"Lifeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... something very awful in the contemplation of death, from which not even the strongest mind can altogether divest itself. But at a wake the solemn gloom which generally pervades the chamber of a lifeless corpse is partially removed by the appearance of the friends of the deceased arranged around, drinking, singing, and smoking tobacco in profusion. Still there was something unusually impressive in observing the poor widow of O'Rafferty, seated ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... They stared at her, fascinated. "Yes, m'm," whispered they, quite humbly. "Now," said Mrs. Brewton, "what is more sacred than an American mother's love? Therefore let her not shame it with anger and strife. All little boys and girls are precious gems to me and to you. What is a cold, lifeless medal compared to one of them? Though I would that all could get the prize! But they can't, you know." "No, m'm." Many mothers, with their children in their arms, were now dumbly watching Mrs. Brewton, who held ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... dews of heaven, where the birds, as they flutter past, may slake their thirst. On each succeeding Sabbath fresh green branches adorn the headstones, and vailed mourners, seated by them, keep silent watch, in the fond belief that the lifeless occupant of the tomb is conscious of their ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him into those paths in which the author has made his own discoveries, if he should be so happy as to have ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... help us. I shall be able to manage the Sir-loin myself, my Mother will eat the soup, and You and the Doctor must finish the rest." Here I was interrupted, by seeing my poor Sister fall down to appearance Lifeless upon one of the Chests, where we keep our Table linen. I immediately called my Mother and the Maids, and at last we brought her to herself again; as soon as ever she was sensible, she expressed a determination of going instantly to Henry, and was so wildly bent on this ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Accordingly they snatched a hurried meal and set off in a small boat. Scarcely, however, had they embarked than they were greeted by the tidings that the vessel which they proposed to visit bore, not the brave Admiral returning to his native land, but his lifeless corpse, worn out with an ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... road stood our horse and trap, with the half-clad stable-boy waiting at the head. We both sprang in, and away we dashed down the London Road. A few country carts were stirring, bearing in vegetables to the metropolis, but the lines of villas on either side were as silent and lifeless as ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... The sufferings of this hapless crowd were acute. Provisions were hard to obtain at the way stations. The water supply gave out. A little child died of exposure, and the heart-broken mother held the lifeless body twenty-four hours on her lap. There was no room to lay it to one side. Another woman ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... make war upon those returned from exile in the land of Israel. But God, the Lord, will stand by Israel in their need and will slay all their enemies by hurling a flame from under His glorious Throne. This will consume the souls in the hosts of the king of Magog, so that their bodies will drop lifeless upon the mountains of the land of Israel, and will become a prey to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. Then will all the dead among Israel arise and rejoice in the good that at the beginning of ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... remedial practice, based upon that definition. What is an impression? Is it the action of a dead substance, which cannot act upon a living substance that can? Assuredly not! Is it not rather the recognition by the living substance of the lifeless one? The whole theory of drug action is easily explainable on this hypothesis. Drugs—inert substances—do not act upon the living organism, but are acted upon, with a view to their expulsion from the living domain. If it were not so, if drugs really acted upon the various ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... rising from the table of his boarding-house to go whence he never returned, some one noticed the seal ring, which you may remember to have seen on his finger, and said, How beautiful that ring is! Yes, he said, and best of all, it was my mother's gift to me. That ring, taken from the lifeless hand a few hours later, was sent to me. Singularly enough, it is broken right across the name from a fall a little time previous. ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... and the wretched have disappeared; the more sober and orderly part of the population have not yet awakened to the labours of the day, and the stillness of death is over the streets; its very hue seems to be imparted to them, cold and lifeless as they look in the grey, sombre light of daybreak. The coach-stands in the larger thoroughfares are deserted: the night-houses are closed; and the chosen promenades of profligate ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... nettles, cuts the little sprout, It fades and, losing all its living hue, Drops by the mother from whose roots it grew: So was it with my Ursula, my dear; A little space she grew beside us here, Then Death came, breathing pestilence, and she Fell, stricken lifeless, by her parent tree. Persephone, Persephone, this flow Of barren tears! How ...
— Laments • Jan Kochanowski
... the grating still remained closed. He arrived just after the poor girl had fallen from the wooden bench upon the tesselated floor of the cold and cheerless anteroom. Her beautiful form lay apparently lifeless before him. Tears fell profusely from his eyes. He chafed her hands and temples. In endearing terms he entreated her to awake. Gradually she revived. Frankly she related the cause of her departure, and entreated him to permit ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... of that capricious and fluctuating conscience which belongs to weak minds, which remains still, and drooping, and lifeless, as a flag on a masthead during the calm of prosperity, but flutters, and flaps, and tosses when the wind blows and the wave heaves, thought very acutely and remorsefully of the condition of the Mortons, during the danger of his own son. So far, indeed, from his anxiety for Arthur monopolising ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... man hung there swaying on his elbow, his face working in ghastly fashion—and then suddenly, with a strange laugh, he carried one hand swiftly to his mouth—and laughed again—and before Jimmie Dale could reach him was lifeless on the floor. ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... necessarily be to a certain extent a permanent one in art. For like it or not as we may, it is true—true to a certain great, fundamental characteristic of nature. For outdoor light is bright, even on a gray day. The luminosity of color is too great to be represented with dark paint or lifeless color. And once this fact is recognized, it is a fact which will inevitably influence all kinds of work. What is possible and right at a certain stage of knowledge or recognition may be impossible when other points of view have ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... surface finish must be pleasing. Good proportions are a matter of design but a pleasing surface finish is a matter of construction. Many, perhaps the majority of, concrete structures do not have a pleasing surface finish; the surface is irregular, uneven in texture, and stained or discolored or of lifeless hue. The reasons for these faults and the possible means of remedying them are matters that concern the ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... would decline to compete with the poet acting in harmony with the musician, and that they would with reverential awe bow before an art-work in comparison with which their own productions would seem but lifeless fragments. For such an art-work there should therefore be prepared a suitable place rather than continue contributions to the support of the individual arts, which the former would invigorate and elevate anew. We see to-day ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... first time the real peril, the colonel of the Eleventh made an impassioned appeal to the regiment to stand by its colors and to take no part in the useless revolt. While he was speaking, a volley riddled his body, and he tumbled lifeless from his saddle. The Eleventh, however, covered the flight of the other officers, but helped to release a thousand prisoners, suffering punishment for various offenses, and then the ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... struggled for the command of the port-holes. But Maj. Montgomery, impatient at the delay, cried out to his men to follow him, and leaped upon the wall in face of the deadliest fire. For an instant he waved his sword over his head in triumph, but the next fell lifeless to the ground, shot through the head by a rifle ball. A more gallant spirit never achieved a nobler death, and the name of the young Tennesseean is preserved as a proud designation by one of the richest counties, as well ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... my wondering vision, and there grew Uncanny phosphorescence in the air Which seemed to throb with some great vital spell Of mystery and doom. With aching eyes I gazed, and lo! the dreadful scene evolved, Black and chaotic, like an awful birth To Desolation, of a lifeless world! My soul in agony cried out to God, When of a sudden all the place grew calm, Save for the trembling of the mountain peaks And the low moaning of the billowy winds Among the abysses. Dull ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... was at that time, and went to bed full of joy. Next morning, (being that of Christmas day), I awoke in a very different state of heart from what I had experienced for many weeks past. I had no enjoyment, and felt cold and lifeless in prayer. At our usual morning meeting, however, one of the brethren exhorted me to continue to pray, saying that the Lord surely would again smile on me, though now for a season, for wise purposes, ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... Henny, and she had time to be glad that she had amused them on the voyage, and made them happy. Then came her mother's face, and Papa Jack's. In a few moments, she told herself, they would be picking up her poor, broken, lifeless little body from the street. How horribly they would feel. And then—she screamed and shut her eyes. The carriage had dashed into something that tore off a wheel. There was a crash—a sound as of splintering wood. But it did not stop their mad ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... flame. Doubtless it served in its day, and in greater or less degree, the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very cast-off slough of a polluted and shameless press. Incapable of further mischief, it lies in the sewer, lifeless and despised. It is not now, sir, in the power of the honorable member to give it dignity or decency by attempting to elevate it and to introduce it into the Senate. He cannot change it from what it is, an object of general disgust and scorn. On ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... the deep bass of Castelroux's "Mordieux!" the sharp gasp of fear from Saint-Eustache, who already in imagination beheld his friend stretched lifeless on the ground, and the cry of mortification from La Fosse as the Count recovered. But I heeded these things little. As I have said, to kill the Count was not my object. It had been wise, perhaps, in Chatellerault to have appreciated that fact; but he did not. From the manner in which he now proceeded ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... till Henry had waited some time in the parlour, and then gave him her hand in a very lifeless way. She said she had a bad head-ache, and seemed disposed to leave the talking to him. He spoke of the picnic, but she rather sharply remarked that it was so long ago that she had forgotten all about it. It did seem very long ago to her, but to him it was very fresh. This cool ignoring ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... letter to its close, then dropped it on her lap, and sank back in her chair, helpless, breathless, almost lifeless. Minutes crept into hours, and still she sat there in the same position, without motion, thought, or ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... once the pictorial vigour of Hugo and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn, and surpasses them both. And beyond this mere dazzling visualization, he gets into his pictures an overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation—of that inexorable and uncompassionate struggle which is life itself. The sea to him is a living thing, an omnipotent and unfathomable thing, almost a god. He sees it as the Eternal Enemy, deceitful in its caresses, sudden in its rages, relentless ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... long, your lonely lot deplored. Thus ignorantly did I slay your child beloved, O hermit sage! Turn thou on me, whose fated day is come, thy all-consuming rage!' He heard my dreadful tale at length, he stood all lifeless, motionless; Then deep he groaned, and gathering strength, me the meek suppliant did address. 'Kshatriya, 't is well that thou hast turned, thy deed of murder to rehearse, Else over all thy land had burned the fire ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... excellent humour on this tour. Like me, he likes the freedom of the Hokkaido. He is much more polite and agreeable also, and very proud of the Governor's shomon, with which he swaggers into hotels and Transport Offices. I never get on so well as when he arranges for me. Saturday was grey and lifeless, and the ride of seven miles here along a sandy road through monotonous forest and swamp, with the volcano on one side and low wooded hills on the other, was wearisome and fatiguing. I saw five large snakes all in a heap, and a number more twisting ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... a sad heart to us all, to see the lifeless creature in his white nightcap and eyes closed, lying with his yellow hair spread on the pillow; and we went out, that the women-folk might cover up the looking- glass and the face of the clock, ere ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... assailed by those terrific cries, I cannot say. They presently died away, as I doubted not, only because Macer himself had expired under the torment. When they had wholly ceased, the engine was reversed and Macer again unbound. He fell lifeless upon the floor. Varus, who had sat the while ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... of science, Lifeless their every plan, Until in living presence, They're crystalized ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... manifest and punished at once, we are amazed at the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors. We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy with which we treat the living like the lifeless and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterized by a natural inability ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... gray beard trimmed to a point, and inside his beaklike nose was a quantity of grayish-yellow hair which made a very disagreeable impression on me. All the time I was speaking he examined his nails. When he raised his eyes finally, to reply, I noticed how lifeless and indifferent they were, and glazed by age. I could see the bones of his face move under the skin as he talked, especially two little round bones, like balls, close ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... the chief of the Coupe-tetes, at their head, had started two hours before, bearing aloft in triumph the heads of the mangled Body-guards, and combining such hideous mockery with their barbarity that they halted at Sevres to compel a barber to dress the hair on the lifeless skulls. And now the royal carriage was surrounded by a vast and confused medley; market-women and the rest of the female rabble, with drunken gangs of the ruffians who had stormed the palace in the morning, still brandishing their weapons, or bearing loaves ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... thoughts were as they stared with pale, rigid faces into the darkness, while their minds, perhaps, peered even more cheerlessly into the dismal obscurity which lay over their future. Better be the lifeless wreck whom they have carried up to the Priory, than be torn as these men are torn, by the demons of fear and remorse and grief, and crushed down by the weight of a sin-stained and ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... afflicted and ashamed, at a friend's house at Dag, the accomplishment of a promise so dearly purchased, she heard the beating of the alarm drum, and looked, from curiosity, through the window, when she saw her unfortunate parent ascending the scaffold! After having remained lifeless for half an hour, she recovered her senses an instant, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the dead man he himself appropriated. Again he spoke to the lifeless body, lowering his voice ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... forgot the sick feeling of dread which then came over him. What had he done? He did not hear Archie's excited words; he came hurriedly to the side of the man, who lay lifeless upon the ground with his head on the young fellow's knee. Archie looked up at him with dilated terrified eyes. And Brian ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the dawning of our brighter days, and the coming glory of our regenerated country, it is hard to lay her away in unconsciousness; hard to close her eyes against the bright sunshine of God's smile upon a ransomed people; hard to send her lifeless form away from us, alone to the grave in her far off home; hard to realize that one so familiar in our little band shall go no more in and out among us. But we say farewell to her not without hope. Her earnest spirit, ever eager in its questioning of what is ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... little Doctor stood at the mantel-shelf, his elbow upon it, and the silence lengthened. To do something, Sharlee pulled off her right long glove and slowly put it back again. Then she pulled off her left long glove, and about the time she was buttoning the last button he began speaking, in a curious, lifeless voice. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... from any one of the party. The bullet of Black Jim had laid him low. Although hurriedly aimed, it had reached the animal's heart, and all the time that Captain Bunting was struggling to overcome his irresistible tendency to sleep, poor bruin was lying a helpless and lifeless body at the foot ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... upon the cushion. His lifeless hands continue to grasp those of Furst and Stauffacher, who regard him for some moments in silence, and then retire, overcome with sorrow. Meanwhile the servants have quietly pressed into the chamber, testifying different degrees of grief. Some kneel down beside him and ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... slowly over the trees. With the darkness came a greater silence, for the myriad insect life was still. This great silence of Central Africa is wonderfully characteristic. The country is made for silence, the natives are created to steal, spirit-ridden, devil-haunted, through vast tracks of lifeless forest, where nature is oppressive in her grandeur. Here man is put into his right place—a puny, insignificant, helpless being in a world that is too large ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... me, and almost intolerable when I ascertained fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill long-cherished, but, after all, merely general designs of literary study, I had forsaken wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt the motion of the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world, remote ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... why prak@rti should be disturbed is the most knotty point in Sa@mkhya. It is postulated that the prak@rti or the sum-total of the gu@nas is so connected with the puru@sas, and there is such an inherent teleology or blind purpose in the lifeless prak@rti, that all its evolution and transformations tike place for the sake of the diverse puru@sas, to serve the enjoyment of pleasures and sufferance of pain through experiences, and finally leading them to absolute freedom or ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... so much as it did death. The motionless air, heavily laden with a certain dead sweetness of flowers from the neighboring garden, might well bring to mind the breathless silence and the heavy atmosphere of the chamber in which the lifeless form and the fading funeral wreath ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... swept after them, down the flat valley, rounding crag and headland, which opened one after another in interminable vista, along the narrow strip of sand and rushes, speckled with stunted, moss-bearded, heather-bedded hawthorns, between the great grim lifeless mountain walls? Did he feel no pleasant creeping of the flesh that day at the sound of his own horse-hoofs, as they swept through the long ling with a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman's tresses, and then rang down on ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... window look, Thou hast no son, thou tender mother! No longer walk, thou lovely maid; Alas, thou hast no more a brother! No longer seek him east or west, And search no more the forest thorough; For, wandering in the night so dark, He fell a lifeless corse in Yarrow. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the ceiling shone clearly upon the dying man's lifeless visage. All standing there gazed upon it, holding their breath as if fearing to disturb something infinitely solemn; and in such silence the laboured, sibilant breathing of ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... only with the establishment of Darwin's great generalisation that the hard and fast classificatory system broke down, and individuality came to its own. Yet there had always been a clearly felt difference between the conclusions of the biological sciences and those dealing with lifeless substance, in the relative vagueness, the insubordinate looseness and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantly from generalisation ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... let us hear Professor Allman. Between a development of material structure and a development of intellectual and moral features, the Professor says, "there is no conceivable analogy; and the obvious and continuous path, which we have hitherto followed up, in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter to those of living form, here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm between unconscious life and thought is deep and impassable, and no transitional phenomena are to be found by which, as by a bridge, we can span ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... issues of the war, the vivid character-sketches of the generals, the political enthusiasm, the thunder of the oratory of general and statesman. The battle-speeches of Livy, whose glow and vigour half atone for their theatricality, have been made use of by Silius, but find only a feeble echo in his lifeless verse. Nothing stands out sharply defined; the epic lacks impetus and has no salient points; outlines are blurred in an unpoetic haze. The history of Tacitus has been described as history 'seen by ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... enraged against his son than he had entered it, and returned home to hear the evil suggestions of the stepmother. He had heard a slight scuffle in which he caught the tones of Robert's voice, as he passed along the hall, and an instant afterwards he saw the apparently lifeless body of his little favourite dragged along by the culprit Owen—the marks of strong passion yet visible on his face. Not loud, but bitter and deep were the evil words which the father bestowed on the son; and as Owen stood proudly and sullenly silent, disdaining all exculpation of himself in the ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... to talk with Joy as she dressed, but Joy was unusually silent. Her monosyllables were low and indistinct. Twice Blue Bonnet turned to catch a word and Joy's face startled her: it was white and lifeless, almost expressionless save ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... character of one so recently taken from amongst us. The shadow of his homely figure has scarcely faded from our streets, and the sound of his eloquent voice still seems to vibrate in our ears. It seems but yesterday that, on that cold and cheerless day, his lifeless but honoured remains were borne to the grave through the crowds of sympathising people who thronged the busy streets to see the last of him they knew so well and loved so heartily. Little could be added to the ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... possess him whenever he was confronted by the inevitable. He sat down, and with his head bowed over it took one of the limp, little hands that lay in Mary Standish's lap. The warmth had gone out of it. It was cold and lifeless. He caressed it gently and held it between his brown, muscular hands, staring at it, and yet seeing nothing in particular. It was only the ticking of Keok's clock that broke the silence for a time. Then he released the hand, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... a lifeless silence; their horse's feet making the first prints since early morning in the unbroken smoothness of the way, and the only sound the gentle tinkle of their own bells, as they moved ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... how it is when at a wake someone views the deceased and says kindly, "She's beautiful," and "she" isn't beautiful at all; just a made-up, lifeless handful of clay. Dead as dead, and frightening. Well, it wasn't that way this time. Their fair skins were faintly pink-tinted and their blonde heads, hers ashen and his a reddish cast, gleamed brightly. And they sat so close in the sofa before the fire, his head resting in the hollow of her throat. ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... than filigree; while the white-robed Colossi supported it as oaks support a spider's web. The garden looked like a motionless forest of enormous and mis-shapen lilies all of ice; a garden under some lunar enchantment, a lifeless paradise of Selene. Mute, solemn and massive the Palazzo Barberini reared its great bulk into the sky, its most salient points standing out dazzlingly white and casting a pale blue ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... the lifeless, and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. Perceiving in an organism only parts external to parts, the understanding has the choice between two systems of ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... realise that the beautiful Princess is someone with very special gifts, which one or two of them would like to learn more about. But in the very process of the ensuing teach-in, more things happen than had been bargained for, and both the Colonel and the Princess end up lifeless. ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... eyes is but a dull lifeless mass, impelled by dead mechanic movements, their finer spirits were aware of a breathing life, a living Presence, distinct, yet not alien from, their own spirits, and thence they drank life, and strength, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... flame, which ordinarily greets us in the east with such a ruddy laugh, was now nothing better than a wan and dismal smile; and even the sun, as he struggled up from what seemed a bed of leaden mist, brought with him only a pallid, lifeless twilight. It was not that his rays were impeded by cloud or haze; he had lost his power to shine. He hung there in the heavens like a great white shield, and looked down on us as rayless and powerless and devoid of life as a dead ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... themselves, and this from the persistency in the practice we are so strenuously condemning. The mother frequently, on awaking, discovers the baby's face closely impacted between her bosom and her arm, and its body rigid and lifeless; or else so enveloped in the "head-blanket" and superincumbent bedclothes, as to render breathing a matter of physical impossibility. In such cases the jury in general returns a verdict of "Accidentally overlaid" but one of "Careless suffocation" ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... the ground. I could barely distinguish a swarm of grey shadows running about in the fog. Then not a single dark figure was visible on the pale background of the tragic scene. How many of the bodies we could no longer make out must have been lying lifeless, and how horrible their proximity must have been to the living stretched side ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... the service of God, as to elevate the hearts of the worshippers, so Christ can use these gifted men, as with them to affect the souls of his people in his church; yet when he hath done all, hang them by as lifeless, though ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... relief the next morning, on our return, to rise out of the lifeless atmosphere of the Gap into the invigorating air at the Widow Sherrill's, whose country-seat is three hundred feet higher than Asheville. It was a day of heavy showers, and apparently of leisure to the scattered population; at every store and mill was a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... embodies their attractions. But Jerrem had felt a passing love for his own dear body: vanity of it had been his ruling passion, its comeliness his great glory—so much so that even now a positive satisfaction would have been his could he have pictured himself outstretched and lifeless, with lookers-on moved to compassion by the dead grace of his winsome face and slender limbs. Joan, too, was caught by the same infection. Not to lie whole and decent in one's coffin! Oh, it was an indignity too terrible for contemplation; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... soft, clogging sand; a desert which dropped away into parched arroyos, and rose to scorched mesas whereon fierce cacti thrust at him with thorns and spikes; a desert dead and mummified in the dreadful heat; a lifeless Inferno wherein moved neither beast, bird nor insect. He remembers, dimly, lying as he fell, when the indefatigable captain called a halt, and being wakened in the chill breeze of evening, to see a wall of mountains blocking ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Charleston was a shambles—a scene of sudden, chilling death. All about were strewn gray, lifeless bodies. Death had overtaken the crew in the midst of their duties, suddenly, without warning, it seemed. Bodies strewn about—yet nowhere was there sign of decay! Bodies, lifeless ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... the whole continent which subsequently took place would have then left the interior a shallow inland sea, girt round with a broken chain of more or less active volcanoes. In time, these grew extinct, the sea evaporated and we were left with our present coast range, with its now lifeless peaks, and our depressed inland plateau, with its saline ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... Miss Evans, hearing heavy footsteps, went to the door. She saw what she took to be the spirit of Charles Seabohn, staggering under the weight of the lifeless body of Mivanway, and the sight not unnaturally alarmed her. Charles's suggestion of brandy, however, sounded human, and the urgent need of attending to Mivanway kept her mind from dwelling upon ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... charge of the thoughtless young girl that had accompanied Charles to the dance. Two young men, his companions in riot, undertook to convey him to his father's house. The stars were just beginning to fade away as they reached the threshold. Speechless, and almost lifeless, they laid him upon his ...
— Charles Duran - Or, The Career of a Bad Boy • The Author of The Waldos
... month had passed since her return to Mr. Abrahams' employment. It had been a dull, leaden month, a monotonous succession of lifeless days during which life had become a bad dream. In some strange nightmare fashion, she seemed nowadays to be cut off from her kind. It was weeks since she had seen a familiar face. None of the companions of her old boarding-house days had crossed her path. Fillmore, no doubt from uneasiness of conscience, ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... situation, and as the horse fell, he kicked his feet free from the stirrups, and flung himself clear. He was not a moment too soon. With a crash which shook the ground, the heavy horse came down, and would have mangled to a lifeless pulp anyone who had been under it. But Vaughan was safe. He lay for a minute, gasping, then stood up and faced the drover. The rein was still in his hand, though the force of the fall had torn the strong leather ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... answer is doubtful, and the doubt appals him. In his absence, the young gentlemen may arrive at the fatal spot. He may return to find their bodies lying lifeless along the sand, their pockets rifled, their ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... very trite to students of any mettle, but there are large numbers who waste no end of time working in a purely mechanical, lifeless way, and with their minds anywhere but concentrated upon the work before them. And if the mind is not working, the work of the hand will be of no account. My own experience is that one has constantly to be making fresh effort during ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... enterprises and was planning how to get on board the steamer unobserved. He edged around outside the lantern shine and went on along the beach to the native village. As he had foreseen, all the able-bodied men were down at the boat-landing working cargo. The grass houses seemed lifeless, but at last, from one of them, came a challenge in the querulous, high-pitched ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... night, as Abdel-Hassan on the Desert lay apart, Nothing broke the lifeless silence but the throbbing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... be determined by a literary rather than a plastic conception. Probably this is not the kind of criticism which by now Wyndham Lewis must have learnt to disregard. He is more accustomed, I suspect, to hearing his work called "mechanical" and "lifeless," and, in a sense, it is both. That is the price an artist must pay who sets himself to achieve the end that Lewis has in view. He who is working by formula towards the realization of a minutely definite intellectual plan must be willing, on occasions, to sacrifice the really valuable qualities ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... people to whom such outward peace is a physical necessity. His feeling for nature, especially for her minutest and seemingly most insignificant phenomena, is closely akin to religion; there is an infinite charm in his description of the mysterious life of apparently lifeless objects; he renders all the sensuous impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... from an antique land, Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... hearing that Sarah Stout's body had been found drowned in the mill-stream behind her old home. That catastrophe had actually occurred. Scarcely had the young barrister reached the Market Place, when the miserable girl threw herself into the stream from which her lifeless body was picked on the following morning. At the coroner's inquest which ensued, Spencer Cowper gave his evidence with extreme caution, withholding every fact that could be injurious to Sarah's reputation; and the jury returned a verdict that the deceased gentlewoman ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... in the camp, whether one wished to go hawking, or wanted a hand at fencing, or only asked for a quiet game of chess by the leaping firelight. Her ringing laugh, her frank glance, and her beautiful glowing face made all other maidens seem dull and lifeless. Alwin dimly felt that hating her was going to be no easy task, and he dared not raise his eyes as she rode past him. Instead he forced himself to stare at the reflection of his scarred face in the silver horn he was wiping; and he blew and blew upon the sparks ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... Rapax, had left a young son at home. This boy subsequently grew up and enlisted in the Seventh legion, raised by Galba.[74] Chance now sent his father in his way, and he felled him to the ground. While he was ransacking the dying man, they recognized each other. Flinging his arms round the now lifeless corpse, in a piteous voice he implored his father's spirit to be appeased and not to turn against him as a parricide. The crime was his country's, he cried; what share had a single soldier in these civil wars? Meanwhile he lifted the body and began ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... a foggy night added to her depression. Why, in the tube railway, did all these people about her look so white and tired and lifeless? Did they just go on in their niches, in the same way that the grotesque music-teacher had gone on in hers for all those monotonous years; only to become like an uncared-for, unwanted letter of the alphabet pushed in to fill up a blank in a big city ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... almost determined to go out for a walk but her courage again failed her. Until noon the village street was dull and lifeless, with only one or two people visible at a time, and yet she dared not go down and walk through it. Were she to show herself, all the idle shopkeepers would issue from their shops, to congratulate her on the postmaster's victory, to inquire where he was spending his ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... the last chapter in the history of old Roman religion was closed. His was the last attempt to fill the spiritual need of the people with the old forms and the old ideas; for what he offered was in the main old though certain new ideas were mixed with it. From now on the lifeless platitudes of philosophy and the orgiastic excesses of the Oriental cults divided the field between them, and it was with them rather than with the gods of Numa or even with the deities of the Sibylline books that Christianity fought its battles. ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... interfused around 45 A thrilling, silent life,— To momentary peace it bound Our mortal nature's strife; And still I felt the centre of The magic circle there 50 Was one fair form that filled with love The lifeless atmosphere. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... subject we have to-night, Glenn,' observed one of my friends, as we approached the dead body. He then threw up the white cloth, and exposed the corpse, the head being still obscured. A breathless silence reigned, while all gazed at the lifeless form in admiration. She was a perfect Venus! Not having been wasted and shrivelled by disease, the symmetry of her lineaments was preserved in all the exactness of life and health. Her bust was full, plump, and the skin of ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... times fifty living men (And I heard nor sigh nor groan), With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropp'd down ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... all the world for her beautiful feminine spirituality, the roots of which lie buried in noble aspirations and boundless self-denial. In fact, compared with these types, the virtuous of other races seem lifeless, as does an inanimate volume when compared with the living word. Yes, each time that there arises in Russia a movement of thought, it becomes clear that the movement sinks deep into the Slavonic nature where it would but have skimmed the surface of other nations.—But why am ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... stood before the woman to have her hair dressed; but no sooner had the comb touched the roots of her hair than the poison took effect, and the maiden fell to the ground lifeless. ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... stand in the storm-wind fast She stands, unsmitten of death's keen blast, With strong remembrance of sunbright spring Alive at heart to the lifeless last. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... will come in the profoundest griefs when those rituals to which young grief is so eager to vow itself will grow lifeless and conventional, the daily tasks of remembrance become as the told beads of pattered prayers. Let the worshipper of relics beware lest his treasures some day turn on his hands to so much irksome lumber, and true ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... sometime upon the bed. The horrible trance, more horrible than ever, must have returned. All that can now be known of what followed is to be gathered from the facts, that next morning his body, half dressed, was found lying lifeless on the floor, the feet upon the study rug, the chest pierced with the ball of the revolver pistol, which was found lying in the bath that stood close by.[2] The deadly bullet had perforated the left lung, grazed the heart, cut through the pulmonary artery at its root, and lodged in the rib ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting from the deadly ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... to him as she said the last words, and there was in the word 'please' that one tone of hers which he could never resist. It is said that even lifeless things, like bridges and towers, are subject by nature to the vibration of a sympathetic note, and that the greatest buildings in the world would tremble, and shake, and rock and fall in ruins if that single musical sound were steadily ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... brief interval we went on again, passing through an aperture in a formidable-looking barricade. We then readied Creteil proper, and there the first serious traces of the havoc of war were offered to our view. The once pleasant village was lifeless. Every house had been broken into and plundered, every door and every window smashed. Smaller articles of furniture, and so forth, had been removed, larger ones reduced to fragments. An infernal spirit of destruction had swept through the place; and yet, mark this, we were still ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... of their helplessness to insult weak women. But here I stand!" she cried, stepping backward, and drawing a gleaming revolver from beneath her cloak. "Search me! but it must be done when the body is lifeless; I'll be a target for the whole of you before I'm searched; so let the ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... may be regarded as the histological units of animal structures; by the combination, association, and modification of these the body is built up. Of the real nature of the changes going on within the living protoplasm, the process of building up lifeless material into living structures, and the process of breaking down by which waste is produced, we know absolutely nothing. Could we learn that, perhaps we should ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... and with that shape which the situation constrained or suffered it to take. What endless melting and playing into each other of forms and colours does the one offer to a mind at once attentive and active; and how insipid and lifeless, compared with it, appear those parts of the former exhibition with which a child, a peasant perhaps, or a citizen unfamiliar with natural imagery, would ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... parsonage. She passed a number of cottages picturesquely dilapidated, a store in which a half-dozen men were smoking, and about thirty lounging negroes. On rising ground was a large house, but the village looked forlorn, neglected, almost lifeless. ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... a little, and made a faint attempt to clasp his. Charles took the cold, lifeless hand, and held it in his strong ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... the gate open as usual, passed through the paved grove up to the palace door, and entered the vestibule. There in her cage lay the spotted leopardess, apparently asleep or lifeless. The Little Ones paused a moment to look at her. She leaped up rampant against the cage. The horses reared and plunged; the elephants retreated a step. The next instant she fell supine, writhed in quivering spasms, and lay motionless. We rode ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... At least, it is said, that, at this very time, he was in correspondence with Vaca de Castro. Almagro himself seems to have had no doubt of his treachery. For, after remonstrating in vain with him on his present conduct, he ran him through the body, and the unfortunate cavalier fell lifeless on the field. Then, throwing himself on one of the guns, Almagro gave it a new direction, and that so successfully, that, when it was discharged, it struck down several of ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... too true a Trevlyn not to become a member of the true fold. His vagrant fancy is straying here and there. He is tasting the bitter-sweet fruit of knowledge and restless search after the wisdom of this world. But already he begins to turn with loathing from the cold, lifeless Puritan code. Anon he will find that the Established Church has naught to give him save the husk, from which the precious grain has ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hand to his heart. Emily sunk almost lifeless on his bosom, and neither wept, nor spoke. Valancourt, now commanding his own distress, tried to comfort and re-assure her, but she appeared totally unaffected by what he said, and a sigh, which she uttered, now and then, was all that ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... pursuit and I stood listening, not daring to move for fear of ditches. The sounds of leaping, stumbling, and crashing came to me on the night air for a few minutes; then my friends returned with the light, and with a poor little spring-hare's lifeless and long-hind-legged body. ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... cold and gray, Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, And from the sky, serene and far, A voice fell, like a ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... after he found himself on the stage amid the garish gas and the dim scenery, acting before the innumerable faces of the void. It surprised him to see that the play which he had known at rehearsals for a disjointed lifeless thing had suddenly assumed a life of its own. It seemed now to play itself, he and his fellow actors aiding it with their parts. When the curtain fell on the last scene he heard the void filled with applause and, through a rift in a ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... winters, there is, as I observed last year in Germany, a dull, damp chill, quite different from the bracing, exhilarating frosts of America. It stagnates the vital principle and leaves the limbs dull and heavy, with a lifeless feeling which can scarcely be overcome by vigorous action. At least, such ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... distant, or under the shade of some trees near by. The latter proposition was acted upon. Jim, Mrs. Fowler and Little Mag, carried Margaret to a shaded spot a few yards away. They all sat down beside her, as she lay stretched and apparently lifeless upon the ground. After little Mag had once more poured the contents of her shoes down the neck of Margaret, and Mrs. Fowler had steadily rubbed her temples and wrists, she opened her eyes, looked wildly about, and then sat up ...
— Young Lion of the Woods - A Story of Early Colonial Days • Thomas Barlow Smith
... her satchel a glass with which she carefully examined the dulled and lifeless eyes, sitting ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... would have thrown her arms round him, and besought him, with tender phrases, to tell her what is on his mind. Now she stands apart from him, with a cold, lifeless smile upon her still ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... the works of some authors is like going through a carefully arranged herbarium, where every specimen is lifeless, shrivelled, dusty, crumbling to the touch. The writings of genuine men of genius are like a conservatory, where every plant of thought and sentiment, whether indigenous or exotic, is alive, full of bloom and fragrance, the sap at work in its veins. Verbal statements ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... sounded through the night as with the whiz of escaping steam and scrape and jar of gripping brakes and howl of wheels the train came to a stop at the station. Sanford dropped his coat and sat down again. "I'll have to stay now." His tone was dry and lifeless. It had a reproach in it that cut the wife deep-deep as the fountain of tears; and she went across the room and knelt at the bedside, burying her face in the clothes on the feet of her children, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... earth twisted away until it was lost in the fringe of a small copse on the left and had dipped behind a hillock on the right. Flat open country stretched ahead, grass lands and fields of stubble, lifeless and deserted. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... with no change in the direction of its motion. It floated onward. It was broadside to its line of travel. It continued to turn. It hurtled stern-first toward the Niccola. It did not swerve. It did not dance. It was a lifeless hulk: a ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... as she fell. What had he said!—but, more than all, what should he do now? He could not leave her alone and helpless,—yet how could he justify another disconcerting intrusion? He touched her hands; they were cold and lifeless; her eyes were half closed; her face as pale and drooping as her lily. Well, he must brave the worst now, and carry her to the house, even at the risk of meeting the others and terrifying them as he had her. He caught her up,—he scarcely ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... ceremonies now in use, but only where indispensable. I shall go through such ceremonies, where they are not conformable to pure Theism, as mere matters of routine, destitute of all religious significance—as the lifeless remains of a superstition which has passed away." And again in article 4: "I shall never endeavour to deceive anyone as to my religious opinions." In the revision of 1871, both articles were dropped, but in the earlier form there was no attempt to disguise that thought was independent ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... stage-boxes, ladies' faces, almost green under paint, showed the excessive lassitude of a long winter of pleasure. The Parisians had all come there from custom, without having the slightest desire to do so, just as they always came, like galley-slaves condemned to "first nights." They were so lifeless that they did not even feel the slightest horror at seeing one another grow old. This chloroformed audience was afflicted with a long and too heavy programme, as is the custom in performances of this kind. They played fragments of the best known pieces, and ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... were disappointed. Christy or Emily Davis would have been so much pleasanter to work with, or even Kitty Lacy, whom Miss Kingston considered very talented. But Emily was theatrical, except in funny parts, Christy was lifeless, and Kitty Lacy had not taken the trouble to learn the lines properly and broke down at least once in every long speech, thereby justifying the popular inversion of her name to Lazy Kitty, a pseudonym which some college wag had fastened upon her ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... because he was unable to behold in the meaningless gesturings of time, space and evolution a dramatic little pantomime adroitly centered about the routine of his existence. He was a silent looking man with black hair and an aquiline nose. His eyes were lifeless because they paid no homage ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... phosphorescent ostrich feathers curling from our bows. Behind me, in the darkened chart-room, the Filipino quartermaster gently swung the wheel from time to time in response to the direction of the needle on the illuminated compass-dial. So lifeless was the sea that our foremast barely swayed against the stars. The smoke from our funnel trailed across the purple canopy of the sky as though smeared ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... over the lifeless scene without as he ceased to speak. I could see a crimson beam glowing upon a crucifix that stood on the wayside by the hill-foot yonder; but the cheerless monotony of plough land and of pasture, stretching away leafless, treeless, ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... how disappointing Avogadro's frontispiece must be to those who hold, as most of us will, that a draughtsman's first business is to put down what he sees, and to let prettiness take care of itself. The main features, indeed, can still be traced, but they have become as transformed and lifeless as rudimentary organs. Such a frontispiece, however, is the almost inevitable consequence of the system of training that will make boys of twelve do drawings like the one given ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... then cast loose by the corporal, who was twirling up his cat, when Snarleyyow, whom the marine had not watched, ran up to the lad, and inflicted a severe bite. Smallbones, who appeared, at the moment, to be faint and lifeless—not having risen from his knees after the marine had thrown his shirt over him, roused by this new attack, appeared to spring into life and energy; he jumped up, uttered a savage yell, and to the astonishment of everybody, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... faces so long trained to conceal the workings of the mind, and for the first time the Fawn remained uncaressed in her father's arms. Astonished and grieved she turned to Grey Eagle; the light had fled from his face, and his soul apparently; he seemed petrified and lifeless as the rock he stood upon. Even the poor wolf, missing his usual attention, or from some inexplicable cause, commenced to howl pitifully as he leaped from one ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... pursue my way. The flowers on the spot where I had lain were crushed to the earth: but I saw that they would soon lift their heads and rejoice again in the sun and air. Not so those on which my shadow had lain. The very outline of it could be traced in the withered lifeless grass, and the scorched and shrivelled flowers which stood there, dead, and hopeless of any resurrection. I shuddered, and hastened ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... in the rush of battle he holds scales, and for the golden coin you spend on him he sends you back lifeless shapes of men; they sent out men, the loving friends receive back well-smoothed ashes from the funeral pyre. They sing the heroic fall of some—all for another's wife; and some murmur discontent against the sons of Atreus, ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... I fed on the mad and morbid literature that the enthusiasm of 1830 called into existence. The gloomy and sterile little pictures of "Gaspard de la Nuit," or the elaborate criminality, "Les Contes Immoraux," laboriously invented lifeless things with creaky joints, pitiful lay figures that fall to dust as soon as the book is closed, and in the dust only the figures of the terrible ferryman and the unfortunate Dora remain. "Madame Potiphar" cost me forty francs, and I never read more ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the wall was a great sword so heavy that other men could not use it. This sword Beowulf seized gladly. Angrily he struck the sea-wolf, and the sword passed through her neck. Down on the ground she sank. The warrior rejoiced in his work. He looked through the great dwelling and saw Grendel lying lifeless. With a strong blow Beowulf cut off the head of the monster, but the hot blood melted the sword and nothing was left but the hilt. The blade melted away as ice melts when the Father, who has power over the seasons, unbinds the bands ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... Instead of pouring the poison into the vinegar glass, where would the Scotch Abigail empty the cruet but into the tumbler with the brandy in it? Her mistress soon after quaffed off the liquor into which the poisonous drug had been poured, and in an hour after she was a lifeless corpse. This was not all; for, on the day of the funeral, young Harry, Mr. Gulvert's son and heir, in order to show his devotion to his beloved parent's remains, was all the morning busy in collecting flowers with which to deck the room where she ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... fleshless, yet one feature still remained Perfect, or perfect seemed at least; the eyes Gleamed for a second on the startled crowd, And then went out in ashes. Even thus The story, when I drew it from the grave Where it had lain so long, did seem, I thought, Not wholly lifeless; but even while I gazed To fix its features on my heart, and called The world to wonder with me, lo! it proved I looked upon a corpse! What further fell In that lone forest nook, how much was taught, How much was only hinted, what ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod |
