"Stale" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time they met. Gervaise, who did not like arguments, usually interfered. She roused herself from the torpor into which the sight of the box, full of the stale perfume of her past love, had plunged her, and she drew the three men's attention ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... a different face on the transaction, but it added spice to the operation; and Napoleon actually succeeded in getting for his stale home bread, goodly sized pieces of fresh chestnut bread, and enough of the much-loved broccio, and bunches of luscious grapes, "to boot," to provide him with a generous meal. But the next day the shepherd boys rebelled; ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... Finding the atmosphere heavy, stale, and oppressive, Maitland moved over to the windows and threw them open. A gush of warm air, humid and redolent of the streets, invaded the room, together with the roar of traffic from its near-by arteries. Maitland rested his elbows on the sill ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... descent appeared to have occupied considerably more than half an hour; but at length they once more reached level ground and, leaving the steps behind them, proceeded to traverse a narrow and winding passage, the air in which smelt stale and musty, while here and there they were obliged to squeeze their painful way between long, spiky stalactites and stalagmites until they came to more steps—this time leading upward. Harry counted these; there were only one hundred and twenty-three of them, and they were ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... for you. Allons, camerados, we will drink together, O hand-in-hand! That tea-spoon, please, when you've done with it. What butter-colour'd hair you've got. I don't want to be personal. All right, then, you needn't. You're a stale-cadaver. Eighteen-pence if the bottles are returned. Allons, from ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... field of view. The character of the shops became more and more difficult to define. Here a window displayed a heap of sailor's thimbles and pack-thread; there another set forth an array of trumpery glass vases or a basket of stale fruit, pretexts, perhaps, for the disguise of a "leaving shop," or unlicensed pawnbroker's establishment, out of which I expected to see Miss Pleasant Riderhood come forth, twisting up her back hair as she came. At a place where the houses ceased, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... and that instead of the perennial smell of the grass and woods and shores, their typical redolence is of soaps and essences, very rare may be, but suggesting the barber shop—something that turns stale and musty in a few ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... a city accent! Ah, you wish to bite off bits of slang? My friend, they are green! Every grape you pick breaks in your jaws, for city grapes are glass bubbles! Having taken from the sparrow only his make-up and grimace, you are just a clumsy understudy, a sort of vice-buffoon! And you serve up stale old cynicisms picked up with crumbs in fashionable club-rooms, poor little bird, and think to astonish us with ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... Hattie, "don't you get awful tired of being a jackass? Sometimes I want to kiss you, and sometimes I feel as if I had to kick you. I 'll compromise with you now by letting you bring me some more beer. This got all stale while your sister was here. I saw she did n't like it, and so I would n't drink any more for fear she 'd try to keep ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of cream 1/4 pound of almond macaroons 4 kisses 1/2 pound of sugar 1 slice of stale sponge cake or 2 stale lady fingers 1 teaspoonful of caramel 1 teaspoonful of vanilla If you use ...
— Ice Creams, Water Ices, Frozen Puddings Together with - Refreshments for all Social Affairs • Mrs. S. T. Rorer
... who I am, still, as you know I might find the detention inconvenient, I shall therefore sail early in the speronara. Your letters may be addressed to me as before, but bear in mind that your information is generally too stale. Now I will get a little rest, if you will show me where I am ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... leads her chosen sons, All armed with squibs, stale jokes, dull razors, puns. The Gallinipper, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... sea to the Forth, and thence home. The actual end was delayed but very little longer, and it has been told by Lockhart in one of those capital passages of English literature on which it is folly to attempt to improve or even to comment, and which, a hundred times quoted, can never be stale. Sir Walter Scott died at Abbotsford on September 21, 1832, and was buried four days later at Dryburgh, a post-mortem examination having disclosed ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... up because a little girl he had seen for five minutes failed to appear! Where was his common sense, his "gumption," as old Robert Williamson would have said? Naturally a man liked to look at a pretty face. But was that any reason why he should feel as if life were flat, stale, and unprofitable simply because he could not look at it? He called himself a fool and went home in a petulant mood. Arriving there, he plunged fiercely into solving algebraical equations and working out geometry exercises, determined ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... it. "Ah, but," said Mr. Morley, "did you not"—meaning Mr. Goschen—"did you not yourself attack Lord Salisbury for that very speech?"—a retort that produced a tempest of cheers. There were then some scornful and contemptuous allusions to Mr. Russell—to his stale vituperation, and, above all, to his grotesque charge against Mr. Morley of making himself the tool of clericalism. "There are more kinds of clericalism than one," said Mr. Morley, alluding to the violent partisanship ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... till we emerged through a trap-door into a garret at the top of the house. I recoiled with disgust at the scene before me; and here I was to work—perhaps through life! A low lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... dust, like soiled packs of cards. Each was similar to the next, as one old five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... into the dormitory from the fresh, pure, night air he thought at first that he would choke in the atmosphere laden with stale tobacco-smoke and foul odours; but in the end he slept ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... stale and distasteful his former pursuits and friendships appeared to him! He had not been, up to the present time, much accustomed to the society of females of his own rank in life. When he spoke of such, he called them "modest women." That virtue which, let us ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... know what, in that line—the line of futility—the real thing meant. HE did— having seen it, having tried it, having taken its measure. This was a memory in fact simply to screen out—much as, just in front of him while he walked, the iron shutter of a shop, closing early to the stale summer day, rattled down at the turn of some crank. There was machinery again, just as the plate glass, all about him, was money, was power, the power of the rich peoples. Well, he was OF them now, of the rich peoples; he was ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... great weariness of spirit. Nevertheless, I must have gone on looking at pictures for ten years before I would honestly admit to myself that they merely bored me. Since then I have given up all attempts to take a holiday. I go on cultivating my old stale daily self in the resigned spirit with which a bank clerk performs from ten till six his daily task. A holiday, indeed! I'm sorry for you, Gombauld, if you still look ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Europe, with the various tincture of differing national habit and custom, this was the mark of the sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately and craftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples which will easily occur to your memory, rankly, as with the tiresome persistence of a slightly stale perfume, an irritating odour of last night's opopanax or vervain. And this is the one point, almost I think the only point, in which the rather absurd and certainly very noisy and hoydenish manifestoes of the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... roadway there were a number of wheeled vehicles moving, which caused the liquefying snow to splash about me. I adjusted my coat controls for warmth and deflection, but that was the best I could do. The reek of stale decay remained. Then there were also the buildings, painfully almost vertical. I believe it would not have disturbed me if they had been truly vertical; but many of them were minutes of arc from a true perpendicular, ...
— The Day of the Boomer Dukes • Frederik Pohl
... crowded back seat, where, leaning one elbow on his knee, he shaded his eyes with his hand. On his right a big, sweaty farmer was smoking a stale pipe. The smell of the cheap, vile tobacco, bad as it was, became a welcome substitute for the odor of the ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... it's rather stale to be in the school. I don't see why your fellows should be looked down ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... three days, and the players were getting a bit "stale" with nothing to do. Then the sun came out, the grounds dried up and the series was resumed. But the Cardinals ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... to that pathetic army of book-lovers who subsist on the refuse of the stalls, which he hunted not for rare editions, but for the sheer bread of life, or rather the stale crusts of knowledge. His tastes were not literary in the special sense of the word. For belles-lettres he had no fancy, and fine passages, except in so far as they were controversial, left him cold. His mind was primarily scientific, secondarily ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... scrutiny left the horizon barren as before; night was falling; without any hope now would I concentrate my attention, as though to force up out of it the creatures which it must conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale and outworn land; and it was no longer in lightness of heart, but with sullen anger that I aimed blows at the trees of Roussainville wood, from among which no more living creatures made their appearance than if they had been trees painted on the stretched canvas background of a panorama, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... in these days of the typewriter such a thing makes little difference. His abstention from bowling (to the playing of which Brassfield had been devoted), and his absolute failure at billiards, were discussed in sporting circles, and accounted for on the theory that he had "gone stale" since this love-affair had become the absorbing business of his life. No one understood, however, his sudden interest in photography, and his marvelous skill in it. He seemed to be ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... came out in groups; the elder ones dressed in black, emitting a stale odor from their innumerable skirts and petticoats; the young ones erect in rigid corsets which crushed their breasts and obliterated the prominent curves of their hips, displaying with stately pride, above the motley hued handkerchiefs, gold chains and enormous crucifixes. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... soon goes forth again. Eastward and still eastward through the stale streets he takes his way, until he reaches his destination: a miserable court, ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... chargynge them that if the Gentilman came agayne, they shold entreate him better not beyng knowen al this while that she was his wyfe, but fayued her to be her sister. Not long after her husband stale thether againe, he sawe the howse otherwyse decked, and better fare then he was wounte to haue. He asked, frome whence commeth al this goodly gere? They sayde that an honeste matrone, a kynsewoman of hys hadde broughte it thyther and commaunded thenm that he should be ...
— A Merry Dialogue Declaringe the Properties of Shrowde Shrews and Honest Wives • Desiderius Erasmus
... hearts, but to change their opinions. They take up the New Testament and read Christ's sermon on the Mount; but they find nothing in it to answer their purpose. It is but an ordinary production in their estimation. They pass on through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. How stale, how dull, how uninteresting these gospels, they are led to exclaim. They see but little beauty in the God-like teaching; or the inimitable example of Christ. His last agonies, his death on the cross is insufficient to move their callous hearts. ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... no public administrator achieved enough good reputation to preserve his memory for twenty years. A number of them achieved bad reputations, or damaged good ones that had been gained in the Civil War. On the whole, even for Senators, diplomats, and Cabinet officers, the period was wearisome and stale. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... copper utensils and the crockery shone in the reflection of the hearth. A cat lay asleep on a chair, a dog under the table. One perceived an odor of milk, apples, smoke, that indescribable smell peculiar to old farmhouses; the odor of the earth, of the walls, of furniture, the odor of spilled stale soup, of former wash-days and of former inhabitants, the smell of animals and of human beings combined, of things and of persons, the odor of time, and of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... all respect, why should you, and I with you, be here on this lonely spot, barking our shins in the dark on the way to a confounded flickering light where there will be no other supper but a piece of a stale sausage and a draught of leathery wine out of a ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... teach, and all men's eyes, whosoever and wheresoever they be, do well enough see and witness for us), it was a foul part of them to charge us with these things; yea, seeing they could find no new and late faults, therefore to seek to procure us envy only with stale ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... how the 'messieurs' could think of such a thing — but from the chill air of the morning. As for the rag, if monsieur could have but tasted its evil flavour, being compounded indeed of a mixture of stale paraffin oil, grease, and gunpowder, monsieur himself would have spat it out. But he did nothing of the sort; he determined to keep it there till, alas! his stomach 'revolted', and the rag was ejected in an access ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... wintry. Truly this Iemon is a beast—a very brute (chikusho[u]). What is Cho[u]bei to do? There is this matter of the honour of Tamiya." He wrung his hands as in great perplexity, glancing sideways toward O'Iwa. The first part of his speech she disregarded. Such talk and consolation were growing stale. That all should pity her caused no surprise. Her situation was not unusual. It was the last words which caught her ear. "The honour of Tamiya: Cho[u]bei San?" Cho[u]bei turned away; to put some peppermint in his eyes. Tears ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... experience with this arm of the civil law. He wasn't sure that he liked it. It wasn't an inviting place with its bare benches and its motley, tawdry throng. He was plumped into a seat between some ladies of irregular habits, and the stale odor of intoxicants, mingling with cheap perfumery, took away ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... tired of Victor. He doesn't talk stale stuff such as all of us get from the stale little professors and stale, dreary text-books at ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... his health, from which he never entirely recovered. It was hoped that his life in the East would be beneficial, but it proved otherwise. Meanwhile, the Civil War was raging in the United States, but the news concerning it was very stale long before it reached us. We did not receive the particulars of the battle of Bull Run, for example, until three months after its occurrence. In view of the turbulent state of affairs at home, the government ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... more to your taste than a bottle of beer and hard-boiled eggs at The Nimble Rabbit. Heaven knows I trust you will be happy, but I cannot persuade myself that this Pomponnet shares your ambitions; with his slum and his stale ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... under the broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a long- past century arrested in its course—unrefreshed for ages by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold-inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... Beef juice and one egg; or, broth and meat; care being taken that the meat is always rare and scraped or very finely divided; beefsteak, mutton chop, or roast beef may be given. Very stale bread, or two pieces of zwieback. Prune pulp or baked apple, one to two tablespoonfuls. ...
— The Care and Feeding of Children - A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses • L. Emmett Holt
... the least—but assuredly a soul of tape. And he that has fetched and carried will explain how it has fared with him in his dealings, and if he has brought the wrong sort of sugar or thread he will wheedle away the displeasure from that leaden face as a pastrycook girl will drive bluebottles off a stale bun. And that man has known what it was to coax the fret of a thoroughbred, to soothe its toss and sweat as it danced beneath him in the glee and chafe of its pulses and the glory of its thews. He has been in the raw places of the earth, where the desert beasts have whimpered their unthinkable ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... deeply than I had ever envied any one. She had the secret of immortal youth, and I felt old as I looked at her. One might be eighty and share that passionate impersonal joy. Age could not wither nor custom stale the infinite variety of her world's joys. She had a child's dewy youth in ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... But if recklessly indulged in, they inevitably sap our interest in these other ideals. Except where they spring from and reinforce true affection, they are an opiate, taking us into a dream world that makes actual life stale and tasteless. "Hold off from sensuality," says Cicero; "for if you give yourself up to it, you will be unable to think of anything else." There is so much else that is worthwhile, life has so many possible ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Life was so horribly stale in London without Barty that I became a quite exemplary young man when I woke up from that long nap on the floor of my laboratory in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury; a reformed character: from ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... me of paying a visit this summer to the land of the Czar; that I want companions; that I like young ones, who will follow my ways better than old ones, who won't; that I enjoy fresh ideas freshly expressed, and am tired of stale platitudes; in short, if you will entrust your youngsters to me, I will take charge of them, and point out what is mostly worth seeing and remembering at ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing for some hours—I mean those who turn ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... which should have been part of a coal-bed countless ages since—and looked out across a sea teeming with frightful life—life which should have been fossil before God conceived of Adam—I would not have given a minim of stale beer for my chances of ever seeing my friends or the outside world again; yet then and there I swore to fight my way as far through this hideous land as circumstances would permit. I had plenty of ammunition, an automatic pistol and a heavy ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the old sense of quickness in the perception of analogies, is the staple of his mind. His resources in the way of figure, illustration, allusion, and anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot wither him nor custom stale his infinite variety, and there is as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in the rockets which he sent up half a century ago. Yet, though the humorist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few things, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... out at last. Even the old princess, though she was ready for anything, as she expressed it, and no noise wearied her, felt tired at last, and longed for peace and quiet. At twelve o'clock at night, supper was served, consisting of a piece of stale dry cheese, and some cold turnovers of minced ham, which seemed to me more delicious than any pastry I had ever tasted; there was only one bottle of wine, and that was a strange one; a dark-coloured bottle with a wide ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... opposite corner. A rude cupboard had been built against the logs next to the fireplace. It contained supplies and utensils. Toward the center, somewhat closer to the door, stood a crude table and two benches. The cabin was dark and smelled of smoke, of the stale odors of past cooked meals, of the mustiness of dry, rotting timber. Streaks of light showed through the roof where the rough-hewn shingles had split or weathered. A strip of bacon hung upon one side of the cupboard, and upon the other a haunch of venison. Ellen detested ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... blinds were drawn; a floor of bare boards, with a few rags of carpet here and there; in the middle, a table covered with painter's apparatus of different kinds; palettes, paints, rags, tin-pots, and, thrown down amongst them, some stale crusts of bread; a large easel, with a number of old and dirty canvases piled upon it; two chairs, one of them without the usual complement of legs; a few etchings and oil-sketches and fragments of coloured stuffs pinned ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are," said D'Arcy, appealing to his neighbours; "didn't I tell you he talked rot? Did you ever hear such a stale joke as that?" ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... looks as if the north of England had produced the greater part of its folk-lore. Certain it is that the witch stories of Yorkshire, as those of Lancaster at another time, by their mysterious and romantic elements made the trials of the south seem flat, stale, and unprofitable. Yet they rarely ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... hid her anger. Kennicott was yawning, more portentously. The room smelled stale. She shrugged and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... is the flat, stale, unprofitable stuff we hear about," he added. "You've been sick, too, ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... cake must be thoroughly cooled before being put into box or jar. If not, the steam will cause them to mold quickly. Crusts and pieces of stale bread should be dried in a slow oven, rolled into fine crumbs on a board, and put away for croquettes, cutlets or anything that is breaded. Pieces of stale bread can be used for toast, griddle- cakes and puddings and for dressing for ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... down a full description of the country immediately behind our present line. The Skipper, for fear we should become stale, allowed us plenty of leave. We would make little expeditions to Bethune for the baths, spend an afternoon riding round Armentieres, or run over to Poperinghe for a chop. We even arranged for a visit to the Belgian lines, but that excursion was forbidden by a new order. Right through the winter we ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... overflowed: with the greatest difficulty we secured a small wooden compartment with seats sharp and narrow and a smell of cabbage, bad tobacco, and dirty clothes. The floor was littered with sunflower seeds and the paper wrappings of cheap sweets. The air came in hot stale gusts down the corridor, met the yet closer air of our carriage, battled with it and retired defeated. We flung open the windows and a cloud of dust rose gaily to meet us. The whole of the Russian army seemed to be surging upon the platform; orderlies were searching for their masters, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... extreme sensitiveness, moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions, with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon these happy humors came seasons of wearisome depression; the stale manuscript of yesterday lost its charm; the fancy refused to be lighted; he has not the heart to hammer at the business with dull, lifeless blows, and flings down his pen in despair. There are successive months during which this mood hangs upon him like an incubus; then ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the shapeless gloom Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down The stale despair of night, must now renew Their desolation in the truce of dawn, Murdering the livid ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... nould believe your tales and fables stale and trite, Irksome as twice-sung tune that tires the dulled ear of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... "That's all stale news!" cried Miss Prunty, jumping up. "And Gon'ril (since I'll have to call her so) must be tired ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... need a good talking-to, a bracing-up all along the line. You are going stale, your standards are dropping, your ideals are getting dull, and the worst of it all is that when you do a poor job, or are careless about your dress and indifferent in your manner, you do not feel as troubled as you used to. You are not making good. This lethargy, this inertia, this indifference ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... witty French blood—or the muddied dregs which were left of it—began to be perversely amusing at Quest's expense. Epigrams slightly frayed, a jest or two a trifle stale, humorous inversions of well-known maxims, a biting retort, the originality of which was not entirely free from suspicion, were his ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... face, his eyes were shut, and he was apparently quite insensible of her presence. For the first time she was conscious of a distressful faintness, which, as she had come suddenly out of the stinging frost into the little overheated room, which reeked with tobacco smoke and a stale smell of cooking, was not astonishing. She mastered it, however, and presently, seeing that Hawtrey did not move; glanced about her with some curiosity, for this was the first time ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... for them in a small private room, which smelt principally of stale tobacco and stale chimney soot. The water-bottle on the table was encrusted with a white enamel advertisement of somebody's whisky, and had another such recommendation legible on its base. The tray used ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... partake of whole milk, cream, or white bread. Use little or no sugar or butter. The only kind of bread that you are permitted to eat is the whole-wheat bread, gluten bread, or whole rye bread. You may take stale bread toasted. Gluten bread is ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... parted his hair like a girl and had not other parts worth naming—absorbed her wholly, and the exquisite symphony was no more to her than an annoying din which made it difficult to hear her companion's compliments that were as sweet, heavy, and stale as Mailard's chocolates, left a year on the shelves. Their mutual giggle and chatter at last became so obtrusive that an old and music-loving German turned his broad face towards them, and hissed out the word "Hist!" with such vindictive force as to suggest ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... vain to labor. The pleasures of toil were as stale as those of idleness. His books were put aside with a shudder, and he walked abroad with a changed gait; the old extortioner was levying on his nerves. And on his brain. He dreamed that night of war times; found himself commander of a whole battery ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... is stale and flat beside the chef-d'oeuvre of Sir Walter Scott's genius? Barry, there is a little bird in our New-England woods known only by its pleasant chirp; yet who would break its amber bill because the nightingales in ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... as there were letters in the names of their mistresses, or lovers; so easily were they overcome with this vice, who by their virtue some other time, became masters of the world; but these devices are peradventure stale now; there be finer ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... becomes a pageant that hath ceased to entertain. As I moved through the mist and the silence, and felt the tug of the thong that bound me to the wrist of the savage who stalked before me, I cared not how soon they made an end, seeing how stale and unprofitable were all ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... "You're stale; that's what's the matter with you. And just now you're dead tired. You'll talk more rationally after you've had some tea. Rest your throat until it comes." They were sitting by a window. As Ottenburg looked at her in the gray light, he remembered ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... entered on its pleasures with eager zest, but of late she had begun to find them wearisome. They no longer satisfied her. If this were the result of a few years' experience, what would she feel when she had grown jaded with time and everything was stale? Then her glimpse of the simple, healthful western life had come as a revelation. It was real, a bracing struggle, in which no effort was wasted but produced tangible results: broad stretches of splendid ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... encounter not only familiar characters but familiar jokes. Like Goldsmith's Diggory, we can never help laughing at the story of "ould Grouse in the gunroom." The best order of dramatic wit does not become stale, but rather grows upon us. We relish it at least as much at the tenth repetition as at the first. But while these considerations may partly account for the pleasure we take in seeing the play as a whole, they do ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... seal, Dry, dry, — a little acid meal, A pinch of mouldy dust, Sole leavings of the amber-mantling must; These, rude to look upon, But flasking up the liquor dearest won, Through sacred hours and hard, With watching and with wrestlings and with grief, Even of these, of these in chief, The stale breath sickens reeking from the shard. Nothing is left. Aye, how much less than naught! What shall be said or thought Of the slack hours and waste imaginings, The cynic rending of the wings, Known to that froward, that unreckoning heart Whereof this ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... pairs, with their first coat carefully brushed, and the white trousers of last Sunday plentifully besmeared with dust and ink. It evidently requires a considerable mental struggle to avoid investing part of the day's dinner-money in the purchase of the stale tarts so temptingly exposed in dusty tins at the pastry-cooks' doors; but a consciousness of their own importance and the receipt of seven shillings a-week, with the prospect of an early rise to eight, comes to their aid, and they accordingly put ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... and unhappy one. She lives on this intoxicant as other women might live on tea or gossip, as a man would take his dram or his tobacco. She drinks this wine because she is thirsty, and the plain, cool, spring-water of life has grown stale to her. It is corked up in bottles like the water sold in towns where the drinking-supply is low. It has ceased to ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... to an old man's ditty; Tho yo live ith' country village,— Tho yo live ith' busy city. Aw've a little tale to tell yo,— One 'at ne'er grows stale wi' tellin,— It's abaat One who to save yo, Here amang men made His dwellin. Riches moor nor yo can fancy,— Moor nor all this world has in it,— He gave up becoss He loved yo, An He's lovin yo this minnit. All His power, pomp and ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... them in my pocket." And Bab produced from that chaotic cupboard two rather stale and crumbly ones, saved from lunch for the fete. These were cut up and arranged in plates, forming a graceful circle around the cake, still in ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... initial cost up to twenty-nine cents. This made enough soup for ten or twelve liberal servings. The lean meat removed from the soup was minced and mixed with not more than ten cents' worth of diced potatoes, stale bread crumbs, milk, seasoning and herbs before being baked as a supper dish for five people, who by their bland smiles and "scotch plates" attested that the viands both looked "tony" ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... those old days we studied Arnold Toynbee overmuch and neglected the civilising influences of the card-table. By the time the Seely-Hardwickes took their house near Hyde Park Corner, philanthropy was beginning to stale and our leaders to perceive that the rejuvenation of society must be effected (if at all) not by bestowing money on the poor, but by losing it to the rich. Seely-Hardwicke himself was understood to spend most of his time in the City, looking after ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... another to live furthest from a station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the other friend had ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... She had been presented with a quarter of a stale loaf of baker's bread, and a big piece of ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... My occupation was gone and I began to fear that I had outlived my usefulness. Life seemed flat, stale, and unprofitable. Betty's weekly letters were all that lent it any savor. They were spicy and piquant enough. Betty was discovered to have unsuspected talents in the epistolary line. At first she was dolefully homesick, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... case has not had time to get stale, you see; it has the charm of novelty, the indictment, as you say, having only been filed yesterday. The prospect, too, of hearing the Syrian defend himself against two such plaintiffs as Rhetoric and Dialogue, one after the other, is a great attraction. Well, Rhetoric, when ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... knowledge of the past, play the patron, and misquote Latin over their cups! They are pleased to welcome me at their board, because the Roman doctors call me learned, and because Nature gave me a wild wit, which to them is pleasanter than the stale jests of a hired buffoon. Yes, they would advance my fortunes—but how? by some place in the public offices, which would fill a dishonoured coffer, by wringing, yet more sternly, the hard-earned ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... '86), treating of vol. iii., opens with one of those plagiaristic common-places, so dear to the soul of The Saturday, in its staid and stale old age as in its sprightly youth. "There is particularly one commodity which all men, therein nobly disregarding their differences of creed and country, are of a mind that it is better to give than to receive. That commodity is good advice. We note further that ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... and cooks were giving the students warm, nourishing, and appetizing food upon which to begin the day's work on the farm and in the shops and classrooms. Nothing made him more indignant than to find the coffee served lukewarm and the cereal watery or the eggs stale. For such derelictions the guilty party was promptly located and admonition or discharge followed speedily. Probably in nothing was his instinct for putting first things first better shown than in his insistence upon proper food, properly ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... young negro, clothed in rags unspeakably vile, which scarcely concealed his nakedness, was standing in the midst of a group of white men, toward whom he threw now and then a shallow and shifty glance. The air was heavy with the odour of stale tobacco, and the floor dotted with discarded portions of the weed. A white man stood beside a desk and was ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... British ship. The sailors took their stations near the torpedoes. The interior of the boat was now lighted with two small electric bulbs. They made the darkness visible, but gave no light outside. Everywhere was the stale smell of oil. The boys found it impossible to speak to each other because of the noise of the engine and the water. The ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... all right," answered Neil, "and if they'll let me into the game I'll do my best. Only—I'm afraid I'll be a bit stale when I get ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... half a dozen young men, since grown into graver habits, with Foster—home again, and a link once more in the circle of his intimates—at its head. The negro airs were still the favorites; but the collection, from frequent repetition, at length began to grow stale. One night, as a revival measure for the club, and as an opportunity for himself, Foster hinted that, with their permission, he would offer for trial an effort of his own. Accordingly he set to work; and at their next meeting laid before them a song entitled "Louisiana ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... all deserted, and fled to the savannahs that border the Orinoco on the west. The Jesuit Fathers had already formed a mission on this spot, and bearing the same name. No tribe is more difficult to fix to the soil than the Guahibos. They would rather feed on stale fish, scolopendras, and worms, than cultivate a little spot of ground. The other Indians say, that a Guahibo eats everything that exists, both on ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... beautiful to look at. You are made to be queen of a ball-room; not a London ball-room, where everything, I take it, is flash and faded, painted and stale, and worn out; but down here in the country, where there is some life among us, and where a girl may be supposed to be excited over her dancing. It is in such rooms as this that hearts are won and lost; a bid made for diamonds is all that ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... upon the toil of the humble folk, will to their liquor and vile luxury. Well, the end is near, for it is killing them, and their children are but few; weakly also, for the ancient blood grows thin and stale. But you are weary and would rest. To-morrow we will ride together," and calling to an officer, she bade him conduct ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... in the bottom of it slices of stale bread (brown bread is better than white) which have been dipped in milk. Then put in a layer of very thin slices of Gruyere cheese. Take two eggs, beat them up to a froth, add salt and pepper, pour them into a baking-dish on top of the bread and ...
— Simple Italian Cookery • Antonia Isola
... lie ripening and aurifying in the womb of some undiscovered Potosi; but dig, dig, dig, dig, Manning! I set to with an unconquerable propulsion to write, with a lamentable want of what to write. My private goings on are orderly as the movements of the spheres, and stale as their music to angels' ears. Public affairs—except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private, I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in. I grieve, indeed, that War and Nature, and Mr. Pitt, that hangs up in Lloyd's best parlour, should have conspired to call up ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... The Red Lion and had a peculiar smell of stale straw. They drove with both windows closed so that the Vicar should not catch cold. The sexton was waiting at the porch to take the communion plate, and while the Vicar went to the vestry Mrs. Carey and Philip ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... commonly used instead of wood. Such iron ribs, with the brick arches or other masonry between them, might well form the finish of the ceilings, and if we were accustomed to see them, our frail lath and plaster would seem stale, flat and combustible in comparison. The usual mode of making floors of thin joists set edgewise, from one to two feet apart, with one or two thicknesses of inch boards on the top to walk upon, and lathing underneath to hold the plastering, is perhaps the most ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... level, even, plane, smooth; prostrate, prone; stale, insipid, vapid, tasteless, unsavory, unpalatable, mawkish; peremptory, unqualified, positive; spatulous, spatulate; sonant, vocal. Antonyms: convex, concave, warped, cambered, undulating, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... do to-day. I am not sure that we can keep up the pace yesterday set us, for it was a pretty thrilling one. Robberies and arrests do not come every day, to say nothing of flotillas of ships and Wild West shows. However, we will do the best we can not to let the day go stale by contrast. But first I must dictate a few letters and glance over the morning paper. This won't take me long and while I am doing it I would suggest that you go into the writing room and send a letter to your mother. I will ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... siesta after the French fashion, while Bruyn took his according to the Saracen. But by the said siesta she learned how the good youth of the page had a better taste than that of the old seneschal, and at night she buried herself in the sheets far away from her husband, whom she found strong and stale. And from sleeping and waking up in the day, from taking siestas and saying litanies, the seneschal's wife felt growing within her that treasure for which she had so often and so ardently sighed; but now she liked more the commencement than the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... week or a fortnight from us by the post, since otherwise we could never converse together. But even they should reply to only the weightier matters suggested, since what they say will probably be stale before it reaches the eyes for which it was written. For the like reasons, I hold a Californian or European correspondence to be an impossibility. As for him whose want of politeness fixes a gulf, a week broad, between himself and his correspondent, there is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... The butcher's boy came whistling down the lane to deliver the rump-steak or mutton-chop I had decided on for dinner; the greengrocer delivered his vegetables; the cheesemonger took solemn affidavit concerning the freshness of his stale eggs and the superior quality of a curious article which he called country butter, and declared came from a particular dairy famed for the excellence of its produce; the milkman's yahoo sounded cheerfully in the morning hours; and the letter-box was filled with ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... satisfied that it was just and honourable, and it was comparatively child's work to arrange the modus operandi. A common trick occurred to him. In former transactions with his wife, he had pledged his word of honour to repay her. It had become a stale pledge, and very worthless, as Michael felt. What if he put his life in pawn! Ah, capital idea! This would secure to her every farthing of her debt. Dear me, how very easy! He had but to insure his life for the amount he wanted, and let ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... black the name of "C. E. Trench, Prop." He could see the swing-doors of the bar, and hear the click of balls from the poolroom advertising the second of the town's distractions. He could smell the composite odor of varnish, stale air, and boots, which made the overheated station waiting-room hideous. Heavy farmers in ear-mitts, peaked caps, and fur collars spat upon the hissing stove round which their great hide boots sprawled. They were his last memory of ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... no object, and at last they solved the problem. At first Tom backed up to the jug and held it, though clumsily, for Sam to drink, and then the youngest Rover did the same for his brother. The water was warm and somewhat stale, yet both could remember nothing which had ever tasted sweeter to them. They drank about half of what the jug contained, then set the rest carefully away for ...
— The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes • Arthur M. Winfield
... cries;) "Gull'd by the despot's hireling lie, with lore That gives for Truth a shadow;—life is o'er When the delusion dies!" "Tremblest thou," hiss'd the serpent-herd in scorn, "Before the vain deceit? Made holy but by custom, stale and worn, The phantom Gods, of craft and folly born— The sick world's solemn cheat? What is this Future underneath the stone? But for the veil that hides, revered alone; The giant shadow of our Terror, thrown ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... an egg, drop into cold water. If the egg sinks quickly it is fresh, if it stands on end it is doubtful, and quite bad if it floats. The shell of a fresh egg looks dull; a stale one ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... truculent manner. Whether the Baron spoke to him, or whether the man recognized his visitor, Ellerey could not determine, but the door was opened wide, and they were admitted into a small, ill-lighted lobby. The entrance was a private one, not a usual cafe entrance, but the smell of stale liquor and smoke and the reek of highly spiced dishes proved that the cafe was under the same roof, and proclaimed it as a resort of that lower stratum of society which loves its food pungent and highly flavored. That there was such silence ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... and unkempt appearance. The atmosphere of the sitting-room was stuffy and redolent of stale tobacco smoke. Wrayson's first action was to throw open ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and clamor of the combat were over, the speech loomed up, perfect and whole, a permanent thing in history or literature, while the loud thunders of opposition had too often died away into low mutterings, audible only to the adventurous antiquary who gropes in the "still air" of stale "Congressional Debates." The rhetoric of sentences however melodious, of aphorisms however pointed, of abstractions however true, cannot stand in the storm of affairs against this true rhetoric, in which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... of how Danes had come and burnt Harwich town. But the people told him to sing less stale news than that, for Harwich was close at hand. Now it was Halfden's ship which had done that, and the fires we saw before the fog came had been the beacons lit ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... go into a wood, with all nature seething around them, with romance on every side; it would be much more to the purpose if they took up their abode in a dull country town, where they should see just so much of humanity as to keep them from desiring more, and only the stale externals of man's life. These externals are as dead to us as so many formalities, and speak a dead language in our eyes and ears. They have no more meaning than an oath or a salutation. We are so much accustomed to see married couples going to church of a Sunday that we have ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... must be such Cellars as I speak of, which inclose a temperate Air, to ripen Drink in; the constant temperate Air digests and softens these Malt Liquors, so that they drink smooth as Oil; but in the Cellars which are unequal, by letting in Heats and Colds, the Drink is subject to grow stale and sharp: For this reason it is, that Drink, which is brew'd for a long Voyage at Sea, should be perfectly ripe and fine before it is exported, for when it has had sufficient time to digest in the Cask, and is rack'd from the Bottom or Lee, it will ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... Pencil, "people often seem to forget that in the present day, when events follow each other in quick succession, a subject becomes stale almost before the traditional nine days' interest in it has expired—that paint is no longer the medium by which a caricaturist can possibly express his thoughts. Of course, I am not referring to mere tinting, such ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... attention but want to go to the game, I should certainly be lacking in reasoning ability if I could not find something in the situation that made my attendance at the game imperative. I am stale, and the game will freshen me up and make me work better afterward. Or, I am in serious danger of degenerating into a mere "grind", and must fight against this evil tendency. Or, my presence at the game is necessary in order to ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... were sitting on the stoop of the boarding-house. On the upper steps, in their shirt-sleeves, were the other boarders; so the bride and bridegroom spoke in whispers. The air of the cross street was stale and stagnant; from it rose exhalations of rotting fruit, the gases of an open subway, the smoke of passing taxicabs. But between the street and the hall bedroom, with its odors of a gas-stove and a kitchen, ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... themselves with nothing else. Let us be English again, and not think of anything serious or unpleasant. Already, as you know, I am half English; there is something to build upon. Ah, and this is the sentimental hour, just when the sun begins to touch the horizon line of the stale, weary old earth and turns it into rosy gold and heals its troubles and its ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... white man would have taken so much trouble, not an Indian, who would have left his handiwork for all to see. And again, when Shanty Town was searched, one of the huts was found to contain evidence of late occupancy—scraps of food that were not yet stale, and, in a rusty stove, fresh coals. But though the coulee, the road, the prairie and the timber edging the river were all faithfully scanned, one thing concerning the murderer's doings remained a mystery. At Shanty Town, the traces of him began ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... sizes and shapes they desired at the florist's where they placed their order for May-day blossoms. The confectionery they decided to leave until the day before the basket hanging, so that it would be perfectly fresh. "Don't insult your friends by handing 'em stale ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... the other expence of the day, after plays, tavern, and a bawdy-house; and men have still some oaths left to swear here. It is the ear's brothel, and satisfies their lust and itch. The visitants are all men without exceptions, but the principal inhabitants and possessors are stale knights and captains[65] out of service; men of long rapiers and breeches, which after all turn merchants here and traffick for news. Some make it a preface to their dinner, and travel for a stomach; but thriftier men make it their ordinary, and board here very cheap.[66] Of all such places ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... energies into pushing it; but if you had them all together, the publisher rested in a vain security that one book would sell another, and that the fresh venture would revive the public interest in the stale ones. I never knew this to happen, and I must class it with the superstitions of the trade. It may be so in other and more constant countries, but in our fickle republic, each last book has to fight its own way to public favor, much as if it had ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with a big diamond stuck in the centre of a broad expanse of white shirt front. At the other end is the so-called stage, while scattered about indiscriminately are the tables and chairs. The air is filled—yea, reeking—with the fumes of bad whiskey, stale beer, and the odor of foul smelling cheap tobacco smoke, and through all this haze the would-be "show," goes on, and the applause is manifested by whistles, cat calls, the pounding of feet on the floor and glasses on the tables. ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... a trice, the eggs had disappeared, and in their place appeared a pound-cake. I have the honour to report that the cake was then cut into small portions and passed round for consumption. His Sheriffian Majesty was good enough to partake of the rather stale comestible. The remainder of the cake was ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... A dull, "burnt" smell, some pungent, "scorched" odour, which he recognised as the stale stench of exploded cordite. He went into the tiny dining-room; everything was ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... were country- town editors and provincial politicians, very like the ilk of a hundred other States and provinces in the raw corners of the world. He lived and died in that stale, flat, and literarily unprofitable expanse of prairie between Lake Michigan and the Rio Grande, where man's most pretentious achievement was the Ead's Bridge at St. Louis, Nature's most spectacular effort, the Ozark Mountains, and literature's ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of old with her doll) her pleasure is to dress him. A new religious atmosphere surrounds her life when the very work of her hands becomes hallowed in its purpose. The old crotchet and insertion—we use words to us more mysterious than intelligible—become flat, stale, and unprofitable by the side of the book-marker and the colored stole; and a flutter of excitement stirs even the stillness of a life which is sometimes offensively still at the sight of the new chasuble with "aunt's real lace, you ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... isle, tost on ill fortune's waves, Ordain'd by fate to be the land of slaves; Shall moving Delos now deep-rooted stand; Thou fix'd of old, be now the moving land! Although the metaphor be worn and stale, Betwixt a state, and vessel under sail; Let me suppose thee for a ship a while, And thus address thee ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift |
