"Lethargy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... horoscope He cast. Unshackled from the bright Phoebean awe, In leaf, flower, mould, and tree, Resolved into dividual liberty, Most strengthless, unparticipant, inane, Or suffered the ill peace of lethargy, Lo, the Earth eased of rule: Unsummered, granted to her own worst smart The dear wish of the fool— Disintegration, merely which man's heart For freedom understands, Amid the frog-like errors from the damp And quaking swamp ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... hypnotism. It is true I have studied hypnotism in all its known manifestations; but what is called spiritualism, is entirely unknown to me. When a subject is thrown into a trance, I may expect the hypnotic phenomena known to me: lethargy, abulia, anaesthesia, analgesia, catalepsy, and every kind of susceptibility to suggestion. Here it is not these but other phenomena we expect to observe. Therefore it would be well to know of what kind are the phenomena we expect to witness, ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... enviable people in the world. Notable, too, were the fanatics of the Kosinski type, stern heroic figures who seem strangely out of place in our humdrum world, whose practical work often strikes us as useless when it is not harmful, yet without whom the world would settle down into deadly lethargy and stagnation. Then in England came a whole host of cranks who, without being Anarchists in any real sense of the word, seemed drawn towards our ranks, which they swelled and not infrequently brought into ridicule. The "Bleeding Lamb" and his ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... would not rouse you from a lethargy, which, knowing it to be fatal to all hopes of usefulness, you still deliberately prefer. Take care, however, lest you bury the one original talent so deep that you fail to unearth it when the Master demands it in the final day of restitution. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... them; then, as if awaking from this state of stupefaction, asked them questions without seeming to hear the reply; and even the presence of the Duke of Bassano and the Duke of Vicenza, whom he summoned more frequently, did not interrupt this condition of preoccupation or lethargy, so to speak. The hours for meals were the same, and they were served as usual; but all took place amid complete silence, broken only by the necessary noise of the service. At the Emperor's toilet the same silence; not a word issued from his lips; and if in the morning I suggested ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... succeed in crossing the stream; they are thrown into it and remain there forever. Some souls come to the edge of the stream but are prevented from passing by the snake that threatens to devour them: these are the souls of the persons in a lethargy or trance. Being refused a passage, these souls return to their bodies and reanimate them. They believe that animals have souls and even that inorganic substances such as kettles etc., have in them ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... thus low, and stood pitifully smiling:—This spectacle, together with some subtle spur from the talk of love, roused Emilia from her lethargy. The warmth of a new desire struck around her heart. The old belief in her power over Wilfrid joined to a distinct admission that she had for the moment lost him; and she said, "Yes; now, as I am ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... But now came a series of cases destined to fling this earliest murder into the shade. Nobody could now be unprepared; and yet the tragedies, henceforward, which passed before us, one by one, in sad, leisurely, or in terrific groups, seemed to argue a lethargy like that of apoplexy in the victims, one and all. The very midnight of mysterious awe ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... light that showed high above our heads grew brighter towards noon, then began slowly to decline. Before the shadows had lengthened in the court above, however, the sound of our door being unbarred aroused us from our lethargy, and a moment later, three soldiers entered and told us to prepare to go before the great ruler Samory. Omar, attired only in a small garment of bark-cloth, took no heed of his toilet, therefore we at once announced our readiness to leave the loathsome place with its myriad creeping things, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... than of old. It did not seem to matter so greatly if there were nothing to be won from life, and she was very tired. It had been a mistake to come to Marden at all, there was too much time to think there. She returned to that fact eventually. The afternoon wore on and she fell into a lethargy with no desire to escape it, and did not hear Christopher's ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... he heard the wheels roll off, shook from him his lethargy. It was not only that Neverbend would boast that he alone had gone through the perils of their subterranean duty, but that doubtless he would explain in London how his colleague had been deterred ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... of Clarice, appearing like Virgil's Camilla, stirs him from this lethargy. He falls in love at first sight, as Tasso's heroes always do, and vows to prove himself her worthy knight by deeds of unexampled daring. Thus the plot is put in motion; and we read in well-appointed order ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... thing," he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a trivial conversation, "is that I didn't think—I didn't think at all. I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones—in a sort of lethargy— stagnant. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... half smile upon the lips, that made still more touching the tears not yet dried upon her cheeks. While thin, frail, shadowy, with white hair and furrowed cheeks, the old man fixed his sightless orbs on space; and his face, usually only animated from the lethargy of advancing dotage by a certain querulous cynicism, now grew suddenly earnest, and even thoughtful, as Fanny ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 4 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... unmoving. The feeling was there again, like a scene waiting only to be gazed at directly to be perceived. It was as though a great wisdom lay at the edge of understanding. If he rested quietly it would all come to him. Yet always, when his mind lost its sleep-induced lethargy, the moment ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... by the practical threat of voudou curses upon Agricola was one thing, Creole lethargy was quite another; and when, three mornings later, a full quartette of voudou charms was found in the four corners of Agricola's pillow, the great Grandissime family were ignorant of how they could have come there. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... Egyptian and endeavored to revive them. North of the Taurus even the Armenians began to write and polish their barbarian speech. Christian preaching, addressed to the people, took hold of the popular idioms and roused them from their long lethargy. Along the Nile as well as on the plains of Mesopotamia or in the valleys of Anatolia it proclaimed its new ideas in dialects that had been despised hitherto, and wherever the old Orient had not been entirely denationalized by Hellenism, it ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... has Ibsen rendered to the drama: he has revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the final decades of the nineteenth century,—when the novel was despotic in its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary expression, and when arrogant writers ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... were marked by aspirations for a better state of things, and discussions between the rival schools of Classicists and Mediaevalists. The latter carried the day, and, after an heroic struggle and many failures, England awoke from her long lethargy, to find herself the possessor of a noble architecture, a true exponent of ecclesiastical art and tradition, although confessedly far from perfect when applied to domestic buildings. For these latter edifices the old manor-houses, with their many mullioned windows and Tudor arcuation, formed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... awake and live My last brief moment as the man I was, Than lapse from life's long lethargy to death Without one conscious interval. At least I repossess my past, am once again No courtier med'cining the whims of kings In muffled palace-chambers, but the free Friendless Vesalius, with his back to the wall And all the world against him. O, for that Best gift ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... seemed burning up. The water he drank only partially allayed his frantic thirst. It was with great difficulty that he could arouse himself from a lethargy that seemed to completely paralyze both body and mind. As the moments passed, however, he succeeded in rallying into something like normal. But as yet he was unable to fully understand ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the last half century. I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is lethargy. It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to public education and to a thousand interferences with their private self-seeking. Just as the pestilence of cholera ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... an indefectible state of union with God) is to be condemned as "a poisoned source of idleness and internal lethargy." ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... defeat and death, of the fall of our forts on the Delaware, of Lord Cornwallis gone to England, of failures to effect exchanges. Then she went on to write: "Your father was, strange to say, roused out of a sort of lethargy by the news of your death. Jack managed to get a letter to your aunt to say you were missing, and Arthur had search made for you; but many nameless ones were buried in haste, and he could not find your name on ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... successful inroads into England, subsisted his needy followers by the plunder of that country, and taught them to despise the military genius of a people who had long been the object of their terror. Edward at last, roused from his lethargy, had marched an army into Scotland, and Robert, determined not to risk too much against an enemy so much superior, retired again into the mountains. The king advanced beyond Edinburgh; but being destitute of provisions, and being ill supported ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... gentle hint did not arouse the old lady, who was falling back into a pleasant lethargy, so common ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... lifting the ice, and the waters were becoming turbulent to the eye; when the sapsuckers and creeping birds were jubilant, and the honk of the wild goose was a passing thing; when, with the upspring of the rest of nature, the trees threw off their lethargy, and through the rugged maples the sap began to course again. It was only a few days before Easter that my friend—his name was Hayes, "Jack" Hayes, we called him, though his name, of course, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... well I recall the gay transformation in my shop-mates when the whistle blew on Saturday night. The dullest and most morose showed intelligence then. The prospect of rest, be it ever so remote—even in the hereafter—roused them from their lethargy. How alert and cheerful we were on holidays, even the prolonged holiday of a strike brought its pinched joys. Quite a number of my ancient comrades of industry looked forward to the Poor House with a hopefulness born of thwarted toil. The luckiest ones out of the thousands whom I knew were those ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... few moments. He had heard that Government officials were hard to move, and knew that, in hot countries, Englishmen who marry native wives sometimes grow apathetic and succumb to the climatic lethargy. But this was not all: he had to contend against the official dislike of anything informal and unusual. Had he been in the navy, his warning would have received attention, but as he was a humble civilian he had, so to speak, ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... suggests the following question: what would happen if I were to chill the creature in its immobile posture? I foresee a more prolonged inertia. The chill, of course, must not be great, for it would be followed by the lethargy into which insects capable of surviving the winter fall when ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... now present you rouse you from your lethargy; yet should they not, I will not cease to cry aloud. I cannot now remain in silence while my fellow countrymen are sacrificed, the citizens of two noble cities deceived, and an enterprise for which I have ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... been open to suppose that the fears which made the old man a homeless wanderer and fugitive for the last two years of his life, were wholly imaginary, but for the circumstances of his death. He died of a lethargy on the 26th of April, 1731, at a lodging in Ropemaker's Alley, Moorfields. In September, 1733, as the books in Doctors' Commons show, letters of administration on his goods and chattels were granted to Mary Brooks, widow, a creditrix, after summoning in official ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... This is not a fancy picture. It is a true copy of one of the features which make up the aspect 'of the State, and of every State where the moral leprosy of slavery covers the people with its noisome scales; a deadening lethargy benumbs the limbs of the body politic; a stupor settles on the arts of life; agriculture reluctantly drags the plough and harrow to the field, only when scourged by necessity; the axe drops from the woodman's nerveless hand the moment his fire is scantily supplied with fuel; and the fen, undrained, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... put one-fifth of his fortune, to the great discontent of the heirs. Henrietta's income had expanded from four thousand a year to twenty; and she spent her days in thinking of and talking of the careers to which she could help her husband if he would only shake off the lethargy which seized him the year after his marriage to a Fuller heiress. But Hastings would not; he was happy in his books and in his local repute for knowing everything there was to be known. Month by month he grew fatter and lazier and slower of speech. Henrietta pretended to be irritated against him, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... lengthened, and a wind of the evening entered the wood. Haward shook off the lethargy that had kept him lying there for the better part of an afternoon, rose to his feet, and left the green dell for the road, all shadow now, winding back to the toy metropolis, to Marot's ordinary, to the ball at the Palace ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... most thoroughly inured to the effluvia of this journalistic jargon; they have literally lost all taste, and their palate is rather gratified than not by the most corrupt and arbitrary innovations. Hence the tutti unisono with which, despite the general lethargy and sickliness, every fresh solecism is greeted; it is with such impudent corruptions of the language that her hirelings are avenged against her for the incredible boredom she imposes ever more and more upon them. I ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... criticism. Clearly it tends at all times to set up individual conviction against authority, freedom against discipline. It has as its virtue the quality of being opposed to red tape, professionalism, departmentalism pedantry, officiousness, intolerance, lethargy, and the tyranny of custom; it has its dangers in that, resting as it does in the last resort on the personal and the concrete, it tends in ill-balanced minds to neglect the value of ancient and dear illusions, and to degenerate into chaos ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... little change had taken place in Victor de Gisons' condition. He remained in a state almost of lethargy, with an expression of dull hopelessness on his face; sometimes he passed his hand wearily across his forehead as if he were trying to recollect something he had lost; he was still too weak to stand, but Jacques and his wife ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... members at his death, and now counts its members in England and America by millions. But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodist revival. Its action upon the Church, as we shall see later, broke the lethargy of the clergy who, under the influence of the "Evangelical" movement, were called to a loftier conception of their duties; while a powerful moral enthusiasm appeared in the nation at large. A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and wisdom into our penal ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... mangled wretch was forced to smile; To match his patience 'gainst her hate, His heart rebellious all the while. Where Pleasure still will lead to wrong, And helpless Reason warn in vain; And Truth is weak, and Treachery strong; And Joy the surest path to Pain; And Peace, the lethargy of Grief; And Hope, a phantom of the soul; And life, a labour, void and brief; And Death, ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... almost beyond endurance to a man of his age and of his volcanic nature. His physician was soon at his side, and, with some degree of success, put forth all his skill to rally his exhausted patient. He at last succeeded in producing a certain degree of lethargy, which, in benumbing the brain, brought respite from ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... power of vitality was there in Bonnevard, that he did not sink in lethargy, and forget himself to stone! But he did not; it is said that when the victorious Swiss army broke in to ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... yielded their uttermost to our guests. The latter would therefore have returned to the drawing-room, where it was possible that one or more of them might go to sleep. Remembering that the chops were loin-chops, we might at all events hope for some slight amount of lethargy. Again we waded through the nettles, we scaled the garden-wall, and worked our way between it and the laurestinas towards the door opposite the kitchen. 'There remained between us and the house an open space of about fifteen yards, fully commanded by the drawing-room window, veiling which, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... is regarded as a disgrace to die of consumption. So it is. But the stigma rests upon the community which permits the ravage of this preventable disease; not upon the victims of it, except as they contribute to the general lethargy. In order to save the feelings of the family, a death from consumption is reported as bronchitis or pneumonia. The man is buried quietly. The premises are not disinfected, as they should be, and perhaps some unknowing victim moves ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... for just such an emergency, were charging the bunch intrepidly. Others made shift with flat sirup-cans with pebbles inside. A few, like Pink and the Silent One, flapped their slickers till their arms ached. Anything, everything that would make a din and startle the cattle out of their lethargy, was pressed into service. ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... want of enterprise among its inhabitants, the result of four hundred years of indolence on the one hand and oppression on the other, renders it problematical whether their ample resources will ever be developed. Should Turkey, however, arise from her lethargy, should genuine civilisation spread its branches over the land, we may then confidently anticipate a glorious future for her south-Slavonic provinces, doubting not that they will some day become 'the noblest jewel in ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... Rabbits), the god of wine, at the latter's own request, he believing that he thus would be rendered immortal, and that all others who drank of the beverage he presided over would die. His death, they added, was indeed like the stupor of a drunkard, who, after his lethargy has passed, rises healthy and well. In this sense of renewing life after death, he presided over the native calendar, the count of years beginning with Tochtli, the Rabbit.[1] Thus we see that this is a myth of the returning seasons, ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... imagine was to determine. She did determine. Yet, even while making so terrible a resolve, a singular calm seemed to overspread her soul. She complained of nothing—wished for nothing—sought for nothing—trembled at nothing. A dreadful lethargy, which made the old mother declaim as against a singular proof of hardihood, possessed her spirit. Little did the still-idolizing mother conjecture ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... like children reveling in the lore of elves and fairies. As the prattle of a child was the power that awakened Silas Marner from his stupor of despair, so this Norman element of gayety, of exuberant romanticism, was precisely what was needed to rouse the sterner Saxon mind from its gloom and lethargy. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... word of which Ada could understand. So eager had she been, that she did not perceive the condition to which Nina was reduced, believing that she was still asleep from simple fatigue, but her eye falling on her, she burst into loud lamentations of grief, which very nearly awoke her from the lethargy into which she had fallen. It was the means, however, of awaking Marianna, by whose aid she was able to make the little girl comprehend the importance of seeking out Paolo, and bringing him to attend on his sister. She ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... so seating her guests that each may be pleased with his or her neighbor. The centerpiece is of flowers; for this never choose a strongly scented flower like hyacinths or narcissi. The heat, the odor of the food, combined with the scent of the flowers, may induce lethargy, so that the dinner may be "garnished ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... are and pin our faith to the belief that, as the baleful effects of the current misunderstanding become more and more apparent, the mother love, of its own accord, will become sufficiently alarmed, to throw aside its lethargy and seek to make amends by devoting itself more consistently to ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... agree to differ. 'Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind' (Rom 14:5). Human arts have been exhausted to prevent that mental exercise or self-persuasion which is essential to a Christian profession. The great object of Satan has ever been to foster indifference, that deadly lethargy, by leading man to any source of information rather than prayerful researches into the Bible. Bunyan's severe discipline in Christ's school would lead him to form a judgment for himself; he was surrounded by a host of sects, and, with such a Bible-loving man, it is an interesting ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... small aid. Her doctrines, as taught by Augustine and Boniface, by Anschar and Sigfrid, were comparatively mild and pure; but she had scarce swallowed the heathendom of the North, much in the same way as the Wolf was to swallow Odin at the 'Twilight of the Gods', than she fell into a deadly lethargy of faith, which put it out of her power to digest her meal. Gregory the Seventh, elected pope in 1073, tore the clergy from the ties of domestic life with a grasp that wounded every fibre of natural affection, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... which can bring the full value and power. Even at present, by mere force of order and authority, the army is the salvation of myriads; and men who, under other circumstances, would have sunk into lethargy or dissipation, are redeemed into noble life by a service which at once summons and directs their energies. How much more than this military education is capable of doing, you will find only when you make it education indeed. We have no excuse for leaving our private ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... takes us to Klingsor's magic castle. Klingsor sees the fool advance, joyous and childish, and summons Kundry, the guilty one, who rests in the dead lethargy of destiny, and in sorrow and anger only follows his command. She longs no more for life, but seeks deliverance in the eternal sleep. She has laughed at the bleeding head of John, laughed when she beheld the Savior bleeding at the cross, and is now condemned ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... whole matter in a philosophical and ultra-pragmatic way. Some observers have hazarded that our postponement of haircuts is due to mere lethargy and inertia, but that is not so. Every time we get our locks shorn our wife tells us that we have got them too short. She says that our head has a very homely and bourgeois bullet shape, a sort of pithecanthropoid contour, which is revealed by a close trim. After five weeks' growth, however, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... up for the admiration and imitation of all those classes of society which profess to have opinions. It would thus become an established element in the temper of the age. Nor need we fear that the result of this would be any flaccidity of conviction, or lethargy in act. A man would still be penetrated with the rightness of his own opinion on a given issue, and would still do all that he could to make it prevail in practice. But among the things which he would no longer permit himself ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... sprang forward into plans for the summer's campaign. His enthusiasm stirred French to something like vigorous action, and even waked old Mackenzie out of his aboriginal lethargy. That very day Kalman rode down to Wakota to consult his friend Brown, upon whose guidance in all matters he had come more and more to depend. Brown's Canadian training on an Ontario farm before he entered college had greatly enriched his experience, and his equipment ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... faintest movement in his whole body, and his brows were still contracted in the same forbidding frown. If Varvara Petrovna had remained another three minutes she could not have endured the stifling sensation that this motionless lethargy roused in her, and would have waked him. But he suddenly opened his eyes, and sat for ten minutes as immovable as before, staring persistently and curiously, as though at some object in the corner which ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... go through with it!" St. Clair looked across at Langdon and the signaling look of Happy Tom replied. They drew in just a little closer. Now and then they talked to him sharply and briskly, rousing him again and again from the lethargy into ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cramps, stupor, convulsion, tremor, palsy: or belonging to the excrements of the brain, catarrhs, sneezing, rheums, distillations: or else those that pertain to the substance of the brain itself, in which are conceived frenzy, lethargy, melancholy, madness, weak memory, sopor, or Coma Vigilia et vigil Coma. Out of these again I will single such as properly belong to the phantasy, or imagination, or reason itself, which [892]Laurentius calls the disease of the mind; ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... action on the part of the creoles was discouraged, divisions and factions among them were encouraged and educational opportunities restricted, and the American-born Spaniards gradually sank into idleness and lethargy, indifferent to all but childish honours and distinctions and petty local jealousies. To make matters worse, many of the Spaniards who crossed the seas to the American colonies came not to colonize, not to trade or cultivate the ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... touched the bottom before Leith started to transship the provisions that were required for the trip across the island. The sight of land seemed to stir the sallow-faced giant out of the lethargy that had gripped him on the way down from Levuka. He suddenly discovered that the mantle of authority was upon his shoulders, and he bullied the island boys as they lowered ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... was brought to him nightly by Ridgar and the young clerk Gifford, and he would look over things and make a few suggestions, dispose of this and that as a matter of course and fall back into his lethargy. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... if a girl on the thirteenth day. On the twelfth day the mother's bangles are thrown away and new ones put on. The Kunbis are very kind to their children, and never harsh or quick-tempered, but this may perhaps be partly due to their constitutional lethargy. They seldom refuse a child anything, but taking advantage of its innocence will by dissimulation make it forget what it wanted. The time arrives when this course of conduct is useless, and then the child learns to mistrust the word ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... it. I said: "It is a lethargy." I still hoped. I returned to the salon, told Alice that I was going out, but would soon be back, and ran to the Rue Saint Maur. I had hardly reached ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... pleasantly-amused interest in their fate. There is, of course, plenty of distinction in the writing. But I could have wished more or earlier movement. Even the motor-car, whose appearance promised a hint, the merest far-off possibility, of farcical developments, shared in the general lethargy and refused to move from its ditch. In spite, however, of this procrastination I wish it to be understood that the story is in some ways one of unusual charm; it has style, atmosphere and a very sensible dignity. But, lacking the confidence that I fortunately ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... a person to sit still in the most complete inactivity, with his hands hanging down, his eyes fixed on the ground, and withdrawn from all other objects, and suppose him at the same time to be encompassed by an atmosphere of gladness, would not a lethargy seize both his head and body, and the vital expansion of his countenance would be contracted, and at length with relaxed fibres he would nod and totter, till he fell to the earth? What is it that keeps the whole bodily system in its due expansion and tension, but the tension of the mind? and ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... That girl! What a keen one! She had caught everything at a glance! And the skipper, to get out of his hole, fell back on violence. "Good God! Have you got ears on your head? Give me a glass, I said." And a glass, for that matter, he really needed, to dispel the mortal lethargy that had settled on his whole body. A sober man he was! But he would drink, and drink and drink till he was drunk, and ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... what we hate to believe, what we fight tooth and nail against. The man who makes us listen to that is the seer and the prophet; he comes upon us like Shelley, or Whitman, or Ibsen, and plumps down horrid truths that half surprise, half disgust us. He shakes us out of our lethargy. To such give ear, though they say what shocks you. Weigh well their hateful ideas. Avoid the vulgar vice of sneering and carping at them. Learn to examine their nude thought without shrinking, and examine it all the more carefully when it most repels you. Naked verity is an acquired taste; it is ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... Hosmer, in art; Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschell, Maria Mitchell, in science; Elizabeth Fry, Dorothea Dix, Mary Carpenter, in prison reform; Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton in the camp—are all parts of the great uprising of women out of the lethargy of the past, and are among the forces of the complete revolution a thousand pens and voices herald at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... not to do others' thinking for them, but to help them to think more vigorously and effectually. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves. The light and life which spring up in one soul are to be spread far and wide. Of all treasons against humanity, there is no one worse than his who employs great intellectual force to keep down the intellect ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... enough that I have said, at first, I have nothing for you? Such lazy vagrants as you hinder a gentleman from walking the streets." Rochefoucault burst into a loud laugh, and awakening the absent man from his lethargy, he was not a little surprised, himself, that he should have taken his friend for an importunate mendicant! La Fontaine is recorded to have been one of the most absent men; and Furetiere relates a most singular instance of this absence of mind. La Fontaine attended the burial of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... defend the cause of truth. It was not thus that our fathers maintained it in the brilliant periods of our history. Prejudice may be trusted to guard the outworks for a short space of time, while reason slumbers in the citadel; but if the latter sink into a lethargy, the former will quickly erect a standard for herself. Philosophy, wisdom, and liberty support each other: he, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave."—Vol. i. pp. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... And in everything I wrote I persistently taught what was for me the sole truth—that our chief object in life should be to secure our own happiness and that of our family. Then, five years ago, supervened a mood of mental lethargy. I grew despondent; my perplexity increased, and I was tormented by the constant recurrence of such questions as—"Why?" and "What afterwards?" And by degrees the questions took a more concrete form. "I now possess six thousand 'desyatins' ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... period contains another notable example of a sudden and unaccountable decline in population. The scene is Spain, which, after playing an active and very prominent part in the world's history, sank quickly into the lethargy from which it has never recovered. It may be noted that here, as in the case of Rome, the decay of population and energy followed a great influx of plundered wealth. On the other hand, the increase of population in our newly-planted North ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... recollection, and a silent tear was observed to trickle down. But when the philosopher described a character so like his own, shame seemed to take entire possession of his soul; and, rousing as from a long and painful lethargy, he softly raised his hand to his head, and tore away the chaplets of flowers, the monuments of his effeminacy and disgrace; he seemed intent to compose his dress into a more decent form, and wrapped his robe about him, ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... of ever going to war, and who, in fact, often did not believe that there was a war. We all felt somewhat relieved one night when we heard that the German fleet was bombarding the English coast, hoping that it would shake the country out of its feeling of smug self-complacency and lethargy. ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... thee And changed the object of thy will, It had been lethargy in me, Not constancy, to love thee still. Yea, it had been a sin to go And prostitute affection so: Since we are taught no prayers to say To such as must to ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... was to watch in the evenings the Spaniards, shedding their usual lethargy, dance the fandango and the bolero with a perfection of grace and agility, even in the villages. The colonel offered them the use of his band, but they, quite rightly, preferred the guitar, the castanets, and a woman's voice; an accompaniment which gave the dance its national ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... skill of which the doctor was capable, and the best part of twenty-four hours of hard work to rouse Anna from the death-like lethargy into which she had fallen. Toward morning she opened her eyes and turning to ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... off the lethargy of its morning sleep: there were many men in the street, some riding back and forth, disdaining to walk the distance of a hundred yards from a saloon they had just left to the saloon to which they were going, some sitting their horses in the shade, ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... respond to the spur of her will. It became an effort to walk, to swing her arms and stamp her feet, to make any brisk movement that kept the circulation going. She knew what it portended, yet was unable to make greater resistance against the lethargy of cold ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... be in a lethargy or under a partial paralysis; he slowly and weakly rubbed his head with his hand, as if vaguely conscious that ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... the love of true glory is the most legitimate agent of extensive good, and you do right to worship and enshrine it. For me it is dead: it Survived—ay, the truth shall out!—poverty, want, disappointment, baffled aspirations,—all, all, but the deadness, the lethargy of regret when no one was left upon this altered earth to animate its efforts, to smile upon its success, then the last spark quivered and died; and—and—but forgive me—on this subject I am not often wont to ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... insensibleness that makes thee silent? I had rather it were shamefastness, but I perceive thou art become insensible." And seeing me not only silent but altogether mute and dumb, fair and easily she laid her hand upon my breast saying: "There is no danger; he is in a lethargy, the common disease of deceived minds; he hath a little forgot himself, but he will easily remember himself again, if he be brought to know us first. To which end, let us a little wipe his eyes, dimmed with the cloud of mortal things." And having thus said, with a corner of her garment she ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... and to feel antagonism and even hatred for other nations. With these objects under despotic governments there is direct prohibition against printing and disseminating books to enlighten the people, and everyone who might rouse the people from their lethargy is exiled or imprisoned. Moreover, under every government without exception everything is kept back that might emancipate and everything encouraged that tends to corrupt the people, such as literary works tending to keep them ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... kept her bed for a week or more. She had sunk into a sort of desolate lethargy of mind and body from which nothing could rouse her. Her mother was in despair. Richard Gardner was too ill to come to see the girl he loved, and he did not write. The blow that had fallen upon ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... hang upon their hands. And they who are abroad seem not like the same people. Their step is now measured and slow—the head bent—no salutation greets the passing stranger or acquaintance, or only a few cold words of inquiry, which pass from cold lips into ears as cold. Apathy—lethargy— stupor—seem fast settling over all. They would indeed bury all, I believe, were it not that the parties of the discontented increase in number and power, which compels the friends of the Queen to keep upon the alert. The question of surrender is now openly discussed. 'It is useless,' ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... eggs. This meal over, they sat sleepily blinking their eyes, whisking away flies, and mopping the moisture from their faces until the sound of "Eis! meine Herrschaften!" "Bier! meine Herrschaften!" roused them from their lethargy. Ices and beer and cherries and peaches successively filled up the weary hours until "the tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," carried joy to their hearts. I can never forget the rapturous look of anticipation and satisfaction which those stolid middle-class Teutonic countenances wore ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... also affect the body and limbs. "Every day so many hours and so much energy are required for digestion; a gross torpidity, a carnal lethargy, seizes on mortal men after dinner. This may and can be avoided. Man's knowledge of organic chemistry widens daily. Already he can supplement the gastric glands by artificial devices. Every doctor who administers physic implies that the bodily functions ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... added, with the divination of her sex. Comforted a little by Mrs. Faith, I quickly abandoned this project; indeed, I soon abandoned every other which concerned itself with Helen, and yielded myself with a kind of desperate lethargy, if I may be allowed the expression, to the fate which separated me from her. Of resignation I knew nothing. Peace was the coldest stranger in that strange land to me. I yielded because I could not help it, not because I would ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... see us murder'd by this Moor; But I'll be active, Boys— Therefore, Antonio, you command the Horse; Get what more Numbers to our Cause you can: 'Tis a good Cause, and will advance our Credit. We will awake this King out of his Lethargy of Love, And make him absolute—Go to your Charge, And early in the Morning I'll be with you— [Ex. all but Phil. If all fail, Portugal shall be my Refuge, Those whom so late I conquer'd, shall protect me— But this Alanzo I shou'd make an Interest ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... only ones. Human pity awoke from its lethargy. The penalties for wrongdoing became less brutal, the prisons less terrible. No longer did gaping crowds watch shivering wretches brought out of the jails every Monday morning, in batches of twenty and thirty, ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... in which Socrates passed his life. Of his influence it is hardly necessary here to speak at length. In the well-known metaphor put into his mouth by Plato, he was the "gad-fly" of the Athenian people. To prick intellectual lethargy, to force people to think, and especially to think about the conceptions with which they supposed themselves to be most familiar, those which guided their conduct in private and public affairs—justice expediency, honesty, and the like—such was the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... First, they neither murmur nor repine; but with genuine religion and philosophy they recognize in these dreadful visitations the ways of a benign Providence, and find in them cause for thankfulness. The Council of Castile exhort the people of Madrid 'to cast off their lethargy, and purify their manners, and to acknowledge the calamities which the kingdom and that great capital had endured as a punishment necessary to their correction.' General Morla in his address to the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... about us; for thus thou hast made us." We would not escape from our history by fleeing into the wilderness, by hiding our heads in the sands of forgetfulness, or the repentance that comes of pain, or the lethargy of hopelessness. We take it, as our very life, in our hand, and flee with it unto thee. Triumphant is the answer which thou boldest for every doubt. It may be we could not understand it yet, even if thou didst speak it "with most miraculous organ." But thou shalt at ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... certain nervous twitches and starts, in one of which he rose to his feet and looked wildly about him, fell into the strangest confusion of dreams. He carried his papers in a leather case or pocket-book, in an inner breast-pocket of his buttoned travelling-coat; and whatever he dreamed of, in the lethargy that got possession of him, something importunate in those papers called him out of that dream, though he could not wake from it. He was berated on the steppes of Russia (some shadowy person gave that name to the place) with Marguerite; ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... on the past with very mixed feelings,—dreaming of the easy-going methods of our forefathers, which gave them leisure for study and reflection, or esteeming their age as an age of lethargy, ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... She was a worldly woman, and my conduct seemed perfectly wild to her. She remonstrated, persuaded, then reproached me in impatient, angry tones. My father was a quiet, amiable man, and rarely interfered with my mother in her management, but he fortunately shook off enough of his lethargy to come to my rescue ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... himself from his lethargy, and went forward into the forecastle with the sailors. But the breed of sailors seemed to have changed since the days he had lived in the forecastle. He could find no kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial creatures. He was in despair. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... boys' nerves were so worked upon that they were unable to go to sleep again and tossed on their cots until the gray dawn began to show through the windows. They lay in a sort of lethargy watching the sky grow brighter and brighter until they were aroused to action by the loud voices of men and the clanking of guns in the ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... of time and subsidence of excitement which tend to insure dispassionate and impartial treatment by the historian, and a juster proportion of impression in spectators, tend also to produce indifference and lethargy in the people at large; whereas in fact the need for sustained interest of a practical character still exists. Intelligent provision for the present and future ought now to succeed to the emotional experiences of the actual war. The reading public has been ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... not now known what the reply was, for just then the prompter came on the stage, rudely twisted the tail of the cow, rousing her from her lethargy, and harshly kicking her in the pit of the stomach, he drove her off the stage, The audience loudly called for a repetition, but the cow ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... not so much intellectual barrenness as their vices, native or acquired,—or because they bring no wisdom to the conduct of life, but dwell in smoky huts, eat unhealthy food, go from starvation to plethora and from plethora to starvation again, exchange the indolent lethargy which is the law of savage life for the frantic struggles of war or the chase which diversify and break up its monotony. Allow the objection; and then what have we accomplished, but carrying the argument one step back? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death.... ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... that once seen, can never be forgotten. He was seeing a nation aroused, preparing to fight. If war came to England it would be no war decreed by a few men. It would be a war proclaimed by the people themselves, demanded by them. The nation was stirring; it was casting off the proverbial lethargy and indifference of the English. Even here, in this usually quiet suburb of London, the home of business and professional men who were comfortably well off, the stirring of the spirit of England was evident. And suddenly the song of the scouts and those who had ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... of no small social rank. He was well off in worldly things; somewhat fond, it is said, of good living and of luxury; inclined, it may be, to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," and to sink more and more into the mere worldling, unless some shock awoke him from his lethargy. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... asked himself these questions, it was with the impersonality of lethargy, for they were dismissed as ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... lion only sleeps! The time may come, when both he and his father will rise from their lethargy, and throw themselves at once into the arms of Scotland. To stimulate the dormant patriotism of these two princes, by showing them a subject leading their people to liberty, is one great end of the victories I seek. None other than a brave king can bind the various interests ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Anne and Charlotte drooped and languished; Branwell, too, was ill. His constitution seemed shattered by excesses which he had not the resolution to forego. Often he would sleep most of the day; or at least sit dosing hour after hour in a lethargy of weakness; but with the night this apathy would change to violence and suffering. "Papa, and sometimes all of us have sad nights with him," writes Charlotte in the last days ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... and being unfortunate in her first Marriage, has taken a Resolution never to venture upon a second. She has no Children to take care of, and leaves the Management of her Estate to my good Friend Sir ROGER. But as the Mind naturally sinks into a kind of Lethargy, and falls asleep, that is not agitated by some Favourite Pleasures and Pursuits, Leonora has turned all the Passions of her Sex into a Love of Books and Retirement. She converses chiefly with Men (as she has often said herself), but it is only in their Writings; and admits of very few Male-Visitants, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... confusion in the corridor. Men were running, voices were crying questions. As they passed the window they saw Wethermill start up, aroused from his lethargy. They knew the truth before they reached the entrance of the hotel. A cab had driven up to the door from the station; in the cab was an unknown ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... sat watching the dawn his mind began to stir, to shake off its lethargy and stupor, to struggle into ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Plimsoll followed to the door, lethargy leaving him in the face of disaster though he could not think fast or clearly. Hahn came clattering over the rocks on his horse, his face chalky white. He was reeling in his saddle, the horse spraddling, wild-eyed, almost out of control. Cookie jumped ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... thought brought to his mind another girl. He struck himself viciously across the eyes as though he would crush the memory, and went out to tramp among the ashes till the dawn. His body had no need of rest, for the exercise he had taken to-day had merely served to throw off the lethargy of the jail; and sleep was ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... and as a condition of national safety; but they rejected it as a lesson in political wisdom, and as an implicit principle of political action. By so doing they began that career of intellectual lethargy, superficiality, and insincerity which ever since has been characteristic ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... distinctly, and knew that Raymond was speaking to him, but for the life of him he could not rouse himself from his lethargy. He could only think of the lonely walk he had taken fifteen years ago; it was his last look at the fields and woods he had known since he was a child, and now it all stood out in brilliant light, as a picture, before him. Above all there came to ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... felt, somehow, that her people were falling away from her. It added one drop to her bitter cup. She began to droop into a sort of calm, despondent lethargy. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... out of sight; yet she worked on him so that he was crooked and shrivelled. Yet he wept and cried to have her ever with him, while he peaked and pined and dwindled away. And her mother, who was once a fine, stately, masterful dame, pined to mere skin and bone, and lay in lethargy; and now she is winding her charms ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and dreaming," she repeated. But the possibility which now suggested itself that one of the shapes might be the shape of Terence roused her from her melancholy lethargy. She became as restless as she had been before she sat down. She was no longer able to see the world as a town laid out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze of feverish red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had been all day. Thinking was no escape. Physical movement ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... sheriffs; then suddenly came this war upon us. But nothing aroused him from his lethargy; and all day long he brooded there in silence, day after day, until our creditors would endure no longer, and the bailiff menaced him. Confused and frightened, I implored him to leave the city—jails seeming to me far more terrible than death—and at last ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... aspiration, and love; in a word, all the sanctified emotions of the human heart, which together melt into the supreme emotion of religion, will sometimes arise to sternly rebuke the selfish life, shame us out of our moral lethargy, and comfort those whose one solace is that their honour is intact, though misfortune has stricken them in mind or body, or robbed them of the goods of earth, or the cheer and comfort of friendship and of love. It is hoped that the influence of what is said and done ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... well as from the desire of eating. I was hurt to find even such a temporary feebleness, and that I was so far from being that robust wise man who is sufficient for his own happiness. I felt a kind of lethargy of indolence. I did not exert myself to get Dr Johnson to talk, that I might not have the labour of writing down his conversation. He inquired here, if there were any remains of the second sight. Mr M'Pherson, Minister of Slate, said, he was RESOLVED not to believe it, because it was founded on ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... conception, what a lightning-like execution! Dutifully re-echoing the words uttered by their masters, the partisans of the Administration console themselves by saying that "this invasion of the North will have the effect of stirring up the North from its lethargy." O, you blasphemers! worse blasphemers than ever have been stoned or burned alive! Is the North not pouring forth its blood and its treasures, and are they not ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... (er) the thing which is (pet), evil (ou). Nevertheless the Coptic language has had its literature, like the Chinese, the roots of which, far from being aggregated, scarcely approach each other without immediate contact. We must admit that nations once roused from their lethargy, and tending towards civilization, find in the most uncouth languages the secret of expressing with clearness the conceptions of the mind, and of painting the emotions of the soul. Don Juan de la Rea, a highly estimable ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... few clients to lose one. He now visited Bassett almost daily, and, being himself full of schemes and inventions, he got Bassett, by degrees, out of his lethargy, and he emerged into daylight again; but he looked thin, and yellow as a guinea, and he had turned miser. He kept but one servant, and fed her and himself at Sir Charles Bassett's expense. He wired that gentleman's hares and rabbits in his own hedges. ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Struthers that he would stay in town over night. The call for the Buckhorn trip was, of course, a polite fabrication, an expedient pax in bello to permit the dust of battle to settle a little about this troubled house of McKail. All day to-day I have felt rather languid. I suppose it's the lethargy which naturally follows after all violence. Any respectable woman, I used to think, could keep a dead-line in her soul, beyond which the impulses of evil dare not venture. But I must have been wrong.... All week I've been looking for a letter from Peter Ketley. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... in that interval, after the decline of the peers, and before the people had yet experienced their force, the princes assumed an exorbitant power, and had almost annihilated the constitution under the weight of their prerogative; as soon as the commons recovered from their lethargy, they seem to have been astonished at the danger, and were resolved to secure liberty by firmer barriers than their ancestors had hitherto provided ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... alone is a charm and a joy. But their primary value to us is that they are among the rare beings who have possessed "the vision and the faculty divine," who, to quote Ruskin, can "startle our lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment." There is about them nothing incomprehensibly transcendental, nothing "unpractical," nothing aloof from the life we live—if we live it fully—but wholly the contrary. Those who say otherwise are but exposing their own short sight, their ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... came out again, and the various shades of yellow and of orange that played over the wrinkled earth deepened and glowed. Domini had sunk into a lethargy so complete that, though not asleep, she was scarcely aware of the sun. She was dreaming ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... north into Lincolnshire, to the Abbey of Croyland, where, as you know, my brother Theodore is the abbot; there we can rest in peace for a time, and watch the progress of events. If we hear that the people of these parts are aroused from their lethargy, we will come back and fight for our home and lands; if not, I will no longer stay in East Anglia, which I see is destined to fall piecemeal into the hands of the Danes; but we will journey down to Somerset, and I will pray ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... dissipation, and the ennui of your own aimless thought, to take up some glowing page of an earnest thinker, and read—deep and long, until you feel the metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your flinty lethargy flashes of ideas that give the mind light and heat. And away you go in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and at the ripeness of what seemed so crude. The glow of toil wakes you to the ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... a little, thin, grey-headed old man, the traits of whose face showed him to be a person of superior breeding, wrapped in a very threadbare damask dressing-gown. His nose was long and straight, his lips thin and pale, his eyes of a soft blue, with an expression of lethargy or fatigue. His white, dry hands had very prominent veins; and he wore a large signet-ring, with which he kept playing in a nervous, agitated manner all the time ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... Pleiads I saw leave to shine in their stead And over the pole-star a lethargy shed And the maids of the Bier[FN22] in black raiment unveiled, I knew that the lamp of ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... a coldness and numbness in her limbs, which by degrees affected the nerves (I think the physicians call them), seized the brain, and at last ended in a lethargy. It betrayed itself at first in a sort of indifference and carelessness in all her actions, coldness to her best friends, and an aversion to stir or go about the common offices of life. She, that was the cleanliest ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... in this state of indecision; in which I did little, except write detached thoughts and contemplate the sublime and beautiful of my subjects; till I was rouzed from this lethargy of determination by a hint from his lordship, that it was necessary for Themistocles to appear abroad again; lest his enemies should say he was silenced, and his friends fear ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... fairies take an hour longer in the morning, the beasts attend to their young, the redskins feed heavily for six days and nights, and when pirates and lost boys meet they merely bite their thumbs at each other. But with the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are all under way again: if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... people's modes of dealing with their children Despair itself would have been like an anodyne Don't begin to pry till you have got the long arm on your side Educational factory Fall silent and think they are thinking Habits, which take the place of self-determination Happiest of souls, if lethargy is bliss He almost lived in his library I dressed his wound and God healed him Judged the hearts of others by his own Leverage is everything Makes men imperious to sit a horse Matrimonial alliance, and a family of half a dozen children Means at least as much as he says Measles ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... known to be so throughout the commune—people were sure that Michel Voss was fifty or thereabouts; but there was very little in his appearance to indicate so many years. He was fat and burly to be sure; but then he was not fat to lethargy, or burly with any sign of slowness. There was still the spring of youth in his footstep, and when there was some weight to be lifted, some heavy timber to be thrust here or there, some huge lumbering vehicle ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... that will not, there are also two sorts. For the first there are the sort who are so drowned in sorrow that they fall into a careless deadly dullness, regarding nothing, thinking almost of nothing, no more than if they lay in a lethargy. With them it may so befall that wit and remembrance will wear away and fall even fair from them. And this comfortless kind of heaviness in tribulation is the highest kind of the ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... vent to my feelings by tears. The agony of my poor sister, who saw enough to convince her what was the fatal sentence, and who immediately went into violent hysterics, was the first thing that recalled me to myself. The sight of her distress roused me from my lethargy; yet it was with a sort of stupor that I moved to her assistance, and when she had in some degree recovered, my brain was still whirled round and bewildered. I had received such a shock that all the world appeared as one vacant blank before ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... strange contrast to the lethargy shown by the British Government in the protection of Anglo-Indian trade interests. In the year 1878 the Sultan of Zanzibar, who held a large territory on the mainland, had offered the control of all the commerce of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... have said has been chiefly appropriate for men. Now my subject widens and shall be appropriate for both sexes. In all ages of the world there has been a search for some herb or flower that would stimulate lethargy and compose grief. Among the ancient Greeks and Egyptians they found something they called nepenthe, and the Theban women knew how to compound it. If a person should chew a few of those leaves his grief would be immediately whelmed with hilarity. Nepenthe passed out from ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... early days of the war. Knowing now the frightful blunders committed at the outset, and the hair's-breadth escape from tremendous tragedy, the miracle of the sudden awakening which enabled France to shake off her lethargy and her vanity, and to make a tiger's pounce upon an enemy which had almost brought her to her knees is one of the splendid things in the world's history which ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... of the saloon. It was very strange, but I was too stupid to arrange things. Once I wondered whether I really was in the cabin along with Mr Frewen, but I got no farther with that line of reasoning, and I was sinking back into my stupor or lethargy when Bob Hampton ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... perceive, one of the old breed of '44, Colonel—the men who were in the saddle all day, and on their knees half the night. When shall we see the like of them again? A few such broken wrecks as I are left, with the fire of our youth all burned out and nought left but the ashes of lethargy and lukewarmness.' ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... abort him. Hawkeye rose from her fright triumphant and rejoicing, and down went Stone's Landing! One by one its meagre parcel of inhabitants packed up and moved away, as the summer waned and fall approached. Town lots were no longer salable, traffic ceased, a deadly lethargy fell upon the place once more, the "Weekly Telegraph" faded into an early grave, the wary tadpole returned from exile, the bullfrog resumed his ancient song, the tranquil turtle sunned his back upon bank and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this time picked up a good deal of Portuguese, and was able to make himself pretty well understood by the Spanish shopkeepers. He, as well as the other officers, was astonished and disgusted at the lethargy that prevailed when, as all now knew, the great Spanish armies were scattered to the winds, and large bodies of French troops were advancing in all directions to crush out the ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... length returned she found him lying still, his face to the wall. The black cat was in her path as she crossed the room, so that she had to thrust it out of the way with her foot, and she called it names for moving with such lethargy. ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before, ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... the present day is the extraordinary interest taken in the investigation of those peculiar physical and psychical conditions attending the states now known collectively under the name of hypnotism, varying from lethargy, catalepsy, etc., to somnambulism. Until quite recently these investigations have been frowned upon and tabooed in scientific circles, and the fact that any man of scientific inclinations was known to feel an interest in matters associated with "mesmerism" or "animal ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did before,—should we, durst we in our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to the World's Untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the Devil's? Only in the world's last lethargy can such things be done, and accounted safe and pious! Fools! "Do you think the Living God is a buzzard idol," sternly asks Milton, that you dare address Him in this manner?—Such darkness, thick sluggish clouds of cowardice and oblivious ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... simply nodded his head in assent. After this he seemed to me to sink back in a sort of brooding lethargy, as if indisposed to pursue the subject. I left him to go to my uncle, in order to relate what had just passed. Mr. Roger Littlepage was as much astonished as I had been myself, at hearing that one so aged should have detected us through disguises that had deceived our ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... division, corps after corps, were moving forward; miles of wagons, miles of cavalry in sinuous columns unending, blackened every valley road. Later, the heavy Parrots and big Dahlgrens of the siege train stirred in their parked lethargy, and, enormous muzzles tilted, began to roll out through the valley in heavy majesty, shaking the ground as they passed, guarded ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... most impressionable years. Enraged at the mental and moral attitude of the rich Conservatives who placidly assumed that Providence meant them to rule the earth and all the lesser horde to bow down to their inspired will, he was dissatisfied with the stolidity and lethargy of the official Liberal party, although he himself was a Liberal. When the Boer War broke out his sense of chivalry and justice was outraged at the thought that a great people like the British nation should attempt to crush a tiny pastoral race, even under some ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... ground, and is still upon the losing hand, and it seems will continue so until it pleases the Lord to pour down his Spirit from on high, or else by some sharp awakening dispensation rouse up drowzy souls out of the lethargy wherein they are fallen, &c. It is many years since the sun fell low upon Scotland, many a dismal day hath it seen since 1649. At that time our reformation mounted towards its highest horizon, and since we left our building on that excellent foundation laid by our ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... influences, or what teachings will work the change in the habits of life of those who thus pretend to cultivate the earth? What shall bring them to a clearer realization of their position, their duties, their opportunities, their prospects? This lethargy of ignorance, indifference, and laziness must be shaken off and laid aside in the immediate future, by study and education, by active interest and participation in every discovery or invention which benefits agriculture; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... spectre of the mighty North, slowly rising from lethargy like those Medicean figures of Michael Angelo, which leap from stone to avengers. There was no mutter of coming storm, no clank of coming sabres and bayonets, no creak of great wheels rolling southward, and war in its extremest ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... dark spot in the center of the mass and found two little boys. The head of the smaller was resting in the bosom of the larger, and both were fast asleep. The lethargy which would have been fatal but for the timely rescue had overcome ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... in spite of the lethargy which necessitated at least some artificial feeding, she was not falling away. She seemed, if anything, plump. To all appearances there was really a retardation of metabolism connected with the trance-like sleep. She was actually gaining ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... of rage, futile passion, and hate, there followed a lethargy from which Ernest Churchouse tried in vain to rouse Sabina. He apprehended worse results from this coma of mind and body than from the flux of her natural indignation. He spent much time with her and bade her hope that Raymond might still reconsider ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild glow of animation during his narrative. It relapsed into lethargy at the advent ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... no one is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue. It is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse the Marquesan from his lethargy. Over all the landward shore of Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the trader's store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was nearly full. So ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... village community by the infusion of any intellectual interest, any sense of Art, or any care for honest sport. And here lies the whole secret of the discontent of villages; their inhabitants are conscious of unjust deprivations in their lot; and if they remain villagers, it is rather from lethargy ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... so much pleasure in all these preparations for Christmas, that it occurred to the abbess she might be able so far to interest her unhappy guest in the work as to arouse her from that fearful lethargy which seemed to be destroying both her ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... of sight went by at a dance measure; the eyesight raced with the racing river; the exigencies of every moment kept the pegs screwed so tight, that our being quivered like a well-tuned instrument; and the blood shook off its lethargy, and trotted through all the highways and byways of the veins and arteries, and in and out of the heart, as if circulation were but a holiday journey, and not the daily moil of threescore years and ten. The reeds might nod their heads in warning, and with tremulous gestures tell how ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson |
