had rung before he ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... in the afternoon sunshine, to the soft, rather soporific cooing of some caged doves, that live in the back-ground out of sight behind a screen of lemon trees in huge red jars, such as Morgiana must have been familiar with. Beyond the terrace wall we note the carefully tended vines, precious plants, for their grapes ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... clean roller a day forbade it. Nothing but the conscientious desire to embellish our "copy" with enough facts and references to make a showing of erudition ever induced Field or any of the active members of the editorial staff to borrow the library key from Ballantyne to break in upon the soporific labors of Mr. Plumbe. Here the editorial conferences, which Field has ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... college. Although I had little to expect from the apprehension of any of these troubles, as my person was, from my short residence, most likely unknown to any of the authorities—yet did Morpheus refuse his soporific balsam to the mind—I could not help thinking of my young and giddy companions, of the kind-hearted Eglantine, immured within the walls of a dungeon; of the noble-spirited Echo, maltreated and disfigured by the temporary loss of an eye; of the facetious Bob ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... an armchair on the other side of the table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I think she found these among her happy times. On such occasions she was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity. For like most young people ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... if warrantable, frenzy, and that they would take immediate steps to abate the nuisance in their own simple way. But that, my brothers, is where we are wrong. Where bees are concerned, the 'smoker's' fumes are of a soporific and soothing nature. Indeed, before a puff of its smoke a bee's naughty malice and resentment disappear, and the bee itself sinks, gently humming, into the peaceful, contented slumber ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... lances of light. The Marquise leaned back with half-shut slumberous eyes, and confessed she was pleased that it would be later, instead of this evening, that she would have the pleasure of meeting the master and mistress of Loringwood—the drive through the great stretches of pine had acted as a soporific; no society for the night so ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... collection of sketches which form a sort of variety museum of all manner of bizarre and even grotesque figures. Critics naturally marvelled at this; and as in the days of old, men explained the effects of morphine by saying that it contained the soporific principle, and the action of the pump by nature's abhorring a vacuum, so critics explained this fact, so strange in the healthy, clear-eyed, measure-loving Turgenef, by saying that he had a natural fondness for the fantastic and the strange. In truth, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... getting out of bullet range, put my back against a tree and tried to read. Mercury was ever a blithe and sportive god, and his gambols on Mount Olympus were noted in days of yore; but the modern namesake—or else my present position—had soporific tendencies; and fear of the target shooters growing dimmer and dimmer, I lost ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... he was not so much interested. The officiating clergyman delivered a long homily in a dull unimpassioned manner, which failed to awaken his interest. Already disposed to be drowsy, it acted upon him like a gentle soporific. He tried to pay attention as he had always been used to do, but owing to his occupying a back seat, and the low voice of the preacher, but few words reached him, and those for the most part ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... in reply to Nort's obvious statement that he intended to administer some of the soporific to ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... same at this very hour, finding in the various technical figures of compositions all the technic necessary. This method is infinitely more trying to the teacher than the old-fashioned, easy-going ways. "Play me No. 22 for next time!" was the order, and in a soporific manner the pupil waded through all the studies of all the Technikers. Now the teacher must invent a new study for every new piece—with Bach on the side. Always Bach! Please remember that. B-a-c-h—Bach. Your daily ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... of the sport when there were neither admiring squaws or approving old chiefs to look on. The chiefs in this case, of course, had consumed the greater portion of the whiskey and were now sleeping off its soporific effects, and the youngsters could only remain where they were, keep watch and ward against surprise, and make no move in any direction until their elders should be themselves again, unless the sudden coming of enemies should compel them to rouse their leaders from their ...
— Sunset Pass - or Running the Gauntlet Through Apache Land • Charles King
... of this church for more than twenty years during its early days was the Rev. John Smith, a tall, strongly-built man, who loomed large in the pulpit as a champion of old-fashioned orthodoxy. His manner of delivery was soporific, his voice thick and monotonous, but none could gainsay the learning and intellectual power ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... men like yourself, Mr. St. John," Mrs. Sillenger began in her quiet diffident way, "continue so prejudiced on this subject. How you could help on the moral progress of the world, if only you would forget the sweet soporific 'poetry of the pulpit," as Mrs. Malcomson calls it, and learn to think of us women, not as angels or beasts of burden—the two extremes between which you wander—but as ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... notes and marks whereby to frame ideas of them in our minds, and distinguish them one from another: all which secondary qualities, as has been shown, are nothing but bare powers. For the colour and taste of opium are, as well as its soporific or anodyne virtues, mere powers, depending on its primary qualities, whereby it is fitted to produce different operations on different ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... soporific parts are so many scenes of serious artfully interwoven, in order to contrast and set off the rest; and this is the true meaning of a late facetious writer, who told the public that whenever he was dull they might be assured there was a ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... of the sea beneath the cliffs were all the sounds that reached him, for the quarries were silent now. How long he sat here lonely and thinking he did not know. Neither did he know, though he felt drowsy, whether inexpectant sadness—that gentle soporific—lulled him into a short sleep, so that he lost count of time and consciousness of incident. But during some minute or minutes he seemed to see Avice Caro herself, bending over and then withdrawing from her grave in ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... of his money-getting. He never thinks of them as evils at all. To be sure, sometimes, across his torpid brain and heart may echo some harsh expressions, from those stern old Hebrew prophets, about these things. But he has a very comfortable pew, in a very soporific church, and he is only half awake, and the echo dies away and leaves no sign. He is just the man to tell us all about the demoralization ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... continued until all the lees or coagulated portion of the milk subsides to the bottom, like the lees of wine, and the thin parts remain above like whey, or clear must of wine. The white lees are given to the servants, and have a strong soporific quality. The clear supernatent liquor is called cara-cosmos, and is an exceedingly pleasant and wholesome beverage[1]. Baatu has thirty farms around his dwelling-place, at about a day's journey distant, each of which supplies him daily with the caracosmos from the milk of an hundred mares, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... opiate against everything subversive and novel. And philosophy is in the same plight: all that the majority demand of it is, that it may teach them to understand approximate facts—very approximate facts—in order that they may then become adapted to them. And even its noblest exponents press its soporific and comforting powers so strongly to the fore, that all lovers of sleep and of loafing must think that their aim and the aim of philosophy are one. For my part, the most important question philosophy has to decide seems to be, how far things have acquired an unalterable stamp and form, and, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Byron he has quaint things to say, and of Wordsworth things that are neither quaint nor wise. We recall the man in the field in the twenty-second chapter of The Romany Rye who used Wordsworth's poetry as a soporific. And throughout his life Borrow's position towards his contemporaries in literature was ever contemptuous. He makes no mention of Carlyle or Ruskin or Matthew Arnold, and they in their turn, it may be added, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... I set out for New-Tarbat to-morrow. Could you come? Let nothing but wedlock detain you. Oh, Boswell! the soporific effluvia of a hearty dinner cloud all my faculties. I'm as dull as the tolling in of the eighth-hour bell, or a neighbour in the country, that pays you an annual visit. At this present moment, I'm astonished how anybody can be clever; and your letter in heroic verse seems ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... over the leaves. Because you're bound to see where, and not turn two at once, or it don't follow on." Aunt M'riar and Uncle Mo confirmed this view from their own experience. It was agreed further that small type—Parliamentary debates and the like—was more soporific than large, besides spinning out the length and deferring the relaxation of turning over, when in book-form. Short accidents, and not too prolix criminal proceedings were on the whole the most palatable forms of literature. It was not to be wondered at that old Mrs. Prichard should ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... suggest any means whereby I can grasp your jokes without being bored to weariness? They're more soporific than bromide. Anyhow, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... ticket porter leans idly against the post at the corner: comfortably warm, but not hot, although the day is broiling. His white apron flaps languidly in the air, his head gradually droops upon his breast, he takes very long winks with both eyes at once; even he is unable to withstand the soporific influence of the place, and is gradually falling asleep. But now, he starts into full wakefulness, recoils a step or two, and gazes out before him with eager wildness in his eye. Is it a job, or a boy at marbles? Does he see a ghost, or hear an organ? No; sight more unwonted ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... circularity. It amounts in effect to saying that the sea is salt because of the large amount of saline matter which it holds in solution. Cheese is also a caseous preparation of milk; the duties of an archdeacon are to perform archidiaconal functions; and opium puts one to sleep because it possesses a soporific virtue. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... from Aramis, disturbed their quietude; not a sound even was heard throughout the vast palace. Outside, however, the guards of honor on duty, and the patrols of the musketeers, paced up and down; and the sound of their feet could be heard on the gravel walks. It seemed to act as an additional soporific for the sleepers; while the murmuring of the wind through the trees, and the unceasing music of the fountains, whose waters fell tumbling into the basins, still went on uninterruptedly, without being disturbed at the slight ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... the cheerfulness and happiness of those on whom it acts. Instruction in reading, arithmetic, geometry, and various other things is made exceedingly amusing; smiling countenances and sparkling eyes are observable all around when it is communicated; and what was dull and soporific, according to the old plan, is now insinuated so agreeably, that the child, while literally at play, is acquiring a large amount of valuable knowledge. At play he sees Nature's book, that world of beauties: he loves to look into it, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... smell mignonette, think of it as a soporific. Just yawn and say you've been working like a fire-horse on the Fourth.... You see, it isn't what happens that gets out to the others, including those we care about, but what is imagined by minds which are ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... To soften his mood, his bottle of supper had been handed to him a little ahead of time. But, unwilling to lay aside the prominence which had been his, all day, he brandished the bottle as if it were a weapon instead of a soporific. ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... It contained, after our loss to the cuirassiers, in bills and money, near upon L8000 sterling. Pippi insisted that our reconciliation should be ratified over a bowl of hot wine, and I have no doubt put some soporific drug into the liquor; for my uncle and I both slept till very late the next morning, and woke with violent headaches and fever: we did not quit our beds till noon. He had been gone twelve hours, leaving our treasury empty; and behind him a sort of calculation, by ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fashion; the sofa was soft and warm; scents, pomades, and soaps adorned the marble washstand, and the pale light fell from the ceiling with a soft glow, like the gleams of a lamp suspended in an alcove. Macquart, amidst this perfumed soporific atmosphere fell asleep, thinking that those scoundrels, the rich, "were very fortunate, all the same." He had covered himself with a blanket which had been given to him, and with his head and back and arms reposing on the cushions, he stretched ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... knew nothing of this, and were all abroad, but they thought Rooke must have the key; so they proceeded to drink with him, and were just about to administer a really effective soporific in his grog, when they and all the merry party were suddenly startled by violent ringing at the bell, and thundering and halloaing at the hall door. The men jumped to their feet and balanced themselves, and looked half wild, half stupid. The women sat, and began to scream: for they had heard a ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... going to be bored tomorrow dining with that old countryman of yours," said Kennedy. "Oh, surely. He has all the signs of a soporific person; but who knows? a type like that sometimes ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... beverage eminently agreeable, inspiring and wholesome. It is at once a stimulant, a cephalic, a febrifuge, a digestive, and an anti-soporific; it chases away sleep, which is the enemy of labor; it invokes the imagination, without which there can be no happy inspiration. It expels the gout, that enemy of pleasure, although to pleasure gout owes its birth; it facilitates digestion, without which there ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... desert, and drank strong coffee and smoked until we too were satisfied, if not surfeited; animals like the rest. Silence fell on us. This was a new life to two of us; to Warham it was familiar, therefore comfortable and soporific. I leaned back and languidly scanned the scene; eyes halfshut, senses half-awake. An Arab sheikh passed swiftly with his curtained harem; and then went filing by in orderly and bright array a number of Mahommedans, the first of them bearing on a cushion of red velvet, and covered with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... awake for hours that night, but when I finally went to sleep and heaven knows I needed it!—it was with the soporific resolution to put my house rigidly in order the very next day. I would be polite about it, but very firm. The Titus family (omitting the Countess and Rosemary) was to be favoured with an ultimatum from which there could be no appeal. John Bellamy Smart had decided—with Morpheus smoothing out ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... soporific effect on me, or I acquired tolerance to the usual dosage, and the folks had to hunt up new things to give. I took soothing syrups and "baby's friends" galore. The night and the day were not rightly divided for me; when I slept, it was during the day ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... because she had not slept the whole night, or the warmth and the closeness and the smell of the candles had a soporific effect on her as ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... of Caprifoliaceous (with leaves eaten by goats) plants, the Elder bush grows to the size of a small tree, bearing many white flowers in large flat umbels at the ends of the branches. It gives off an unpleasant soporific smell, which is said to prove harmful to those that sleep under its shade. Our summer is [171] not here until the Elder is fully in flower, and it ends when the berries are ripe. When taken together with the berries of Herb Paris (four-leaved Paris) they have been found very useful ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... receives in her own bosom the blade intended for ——, etc. But of course not enough blade to endanger the happy ending. So there you are. A placid, undistinguished tale, that may be commended as nourishment or soporific according to the taste and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... The Baroness de Vibray, well known in the Parisian world and among artists, whose generous patroness she was, has been found dead in the studio of the ceramic painter, Jacques Dollon. The young painter, rendered completely helpless by a soporific, lay stretched out beside her when the crime was discovered. We say 'crime' designedly, because, when the preliminary medical examination was completed, it was clear that the death of the Baroness de Vibray was due to ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... the house, under the great trees; Feliu and Captain Harris leading the way. It was sultry and bright;—even the sea-breeze was warm; there were pleasant odors in the shade, and a soporific murmur made of leaf-speech and the hum of gnats. Only the captain entered the house with Feliu; the rest remained without—some taking seats on a rude plank bench under the oaks—others flinging themselves down upon the weeds—a few ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... this instrument that had pricked the skin of Lanyard's neck; beyond reasonable doubt it contained a soporific, if not exactly a killing dose of some narcotic drug—cocaine, at ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... their conduct. To my surprise, not a syllable was dropped on the subject. They sat as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence by inquiring of his next neighbour, 'Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House?' and the question operated as a soporific on my moral feelings ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... furnished even by demonologists, that all these supposed journies and entertainments are nothing more than dreams. Persons accused of witchcraft have been repeatedly watched, about the time which they had fixed for the meeting; they have been seen to anoint themselves with soporific compositions, after which they fell into profound sleep, and on awaking, several hours afterwards, they have related their journey through the air, their amusement at the festival, and have named the persons whom they saw there. In the instance told by Hoffman, the dreamer was chained to ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... England theocracy was a social structure resting on a book, that corner-stone was the Bay Psalm-Book and the walls above it were built of sermons. These sermons seem to us technical, sapless, and jejune, "as soporific as a bed of poppies," but they show the intelligence, energy, and assiduity of the writers just as plainly as they show the gloomy theology and sad earnestness of the time. And though no one now reads them, we profoundly respect them, for they have been conned by our honored forefathers with ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... in the great walnut bed which had been his mother's, and read his prayer book by the light of his evening lamp. He read the Evening Prayer and the Litany, and then at last he resorted to the thirty-nine articles, which usually had a soporific effect on him. But ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... or slippery fragments, but solid paving, and a whiff of faint mist drifted across his face in the gray of the first dawn, and the burro craned his neck forward at the very edge of a black rock basin where warm vapor struck the nostrils like a soporific. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the air-loom by these pneumatic adepts are infinite; but principally effluvia of certain metals, poisons, soporific scents, etc. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... the Trinity, was led to recognize in the person of Jesus Christ the Alpha and Omega of his theology. It is possible that Archdeacon Wilberforce, and Chalmers, and Arnold, may never have perused the treatise in question; and it is equally possible that under the soporific influence of a heavy style, they may never have noticed passages for which their own minds possessed such a powerful affinity. But by the legitimate expedient of appropriate language—perhaps by means of some "ornament or elegance"—Jeremy Taylor or Barrow would have arrested attention ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... eating them in Spain. I never ride horseback now at home; but in Spain, when I think of it, I bound over all the fences in the country, barebacked upon the wildest horses. Sermons I am apt to find a little soporific in this country; but in Spain I should listen as reverently as ever, for proprietors must set a ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... than the rest, and had resolved to effect her removal. For this a favourable opportunity soon occurred, owing to the sultan's departure for twenty days upon a hunting excursion. In a day or two after his absence, the sultana invited Koout al Koolloob to an entertainment, and having mixed a strong soporific in some sherbet, presented it her to drink. The effect of the potion was instantaneous, and she sunk into a trance; when the sultana putting her into the chest, commanded it to be given to a broker, and sold without examination of the contents, for a hundred deenars; hoping, that whoever might ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... HARDING, it is announced, has acquired a new play in four Acts entitled Bed Rock. Surely the lullaby touch in the title is a mistake? Audiences are quite prone enough to fall asleep without these soporific aids. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... outlook over life. This, however, is a consummation which will remain devoutly to be wished, for there is a limit to human complaisance. One will never know the exact measure of one's infecting power; or whether, indeed, one is not just a long soporific. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
